Microsoft Asks For a Refund From Laid-Off Workers [updated] 424
An anonymous reader writes "The large print giveth, the small print taketh away. Microsoft, which recently laid off 1400 employees, is now claiming that some of those lucky schmoes were inadvertently overpaid on their severance package. A letter from the company, which was subsequently circulated on the internet, states: 'We ask that you repay the overpayment and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience to you.' Microsoft has confirmed the authenticity of the letter, but it's not known what the amounts in question are, or how many of the 1400 were affected." Update: 02/24 14:00 GMT by T : VinylRecords writes "Well, now Microsoft has recanted, saying that the situation has resulted in unfortunate amounts of bad press and public relations. 'This was a mistake on our part,' said a Microsoft spokesman in an e-mailed statement. 'We should have handled this situation in a more thoughtful manner.'"
So? (Score:1, Insightful)
Why are people so lunkheaded about this?
Re:Large, unmarked bills. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No accident (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing at all accidental about it. It's a cruel joke perpetrated by cruel people.
Yea, definitely. I bet those guys over in payroll were all like "Hahah, wouldn't it be hilarious if we paid those losers that got fired more than we should? We'd give the company even more bad press, and if we're lucky we might even get fired ourselves!"
Re:Rubbin' salt on the old wounds! (Score:2, Insightful)
It's almost as if Ballmer threw these employees' chairs out the window and now he's billing them to replace the broken window! Good luck collecting this, Micro$oft!
There you have it the real cause of why Windows Vista doesn't work: chairs ;)
Re:Large, unmarked bills. (Score:5, Insightful)
They probably won't need luck if the following happened. Paperwork is drawn up stating that the terminated employee gets paid $2,000. Supervisor and employee sign off on that sum. Retard typing in the info for the check keys in $20,000 instead of $2,000.
The employee can't possibly think that he/she actually deserves the extra $18,000 after agreeing to the original sum.
Re:I think I am not unique in saying.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess you must have some unique skills, or are a leader in your field, or your resume is so good that it would also open doors and guarantee you a new job without references. Pretty confident for this economic environment, huh?
Re:I think I am not unique in saying.... (Score:2, Insightful)
You'd be surprised how much zealotry you can accomplish at Microsoft :) There's opportunities everywhere!
There's at least one large product with decent Unix support thanks to my efforts (unrelated to my internship, even).
My point was this: Microsoft does evil things, but we all know that. But no one ever said they treated their employee's evilly.
You don't have to be blind to be a zealot. I prefer to think my zealotry is based on reality.
Re:Technically they are right (Score:5, Insightful)
If you accidentally overpay someone, you shouldn't ask for the money? I'd argue that if you know you've been overpaid, keeping the extra money is bad morals.
Re:No accident (Score:5, Insightful)
Payroll is in North Dakota? (Score:5, Insightful)
The letter asks for repayments to be sent to Fargo, North Dakota. If I got a letter purporting to be from my former company asking me to send money to a totally different state from that where I had worked and that where the company was based, I'd be more than a bit suspicious. This is apparently legit, but I wonder if any employees thought it was a scam (a scam by other than Microsoft, anyway)...
Re:Large, unmarked bills. (Score:1, Insightful)
How's that any different than when the government overpays you?
It is different because it's micro$oft, and anything that's done by them is bad. It doesn't matter if other people have done it.
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, I sometimes have the feeling that if some megacorporation figured out a way to make a profit torturing puppies to death, people like you would say, "Well, you know, they're just honoring their obligations to the shareholders!"
Re:Large, unmarked bills. (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole reason managers exist is to maintain sanity: if a company reaches the point that it is terminating an employee without the employee's direct manager reviewing the documents involved, it deserves everything it gets.
You can chose to be either an ongoing, profitable business, or a bizarre digital art-form, but if you chose the later, do not be surprised when you lose money in the real world.
Re:they probably are owed it (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have any strong evidence, but it sounded more to me like their methods for calculating what a person should be paid was just discovered to be faulty. If it really were some sort of entry error into their payment systems it seems like it should be one or two very isolated cases. When combined with that line that "some laid off employees were also undercompensated," it paints a picture for me of a broken formula. The fact that they call it an "administrative error" rather than "accounting error" also points me in that direction.
As such, these people probably agreed to the package that they ultimately received. If Microsoft actually had any right to collect the over-payments, they probably would have said so in the letter to ensure greater initial compliance--even if they ultimately had no intention to go after the money with the lawyers.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I sometimes have the feeling that if some megacorporation figured out a way to make a profit torturing puppies to death, people like you would say, "Well, you know, they're just honoring their obligations to the shareholders!"
The sad thing is that the people who said that would be correct. In fact, there probably is a corporation out there right now making a profit from torturing puppies (probably a cosmetics company).
Corporations have a legal obligation to make a profit. They do not have a legal obligation to do the right thing. In fact, most seem to think that the legal obligation to turn a profit trumps the legal obligation to follow the law (in nearly every circumstance, if the chance of getting caught * the fine it would have to pay < the ROI from breaking the law, the law gets broken).
Modern corporations need severe public oversight. Or we could nix the public stock market and finally get the Supreme Court to announce "Corporations are not People". I don't think I'll live to see either of these things come to pass.
I didn't give the money back and... (Score:2, Insightful)
Karma (Score:2, Insightful)
I think MS got what they deserved here.
Should the employees give it back?
Yes. Anyone who keeps something that doesn't belong to them is an honorless cheating scumbag.
Will they?
Probably not. What possible leverage does MS have to make the employees do what they should? The ex-employees have no reason, other than honor, to give it back. MS has no leverage, they shot themselves in the foot.
Personally, I think that all the workers who don't cough up the dough are just exploiting microsoft's blunder to advantage themselves.
However, since MS has exploited weakness to make itself stronger and stabbed its competitors in the soft underbelly (netscape anyone?), I think this is nothing more than a bit of bad karma biting them in the arse.
They really have no choice but to write it off as a blunder. Expecting the ex employees to be honest? Hah, they're lying cheating human beings! What do you expect them to do?
The only way I see MS coming out ahead is by taking people to court over it and tacking on punitive damages for a breach of constructive trust. Knowingly keeping or disposing of property that isn't yours is called conversion.
MS screwed itself over and needs to let it go because of the bad PR that fighting karma will create. But those folks who kept the overpayment for themselves are a bunch of dirty rotten cheaters and should be ashamed of themselves.
And the nincompoop in the payroll department? A ripe target for both a canning and a negligence suit owing to breach of fiduciary duty. This is really the only person I see MS able to go after without a major karmic backlash. If the action was deliberate, then it's embezzling and he/she deserves jail time.
Re:Karma (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as I'm concerned when it comes to severance, the question of whether I should return money comes down to one question: is the amount paid to me in excess of what the documents I received when I left said I was to be paid? When I leave, I confirm with the company rep that the amount those documents give is accurate and we both sign things off. After that, their miscalculations are No Longer My Problem. They've agreed that's the amount they're to pay me, I expect them to abide by their agreement just as they expect me to abide by mine. If they cut a check for more than the agreement said, they get their money back. If the amount of the check matches the agreement, they can ask all they want but I'm not inclined to change the agreement without getting something in return for the changes.
What exactly is the big deal? (Score:4, Insightful)
This sort of thing happens all the time, banks overpay, payroll overpays, people overpay. It happens, if you get called out on it, you are legally and morally obligated to return the money(personally I tend to point out the mistake if I see it being made as well, but that's me).
Is it a little petty to be going after terminated employees if the amounts are fairly trivial? Yeah. Do we know that the amounts are trivial? No. Remember an average of an extra grand per employee is 1.4 million dollars, not exactly pocket change, even to Microsoft.
Companies do this all the time, it's part interacting with human beings who can and do make mistakes. If anyone other than Microsoft had done this, the article wouldn't have been written.
Re:No accident (Score:5, Insightful)
A bureaucracy is neither evil, good, nor even conscious; it just seems that way. Who said, "never ascribe to evil what can be explained by stupidity"? They call bureaucracies "mindless" for a reason.
I think one could make a good argument for bureaucracies exhibiting consciousness. I think that they long ago reached the point that computerized AI will reach in the future, but with humans and rules as their brains. It's always fascinating to see a bureaucracy do something that no one within it wants or understands, and it happens more than one might expect.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Other than that, You are correct.
Re:Capitalism is Ugly (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow... Government spending equals concentration camps?
Re:No accident (Score:1, Insightful)
Microsoft, a company that (among other things) makes accounting software having an error in accounting? That's not reassuring.
Also (to parent), I'm not really sure I want to know what the furries' contingency plan is for this sort of situation.
Prove it in a court of law (Score:5, Insightful)
Prove it!
Let Microsoft prove it in a court of law that it overpaid them.
Just because a BIG corporate demands money from you doesn't mean you have to bend over.
If i claim Microsoft wasted my money due to faults in its XP, would Microsoft bend over and pay me? NO
They will regretfully inform me of their inability to pay and thank me for my comments.
So, i have to sue them.
Similarly, each such employee should send a simple regret letter expressing their deep regret at microsoft and stating clearly their personal policies prevent them from paying. Neither confirm nor deny you owe them money. State POLICY.
Simple.
Microsoft will spend 10x times the money on lawyers to recover the money from you.
They don't treat INTERNS as cogs (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a difference. As an intern, you responsibilites end at the end of your internship. So no one is cracking the whip over your head or forces you to come to work on Saturday (otherwise you won't want to join after you graduate). Once you become an FTE (full-time employee) all of that will change. For one, there will be "stack ranking" where you're ranked against your peers according to the perception that management has of you. If you don't pay attention to "visibility" -- you won't get promoted, no matter how much of a genius you are. You will learn this in about a year or two. Another killer thing is that nowhere does the TEAM performance come into the equation. You're competing solely with your peers for a fixed size pie. The problem with this is that someone has to get a shitty review score in order for someone else to get a good review score. If all members of your team are good, you may have to whore yourself to the management in order to get promoted. But that won't be easy either, because your team members are not stupid, and they're doing the same thing.
This is how FTEs are forced into overtime, ridiculous schedules, and other unreasonable demands. Needless to say, this shit doesn't work on interns, since they couldn't care less if they get a promo.
After about 2 or 3 years there I figured things out and started acting accordingly. I maintained a reasonable, albeit not outstanding, promotion velocity while flat out refusing to work weekends and overtime (except in the final stretch of the shipping cycle). I did good work, I kept my manager (and skip-level manager) informed, and I set the expectations beforehand with each new team I moved to.
That said, the endless fucking performance review cycle did me in and I decided to go somewhere where I'd be actually focused on my job, not on keeping everyone informed.
I did learn a TON, though, both about software engineering and about corporate life (or, shall we say, warfare). I can't recommend Microsoft highly enough for someone who's just out of college, if only for 2 or 3 years.
Don't make a mistake of staying longer. The compensation system is engineered in such a way that you really start liking the numbers in your paycheck at around 3 or 4 year mark. Stash away some cash and move on.
Re:No accident (Score:2, Insightful)
Is it possible to be really competent and work for Microsoft?
Re:No accident (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you read your taskbar? :|
Re:No accident (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure if that indicates superior marketing skills, or just the general idiocy of the population ?
Re:No accident (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No accident (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh man, no joke.
Guys used to have mysterious allotments coming out of their LES' now and then, with little recourse to find out other than some pay clerk telling you to do a "pay inquiry". Over-payments, no-pay-due's, all kinds of random stuff that was just inevitable in a paper-and-red-tape bureaucracy.
Ah yes, I remember the "good old days" of my first enlistment (87-93) how we used to joke about the "Lies and Exaggerations Statement". I never had any expenses beyond beer and cigarettes, so the "surprises" never hurt me, but I watched a lot of married guys with kids go through hell. It was so regularly F'd up that our company commander at Ft Hood had to borrow three bucks from me for lunch off base because he'd loaned all his spare money to a guy whose LES had come up ZERO with a wife and screaming baby (or was it a screaming wife and baby?) to contend with. I suppose DFAS fixed a lot of it, but I never paid much attention on my second active duty period (2001-2003)... I just came home and found a bunch of unspent money in my account.
...As do (Score:3, Insightful)
About 90% of the (Anonymous) commenters at MiniMSFT. [blogspot.com] - The notorious bitchy insider blog.
As expected in a company that size, at the lower levels one is expendable, and any higher up one's energy is entirely consumed with political survival.
This may help explain the quality of the product, management and strategy that we have been seeing for the last few years...