Posted on 02/22/2009 8:33:55 AM PST by Askwhy5times
Microsoft wants laid off employees to return part of their severance pay. I guess over $50 billion is not enough money for Bill Gates. Microsoft recently laid off 1400 workers ,mostly in the US. They have now decided their severance package was too big. They have sent the a letter (see picture) to them asking for the money back. Perhaps some of those mosquitoes Bill Gates recently released at a tech conference have infected him with an insanity virus.
(Excerpt) Read more at bloggingredneck.blogspot.com ...
Ain’t gonna happen.
This really makes no sense, and is very difficult to believe....but these days who knows for sure.
LOL come and get it Bill.
Bill has the right to be just as wealthy as he can become. But this is not the smartest thing he’s ever done.
I thought Gates wasn’t running MS anymore.
When My hunch-back brother straightens up!
Not really tech related, but worth a few laughs.
The story needs more research.
Was it in fact an “administrative error”?
What was the policy in place at the time?
If it were an error, they should have include specific policy references to identify the method to calculate the proper amount.
"So clearly, there has been a great rush to send all kinds of work overseas. But WHY? The usual answer is “To be cost competitive. We could not survive as a company if we continued to pay exorbitant American salaries.” Is this really true? Consider Microsoft. One of its managers, Brian Valentine, was quoted in a trade magazine as saying “Think India! Two for the price of one!” But before its big dividend payout, Microsoft was sitting on some $50 billion (with a “B”, folks)--in Cash. And essentially no debt. Are you telling me Microsoft has to pinch pennies on salaries, because they can’t afford to compete otherwise? Let’s do the math. MBA types like to talk about comparing expected return on investment to the “risk-free” rate of return, US Treasuries. If Microsoft had just invested that money into US Treasuries, even when interest rates bottomed out at about 2%, they would have had $1 billion /year, CASH, with which to pay American programmers. And this would have been without touching the principal and without affecting cash flow from continuing operations."
Sorry Bill, your attempt to globalize has failed. You can suck on it.
Cheers!
Apparently they used MS Money to calculate the severance packages and discovered Money has a glitch that added 2 zeros.
It’ll be fixed in SP4.
Maybe M$ should return part their former job in proportion?
Sounds like a Nigerian Scam to me.
yada yada warden yada yada
Apparently the person that wrote this doesn't keep up with Microsoft too well.
Bill Gates left as CEO long ago. He doesn't have anything to do with running the company anymore.
As if I would send ANY money to an address at “One Lone Tree Rd., Fargo, North Dakota”!
“An inadvertent administrative error occurred that resulted in an overpayment in severance pay by Microsoft,”
Could one presume that MS is asking nicely since they used their own software (and didn’t have a TOS clause to cover this?)
Haw, good one!
Some of the severence packages were calculated wrong. Some were overpaid, some were underpaid. The article is inaccurate on it’s face and characterizes what happened wrongly. That said, MSFT should fix the underpaid packages and leave the others alone. Bad PR is bad PR.
Gates retired some years ago.
” Apparently the person that wrote this doesn’t keep up with Microsoft too well.
Bill Gates left as CEO long ago. He doesn’t have anything to do with running the company anymore.”
He does not run the company on a daily basis, but to say he doesn’t have anything to do with Microsoft anymore isn’t completely correct.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-9976872-80.html
He is Chairman of the Board of Directors.
In spite of all the faults that Microsoft has, you have to admit that their Software lifecycle model is simply brilliant.
Step 1: Write a piece of software.
Step 2: Instead of conducting beta testing, (which nobody likes to do because Beta Versions are unstable and full of bugs,) simply call it a Production release and go to market.
Step 3: When the error reports start coming in, (which they will at a higher percentage than if you had called it a Beta Rel. People expect a Beta Rel to be buggy and may not report minor problems.) start writing patches to fix the error.
Step 4: Release the Error Fixes as "Service Packs" to improve and enhance your computing experience.
Simply brilliant.
I thought their software model was “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.”
It won't happen.
Who in their right mind would return severance pay?
LOL!!!
Unless the money one of the employees received was a mistake, they are under no obligation to return it.
“Don’t make me come lookin’ for you.”
LOL, right. What is MS going to do, fire the guy?
If this was electronically deposited, it may be possible for MicroSoft to electronically recover it.
Those arrangements are often bi-directional.
Well OK, but only if I get a finders fee.
Has the person who made the “administrative error” been laid off?
If they left on good terms it’s possible to get rehired. I think I’d pay the money back if that were the case.
I did check to see if MS did indeed move their payroll operations to Fargo. They have.
Not if you close the account.
That might be a wise action on the employee’s part.
This is a joke, right? ‘Cause it’s REALLY FUNNY!
This is satire, right?
Um, yeah, I’m not giving the company who just fired me some of the money they voluntarily gave me.
Hmmmm...
1. MS screwed up the payments. Stupid.
2. It is a PR mistake to try to fix it. Stupid.
3. Should ex-employees return the money? Of course. It doesn’t belong to them. That’s called honesty. Being laid off is no justification for theft.
From the letter, it appears that an accounting function error was made. I see nothing wrong in asking for it to be corrected, if that was, in fact, the case.
If there were an error on your 1099, W-2 or whatever, you’d want it to be corrected too, wouldn’t you?
Really, it’s not a matter of the money, it’s correcting an error that could come back to haunt them and the employee in the future.
I thought Microsoft was in Washington State? I forget, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t in North Dakota. I would definitely check the scamminess of this before I did anything like ragging on Microsoft (there are plenty of other reasons for that) or thinking of sending back the money.
MSFT should just blame the mistake on a bug in the software. Nobody will doubt it.
nice to see how microsoft cares about the American worker..
hahahahahahaha!
i was thinking that this just has to be from The Onion...
I think the coldest action of this type was a metroplex PD that asked the widow of an officer killed in the line of duty to return the balance of his duty pay for the part of the shift he didn’t work.
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