Ask Slashdot: How Many Employees Does Microsoft Really Need? 272
An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday, word came down that Microsoft was starting to lay off some 18,000 workers. As of June 5th, Microsoft reported a total employee headcount of 127,005, so they're cutting about 15% of their jobs. That's actually a pretty huge percentage, even taking into account the redundancies created by the Nokia acquisition. Obviously, there's an upper limit to how much of your workforce you can let go at one time, so I'm willing to bet Microsoft's management thinks thousands more people aren't worth keeping around. How many employees does Microsoft realistically need? The company is famous for its huge teams that don't work together well, and excessive middle management. But they also have a huge number of software projects, and some of the projects, like Windows and Office, need big teams to develop. How would we go about estimating the total workforce Microsoft needs? (Other headcounts for reference: Apple: 80,000, Amazon: 124,600, IBM: 431,212, Red Hat: 5,000+, Facebook: 6,800, Google: 52,000, Intel: 104,900.)
the answer is (Score:5, Funny)
42
Re:They need exactly 63 999 employees (Score:5, Funny)
If you're gonna be pedantic, then do it right:
64K = -209.15 C = -344.47 F
64k = 64,000
Re:How many? Hard to say (Score:3, Funny)
I bet you're working for the large company today :)
Re:Shitpost is shit (Score:5, Funny)
If they care about their customers (HA!) they should put at least half the employees they're letting go into expanded testing and security divisions.
good idea! if they sic a bunch of HR drones on to testing and security issues, the problem will be solved in weeks.
Re:They need exactly 63 999 employees (Score:5, Funny)
They need exactly 63 999 employees
You must work in the marketing department of a hard drive company.
Re:the answer is (Score:5, Funny)
640 employees ought to be enough.
Re:Binary prefixes: Use them (Score:4, Funny)
> Yes, RAM has been traditionally been measured using prefixes that imply powers of 2, but the errors have been getting worse and worse as the numbers get larger.
Total nonsense. You never buy 16,000,000,000 bytes of RAM. You buy 16 GB = 16384 KB of RAM, because the address line is always in base 2, never base 10.
Likewise hard disk drives are intentionally marketed to confuse people. Sectors [wikipedia.org] have always been 256 bytes (Apple ][), 512 bytes (MFM) or 4096 bytes (modern HD)
Clock cycles were measured in MegaHertz, so powers of 10 are natural.
Getting bent out of shape because of some theoretical definition of perfection is a waste of time.