Microsoft’s shedding of employees has been much talked about. We’ve already read some of the memos that have been flying around internally, and the latest to be made public comes from chief of Operating Systems Group, Terry Myerson.
The memo is dated July 17, and it must have been a difficult one to write. Words like “restructuring” and “consolidating” always set alarm bells ringing, and while our thoughts are with those affected by the layoffs, it’s easy to forget that people like Myerson are also affected — they are losing friends and valuable colleagues.
The memo reads:
Re: Focusing our team
Team,
As Satya shared last week, and we’ve been discussing for almost a year, we are making broad changes in how we engineer products. Thus, today we are restructuring some parts of our team in three areas: consolidating some of our geographically distributed teams, cancelling some projects to increase investment on higher priorities, and changing the ratio of people working across disciplines as part of our new engineering process. For individuals in Redmond whose jobs are impacted, a leader within their organization will have reached out by 11:30 AM PDT today; timing outside of Redmond will vary.
This change is so incredibly hard. People whose jobs are impacted by these changes are our colleagues and friends. The company is offering support, services and assistance during this transition in a number of ways. For those of you whose jobs are impacted by this, I want to thank you for your contribution to Microsoft and our customers, and wish you the best.
It will take time for all of us to adjust to today’s announcement, but we can now move forward knowing that we have completed the OSG-wide restructuring in the US today; the process outside the US will be completed according to local law and practices.
-Terry
The impact of the week’s announcement will be felt for some time to come, but it is interesting to see the personal side of internal communications.
