Microsoft
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
It's been a couple of weeks since Microsoft announced the biggest layoff ever in its 39-year history: 18,000 employees.
And despite the initial shell shock of that news, most employees in Redmond are happy with their new CEO Satya Nadella and the way things are going, a source close to the company tells Business Insider.
Our source says that within hours of the news, the company was "back to business as usual."
This is just one source, so it's impossible to generalize for a company of thousands. However, it was an insightful take on the situation, and the sentiment is backed up by job-hunting site Glassdoor. It says Nadella still enjoys an 87% employee approval rating.
No One Surprised By Nokia Cuts
As we previously reported, the layoff hit newly acquired Nokia employees the hardest. Of the 18,000 cut, 12,500 were from Nokia.
Most Microsoft employees understood why, our source said. Microsoft had no interest in building feature phones, so it trimmed all the people working on feature phones, about half the company.
Even so, our source believes that Microsoft had no choice but to buy Nokia. It was the only phone manufacturer building high-quality Windows phones and in a post-PC world, it had Microsoft in a headlock. If Nokia turned its focus to Android, as it had begun to do, Microsoft would be stuffed.
Cutting Bureaucracy
Another 5,500 employees are being cut from Microsoft, with most of the layoffs, 13,000, done on day 1. The rest will occur over the next six months, the company said.
And that's all about Nadella systematically getting rid of an awkward, bureaucratic project management structure, Nadella explained just days before he made the cuts.
Inside Microsoft, test engineers across the company, particularly in the Windows unit, were the hardest hit, our source said. Nadella had already reorganized the units he ran before, cloud and Server and Tools.
YouTube
Jerry Berg, a former Microsoft employee.
One test engineer who was laid off, Jerry Berg, released a 20-minute video describing how it felt. He said he was one of 150 employees in his unit to get a pink slip that day.
Nadella is not mandating the cuts or the organizational structure of each unit, another source tells us. In fact, that's one of the changes to the culture that he's implmenting. Every unit may be structured a little differently. The cloud unit, which pushes out new software daily, may not need the same structure as, say, the Windows unit.
Still, the layoff undoes the organizational system favored by Steven Sinofsky, multiple sources tell us, who helped spread a single structure across the company.