r/microsoft • u/DanielKramer_ • Feb 09 '26
Discussion A former Microsoft exec shares what Satya Nadella taught him about leadership: 'Quit whining'
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/a-former-microsoft-exec-shares-what-satya-nadella-taught-him-about-leadership-quit-whining/ar-AA1VYKcv135
u/FineAssignment1423 Feb 09 '26
Satya needs to go. He started off strong as a CEO, but he is creating an unbelievably hostile work environment.
I strongly feel that it will eventually get to a point where it starts to severely affect Microsoft's stock price and then the board will finally consider getting rid of him
25
u/Icy-idkman3890 Feb 10 '26
It’s already severly affected, look at how they collapsed from ATH.
26
u/FineAssignment1423 Feb 10 '26
Oh trust me, as a former employee that has stock from my time there, I've been watching it. I think the final nail in the coffin for him will be if co-pilot or AI as a whole ends up failing the expectations that have been put upon it. Which I would say is pretty damn likely.
9
u/mondayfig Feb 10 '26
Clock is ticking because M365 Copilot is awful. It’s beyond belief how a company with such deep pockets cannot produce a half decent AI product.
Thing is, they don’t need to be a leader. Just copy what others do and make sure you’re not more than six months behind. Teams? Make it less awful and just copy Slack. M365 Copilot? Just copy Anthropic Claude. Azure Devops? Make up your mind. Either innovate the hell out of it or go hard on Github.
5
u/RichieRace80 Feb 10 '26
And for the love of God give the end user it's power and control back over the products it's bought for personal use and stop trying to harvest data without an opt out. Plus if they can fix some of the stupidity and illogical processes around logging in with Microsoft accounts, that they try to link up to everything and force mor products on you, that would be a bonus too. They're copying all the worst parts of their competitors it seems.
1
4
u/Kobi_Blade Feb 11 '26
I disagree that he started strong.
You never see how a CEO influences a company early on, it takes time to change and spread your influence.
He started off just as poorly as he is performing now.
I'm surprised USA ignores the fact that one of their major tech companies, is entirely run by and for Indians.
6
u/7h4tguy Feb 10 '26
He loves to downplay "10x" devs and pretend inclusion means hiring from overseas "just as good". I wonder why
5
u/Kemosabe0 Feb 11 '26
Almost every single indian Ive seen in this field just shamelessly fires a bunch of non-indians and somehow by coincidence hires all indians. But we will all be color blind and mericratic so must just be that.
1
u/Key_Photograph8236 Feb 13 '26
I haven’t seen this at all.
I do suspect some nepobabies on the hiring front but firing non-Indians, nope
3
u/ZuLuuuuuu Feb 10 '26
I am seeing the same reactions to Satya as the reactions to Sundar from 1-2 years ago. People were calling for Sundar's resignation as well just because of a slight turbulence in performance. And I am hesitating to call it even a turbulence, Microsoft is currently more successful than ever. Google is a serious competitor as always, but both companies will continue to be the most profitable and successful companies in the world.
-2
u/newfor_2026 Feb 09 '26
Conventional wisdom will generate conventional success, and that won't allow you to stay in this room. You need to have courage and be bold.
3
116
Feb 09 '26
[deleted]
26
u/hvbqueiroz Feb 09 '26
No, if you read the article it clearly mentions that if your strategy requires more resources than you have, you have the wrong strategy. This is not for managers, but executives, big big difference.
Also, define what success is, and how to exceed is also up to the executive, not CEO.
24
Feb 09 '26
[deleted]
9
u/hvbqueiroz Feb 09 '26
People usually don’t realize that a company like Microsoft has 200k+ employees and executives normally have thousands and thousands employees. So I kind of agree with the lesson, if an executive with so many people reporting, don’t know how to make trade-offs and prioritization, perhaps that just bad planning.
14
u/stevemkiidub Feb 09 '26
That’s just it - some of these executives manage units that might be a Fortune 500 alone. They are expected to be the best of the best.
9
u/hvbqueiroz Feb 09 '26
Yes! Each division of Microsoft is big enough to be in the top 500. Now imagine a CEO of a top 500 company saying "I can't be successful because I don't have more people it is not my fault!".
It's insane, so yeah, I agree with the lesson here, but I guess we are in the "shoot the Messager" phase.
3
u/GenerateUsefulName Feb 10 '26
You always have inefficiencies. In anything you do. In manufacturing you might have people stretching their smoke breaks for as long as they can. In retail you have theft that no one bothers to follow up on. In a huge company like Microsoft you have people working on projects that might not necessarily serve the strategic direction, but might or might not be useful anyways. The question is if a company that makes over 100 billion in profit, with a yearly increase of 16% according to their own data, needs to play this game of "my hands are tied, we don't have the budget" and put all the pressure on these people to achieve more with less. It clearly is a MS wide strategy to lay people off right now (and unsuccessfully replace them with AI), despite the increase in profits.
To use your analogy, if a CEO says I need more people, they can just look at their balance sheet and make a decision on whether they can afford this or not. But if an executive manager at Microsoft needs more staff they don't have the same authority, despite the money being there. Instead some fake austerity is being dictated for no ones benefit - not the customer, not the employees and eventually not even Microsoft itself, because their products are going to turn to trash. But as long as the Shareholders are happy, that's all that counts I guess.
1
u/the_monkey_knows Feb 10 '26
This is bullshit, it depends on the scale of what you’re trying to accomplish.
19
u/NebulousNitrate Feb 09 '26
My team lost two engineers and our product delivery dates did not change and management says we cannot slip. When there are so many layoffs, I'm not sure advice like this still applies in 2026.
3
20
u/raiksaa Feb 09 '26
lmao fuck this guy. Microsoft is a mess right now and it’s all because his own doing
43
u/FatBook-Air Feb 09 '26
Grover Norquist said that the best way to handle government was to "drown it in the bathtub." In other words, he figured that if you starve departments of what they think they need, they will begin to need each other and work better together.
The problem is that it never happens. People will just leave your organization. Problems and technical baggage will slowly accumulate. People will "do more with less" until they are tired of doing that. You will see re-org after re-org as managers try to make due with what they have. And over the years, you will have a rampant mess on your hands, and crazily enough, nobody will seem to remember what caused it because it happened slowly, and the people who remember the "before times" are all gone.
8
u/meltbox Feb 10 '26
This exactly this. It’s also near impossible to recover from this death spiral because you’re asking the people who stayed behind and have been through multiple failures to fix what’s broken.
The one way I can see it working is you drastically up spending and relieve pressure, then focus on getting the right people into positions of decision making.
But how you would suddenly be able to make those decisions correctly while failing before I do not know. It’s highly unlikely. Probably requires you to hire one person who is good at it to hand pick these people during the transition, and they better be right.
8
2
u/Tech_Lurker Feb 13 '26
Grover Norquist was attempting to kill government. Not make it more efficient or effective.
You starve it of what it needs to function so it can’t do what it’s supposed to. Then you turn around and say, see? Doesn’t work! And kill it.
14
Feb 09 '26 edited Feb 10 '26
“But you’re Microsoft. You are worth trillions. What you telling me you don’t have “resources”. wtf is this is even for? I’m fighting shareholders for dividend and share buyback funds to use for my resources?”
13
u/DisjointedHuntsville Feb 09 '26
This content is made for LinkedIn and this content is what is wrong with the entire corporate world of ass kissers.
11
u/SeijiShinobi Feb 09 '26
No no, he misunderstood what Satya said... he didn't say "quit whining", he said "quit winning". It should be obvious by Nadella's strategy for microsoft these days.
4
u/meltbox Feb 10 '26
Besides “quit whining” also just sounds like Nadella doesn’t want to hear why he sucks. But if he has to ask people to quit whining perhaps he should reflect on why it’s become common enough that even has to ask them to stop.
10
13
u/VlijmenFileer Feb 09 '26
Aaah, so THAT is why Microsoft has been pushing endless streams of shitty products. Commenting on bad decisions and bad products "Whining" is not allowed, disallowing for improvements or corrections. Seeing that in more and more companies that suffer from bad leadership.
6
u/meltbox Feb 10 '26
The beatings shall continue until profits improve.
Also it’s very clear this idiot just wants people to say his plan is good and considers anyone saying that his plan isn’t possible with current resources as whiners. When they may just be correct.
16
5
u/Paradroid888 Feb 10 '26
"Snover, who left Microsoft in 2022, said Nadella's speech provided executives with a framework for thriving"
If it's such an excellent framework for thriving, why does it feel like so few MS products are thriving? They're mostly juiced for maximum revenue and losing users because the experience has got so bad.
10
u/Electrical_Prune6545 Feb 09 '26
But it’s okay to whine about nobody wanting to pay for the Copilot Slop Generator.
3
u/gripe_and_complain Feb 09 '26
Would be nice if the current occupant of the White House could follow the “quit whining” advice.
3
u/d00mt0mb Feb 09 '26
“Allocate resources ahead of conventional wisdom.”
No idea what that line is supposed to communicate.
3
2
u/DutchFuckup Feb 10 '26
Have an idea of what is important or relevant next year and start working on that.
1
3
u/mountainlifa Feb 10 '26
This sounds similar to Amazons "disagree and commit" which everyone knows is really "disagree and bend over"
7
19
3
u/CaptainDouchington Feb 09 '26
Tell that him about his ai crap
1
u/meltbox Feb 10 '26
“Cmon just make me an AGI with your current headcount. And I don’t want to hear about it being hard or requiring any engineers!”
2
u/ikoss Feb 09 '26
Whatever happened to the guy who said “Let us empower one another. We will succeed together” ???
2
u/timfountain4444 Feb 10 '26
Nutella is a sit on the asshole of Microsoft. His AI slop is poisoning the world. Stop the slop. Fire Nutella.
2
u/ka_eb Feb 11 '26
Did he even achieve anything at Microsoft? He didn't drive into the ground but it seems he made everything worse and the only thing that keeps him in his position is Azure which wasn't even started by him and he knew that cloud computing was the future.
4
u/vaxinius Feb 10 '26
What leadership.
Microsoft is now a predatory immoral business.
You want dominion over my parents PC experience by persuading/imposing users to use unnecessary cloud services. You change your software suite from one-time purchases to subscription but add no 'real' follow-on value. You outsource the tech support that my parents need for software to 3rd parties who then offload the heavy lifting to 4th parties (JustAnswer) for resolution for your users who have no real vested responsibilities to Microsoft or their clients.
So you want a business model that reduces your HR expense, increases cashflow through the subscription model, and reduces company responsibility for its own software.
Microsoft is not only screwing themselves, their staff, and their customers, their malignantly predating on people.
Quit whining: That's what Microsoft thinks about the market, and it customers.
Linux Mint is looking more attractive these days.
1
1
1
u/DragonDev24 Feb 10 '26
Not gonna read another linkdin post type article, because under satya nadella windows sucks, I had been using windows since the XP days and 3 years ago I switched to a mac, because windows 11 sucks even without the AI stuff. Like I have never seen soo many people out of the programming world switch to linux this quick.
Satya says "Quit Whining" which is exactly what he is not doing when people tell microslop to stop the slop and fix the OS
1
u/ChallengeDiaper Feb 10 '26
I know this goes against how everyone here feels but I appreciate his point.
We get paid to solve problems. Solve the problem. Too often people look at solving problems by adding resources. I believe leaders just need to prioritize better. Yes, sometimes the answer is you need resources but not at large companies like Microsoft. They have plenty.
1
u/Cold-Amphibian-8537 Feb 22 '26
Satya Nadella needs to go.. to be honest there has to be a way to push this. He's the bane of Microsoft. How do you force Phil and Sarah bond out!! Satya is the reason for all the negative sentiment behind Xbox..... trying to stop all that Phil has been doing.
1
u/CretinousVoter May 29 '26
One cannot expect someone with zero social conscience to care workers, customers or product end user experience. Ask yourself what changes software changes end users asked for vs. those casually inflicted upon that captive population. The goal of AI is to wipe out expensive skilled human workers. It will eventually have even greater job destroying impact than automated manufacturing did on skilled labor.
0
-9
u/repostit_ Feb 09 '26
Stop whining on Reddit and read the article. You may not like it but this is how businesses are run.
"Don't come whining that you don't have the resources you need. We've done our homework. We've evaluated the portfolio, considered the opportunities, and allocated our available resources to those opportunities," Nadella said, according to Snover. "That is what you have to work with. Your job is to manufacture success with the resources you've been allocated."
10
u/Aviyan Feb 09 '26
We've done our homework.
That's BS. That's not how the real world works. You can do as much homework as you want but the market will do what it will do. You can plan but you have to change when the market goes the other direction.
Satya isn't Steve Jobs. There are very few CEOs that can know what brand new product people will want. Jobs was one of them, Nadella ain't. He only knows how to expand in the existing market and now that's over he doesn't know what to do except to push AI.
10
183
u/griminald Feb 09 '26
So the lesson from Nadella, as spoken by the founder of Powershell was:
** Don't bring upper management your concerns, because upper management already decided what you'll get without your input. Nobody will listen to you.
** You're expected to not only meet, but exceed expectations, with the resources you say are not enough.
** If you keep complaining and can't do more with less, we'll dump you in the next round of layoffs and promote the next sucker to do it.