Satya Nadella remains popular at
Microsoft, despite his implementing the layoff of 18,000 employees, according to
Business Insider. Although the website cited only a "source close to Microsoft," it noted that Nadella retains an 87 percent employee approval rating on Glassdoor. Most Microsoft employees understand the reasoning behind the layoffs, BI's source said: The company isn't interested in building feature phones, and so it let go the people at
Nokia working on them. About 12,500 of the people who lost their jobs were at Nokia. Meanwhile, Nadella was determined to streamline Redmond's project management structure.
Test engineers, particularly in the Windows unit, were among the hardest hit, BI says.
Click here to find test engineer positions. Nadella is trying to reinvent Microsoft as a cloud- and mobile-centric company focused on cross-platform services and applications. Analysts and pundits long predicted that Nadella would cut jobs as part of his broader strategy. Before the layoffs, Microsoft employees were organized into three disciplines:
program managers,
developers and
testers. Those groups reported to their own managers. As a result, product decisions were made by committee—program managers, developers and testers all weighing in to their managers, who in turn weighed in to
their managers, to a level quite high up the food chain. It wasn't until an issue reached the EVP level that a single person would make a call. "It was management by committee on steroids," BI observes, "a very slow way to build products." Before the cuts were announced, Nadella was already talking about changing Microsoft's culture. "Nothing is off the table in how we think about shifting our culture to deliver on [our] core strategy," he wrote in a July 10
memo to employees.
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