Microsoft to Cut 9k Workers in Second Wave of Major Layoffs

Here's what i learned: the person buying software/services at many enterprises cares very little whether the thing being purchased is actually any good or not. They either pick based on some brand awareness (who doesn't know who IBM used to be, and who Microsoft is nowadays?), or they defer to someone else in the org...and that "some other senior leader person" in the org may or may not be the proper person to make the decision, etc....and then, the rest of the employees from said enterprise are stuck using something that very few might have chosen. Do i think there are good purchasers out there? Sure, but my direct experience is that the good ones are very few and far between sadly...and then momentum takes over in perpetuity.

And, then of course there's the "do as the competitors do", where when employees DO BRING UP good alternatives, the same aforementioned type of purchasers use the argument: "Well, lots of other firms and even our competitors use Microsoft...so why not stick with Microsoft...etc?"

Years ago, there used to be the phrase: "No one got fired for buying IBM...". I suppose nowadays you swap that brand out with "Microsoft", or "Google", etc. This rabbit hole goes really deep....but i encourage the interested to look up this IBM phrase, and you'll get tons of literature on why companies make purchasing decisions, and more importantly why they're often poor decisions.

This is also how the contracting firms maintain business.

Accenture, Deloitte, et al are some of the only businesses that are "trusted partners" for the big F500s* or the only firms that are sufficiently capitalized/insured etc etc such that they can "win" the big jobs. Quality and such doesn't matter much--if you and I could spin up and LLC tomorrow with the ability to deliver something at 10x the quality in half the time, it literally wouldn't matter, for exactly those reasons. It's an identical situation to buying services/software from MS.

*the amount of work outsourced at these places is staggering, speaking from experience.

Oh, you're 100% correct about these big "trusted partners"! At my current and previous dayjobs, no matter if you had employees who were top experts in their fields, if some nitwit from MaKenzie, Accenture Deloitte, etc. says that the sky is brown, then the enterprise's senior leaders will ignore the inhouse expert, and just blindly believe that the sky is brown per whatever these "consultants" say. I've had colleagues use terms like "the CEO whisperer" or "the CTO whisperer" to describe some of these folks from the "big consultant" firms...which i find very accurate. And you know what? In like 85% of the time, after these big firms are done with a project, its the biggest pile of awfulness in so many ways! And, the employees and long-term contractors are left to fix the mess, and keep managing whatever spaghetti these "consultants" left behind. I have nothing against the individual human beings who are hired by these big firms. They're just trying to earn their living. But, the leaders from these firms sell them off as "top industry experts" (when half the time they're quite junior in experience and know-how). Plus, the leaders of the enterprise who are procuring these big firms simply want to throw cheap bodies at a problem or project, but instead of hiring employees, they get seduced by the "senior leader whisperers" from these big firms.

And then, after any big project is "done" (regardless if there was a colossal mess left behind by the consultant team), the same senior leader who hired the awful big firm gets the promotion or moves on...and the employees are left holding the bag. What's worse, the enterprise's remaining leaders threaten the employees to keep managing the mess - "keep working hard, or you'll be replaced by AI...".

It feels all like an environment of snake oil, and magician's smoke and mirrors. Sad, really.

You've described my experience exactly.

The amount of money that "enterprises" will spend in order to avoid hiring actual competent people is staggering. They quite literally spend orders of magnitude more than just hiring people, always end up with mixed results and have no ownership over the things they depend on.

I've also seen several cases where these companies maintain a "predatory" relationship: they build some big convoluted Thing of dubious quality and utility, and then, as a result of the hiring company refusing to invest in employees of any expertise, they either pay the same company to "maintain" or "add features" to The Thing, or worse, they hire another outsourcing firm to do that.

My favorite experience was working with a large F500 that outsourced (effectively) 100% of their IT--the internal staff were basically "yappers", people that just attending meetings and said things like "we'll have to ensure this meets security standards" but did no actual implementation work and had no intimacy with anything developed.

The irony, of course, is that attempting to get answers about any of the complex stuff that their employer ostensibly owned was an exercise in futility: "oh you have to ask the 'platform'/'data'/whatever team (another subcontractor or several)". I was under the impression no actual employee at the company knew, in any material way, how any of the stuff the business depended on worked, beyond whatever prepared slide deck they were given.

They'd have zero useful technical input on any solution, only occasionally quipping with some sort of canned platitudes: "we use dotnet internally", right, sure.

Utterly bizarre, and not, I fear, unique.

Ok, so the only silver lining in all of this (if any), is that I'm not alone in these types of experiences. Thanks for validating that its not just me seeing this same kind of craziness! :-)