Ex-MSFT here. I resigned in June, I was an L63. I spent 8 years at MSFT across two stints.
My last 18 months at MSFT were deeply unproductive. Constant reorgs, the work not being aligned to my capabilities and unfortunately just the general feeling that I was under worked and had very little opportunity for career advancement.
I would look at my colleagues and sister teams and wonder, why do they need these many people to work on something so trivial ? Or how did this person get promoted for doing that work ? I am sure envy played a part in the second question but it was legitimate. Remember, all this was before LLM tools were prevalent.
In the end, I left off my own volition. In my last 6 months, I did very little work, if at all any. I thought why am I being paid so handsomely for such little and trivial work. I did try interviewing in a few different teams but didn’t make it (Azure Files and Hyperscale DB). If I had stayed, I would have been swiftly laid off or if I was lucky enough last long till this buyout.
I think same is true for all Big Tech companies. Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.
> I think same is true for all Big Tech companies. Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.
A lot of people has this feeling because the work at a big corporation is different than in starting technologies.
When you start a new technology everything is new, and a lot of stuff is added at the edge.
When you work for stablished company most of the work is refinements, following new rules or regulations, incorporating products from merges, maintaining technology up to date with new releases... nothing feels important and nothing feels challenging. At the same time, your company fails if it is not done. Quality is also incredible important, to break a tiny component may send thousands of companies around the world spinning.
Maybe you should work for a startup instead of a stablished company. You can move fast and break things when you have no customers, or just very few of them.
> When you work for stablished company most of the work is refinements, following new rules or regulations, incorporating products from merges, maintaining technology up to date with new releases... nothing feels important and nothing feels challenging. At the same time, your company fails if it is not done. Quality is also incredible important, to break a tiny component may send thousands of companies around the world spinning.
This is part of it, but it's also true that in a lot of massive enterprises there is an absurd amount of inefficiency that leads to people effectively having nothing to do.
I had one such role at Splunk, pre-acquisition, which had a mere ~2k or so employees at the time. My entire office was effectively doing nothing; we were the result of another acquisition and management had no idea what to do with us. More hours were logged at the foosball and ping-pong tables than in front of an IDE. I'm not even exaggerating. I left after 9 months because I was bored; I did not write a single line of code that got used in any real application, internal or external.
When I went to AWS, it was closer to what you're describing; it took a lot of work to do seemingly very small changes for the reasons you mention. But I would never say that my team there had too many employees doing not enough work; everyone was busy all the time, it just took a lot of work to do very small changes.
> When you work for stablished company most of the work is refinements
At what point is a company established? I recall that the early years of Google, it produced not only Search but also Gmail, Maps, Translate, Android, and Chrome. That was all between 1998-2008. At what point did most of Google's work become refinements?
My point being, it is a culture issue. Google could have become "established" and focus on "refinements" after Search. Or Gmail. Or Maps. Or Translate. But each of those times, it did not.
In the years since, Google has spun up GCP from nothing, built the foundations of the current AI boom, designed its own chips (TPU), rolled out self-driving cars, etc.
It's possible for both things to be true at once: a huge company can contain pockets of innovation, pockets of people doing nothing, and a lot that's somewhere in between.
Yeah, at least in the pre-AI times I was writing way less code than in my startup days. but like 10 to 1000x people actually interacted with them.
OP might have been stuck in a dept that is winding down to prep for a layoff or something. I probably would have stuck around unless I found a different role. Who knows, you might just get some severance.
I work in oil and gas manufacturing and we are slow dinosaurs when it comes to adapting or using new technology.
Recently we've hired a few startups for PoCs regarding to data analytics and they all get deeply frustrated at the pace it takes us to even agree basic details.
Honestly the same impression I get. I met with some old coworkers I hadn't seen in a few years two weeks ago and we caught up. I went to a very small company that almost got killed by false rumors that killed a few of our biggest contracts and got us blackballed for a few years that we've only recently come out from under.
Two of them, in contrast, went to Google, and the differences in experience were so drastic. I'm out there almost every single week directly meeting with customers. Our CEO knows me personally. CEOs of other companies know me personally. Whether or not what I'm doing actually matters, I can at least feel the impact. I can give a concrete dollar amount for deals from the past year that would not have closed without my contribution to tackling issues the buyers had.
The guys who went to Google talked of how nice it was to have stock grants appreciate, but they did basically no work at all. It seemed Google was just experimenting with expanding into remote work but had no idea what to actually do with all these people. The strategy seemed to just be hire anyone smart enough whether or not there was work for them. They'd describe periods of weeks doing nothing at all, with no contact from any team members or superiors, no direction being given to them. Then contraction comes and, sure enough, they're the first to get laid off. Not because they did anything wrong, but just because companies that big are constantly experimenting with entire divisions and product lines that existed for no real reason other than they had more money than God and may as well do something with it, but when it turns out a product line with no purpose never actually sells or even gets completed half the time, the entire division gets axed and anyone in it goes, regardless of the quality of their work or their persons or intellect.
I know these guys very well. One of them is pretty good and I'd take him in a heartbeat for anything not super challenging, but the other is a straight up honest to God superstar in the making. He was solving other team's challenges without even being asked within a week of being on the job. I'd put him on any project ever. The fact that a company would even consider losing him is an indictment on their ability to judge ability.
This isn't even really saying anything specifically bad about Google or Microsoft. I just frankly don't think it's possible for any organization that large to have any idea what 90% of their employees are even doing on any given day. Google and Microsoft should each be about 30 different companies, not one, and even those 30 would still be too big to really stand out if you're not Raymond Chen or Jeff Dean.
I work at google and our team has too much work and is expanding constantly. Anyone I meet in GCP is working 45 hours a week minimum. It's not a death march but I've yet to meet the people who just don't do anything.
As with any large company, I think it's going to vary, even within the same jurisdictions.
Something a lot of people are bad at is the gradations of "no" that might be allowed in a situation, and learning how to communicate that can ripple up and down.
If upper management tells you "I want 1 million ponies by tomorrow", but what they really mean is "I want to see how far you can get at delivering those ponies by tomorrow", that can be the difference between making a plan for coordinating that transport and going home on time or being up at 2 am calling around to find someone who won't call you expletives for waking them to ask about ponies at 2 am.
60k workers, 1/4 of the workers. This is a big deal. It also really puts you into a bind if you receive the offer. Do you accept, take the money, and hope you can find a job (Now competing with many other Msft employees that are looking). Do you decline and hope you don't get hit with the layoff which hits if not enough people accept?
My dad was a newspaper reporter in the early 2000s, so there were several dinner table conversations about this dilemma.
The buyouts were taken by superstars and low performers. The superstars moved on to other things, like working in other forms of media.
Dad didn't take several rounds of buyouts and was fine.
After suffering a stroke, he was "put out to pasture", which for a journalist means he was sent to cover city hall meetings in some suburb. Eventually, he retired with some much smaller payout than what the last buyout would have given him. The sense in the family was that the collapse of the industry denied him a dignified last decade of work. (When the industry was flush with cash, older journalists were sort of like "elder statesmen" in the newsroom. Post-internet, no longer.)
With all due respect, it's just a job, and we would do well to remember that. Chasing status and respect through work will lead to sadness (reality - expectations = happiness).
I think we should buy people out with reasonable comp and let them live the rest of their life doing something that brings them joy and happiness, even if that's volunteering in what they used to get paid for. But I'm not a policymaker.
A whole lot more of us are going to get involuntarily put out to pasture through no fault of our own eventually.
I was a journalist in the old days. With all due respect it was mote than just a job. It was a community, a calling. It felt important. I went out to dinner with my first ever boss and some original colleagues a couple of months ago and had a great time.
>A whole lot more of us are going to get involuntarily put out to pasture through no fault of our own eventually.
And that is going to have predictable consequences like increases in suicides, substance abuse, etc.
A job might "just be a job" but I'm growing tired of this trend online of treating work like it isn't important for most people's sense of worth, place in society, and overall mental health.
It might just be a job but someone living happy in good conditions that feels like the rug might get pulled under them for something they cannot control for is a lot more unerving even if your material conditions work out just fine in the end.
Also I think your being a little atomizing in the impact here. 1 Person losing a job is their problem, I agree. 60 thousand people losing there job is a problem for the government and society. 60K people is a lot and it has a ton of consquences. This is also leading into the prospects of we have these massively profitable corportations who are on the cusp of firing large % of high income people. Whats the tax implication of losing 60K engineering staff level saleries. Its atleast in the billions which is small in the total Federal revenue but if this is a sign of whats to come we have problems. Maybe those people go to different employment but change will effect a lot of local economies.
Granted I know you are really talking about the local emotional effect but the granular net effect is worth the conversation too.
I like your comment but I think you're generalizing too a bit in a different way. It's 60k people spread in different countries, at least four. It is still a big problem, but it's not "the tax implication of losing 60k salaries" for a single government
> This is also leading into the prospects of we have these massively profitable corportations who are on the cusp of firing large % of high income people. Whats the tax implication of losing 60K engineering staff level saleries
Muh job creators! You can't tax your way to growth!
Well actually, they are now job destroyers. Tax the fuckers.
In the US, currently, ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US, ~400k/month, ~4.8M/year. 60k workers leaving Microsoft is a drop in the bucket, relatively speaking. But of course, they should still get as much support as possible via the packages they accept, and getting to retirement (Social Security and Medicare benefits) as pain free and least uncertainty as possible.
> Granted I know you are really talking about the local emotional effect but the granular net effect is worth the conversation too.
I vote for and support Democratic Socialist candidates, who would implement and maintain more humane and pro worker economic systems, I'm doing my part at system levels. But systems will take decades to change. It took decades to get here from Ronald Reagan and his policies. Certainly, people should never be in economic peril, but they also shouldn't tie their identity to their job, or think their job matters. The evidence is robust that the job does not matter.
(and if you think there is a problem with corporate earnings vs what workers take home, again, that is a political and labor organizing problem to solve for)
> In the US, currently, ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means...
Sure, from a raw numbers perspective it's a drop in the bucket. But not all numbers are created equal. How does the pay of these employees from Microsoft compare? You mention those of the baby boomer generation, but are all employees who may be leaving Microsoft of the same age range? What about their skillsets and the investments they and we as society of spent in their education? Those other factors matter quite a bit, so you can't just do a simple 1-1 analysis of "people".
> Certainly, people should never be in economic peril, but they also shouldn't tie their identity to their job, or think their job matters. The evidence is robust that the job does not matter.
Why? Which evidence? I think more people could have more meaning if they were self-employed, were craftsmen or artisans, and such, but this nihilistic viewpoint (which is a hallmark of anti-social/authoritarian ideologies like DSA and others) not only doesn't reflect reality but seeks to belittle those who do in fact find meaning and joy in their work. I for one like my job and have liked most of the jobs I've had. Just because an organization no longer needs you, or you no longer need it, doesn't mean that the job all of a sudden "doesn't matter".
If people don't tie their identity to the thing they spend the most time doing what will they tie it to? Should a police officer or teacher not think of themselves through the lens of their chosen profession? When you ask a professor at your university do you want to work with one who doesn't tie themselves to their work or their research? Would you want to buy produce from a farmer who sort of doesn't care about the quality of the food they grow? Do you want to fly on an airplane built by people who think their job doesn't matter?
If the org can operate without you in the role, or without the role itself, the job does not matter. The human always matters, the job does not.
> If people don't tie their identity to the thing they spend the most time doing what will they tie it to? Should a police officer or teacher not think of themselves through the lens of their chosen profession? When you ask a professor at your university do you want to work with one who doesn't tie themselves to their work or their research? Would you want to buy produce from a farmer who sort of doesn't care about the quality of the food they grow? Do you want to fly on an airplane built by people who think their job doesn't matter?
Finding meaning in the human condition and experience I suppose. Is that in your job? I argue no, but everyone will find meaning in their own way, if they find it before death. If it is your job, and you are involuntarily retired, my condolences. I fly on Boeing equipment occasionally (not my choice), so I definitely fly on airplanes built by companies who think building good aircraft doesn't matter. I'm sure some people at Boeing care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia of "bean counter idgaf".
Society, broadly speaking, runs on everyone doing just good enough in the aggregate to keep the system running. Some systems are better than others (Japan institutionalizing perfectionism, for example).
> If the org can operate without you in the role, or without the role itself, the job does not matter. The human always matters, the job does not.
Blueberries grow in the wild, ergo farmers don't matter.
> Finding meaning in the human condition and experience I suppose. Is that in your job? I argue no, but everyone will find meaning in their own way, if they find it before death.
So why are you prematurely defining what meaning should be for everyone? That's one of the problems with these authoritarian ideologies.
> I fly on Boeing equipment occasionally (not my choice), so I definitely fly on airplanes built by companies who think building good aircraft doesn't matter. I'm sure some people at Boeing care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia of "bean counter idgaf".
I don't understand this at all. Clearly they care a lot or else these planes would be crashing and stuff. If you think they don't care and you're saying flying on the aircraft sucks because they don't care, then maybe they should care more about their jobs and then it would be a better experience, which sort of runs counter to your thesis here.
Local journalism _feels_ like more than a job. Before my CS career, I was a photojournalist for a few different daily papers. It felt like important work. We were history keepers and story tellers for a community.
It is important work, but we have yet to find an economic model to effectively support it and the people doing the work.
(i donate to journalism orgs across the US [ProPublica, Associated Press, Tampa Bay Times, Salt Lake Tribune, Marion County Record, Muckrock], but far more and consistent financial support is needed than these orgs are receiving today)
I agree that it's a job, but.. for most of humanity, people lived and worked in the same spaces with the same humans. The home was a unit of (pre) industrial production. Your neighbours were your partners, or at least involved in general economic activities with you.
Our human brains unsurprisingly still default to that, and it is quite understandable imo.
I tend to agree with the idea that one shouldn't define oneself by a job, especially since one's career is generally dependent on some combination of market forces, institutional gatekeepers, and other factors that are beyond one's control to varying degrees. However, people do tend to put that kind of personal investment into things they spend most of their time on, and especially things they had to spend a long time training for. In order to realize a world where people aren't defined by their career, we would need to first realize a world in which people weren't equal parts encouraged and forced to put most of their time and effort into one, which would require somewhat different economic arrangements than presently exist
The dream, when possible: to continue to perform work one enjoys without an economic requirement or component. It would be great if we could do this for more people, whenever possible, via systems.
> I think we should buy people out with reasonable comp and let them live the rest of their life doing something that brings them joy and happiness, even if that's volunteering in what they used to get paid for. But I'm not a policymaker.
Respect is how you feel, a good position in life is a function of your retirement benefits and financial comfort. If the market has no place for these folks anymore, and we're not offering a permanent jobs bank to keep people working who want to work (which I absolutely think we should do), "it is what it is." Sorry if they feel bad about market changes and demand for certain skills and labor.
We show respect by packaging folks out to live comfortable remainders of their life. "Thank you for your contribution and service." Lack of respect is leaving them hanging in the wind financially, not words. If you need a job to feel needed and respected after entering retirement and with sufficient financial and retiree benefits support, we'll throw a standing appointment with a therapist into the package and/or a volunteer opportunity online board/bank.
If you're looking for validation from your job or your work as a component of your identity, you're going to end up sad. That's a choice. Make better choices if you don't want to be sad.
I've a neighbour who declined, and then got hit by layoffs. It was quite a gamble, and they lost out big time.
Honestly, if work was to come at me with a buy-out offer, and I was in a position to be able to afford to not work for a few years, I'd probably accept. Maybe go find some non-tech work for a little bit to stretch the dollars and ensure I have health insurance.
We're in such a bubble at the moment, things are going to get really rough.
Often, buyouts terms are more generous than layoff terms. Even if the company has a history of generous layoff terms, the next one may be less generous.
The other thing to consider is if you'll want to keep working at the company after so many people have left due to the buyout and the layoff. If not, taking the buyout and looking for a new job is likely to be better for you than not taking the buyout, not getting laid off, and looking for a new job once you conclude you don't like the new environment. For one thing, you'll probably have buyout compensation and new job compensation at the same time; for another, it may be easier to find a new job if you're in the market before the layoffs increase the hiring pool.
Not to start an argument, but do you really think you could easily find non-tech work that also provides health insurance? I get a little triggered at this line of thinking. People often day dream about working as a Costco receipt checker without realizing you literally have to work your way up from seasonal to part-time to full-time over years. And that's assuming you can even get hired as a seasonal worker with a 5+ year unemployment gap on your Resume (your SWE career).
I'm realizing I'm a little bit too passionate about this lol but I would love to hear if you have a specific plan or goal in mind so I can copy it. For me BaristaFIRE would be ideal, but with so many friends going through the layoff/unemployment cycle and hearing their experiences I've concluded it's much more pragmatic to stay in tech.
> with so many friends going through the layoff/unemployment cycle and hearing their experiences I've concluded it's much more pragmatic to stay in tech.
If so many of your friends are becoming unemployed, isn't this a sign of things to come? If people keep getting laid off in tech, what is the motivation to stay there if you might be next?
Like you, I'm confused by the dreams people post about working low-paid jobs if they're laid off. If the job market is flooded with tech workers, all these jobs will become even more competitive than before, and wages will fall. If you think your own career in tech is actually in danger (as in, you don't think you have any skills that couldn't be fully automated in the near future), I think the best option is getting some different education to put some barrier of certification between yourself and the rest of the desperate job market. But it should be something that's highly employable and difficult to automate, which is a scope that keeps narrowing.
87% of full-time private sector workers have access to employer-subsidized healthcare. On average employers pay 82% of the cost for an individual and 73% of the cost of a family. To use BestBuy as an example: Reddit threads suggest costs range from $100/month (as of 2021) to $250/month (as of 2025).
When they offer a package YOU ALWAYS TAKE IT. It means that layoffs are coming.
My friend's company offered a voluntary severance package to a bunch of employees. She was talking to one of her employees and she knew that he was going to get laid off if he didn't take the package but was unable to advise him. I think the voluntary severance was 2 years medical, 2 years of vesting, many months of pay, etc. But he decided not to take the offer and was laid off for a much worse package a few months later.
The interests might be aligned albeit for different reasons. A corporation laying off a huge number of employees is facing reputational damage or regulatory consequences. That doesn’t mean you gain any benefit from their pain. Maybe you could sue for wrongful termination and keep your job?
It really depends on who it's being offered to - if it is literally EVERYONE you need to evaluate it on a case-to-case, but if it's a small targeted group, you probably should take it.
Also if you're a manager you should be able to make it pretty clear.
It obviously depends on the specific amounts of the package as well as the timeline and personal impact of the upcoming layoffs (the latter of which you can’t know).
The company doesn’t necessarily want everyone to take the package, and they’re inevitably going to price the separation benefits such that some employees would end up better off taking it and others would end up better off not taking it.
Always? What I’ve seen is sometimes the buy out is no better than the current severance package. Might as well ride it out. The severance could in theory get worse over time but that doesn’t seem like a worthwhile reason to throw away your job. You’re also throwing away unemployment.
If you take it you're not eligible to unemployment. I think in this market, given the undefined length of employment searching at the moment, that's a major consideration.
For most Microsoft employees, the maximum unemployment benefits in most states are a rounding error vs the buyout offer. Here in Missouri it's $320, maxed to 20 weeks. So for most local employees that might get this letter, It's less than a month of salary, and that without accounting for months of health benefits, which I bet the buyout includes.
Yeah, it’s really not for us, it’s more about tiding over a laid-off retail worker so they don’t get evicted. Not allowing someone with a mortgage in Cupertino or Redmond and little savings to keep their lifestyle mostly intact with just a little belt-tightening.
And I’m not saying that in a grumpy way. Yes we do have much higher salaries, and because of that it’s reasonable that it’s on us to save up for this type of rainy day, in accordance with our own personal risk assessment.
It’s honestly something I spent 15 years rarely thinking about, because while I’ve seen many RIFs, I was never worried since getting a new job was as easy as just responding to a few of the messages that constantly came in via LinkedIn or email. No longer.
I would assume a lot of the types of people you're talking about are in fact not Microsoft employees, it's way more common these days to hire people like on-site cooks through agencies that effectively make them contractors for Microsoft. This notice is definitely about "corporate" employees, and I believe another comment noted that in a different source it's stated that sales and marketing are not even being offered this deal.
Eh, the voluntary severance offered at Google in various European countries recently was less than the negotiated payout for mandatory layoffs. And most of the headcount from people who took it was backfilled, too.
Having been in a company for many years, that every so often had these packages, I disagree.
Yes, of course it means layoffs are coming. This isn't a conspiracy. The whole point of these packages is "We want people to leave. The more people who take the package, the fewer the number that is laid off."
If the package is going to only a small percentage of the company, then yes, it's a sign they'll get rid of you. When it's offered to such a large number, then it's just a lottery to see who'll lose their jobs. Like all lotteries, the chances of you being impacted are low (e.g. 10% was the max in my case).
Well, it’s often a big payout though, and taking it can be a nice bit of cash if you can line up a new job quickly. But I’d be the first to admit that likelihood seems to have plummeted for everyone (except for the geniuses who develop the AI models themselves, who are in a ton of demand.)
Can't be software engineers, from what I learned they were never really paid commensurate to value they delivered. So it must be quite economical to keep them around.
A couple of times in my career, I was one of those who were not given out a buyout. I was chosen to keep the lights on while the number of employees shrank every month. It sucked. I was given responsibility for systems with no documentation or than a username/password. I was called by all sorts of people I had never spoken to who had their hair on fire because the system was breaking left and right. I wished I was given the buyout; instead I was told I should be grateful I had a paycheck. No thanks.
I've never been involved in such a situation, but I assume part of individual's calculation is: If I indicate interest, but the company doesn't accept it or go through with it and keeps me... am I now viewed as a disloyal, detached worker?
I've been given such an offer. The company gave eligible employees X days to opt in and then it gave itself Y days to decide which volunteers would get buyouts. This matter of loyalty perception was certainly a live question for the employees. But also the company did iterative buyouts so in later rounds there was some evidence available to the current prospects about how employees were treated earlier. Not so much in what opportunities were withheld from the "disloyal" but in the take rate of volunteers and in the probability of being "laid off" given the receipt of an earlier buyout offer.
Ahhh, I retract my previous statement. I assumed it was "do you want to accept the offer". If it is "do you want to be considered for the offer" that's a little more complicated...
very much this. I was denied 2 rounds in 2008. I knew too many of the systems to risk losing me. Was sort of ok with it in at the time, and the length of the recession made me really happy in retrospect. Today I recognize offering to be let go as risky, since upper management may see you as a flight risk, which changes future layoffs and makes you slightly more likely to be included.
At Google it was really rare to be denied, and if they did then it was kinda a negotiating chip for you - if you're so important to the company they won't let you leave, then are they going to pay you accordingly?
Not a problem. While it is reasonable to consider the signaling impact of all your comms at work, if you take this, they'll smile at getting closer to quota and wish you well.
Reasons to accept. Reasons to decline, but that isn't one of them.
Just because the offer is made to 25% of the workforce doesn’t mean they will all accept. These are generally very well paid jobs and the prospect of entering the job market right now isn’t going to appeal to everyone. Especially not when you have upcoming RSU vests after a recent 50% stock rally. If say a third of the employees accept then it’ll be an ~8% reduction, which is in line with a regular company-wide layoff.
There is a difference this time though. There has never been a time in last 40 years where being laid off seemed terrifying for knowledge workers in tech. It's speculative what's ahead, but man, does it LOOK bleak. Many would still come out OK, but it's not a given.
Things during dotcom crash looked at least this bleak. Easily. It felt like every company on earth (at least in tech) was crashing and firing people. Even high-flyers like Google absolutely stopped hiring.
If you were lucky, you got laid off with a severance. If you weren't, you showed up to work one day and the doors were locked with no notice.
> There has never been a time in last 40 years where being laid off seemed terrifying for knowledge workers in tech.
How about the last several times all of big tech was laying off tons of people at the same time?
I'm not going to disagree with "this time it's different", but I've seen this fear several times before. This time it's AI that's going to take our jobs, and maybe that will happen, but it's not the first threat.
It's incomparable the difference now compared with say layoffs in 2022
Back then, you might think the market was a bit cooler, but talented engineers were still in massive demand. Growth in tech was stalling but a massive reduction in demand was very unlikely
This time there's a real chance that in 10 years we have 50% or less the number of software engineers today, if the job title still even exists as we know it
If they're doing similar to what was mentioned back in April there is some calculation about current age + years of service that could be tempting to people on the "bubble" of retirement.
The worst case scenario is not taking the offer then getting let go for performance, which means zero severance, health insurance terminated same day. This has been happening at Microsoft for the last few years, sometimes in large waves. Many of these people were not egregious non-performers, just people who had been marked as not quite meeting expectations, and thought they had another chance.
Big companies are notoriously overweight and need to trim down continuously. Microsoft is already a big bureaucracy and nothing like the start-up mentality it had throughout the 80's and 90's.
It's fine for them to get rid of excess weight. My guess is they could probably cut a lot more if they wanted.
I have been through a similar situation at a former employer, during the aftermath of 2008 crisis, and is complicated.
Exactly as you place it, the way they found out to push for buyouts was to terminate existing positions.
Everyone was forced to decide between taking the buyout, or apply to internal positions instead, naturally the later was much more complicated than just taking the money.
If you get the offer take it and start your own company with it. There's no use in staying if you're not wanted and even though you'll get a severance package it won't amount to much more than a couple months back pay.
Didn’t Microsoft have an issue with VP Vance regarding layoffs and all the perm processing were stopped. So why is MS doing this which will bring more trouble.
With these kinds of offers, they don't expect to get rid of 60,000. They expect to get rid of Y,000.
They make the offer to 60,000 (typically, an entire department gets this offer, including people they want to keep). Some X,000 will take the offer. If Y,000 > X,000, they they lay off the difference.
This is what I was wondering, if they have some internal math that says "15% will probably take this offer" targeting a lower number like 10k. And if they overshoot, it's not like they'll have trouble refilling positions in this economy...
You say that but the economy seems pretty strong to me, we have lower than average unemployment with above average job listings. It's harder if you're on visa otherwise it's pretty competitive
Including people they want to keep? What if all the people they wanted to keep accepted while those they didn't want to keep stayed? Certainly makes no sense.
I imagine they don't extend the offer to specific people they want to keep.
I'm still not sure what the advantage to the company of an offer like this is versus layoffs where management gets to choose who leaves, unless they feel the "loyalty test" of deciding to stay is worth more than their own evaluation of employee performance.
1. Some C-suite asshole wants headcount in your division reduced by, say, 5% next year. He has zero visibility into anyone's performance, or any of the projects anyone is actually working on.
2. His subordinate directors could do random, or targeted layoffs to hit that 5%, but this ruins morale for everyone who survives.
3. ...Or, they could make this offer, let people leave on their own, try to convince any stars who want to take it to stay, don't do any backfill. Then, hopefully, between the voluntary layoffs and no backfill, you might hit that 5% reduction, and not have to do involuntary layoffs. (Or if you do, they would be much smaller.)
4. This is less disruptive for teams and managers, because with voluntary layoffs, they have time to plan for these people leaving, instead of showing up to work on Thursday, and being told that 5 people on their team were given the pink slip this morning.
5. This is also, obviously, less disruptive for employees who take the offer (as they can control their exit, and get a payout), and less disruptive for anyone who doesn't take the offer (lower odds of showing up to work on Thursday, and getting a pink slip).
> What if all the people they wanted to keep accepted while those they didn't want to keep stayed
That's not an outcome they'd like, but it's an outcome they have to accept, in order to not piss off everyone else.
1. For anyone they want to keep who takes them up on the offer, they always have a chance to try to convince those people to not take the buyout offer.
2. If you make the buyout offer conditional to particular individuals, it will sow resentment and division.
It's generally better for the employees and the employer to do this kind of blanket buyout. If they voluntarily hit the reduction targets, nobody needs to be laid off. If they don't, the layoffs will be there, but smaller. If the 'wrong' people want the buyout, there's still a chance to convince them to stay. If they don't want to stay after the convincing, it's probably best for them to go on their way.
Microsoft made $134B in net income in the last 4 quarters. It used to be if you worked for a company that was printing boat loads of money that you had job security.
Now, even if the company is crushing it, they'll still see employees more as a cost center instead of a revenue generator.
No, this has never been the case. Companies are and always have been very conscious of wage and salary expenses, as it's one of the most controllable categories on the P&L.
They are making $600k in net income per employee. 10+ years ago, I'd never seen a mass layoff at any company making that kind of money per employee.
Their net income is up more than 2x in just the last 5 years. 10 years ago, Microsoft only had $85B in revenue, now they are up to $134B in net income, and they need to let 25% of the company leave?
If I have a team of 20, making a lot of money, but I think I can do the exact same job with 15 because of AI productivity gains, should I keep the other 5 employed for the vibes?
The total net income doesn't matter: The move is management saying they are overstaffed for the work they think they need.
Assume Microsoft is expecting just a third of people to take the offer. It's just too many people to want to move to a different division that needs more labor: It's basically entire divisions that they'd have to create from whole cloth.
> If I have a team of 20, making a lot of money, but I think I can do the exact same job with 15 because of AI productivity gains, should I keep the other 5 employed for the vibes?
yes, because, (a) you would be an amoral company otherwise and (b) the productivity and work quality of those remaining 15 will plummet if you don't and AI won't save you in the end: you'll build faster and cheaper, but the quality of your products will enter a downward spiral it will be hard or impossible to exit from.
Why amoral? If a an employee costs the company more than they make, it means the owner of the company is essentially donating his money to the employee. Is it amoral to not do that? What if the owner wants to donate the money to cancer research instead?
To expand on this, a company’s purpose should go beyond simply generating profit for its owners, imho; among other things, it should also include a duty of care toward its employees. Society instills a strong work ethic in us from childhood, teaching us that contributing to the greater good is our individual duty. Before the plague of neoliberalism, there was an expectation that companies would have a positive impact on society, too. Nothing, except greed, forbids to return to those values.
Companies should also be legally barred from hiring for three years if they engage in layoffs. Mergers should also be off the table for the same period.
It's deleterious to the economy. As the recent Microsoft game studio apocalypse shows, mergers are also extremely deleterious. It would be better to have a dozen game studios employing people and competing rather than one shit company cutting expenses and reducing products going to market.
But like if your company is making money hand over foot you didn't typically cut staff by 25%. You could just as easily do a hiring freeze and get out ahead of it. I mean if your profit metric is showing all green and growing you have to be really cold to say we need to fire 1/4 people now why? (to maximize shareholders short term value of course)
> I mean if your profit metric is showing all green and growing you have to be really cold to say we need to fire 1/4 people now why? (to maximize shareholders short term value of course)
Yes, it's cold, but in the grand scheme of things, it's good for the society if companies are efficient and the economy is efficient. An efficient economy means that we can produce and consume more per hour worked.
Such behavior by companies may not be in my self-interest but that's another matter.
They aren't cutting staff because they made a ton of money. They are cutting staff because they see trouble on the horizon and are positioning themselves for that. Layoffs are rarely lagging indicators. They are more often predictors of trouble coming. This bubble will explode, MSFT wants to survive it. Thats all there is to it.
This may be so but what others in this thread are trying to point out is that this is a relative novelty. Decades ago, layoffs were something that hapened at struggling companies trying to stave off bankruptcy (or already in it). It is a major cultural change to treat employees so casually as fat to be trimmed.
AI adoption is a huge shift from labor to capital. Its history repeating, now instead of muscle power being replaced its brain power.
The amount of capex flying around requires raising funds, there have been dozens of stories recently about investors demanding higher rates for AI bonds. MSFT et al need to get their balance sheets in order to get good rates. Also, everyone is waiting for the bubble to burst, getting the house in order ahead of it is very prudent.
You cannot act with perfect information when you're making an offer to 25% of a company that size. If they were able to and willing to plan this on a per-person basis, they wouldn't be in the position of mass-buyouts.
It's very common in these situations to target every org in the company with a goal of X% reduction. If a small fraction of these teams now need extra headcount, easy enough to allow those teams to hire. Usually you don't keep the severance if you return in under X days.
I've personally been laid off, only for the post-re-org team to hire several people, including asking to rehire me. It's rare, and those affected should probably plan to find new jobs, but it happens.
typically in that case the boomerang is they come back but as a consultant. just doing the same thing they were doing before but at a different rate. usually higher to cover health ins plus a bit of a bonus.
The mass buyout offer to 25% of Microsoft's workforce comes less than a week after Microsoft President Brad Smith proclaimed to employees: 'We stand by our people. We always have. We always will.' in a video he posted to LinkedIn.
To be fair, such "voluntary exits" with a generous severance package are well above the practices of most US companies, where great numbers of employees are fired without warnings and with little compensation.
So there is some truth in the claims of the MS President.
My former boss at Microsoft told me this sort of thing is a good way to get rid of your best, most employable employees. I guess he didn’t pass the memo up the chain.
The truth of the matter I think is that you do not actually need the best.
Most of the time, anyway.
As far as business is concerned, the thing often runs better with mid people with less leverage. They just do their job, don't have any ideas and you can squeeze them.
Because it's not all the best that are leaving. Just the ones not stuck with a mortgage or similar stuff. This cuts the wings of very capable people and completely strips them off their bargaining power. Which is very useful to management.
> The truth of the matter I think is that you do not actually need the best.
Not all employees need to be the "best". But if you are a top tier company in a given field like Microsoft, you need the best minds to stay top tier, otherwise you will descend. But on the other hand you don't need the lower tier performers to stay top tier except for scaling reasons because the supply for top tier performers is a very small pool...
You can still keep some of the best minds, but you do not need them on every team and every project.
I might be wrong, but I doubt that these mass buyouts were also offered to those that are strategically relevant. Though I guess that can happen if that specific branch of the management tree is bad at their jobs
Other ways are to offer "secret" bonuses and perks to the talent you want to keep. If the management / department wants to keep you no matter what, you will clearly notice this despite mass layoffs.
I think you are right. Besides this "Best" category is also fluid. Best of 2000's is not best in 2020s for a business.
This also works as price discovery mechanism for both parties. Best employee can take a break and apply later for different job, profile, growth industry etc. Companies also find better to hire what they think best at market price instead of honorary best which are there for long time.
The last ms team I was on before I quit changed quite a few over the years as the business and requirements changed. I learned a lot about what I enjoy and where I thrive. Where I had done well for a few years the business had become something that was better suited for others. It was best for me and the team that I left and they find someone better suited for the current and future work.
Even now with agentic work there are areas I am able to do well and some areas im not. It's definitely always changing.
You sound like you don't really know much about teams and leadership.
Getting rid of your best means you'll also make sure that the rest of them slowly, but surely leave and never come back. Good people will not work with average people which results in long term failure to compete for the company.
There's a reason why all tech industry leaders have focused on getting a *consistent* and *even* pool of good workers to establish themselves there (against wisdom of the MBA crowd you're repeating here).
U-huh. I don't think that what you're doing here is warranted or correct.
Having checked your CV, I can see why you're probably doing it, but that's still.. not great.
Maybe you should've also checked mine before running with these strong opinions.
What management thinks is good and what employees, especially engineering type employees, think is good are usually counter.
The execs want to run the most profit to cost they can squeeze out, usually short term. The employees see the value in the senior and knowledge rich staff with higher costs long term.
Companies want to get rid of the bottom 25% of the employees at all times. These offers often get taken advantage by half of those and half of others who are more capable & find it opportunistic to do something better. If that latter half had stayed, they would have outperformed their pay. If the company needs to re-hire that lost output in employees, it's a net negative. If they can guarantee that the ones who stayed plus AI outweighs the time to onboard and institutional knowledge lost, sure seems reasonable but high risk for a large company that is allowed to play it safer.
I think by now companies are not under any illusion that they can precisely pinpoint bottom 25% of employees. Their reasonable efforts are about separating out few folks they absolutely want to keep in business continuity sense. Rest below average, average, above average, "best" are fair game.
That is a rule for a good project manager. When work is simple, you don't need bright people. You just need average guys. But when work is cutting edge, you need very talented people.
I think the efforts on cutting edge works has been reduced and redirected to more market-dominating trends like LLM optimizations. This is a bet. Cut off the finger for a stronger arm. And I think this bet will fail. But I thought the same about this new Gemini after Bard, and boy I was wrong.
> The truth of the matter I think is that you do not actually need the best.
That is true for monopolies. Once you get a monopoly, you do not need to compete anymore. Lower the salaries. Make products worse. Increase prices. Monopolies do not need to care. We used to break them because that. Nowadays, bots just will tell you that they are monopolies because they are "so good". So, here we are.
This is true if you are running a car wash. Even the mid tier employees satisfactorily do the job and customers can be given what they paid for. You are competing on geographic location and ability to do a very easy task repeatedly over and over. You get another chance to sell your product every single day, and you can adjust your prices up and down to find the sweet spot because the sales cycle repeats every day.
It is not true if you are determining the correct feature to add to microsoft's money making products. That requires deep knowledge of users and the industry and the existing product. It requires understanding the industry and users far in advance, the turnaround time for a feature in Windows or Azure is likely 6 months or longer, sometimes years. It requires acumen and an ability to think about customers and the market and sales. Microsoft doesn't have 5000 people who can do this. They probably don't have 1000. These people can go start their own business or consulting firm today. There are lots of people they worked with in the past who know how good they are so they can get another job.
The same is true for engineering. Out of 500 engineers, there are 10-20 that are doing the really important work that you can't just find someone else to do. They know everything about the system and everyone comes to them for advice or to get explanations about how things are put together and why. You can't just find some average engineer and put them in the same desk as these 10-20 and magically things are fine, the mid tier person doesn't have the years of experience nor the potential to fill this role even if they did have the experience.
> That requires deep knowledge of users and the industry and the existing product.
I.. uh. I hate to break it to you, but that's not as deep of a moat as this reads like you would believe it is.
Engineers (like me, fwiw) would love to believe all these things about themselves, but they're not really true.
Of course, there is a difference, but the difference just doesn't matter all that much in the real world. Markets do not care.
Which isn't to say that people shouldn't know their worth. But it is to say that one can better defend their worth when armed with an accurate assessment of reality.
I dunno how prevalant this term is, but people at my last robotics company called it the "dead sea effect." Those who can, leave. Those who can't, hang on.
It didn't seem that obvious a term as you described it here, but a bit of googling gave the background:
It's effectively that the more desirable elements leave, the less desirable parts stay behind and get more concentrated... So the bad employees are the salt in the dead sea
MS did a round of layoffs that was specifically targeting low performance last year: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/08/microsoft-confirms-performan... and there's no reason to believe they wouldn't do it again. I doubt that anyone there is unaware that hanging on isn't a realistic option if they're not delivering.
My dad told me his bosses were very surprised when he eagerly accepted a similar deal. IIRC, he was about 60 at the time, so would have had about 6 years early retirement given what the pension age was back then.
Ultimately, you can only take equity away from people like that for so long. We're taking the people who actually create the value and firing them so that we can satisfy the hangers-on, meaning shareholders who often 1) don't know they even own MS and 2) are often diversified as to make a real problem with Microsoft not a dealbreaker for their financial goals.
Market is horrible even for 'best employees' . Best employees arent that different from mid employees these days because everyone is slinging the same slop.
Not true, the market is exceptional for the best in tech. The problem arises when some employees think they are the best - despite the facts not lining up.
I don't believe you. I literally can't get an interview, but I joined a mature startup through a subcontracting gig to make ends meet, and a month in they're asking if they can just hire me. The hiring process is broken.
You were promoted to perm employee a month in. How does that contradict my earlier statement? The broken hiring process in tech is something entirely different - it was broken 10 years ago, 20 years ago, nothing new
Yes and No. If you are a citizen and have “AI” experience there’s plenty of startups offering base salaries in excess of the average Microsoft total comp.
"1/4 of workforce was offered buyouts" does not mean all 60000 will accept them. "Results may vary", you know.
I saw it happening in a funny way not long time ago - company offered buyouts, but got insanely surprised when high percentage of people actually accepted it. Management thought acceptance rate would be much, much lower, but when numbers started to pour in on a 2nd day, oh man... Panic spread very quickly because people were accepting packages in fear of layoffs without such package, so management said if any layoffs will happen in 3 years period after this, same package will be offered no question asked. Cooled things a bit, but what a mess...
If this claim was in writing then it's legally binding in most U.S. states. Technically it's legally binding even if it's not written but in those cases it's harder to prove.
It was more than 3 years ago, but as far as I know, they did honor the agreement. Some people took early retirement packages closer to the end of that three-year period and they got the same deal.
30% was the quoted number for the acceptance rate of the earlier VRP, which was mostly long tenured employees who were at retirement age, or close to it. I would be surprised if this gets a significant acceptance from the younger employees. OTOH, older employees who didn't accept the earlier VRP and were regretting that decision may jump at this offer.
>so management said if any layoffs will happen in 3 years period after this, same package will be offered no question asked. Cooled things a bit, but what a mess...
Unless those funds were placed in an escrow account, I would have assumed that claim held no water.
Also just from raw corporate penny pinching. Why would they make payouts like that if they're not forced to, yes there's reputational risks of making that promise and then not following through with it but faced with a choice between that and a few lawsuits (with the usual corporate advantages of arbitration clauses and vastly more resources they're likely to win too) a corporation looking to shed people is likely to take the win of reducing their severance payouts.
Litigation is a rich man's game. Companies almost always have more resources to dedicate to litigation than individual employees, especially if those individual employees have been laid off and are now without an income.
The company knows this, the employees know this, the company knows the employees know this, and vice-versa.
A promise like that just isn't binding, things can change in 2 years, the managers themselves may have moved and been replaced with different people. A bird in the hand is worth many birds three years from now.
Tinfoil hat thoroughly fixed upon my head, but a part of me kind of thinks that this might have been a long-game from big tech in the same vein as Grapes of Wrath.
Software engineers make a lot of money, at least historically because of supply/demand mechanics. By suddenly and continuously flooding the market with lots and lots of software engineers, you effectively can bring down wages, since if people are unemployed long enough they're likely to take a lower salary.
The FAGMAN companies got caught colluding to depress wages by avoiding hiring people already employed by the others, so they learned to accomplish the same thing without writing it down by having these periodic huge layoffs across the entire industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
They (the industry) have always wanted to find a way to do this. Tools like Rational Rose and Visual Basic were touted as being able to do this. Sending work overseas is another way. AI is just the next in line.
I don't know what the overall answer is, but I would say that if you have high demand skills, you can still earn a living.
The 3% growth in the us market is virtually (90%+?) all in AI company valuations/investment. It is a depression, that hasnt been announced. Wait till after midterms for the blame to be leveled with the announcement.
Yep. We'll be told to argue over our collective political beliefs while corporations and billionaires continue to drive the economy for the 99% into the crapper. It's a machine that cannot stop until we all have nothing left.
I highly doubt it’s a factor. If we learned anything in the last 10 years, is that you can’t unflood the zone with facts. The administration is going to say what they are going to say and signal to their target audience. Corporations are going to do what they need to do. Their target audiences barely overlap.
This is micro scary but macro exciting; in the large, and zoomed out from this one instance, it's a sign we're entering an ENORMOUS diversification of the capabilities of the economy.
This feels like the centuries-ago transition of peasants from subsistence farmers to economically valuable consumers: thousands of Microserfs, spat out by a geriatric company that lost its ability to leverage their strengths. Their intelligence, their cognitive work product, will be their own again.
Awful for some affected folks; great for others, but SUPER great for everyone who stands to benefit from these talented folks' ejection into the great unknown of "holy shit I need to make money, lemme skate where the puck's going"
Some may even disrupt Microsoft. After all Microsoft can't force their knowledge out of their minds.
The way these companies are run so cut-throat while also being worth a trillion dollars is such a fundamental systemic failure.
To say that it's because Microsoft overhired is a gross mis-remembering of the last 20 years.
For starters, I remember way back in the late 2000s meeting an engineer from the office team. Their entire job was focused on making buttons. Microsoft also used to employee engineers focused soley on testing software, though I've heard that has changed.
Anyway, this is a company with decades long cultural roots for enormously large teams where each person is hyper focused on tiny little pieces of a much larger product.
Also, let's not forget that they bought up 1/3 of the gaming industry.
I don't mind that Microsoft is hurting, because it makes mid products, that always seem to fail-up. However, I do mind that the people are okay that the answer is to lay people off instead of, maybe, breaking the company back up into smaller companies that preserve the stability of the workforce.
This sounds like satire, but I don't think we're far off from major tech companies announcing layoffs alongside new products at keynotes. After all, their purpose is to drive consumer and investor hype.
Someone posted the internal version of it on Reddit. Not all orgs are eligible for VEP. And some are only partially eligible. So the 60,000 number is going to disproportionately hit certain parts of the company.
The interesting question is what it means for the ineligible part of the company. Are they simply going to get another iteration of VEP later, or are they going to be hit by brutal layoffs at some point in the near future?
> 1–2 weeks’ pay per semester of tenure, based on level; six months of fully covered COBRA (remaining 12 months paid by you) and two vesting events in February and May.
> L65-L67 get 4w of pay per year of service, while L64 and below get 2w per year. I’ve been with MS for 10 years, so I qualify for the max payout of 39w.
> Eligibility this time is up to L70, not sure what the package is for L68-70.
It seems to depend on your level (above or below L65 which is first Principal rung). 12 months of health insurance is nice, but the pay seems to be between 3-9 months worth of pay depending on various factors.
It's something like
- 3 months base salary
- plus either 2 weeks or 1 month of pay per year of service (the former if you are at principal level or above)
- 12 months health insurance
"This offer will be available to eligible employees in participating teams in Canada, India, the United Kingdom and the United States at level 70 and below."
it'll be part of their internal pay banding system, so it'll correspond to a certain level of seniority and a pay range. From a quick google L70 is pretty high up, up to maybe a 7 figure salary.
Very few people are level 70. It means VP or Distinguished Engineer. Probably far less than <1% of the company. These people are making over $1m a year most likely, if not more. For Microsoft, that is big money. They don't pay like Meta or the AI labs. We are more comparable in pay to Amazon and other 2nd/3rd tier big tech companies.
Entry-level software engineering positions start at level 59 at Microsoft, with first couple positions taking 2 levels per work title change (59-60 = SE, 60-61 = SE II, 62-63 = Senior SE). Take a look at levels.fyi, that could offer some info / comparison with other companies).
Before getting wrapped up in the usual LLM vs anti-LLM narratives, note that like many of these recent layoffs, this is essentially reversing 2020-2022 net headcount growth.
IMO a lot of these layoffs are companies going from an experimental fiscal mindset to a conservative fiscal mindset - ie, rather than acquiring companies and hiring to grow into new markets, a lot of organizations are falling back on what they know works, independent of any productivity impact of LLMs.
So I checked your claim and it is accurate, in 2020 Microsoft had 163,000 while in 2022 it had 221,000.
There is a big HOWEVER. At least 2 in fact.
1. The company had been growing in the previous years, 2019, 2018, 2017 (they shrank somewhat in 2015 or 2016). In 2014 they had 29% workforce increase. So the significant growth in 2021/22 is not an aberration but rather continuation of the growth in previous years.
2. What IS an aberration is the workforce count after 2022. No growth in 2023 or 2025 (as in ZERO YoY change), and measly +7,000/3% growth in 2024. And some YoY loss in 2026 (-5,000, or 2.2%). With 2027 YoY likely showing at least some (and possibly a lot) of these 60,000.
So no, "it's just overhiring due to pandemic" was supposed to die years ago.
I also believe the Twitter exodus exposed the software engineering headcount sham for what it is. Something like 80% of the company left or was let go, and despite all the smug laughing about how the platform would go under within weeks, it just kept on going.
> Something like 80% of the company left or was let go, and despite all the smug laughing about how the platform would go under within weeks, it just kept on going
I’ve heard this claim many times and is not backed by any more evidence than “it works on my machine”.
If the company really did continue to operate in the same manner, it wouldn’t have been worth 80% less in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...), nor would it need to be rolled up and financially engineered into being part of an AI company that then gets rolled into a rocket company.
It has been losing users, safety standards have dropped and overall the platform is worse off than before. There’s a reason why no other company has done something similar with their employee counts.
I think Twitter is worth less mainly because Musk removed some kinds of censorship and by doing that, scared advertisers. Not because the layoffs actually caused any significant technical issues. I don't think they did, since from a technical perspective X works just fine right now.
The matter of the fact is that most governments and newspapers publish on twitter (now X) still. It also serves the purpose of amplifying Musk to a large audience.
If you wanted to transform a public forum into a right -wing echo chamber, then the transformation is a massive success and the platform continues to achieve all relevant objectives.
You’re ignoring the context of the comment here. The parent uses an example of Twitter doing better after laying off 81% of the staff to suggest that other companies could do the same.
While you’re right in that the platform has its uses, other companies cannot do the same. Which is why it’s important to talk about objective success metrics. Sure if you want to fire 80% staff at Microsoft and have a transformation where they only cater to half the user base then they can do it. But they will also not be taking in the same profits as before.
Good points. Viewing it from the lens of the original business model or mission, it's a disaster.
I don't think it's right, but I can see how a billionaire just completely overrides the company mission and business model after they buy enough shares or something.
Maybe there are other non-obvious use-cases for other companies, where you're effectively buying the user base to then pull the rug.
A lot of the original customers will just accept such a change. See Twitter or GitHub.
> If the company really did continue to operate in the same manner, it wouldn’t have been worth 80% less in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...), nor would it need to be rolled up and financially engineered into being part of an AI company that then gets rolled into a rocket company.
Musk paid an absurd premium for the company. Far more than it was worth. It was intended to force the board to sell. So an 80% estimated drop (it’s private so it’s a very rough estimate and I won’t go into the various reasons you should not accept it at face value), sounds scary but it’s by design.
Twitter as a company was doing quite poorly leading up to the acquisition. It lost more than $1.3B in the two preceding years. A big downgrade from its previous $1B+ annual reported profits.
As for the 81% headcount reduction, Musk confirmed that, but if you think he’s lying about that for some reason, CNBC investigated it. Journalists examined internal Twitter records and reported approximately 1,300 actively working employees, with another 1,400 still receiving pay but no longer working. CNBC also interviewed two recent employees who corroborated the scale of the reductions. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
Prior to acquisition, Twitter's SEC filings confirmed more than 7,500 full-time employees.
I don’t see why this claim is so unbelievable. Twitter was famous for its army of social media staff whose entire day comprised two meeting between matcha tea and meditation. https://youtube.com/watch?v=buF4hB5_rFs
Musk just fired everyone who wasn’t an engineer and it turns out the engineers keep the lights on.
I don’t see anything in what you wrote really support that Twitter did well after firing 80% of its staff.
As for this:
> Twitter as a company was doing quite poorly leading up to the acquisition
This is objectively false. 2020 revenue for Twitter was $3.71B while 2021 came in at $5.07B. The company was on a growth trajectory and path to profitability.
they were doing far more than propping up twitter. they were also doing tons of engineering on the side like bootstrap, and shaping fundamental internet technologies.
Musk, in traditional private equity ways, killed anything that wasnt immediately making money. Then he made it pay to play and monetized the hell out of it. All of that BEFORE he opened the far-right floodgates.
Now its a shell of its former self and coasting on the momentum it once enjoyed.
Trying to do anything other than posting on the platform is a mess. Advertising dashboards etc were broken for so long that I gave up trying all together.
Also look at their recent account merging efforts and all the problems people have encountered and posted about on the platform itself.
It kept on going, but they have been far less stable from a technical OR leadership perspective. They had a user exodus. They had advertisers leave in droves. I suspect it was a net negative change.
I strongly disagree with this take; do you think all companies are 80% SREs? Did Twitter make money by serving pages to users?
The Twitter exodus does relate to this, kind of; it's an example of the "fall back on existing revenue streams" strategy (you could call it a private equity playbook, but it's more universal than that) exaggerated by the guy acquiring it not needing more revenue and clobbering the revenue part too.
Twitter pre-Musk had an _enormous_ amount of experiments going on. They were building streaming services, clones of every social network you can think of (Spaces etc.), an entire sports brand around MLB, and so on and so on.
They also had an army of sales people who sold ads and an army of engineers building and optimizing an ad platform, which is (or was?) their actual business.
The "platform going down" narrative from both sides was 100% irrelevant to what was actually going on. "We laid off PMs, salespeople, and engineers and the system didn't crash" is a complete non-sequitor that should be obvious to anyone who's involved in software engineering or maintenance. If anything, I'd expect laying off most of any company to make it much more stable; when you don't change things you introduce fewer bugs.
twitter had an enormous trust&safety moderation org and a lot of the headcount reduction was simply automating trust&safety processes and removing humans as much as possible
This is because nobody can say how many people are needed to develop or maintain some body of software. So companies hire however many employees they can afford. When the number they can afford changes they hire more or fire some. The number of staff has pretty much nothing to do with the actual work. AI introduces another factor to the equation: it allows one person to perform N times as much softy-work as before. So even if you have no idea how many people you need (as always, see above) you do know that you can get by with 1/N.
Platform was super unreliable for a while after that - although that might be related to making all the software changes to turn it in to an even worse cesspit.
Edit: Enron Musk apologists will always crack me up.
There is enough until the company hits the early 2020 approximate headcount, adjusted for business changes in that time. The exact adjustment is hard to know, but in general, if a company was growing at, say, 10% per year, prior to the covid-craziness, then one would expect something like that natural growth to continue. Very generally speaking.
For example, Google had been growing somewhat quickly for decades prior to 2020, but in 2021 and 2022 it grew by over sixty-thousand people, and the crazy growth actually started in 2020, so even more than that. Sixty thousand!
Undoing that takes a very long time--they should have been much smarter about it. You need four rounds of twelve-thousand person RIFs (whether layoffs or buyouts) to get back to the earlier growth trajectory. Each round generates several stories that hit HN.
Is this MS still dropping back to pre-Covid? I would bet at least some of it is.
> There is enough until the company hits the early 2020 approximate headcount
This is an incorrect way of looking at it. Microsoft was growing at approximately 10-15% headcount year over year prior to COVID. If they reverted to the approximate 2020 headcount that would mean an overall decline in growth in comparison to a situation where COVID did not exist.
Is there? GE, back in the days, did everything, and looking at Samsung as a percentage of South Korea's economy, would say, absent any government regulation like anti-trust, there really isn't. Berkshire Hathaway is one such conglomerate in the US today.
a lot of places, including Microsoft, drastically cut or are in the process of cutting down on WFH also means what, vast distances between teams, coworkers, buildings, cafeteria, etc (for campus based companies). How many of these places that are "going back to office" (or have already) are doing more in-person and less or no Zoom/Teams meetings now, anyway?
Yes. By and large the talks of LLM as the reason for all the layoffs across big tech are just a marketing spin. Companies are going through rounds of cost reduction for reasons that are as old as the invention of the stock market.
I always think of that line from Doctorow: "If you want to know how Amazon will treat its coders once they can be readily replaced, just look at Amazon warehouse workers and drivers".
it's not just experimental fiscal mindsets, cash was a lot cheaper then. funding was cheaper. now it's less. LLMs don't help but some of these headcounts were taking advantage of the free/cheap debt.
Wow. This is insane news. To think you suddenly can get by with up to 25% fewer people is truly a sign of what is to come. They probably assume much fewer will accept, but still. They probably think 10-20% will actually accept. But they're confident that they can make due with suddenly quite a bit fewer people.
microsoft should ideally be doing the reverse. hiring more workers or re-skilling.
they've the most deployed software in the world - the software is inadequate most of the times (i.e full of bugs). 2nd the software is prone to misuse cz M$ doesn't have enough people listening to customers and making software meet the needs of its users.
if there was a company that should've done the Forward deployed thingy is Microsoft.
Microsoft has done Forward Deployed Engineers; they just weren't call that. Nowadays, most of consultants are focused on Azure since that's where money is.
Windows ecosystem is not Microsoft focus. It's in supported phase where Microsoft will make some updates to it, but they are not spending a ton of money or attention on it.
looking at azure - the traditional .net shops will insist on mssql instead of cosmosdb - when cosmosdb might fit their needs.
so many things wrong in the m$ ecosystem that could be fixed with m$ showing a little bit of care and deploying knowledgable engineers or resources to empower their customers.
I'm not sure if these are the absolute best numbers, but this shows Windows at ~76% market share for desktop OSes. I've seen other numbers that have them at 66%. MacOS is the second place. Linux is third.[0]
The consumer market both does and doesn't matter to Microsoft. There are certainly more options besides Windows for the average person looking to buy their next device (assuming they'll even get a full desktop/laptop computer) and that will continue to be the case moving forward. If you look at what drives most of MS's decisions on Windows, business-wise, it's not a desire to capture more of the consumer desktop market. It's a desire to maintain the enterprise and to use that as a jumping-off point for more revenue-earning opportunities like 365 or Azure. They know they are far, far safer there and have the connections with clients that matter. Your CTO will not be throwing together a slide deck to justify spending a large slice of the budget on switching away from Windows, at least not anytime soon, because it means throwing out a lot of other stuff like Active Directory, SharePoint, and the like that no one wants to think about.
I don't know what the situation in the US is like, it's probably relatively well insulated. Normally, I'd expect the middle-of-the-road to stick, and the shining stars to twist, take the money and find something else in short order.
But across Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere, it's an absolute bunfight to get a new role in software at the moment. Thousands, even tens of thousands of applicants for every role on LinkedIn, in relatively short order. Invariably, if the role exists, it's too many for them to sanely process. Not just desperate applicants but qualified ones that meet the spec comfortably.
If that's coming to the US eventually, there will be lots more layoffs to come and nowhere else to jump to.
Not true. Things are harder than precovid era but it’s still relatively fine to get a job as software engineer (perhaps except for juniors, but that’s worldwide)
This is not true at all. Last year maybe, right now it's better.
Still a little harder if you're into dev and one single stack, but still not as catastrophic as you describe
(ex-MSFT) Not surprised. I left a month ago after a chaotic year of reorgs, charter changes, no leadership nor roadmap, being crunched, being asked to de-facto manage 4 engineers with no title bump nor pay increase. Moved to a medium sized company with a compensation increase, better title, more interesting project and amazing work-life balance. I expect many of my friends and former coworkers are going to take the buyout offer as well.
> 1–2 weeks’ pay per semester of tenure, based on level; six months of fully covered COBRA (remaining 12 months paid by you) and two vesting events in February and May.
> L65-L67 get 4w of pay per year of service, while L64 and below get 2w per year. I’ve been with MS for 10 years, so I qualify for the max payout of 39w.
> Eligibility this time is up to L70, not sure what the package is for L68-70.
nondisclosure of compensation package and disparagement clauses are usually on the contracts as well. People don't want to tip off the H1B guy he makes 40% less than the dude standing next to him. =3
YMMV = Your milage is controlled by law, and cannot vary.
You can sign broken contract freely - it's unenforceable, so you can sign whatever paper HR hands to you, and only when you're retaliated against do you need to care. Which coincidentally is when you stop needing to be cooperative anyways.
Don't "YMMV" your way out of laws that protect you.
I spend a decent amount of time talking to newcomers and people on Reddit that are interested in cybersecurity/tech about the job market. There's no shortage of people who are frustrated because they can't find jobs. Fresh tech and cyber graduates are basically unemployable. People with 1-5 years experience find it extremely difficult to find work.
Layoffs like this are a huge reason for that. Talent pools are overlapping like never before. A person with 5 years of solid experience applying for tons of jobs and getting nowhere, only to realize they are competing with people with 10-15 years of experience freshly laid off from big companies. At that point, early career people are getting pushed almost completely out of the industry.
So "Up to" 39 weeks of base pay, let's say 9 months.
In this job market, that may not be enough time to feel comfortable and safe taking the offer (if you're a super-employable hotshot with offers awaiting in your LinkedIn, you're probably not the likely target for the offer)
The prior VRP shook out a number of folks who were banking their options grants -- it was like "look let's be clear, you're not moving up any more and you're checked out. Thank you for your service." I'd imagine they were happy enough with that to go a little broader. The pay scales work out to getting paid more the longer you've been there. Mentioned in the memo is employee choice, and I think that this is likely designed with that in mind - why not let people self identify without penalty when you want to reduce headcount? The goal is likely to increase morale for those who want to stay, both by showing them they have the ability to stay, and getting low morale people out the door.
You are getting downvoted but I have to believe this is at least what some of the executives are thinking, even if it proves to be a complete illusion.
The term 'Voluntary Exit Offer' reminds me of the suicide drug Quietus in P.D. James' Children of Men, which the government offers to people who no longer wish to live.
So what's the context for this? A third accept, so 20k redundancies in a year? 10% churn is very high? doesn't sound high compared to other tech companies.
The terms for this seem kind of not great tbh, unless you have been there for like multiple decades, especially in this job market.
I probably wouldn't take this and instead devote more of my time to practicing for and collecting interviews during the equivalent time period with the hopes of keeping my job at the end.
You underestimate how many old-timers are there at MSFT. I don’t imply any negative connotations to that.
But these are the most lucratively paid employees. These are also the same folks that are used to working at the same company and who might find it trying to interview elsewhere.
Here's where I like working with some employment security. If they want to fire me, they'll have to buy me out WHEN that happens. It's not like I need to face some dilemma between choosing a buyout or otherwise get nothing in case I'm fired.
Would be interesting to know how much of it is result of AI and how much because the government is looking into their H1B practices, aka how much of the people who got this offer are under H1B.
Yeah, it’s definitely not the devs who get LLMs to do all their work but still act like it takes the same number of story points or time as the before times
I hope these people form a group to develop software that directly competes with Microsoft or even make it free now that you have extra time. It'll keep your skills up and good for the resume.
One of my last productive acts when I was at microsoft was to get a two-line change committed in windows to a tree outside my org. It took two full months just to propagate the change up the very fragile and fractured tree of repos from my team's to WINMAIN and from WINMAIN back down to the owning team's org, and my efforts were required every step of the way. It was truly soul-crushing.
Edit: this was in the windows vista days and I hope/expect they have overhauled that entire process in a major way, because things were at a near standstill.
Then again, if/when they do lay off so many employees, then Microsoft is putting themselves in the position that eventually they will "have no choice" but to depend more and more on agents to do as much of the work as possible...which i predict means that their products will dip in quality even further, at least until models, agents, etc. can markedly improve...so, a continuation or worsening of the quality. The future looks bleak in a few different ways; oof!
Pretty big, but remember that offering a buyout to 1/4 of their employees doesn't mean they're looking to get rid of that many! Not everyone's going to take the buyout, and they're not expecting them to. Their target is likely much lower.
Definitely a precursor to layoffs, but they also know that not everyone will take the offer. So if you want to reduce your workforce by X%, you offer (X+Y)% the buyout. The more attractive the offer, the smaller Y needs to be.
Personnel firms have decent experience predicting the takeup of an offer, so they make predictions about how good the offer needs to be, and they try to get close, within expenses and other considerations.
If Z people take the buyout, then, after the dust settles, you layoff the remaining X-Z people.
So it is unlikely that their target reduction is 25%.
This can be interpreted as a form of soft layoffs, or it can also be interpreted as an attempt to change their labor culture. Microsoft was notorious for stacked ranking, where supposedly "low performers" were regularly culled. If you offer low performers a smooth way out, it's another form of culling without the harsh push.
This was announced back in April. Lot better than doing layoffs imo. If someone is already checked out then giving them an incentive to leave works out for both sides.
There's no way 25% of their total employee base are "checked out". Yes, a bunch of folks close to retirement or fed up with working there will take the deal. But with the job market as it is, a whole lot will roll the dice on keeping their job through the inevitable follow-up round of layoffs.
This is just an optics-friendly way to soften the blow of 25% layoffs.
This is my experience too, although probably not checked out enough to take a voluntary severance. Most people just want to chill and work at a steady pace. That kind of work ethic is fine for most industries, but not tech companies unfortunately.
It is much better than optics friendly, because it gives the affected people a chance to determine their own destiny.
Layoffs absolutely suck, and there is likely more pain on the way, but if the alternatives are voluntary buyouts + layoffs vs plain layoffs, the first is much better.
I think the April instance was a different one all-together but that was also followed with layoffs in July. Seems they expect less than 30% of the 60,000 to take the deal?
It's mentioned elsewhere in the comments, but is buried: level 70 is "Distinguished Engineer" and below, so effectively, it's available to all normies.
Remember, people, that Microsoft is a reformed company that supports open source and DEI Anything else was flagged up to 2025. Now that they have stolen all open source they fire people.
But some people here have a short memory and already support the new thieves on the block Anthropic and OpenAI.
Whether it was a necessity or not, they hired many mediocre but dominant open source people up to around 2022 who introduced CoCs, forced the projects to move to GitHub etc. and push for permissive licenses.
Presumably AI is making everyone, particularly sales & marketing more productive. While at the same time, their customers are building more things, and selling more things.
Why a force reduction?
Ignore AI for a second. If you had a magic wand, that would help everyone at your company produce more, sell more, and all of your customers are producing and selling more, would that be a growth phase?
if you are one of the ones who is valued enough to keep their job, you are strong enough to go get hired at another FAANG. Do you actually still want to be there after the bloodbath that the follow-up round of layoffs causes?
when you start somewhere after their bloodbath, you don't have to deal with all the crap you would if you stay through a bloodbath (i.e. you aren't on the hook for all the legacy shit your team owned before it had a haircut)
> At the same time, we'll keep helping people focus on the work that matters most, build new skills, and, where it makes sense, find new opportunities across Microsoft.
Anthropic is already doing this - some software engineers have redeployed into research roles, for example. “Redeploying” is going to be the latest HR trend I think.
The writing was on the wall for a long time. All of big tech (and many midsize tech too) have way too many employees. In the AI era is just more absurd than it was before. I always appreciate companies that take care of their employees this way so kudos to Microsoft. We haven't seen the package they are offering yet but I'm assuming it'd going to be very good, esp for those who have been there for a while.
They've figured out that they can offer poorly performing services that suck and nobody cares. The company will continue to explore that concept until people care.
I run an org with 200k employees. We're on our 4th significant outage with M365 services in a month. We're talking major stuff -- including user data like email getting deleted by various processes. Their approach is pretty much "meh".
> The company will continue to explore that concept until people care.
MS is an entrenched monopoly which is hard to move off of, especially in times of low budgets and tough debt markets. On the other hand, LLMs are reshaping the competitive landscape and MS might be reacting to that threat, in their usual MS way.
How banal. The first action after achieving "AGI" is not taking over the world, curing cancer, or anything fantastic like that, but rather "lowering operating expenditure"..
Makes me nostalgic for when I read Coupland's Microserfs in the bookstore the month it came out and thought, this... finally, people I could feel less awkward working and being myself around, weirdness and all.
Tech is nothing like that now. Guessing a lot of people will find earlier retirement tempting with so many skills to keep up with now and AI rooting out personalities and ages subtley in the HR pool.
One of the inherent problems with capitalism is any logical person or company within a certain threshold is not going to pay for or employ people they do not have 'work' for or need. Just like you would not buy a whole bison without a freezer (single or with an extended family); it would be wasteful, regardless of how of I or others might feel a certain amout of those types of employees should be baked into the corporate model (and not as 'corporate welfare'). Most companies have dozens of employees with nebulous duties whose mere presence is something a corporation wants or needs for whatever reason. This happens often in Asia. It also happens because companies look for connections or things they cannot deal with a few days or times a year and people who can do them would not be locateable quickly or maybe want to do it; specialists, too.
Sit on your butt doing nothing for what I would not pay minimum wage for alone, all year, then essentially do a week of work or come up with a solution the company knows is worth millions, so they're largely left alone and paid well. I have, as have others I have known, had those sorts of jobs a few times (things aren't quite like that nowadays, people either get over or underpaid now, and mos of those people have retired by now, or the newer "those types" get stock in the "new model"). Often it is not a hard tech skill but a good gut in an emergency, in tech or business.
Then there is this newfangled "communist" or "socialist" model of "companies" and "work" we are seeing that have nothing to do with either of those "isms" or capitalism, where people protest layoffs and expect everyone can get a paycheck while still refusing to check their egos and selfishness at the door. Of course, the truth is "communistic" things are generally pooled and meted out among people in s "commune" where people share similar very specific values requiring trust, and a great majority of those places do not even have the concept of a paycheck.
Either way, income has to come from somewhere. I mean, I guess feudalism could make a comeback if we had a large population die off and people split their time up between farming with high tech harvesting machines and hanging out playing PS4 games off the solar panels after dark, but in general I think most of the people I have seen getting upset make little or no sense.
I mean, is the goal for firstworld and secondworld countries a handful of neuralinked (no thanks) tech overlords we beg for equal monthly monetary alotments from and a world like in "The Machine Stops"? What would you need to do for that ("Black Mirror" and credits?!).
We can't sure all be "YouTube stars" or "self-affirmation LinkedIn gurus", obviously.
Is is corporate slop speak entirely or are many of them just as flummoxed as many of us?
(disclosure: I usually do 1099 work, but I sure know what it is like to suddenly be blindsided.)
I'd argue it's actually better to do 25 % at once and then not doing anything like it for ... decades, ideally, but years, realistically.
Spreading it out means employees spend some of their time with an ear to the ground rather than working, and teams have to deal with multiple restructurings, neither of which are good for well-being nor productivity.
But Microsoft has turned layoffs at the end/beginning of the fiscal year into an iPhone-like release schedule. It's so reliable at this point that it's a meme outside the company amongst its customers. I know for a fact each June/July I'm getting a new account team as people are shuffled around, and low performers are shown the door
Even with these buyouts, there will be layoffs next summer. And the summer after that. And the summer after that.
No one said there wouldn't be churn. It's like if in 1999 a company had 10,000 webmasters - those roles are simply being phased out. New roles are being added and will be added, but they won't be the same or require the exact same skills, for better or worse.
Rapid technological advancement is always painful. Extrapolating that to "death of the industry" is awfully reductive and I haven't seen any signs of that. As others have pointed out, Big Tech layoffs have only reverted the shotgun-blast hiring of ~2020-2022.
Yeah, there is no way this will not make the horrible issues at Microsoft even a tiny bit better.
Azure is an epic shitshow (to be fair, GCP is even worse, but eh). Github is seriously struggling staying up and alive. Windows updates are posing more of a danger for business continuity than the security issues they fix, which is a challenge in itself. Windows itself is being made irrelevant as more and more software moves for SaaS web models and the gaming flank is being eaten left and right by SteamOS/Proton/WINE, what's left of Windows Embedded after CE got terminated looong ago (that was the foundation for a lot of HMI stuff) is being replaced by Android or straight Linux on Raspberry Pi style devices. Office 365 is buggy as hell (and in the case of Outlook, a horribly bloated Electron mess). Wide masses resent Windows itself for the bloatware, espionage and advertising that's forced down your throat.
And to make the already bad situation even worse, the Trump government made American Big Tech their bitch and everyone but the US is now looking to divest from them as fast as possible.
Wow, while I think that large headcount often leads to terrible products (looks at Apple for the last 5 years), MS platforms and software are SO BAD and more un-supervised AI slop code isn't going to fix it. I never want anyone to lose their job but this seems like a massive reduction.
Text of the memo driving this, from an article posted by Business Insider [0]:
Introducing a Voluntary Exit Offer
Today, we're introducing a new Voluntary Exit Offer (VEO) to
eligible employees within participating organizations. This offer
gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the
company a new choice to make that transition now with support. It
also gives participating orgs another way to adapt their workforce
to changing needs.
The Voluntary Exit Offer reflects an important part of how we're
evolving our approach to change: creating greater flexibility and,
where possible, more ways for employees to shape their next chapter.
This builds on what we learned earlier this year through the
Voluntary Retirement Program.
What employees should know
This offer will be available to eligible employees in participating
teams in Canada, India, United Kingdom and United States at level 70
and below. This is a time-limited, voluntary program that gives
those who are eligible the opportunity to leave Microsoft with
financial support and career planning resources. Some organizations
are providing the Voluntary Exit Offer, and some are not.
Participation varies based on each business's priorities, customer
commitments, and workforce needs.
Eligible employees will receive an email with a link to their
Voluntary Exit Offer details within the next few hours.
Looking ahead
The Voluntary Exit Offer is new for us. We'll learn from it. At the
same time, we'll keep helping people focus on the work that matters
most, build new skills, and, where it makes sense, find new
opportunities across Microsoft. There is no one-size-fits-all
approach for every team or every employee. These are a few of the
ways we're trying to meet different business needs while continuing
to create opportunities for our own people to grow and contribute.
My promise is to continue to provide clarity, listen and learn, and
keep improving.
Thank you for everything you continue to do for our customers,
Microsoft, and for one another.
Amy
Ex-MSFT here. I resigned in June, I was an L63. I spent 8 years at MSFT across two stints.
My last 18 months at MSFT were deeply unproductive. Constant reorgs, the work not being aligned to my capabilities and unfortunately just the general feeling that I was under worked and had very little opportunity for career advancement.
I would look at my colleagues and sister teams and wonder, why do they need these many people to work on something so trivial ? Or how did this person get promoted for doing that work ? I am sure envy played a part in the second question but it was legitimate. Remember, all this was before LLM tools were prevalent.
In the end, I left off my own volition. In my last 6 months, I did very little work, if at all any. I thought why am I being paid so handsomely for such little and trivial work. I did try interviewing in a few different teams but didn’t make it (Azure Files and Hyperscale DB). If I had stayed, I would have been swiftly laid off or if I was lucky enough last long till this buyout.
I think same is true for all Big Tech companies. Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.
> I think same is true for all Big Tech companies. Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.
A lot of people has this feeling because the work at a big corporation is different than in starting technologies.
When you start a new technology everything is new, and a lot of stuff is added at the edge.
When you work for stablished company most of the work is refinements, following new rules or regulations, incorporating products from merges, maintaining technology up to date with new releases... nothing feels important and nothing feels challenging. At the same time, your company fails if it is not done. Quality is also incredible important, to break a tiny component may send thousands of companies around the world spinning.
Maybe you should work for a startup instead of a stablished company. You can move fast and break things when you have no customers, or just very few of them.
> When you work for stablished company most of the work is refinements, following new rules or regulations, incorporating products from merges, maintaining technology up to date with new releases... nothing feels important and nothing feels challenging. At the same time, your company fails if it is not done. Quality is also incredible important, to break a tiny component may send thousands of companies around the world spinning.
This is part of it, but it's also true that in a lot of massive enterprises there is an absurd amount of inefficiency that leads to people effectively having nothing to do.
I had one such role at Splunk, pre-acquisition, which had a mere ~2k or so employees at the time. My entire office was effectively doing nothing; we were the result of another acquisition and management had no idea what to do with us. More hours were logged at the foosball and ping-pong tables than in front of an IDE. I'm not even exaggerating. I left after 9 months because I was bored; I did not write a single line of code that got used in any real application, internal or external.
When I went to AWS, it was closer to what you're describing; it took a lot of work to do seemingly very small changes for the reasons you mention. But I would never say that my team there had too many employees doing not enough work; everyone was busy all the time, it just took a lot of work to do very small changes.
> When you work for stablished company most of the work is refinements
At what point is a company established? I recall that the early years of Google, it produced not only Search but also Gmail, Maps, Translate, Android, and Chrome. That was all between 1998-2008. At what point did most of Google's work become refinements?
My point being, it is a culture issue. Google could have become "established" and focus on "refinements" after Search. Or Gmail. Or Maps. Or Translate. But each of those times, it did not.
In the years since, Google has spun up GCP from nothing, built the foundations of the current AI boom, designed its own chips (TPU), rolled out self-driving cars, etc.
It's possible for both things to be true at once: a huge company can contain pockets of innovation, pockets of people doing nothing, and a lot that's somewhere in between.
When you start hiring former management consultants into leadership positions
Yeah, at least in the pre-AI times I was writing way less code than in my startup days. but like 10 to 1000x people actually interacted with them.
OP might have been stuck in a dept that is winding down to prep for a layoff or something. I probably would have stuck around unless I found a different role. Who knows, you might just get some severance.
I work in oil and gas manufacturing and we are slow dinosaurs when it comes to adapting or using new technology.
Recently we've hired a few startups for PoCs regarding to data analytics and they all get deeply frustrated at the pace it takes us to even agree basic details.
Alot of people with legacy knowledge that pitch in sometimes, but are mostly blocking others work/playing politics all day
Or they wont stop talking in meetings, but produce no real work
So glad we can finally notice this! :)
This makes it sound as if LLM tools weren't prevalent inside MS yet by June. Is this really true? I'd be shocked if so.
I am speaking of the time from 2024 to mid-2025. While upper management was pushing developers to use Copilot, it was still not prevalent.
Post mid-2025, there were mandates to use it wherever we could.
Honestly the same impression I get. I met with some old coworkers I hadn't seen in a few years two weeks ago and we caught up. I went to a very small company that almost got killed by false rumors that killed a few of our biggest contracts and got us blackballed for a few years that we've only recently come out from under.
Two of them, in contrast, went to Google, and the differences in experience were so drastic. I'm out there almost every single week directly meeting with customers. Our CEO knows me personally. CEOs of other companies know me personally. Whether or not what I'm doing actually matters, I can at least feel the impact. I can give a concrete dollar amount for deals from the past year that would not have closed without my contribution to tackling issues the buyers had.
The guys who went to Google talked of how nice it was to have stock grants appreciate, but they did basically no work at all. It seemed Google was just experimenting with expanding into remote work but had no idea what to actually do with all these people. The strategy seemed to just be hire anyone smart enough whether or not there was work for them. They'd describe periods of weeks doing nothing at all, with no contact from any team members or superiors, no direction being given to them. Then contraction comes and, sure enough, they're the first to get laid off. Not because they did anything wrong, but just because companies that big are constantly experimenting with entire divisions and product lines that existed for no real reason other than they had more money than God and may as well do something with it, but when it turns out a product line with no purpose never actually sells or even gets completed half the time, the entire division gets axed and anyone in it goes, regardless of the quality of their work or their persons or intellect.
I know these guys very well. One of them is pretty good and I'd take him in a heartbeat for anything not super challenging, but the other is a straight up honest to God superstar in the making. He was solving other team's challenges without even being asked within a week of being on the job. I'd put him on any project ever. The fact that a company would even consider losing him is an indictment on their ability to judge ability.
This isn't even really saying anything specifically bad about Google or Microsoft. I just frankly don't think it's possible for any organization that large to have any idea what 90% of their employees are even doing on any given day. Google and Microsoft should each be about 30 different companies, not one, and even those 30 would still be too big to really stand out if you're not Raymond Chen or Jeff Dean.
I work at google and our team has too much work and is expanding constantly. Anyone I meet in GCP is working 45 hours a week minimum. It's not a death march but I've yet to meet the people who just don't do anything.
Maybe they were L3s? Maybe it's EU?
As with any large company, I think it's going to vary, even within the same jurisdictions.
Something a lot of people are bad at is the gradations of "no" that might be allowed in a situation, and learning how to communicate that can ripple up and down.
If upper management tells you "I want 1 million ponies by tomorrow", but what they really mean is "I want to see how far you can get at delivering those ponies by tomorrow", that can be the difference between making a plan for coordinating that transport and going home on time or being up at 2 am calling around to find someone who won't call you expletives for waking them to ask about ponies at 2 am.
60k workers, 1/4 of the workers. This is a big deal. It also really puts you into a bind if you receive the offer. Do you accept, take the money, and hope you can find a job (Now competing with many other Msft employees that are looking). Do you decline and hope you don't get hit with the layoff which hits if not enough people accept?
My dad was a newspaper reporter in the early 2000s, so there were several dinner table conversations about this dilemma.
The buyouts were taken by superstars and low performers. The superstars moved on to other things, like working in other forms of media.
Dad didn't take several rounds of buyouts and was fine.
After suffering a stroke, he was "put out to pasture", which for a journalist means he was sent to cover city hall meetings in some suburb. Eventually, he retired with some much smaller payout than what the last buyout would have given him. The sense in the family was that the collapse of the industry denied him a dignified last decade of work. (When the industry was flush with cash, older journalists were sort of like "elder statesmen" in the newsroom. Post-internet, no longer.)
With all due respect, it's just a job, and we would do well to remember that. Chasing status and respect through work will lead to sadness (reality - expectations = happiness).
I think we should buy people out with reasonable comp and let them live the rest of their life doing something that brings them joy and happiness, even if that's volunteering in what they used to get paid for. But I'm not a policymaker.
A whole lot more of us are going to get involuntarily put out to pasture through no fault of our own eventually.
'I've applied for 300 jobs. My 25 years' experience is worthless' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50182823 - October 2026 (111 comments)
I was a journalist in the old days. With all due respect it was mote than just a job. It was a community, a calling. It felt important. I went out to dinner with my first ever boss and some original colleagues a couple of months ago and had a great time.
I would say the problem is that it NOW is just a job... it used to be the fourth estate
It had an aura precisely because journalists were the arbitrators of truth, so denial of real information elevated it
>A whole lot more of us are going to get involuntarily put out to pasture through no fault of our own eventually.
And that is going to have predictable consequences like increases in suicides, substance abuse, etc.
A job might "just be a job" but I'm growing tired of this trend online of treating work like it isn't important for most people's sense of worth, place in society, and overall mental health.
I think you should review your equation
reality - expectations - uncertainy = happiness/saddness
It might just be a job but someone living happy in good conditions that feels like the rug might get pulled under them for something they cannot control for is a lot more unerving even if your material conditions work out just fine in the end.
Also I think your being a little atomizing in the impact here. 1 Person losing a job is their problem, I agree. 60 thousand people losing there job is a problem for the government and society. 60K people is a lot and it has a ton of consquences. This is also leading into the prospects of we have these massively profitable corportations who are on the cusp of firing large % of high income people. Whats the tax implication of losing 60K engineering staff level saleries. Its atleast in the billions which is small in the total Federal revenue but if this is a sign of whats to come we have problems. Maybe those people go to different employment but change will effect a lot of local economies.
Granted I know you are really talking about the local emotional effect but the granular net effect is worth the conversation too.
I like your comment but I think you're generalizing too a bit in a different way. It's 60k people spread in different countries, at least four. It is still a big problem, but it's not "the tax implication of losing 60k salaries" for a single government
> This is also leading into the prospects of we have these massively profitable corportations who are on the cusp of firing large % of high income people. Whats the tax implication of losing 60K engineering staff level saleries
Muh job creators! You can't tax your way to growth!
Well actually, they are now job destroyers. Tax the fuckers.
Equation comes from https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-...
In the US, currently, ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US, ~400k/month, ~4.8M/year. 60k workers leaving Microsoft is a drop in the bucket, relatively speaking. But of course, they should still get as much support as possible via the packages they accept, and getting to retirement (Social Security and Medicare benefits) as pain free and least uncertainty as possible.
> Granted I know you are really talking about the local emotional effect but the granular net effect is worth the conversation too.
I vote for and support Democratic Socialist candidates, who would implement and maintain more humane and pro worker economic systems, I'm doing my part at system levels. But systems will take decades to change. It took decades to get here from Ronald Reagan and his policies. Certainly, people should never be in economic peril, but they also shouldn't tie their identity to their job, or think their job matters. The evidence is robust that the job does not matter.
(and if you think there is a problem with corporate earnings vs what workers take home, again, that is a political and labor organizing problem to solve for)
St Louis Fed: US Wages Share of GDI at 75 Year Low - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238884 - October 2026
Pew Research: Many Americans Are Struggling to Afford Basic Necessities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50197020 - October 2026
Gallup: A majority of Americans have low-quality jobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50195502 - October 2026
(i am once again asking to think in systems)
> In the US, currently, ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means...
Sure, from a raw numbers perspective it's a drop in the bucket. But not all numbers are created equal. How does the pay of these employees from Microsoft compare? You mention those of the baby boomer generation, but are all employees who may be leaving Microsoft of the same age range? What about their skillsets and the investments they and we as society of spent in their education? Those other factors matter quite a bit, so you can't just do a simple 1-1 analysis of "people".
> Certainly, people should never be in economic peril, but they also shouldn't tie their identity to their job, or think their job matters. The evidence is robust that the job does not matter.
Why? Which evidence? I think more people could have more meaning if they were self-employed, were craftsmen or artisans, and such, but this nihilistic viewpoint (which is a hallmark of anti-social/authoritarian ideologies like DSA and others) not only doesn't reflect reality but seeks to belittle those who do in fact find meaning and joy in their work. I for one like my job and have liked most of the jobs I've had. Just because an organization no longer needs you, or you no longer need it, doesn't mean that the job all of a sudden "doesn't matter".
If people don't tie their identity to the thing they spend the most time doing what will they tie it to? Should a police officer or teacher not think of themselves through the lens of their chosen profession? When you ask a professor at your university do you want to work with one who doesn't tie themselves to their work or their research? Would you want to buy produce from a farmer who sort of doesn't care about the quality of the food they grow? Do you want to fly on an airplane built by people who think their job doesn't matter?
If the org can operate without you in the role, or without the role itself, the job does not matter. The human always matters, the job does not.
> If people don't tie their identity to the thing they spend the most time doing what will they tie it to? Should a police officer or teacher not think of themselves through the lens of their chosen profession? When you ask a professor at your university do you want to work with one who doesn't tie themselves to their work or their research? Would you want to buy produce from a farmer who sort of doesn't care about the quality of the food they grow? Do you want to fly on an airplane built by people who think their job doesn't matter?
Finding meaning in the human condition and experience I suppose. Is that in your job? I argue no, but everyone will find meaning in their own way, if they find it before death. If it is your job, and you are involuntarily retired, my condolences. I fly on Boeing equipment occasionally (not my choice), so I definitely fly on airplanes built by companies who think building good aircraft doesn't matter. I'm sure some people at Boeing care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia of "bean counter idgaf".
Society, broadly speaking, runs on everyone doing just good enough in the aggregate to keep the system running. Some systems are better than others (Japan institutionalizing perfectionism, for example).
> If the org can operate without you in the role, or without the role itself, the job does not matter. The human always matters, the job does not.
Blueberries grow in the wild, ergo farmers don't matter.
> Finding meaning in the human condition and experience I suppose. Is that in your job? I argue no, but everyone will find meaning in their own way, if they find it before death.
So why are you prematurely defining what meaning should be for everyone? That's one of the problems with these authoritarian ideologies.
> I fly on Boeing equipment occasionally (not my choice), so I definitely fly on airplanes built by companies who think building good aircraft doesn't matter. I'm sure some people at Boeing care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia of "bean counter idgaf".
I don't understand this at all. Clearly they care a lot or else these planes would be crashing and stuff. If you think they don't care and you're saying flying on the aircraft sucks because they don't care, then maybe they should care more about their jobs and then it would be a better experience, which sort of runs counter to your thesis here.
Local journalism _feels_ like more than a job. Before my CS career, I was a photojournalist for a few different daily papers. It felt like important work. We were history keepers and story tellers for a community.
It is important work, but we have yet to find an economic model to effectively support it and the people doing the work.
(i donate to journalism orgs across the US [ProPublica, Associated Press, Tampa Bay Times, Salt Lake Tribune, Marion County Record, Muckrock], but far more and consistent financial support is needed than these orgs are receiving today)
>It is important work, but we have yet to find an economic model to effectively support it and the people doing the work.
We had an economic model that supported both the people and the work; the current economic model supports neither.
I would submit that this one of a great many reasons why the current economic model is problematic.
I agree that it's a job, but.. for most of humanity, people lived and worked in the same spaces with the same humans. The home was a unit of (pre) industrial production. Your neighbours were your partners, or at least involved in general economic activities with you.
Our human brains unsurprisingly still default to that, and it is quite understandable imo.
I tend to agree with the idea that one shouldn't define oneself by a job, especially since one's career is generally dependent on some combination of market forces, institutional gatekeepers, and other factors that are beyond one's control to varying degrees. However, people do tend to put that kind of personal investment into things they spend most of their time on, and especially things they had to spend a long time training for. In order to realize a world where people aren't defined by their career, we would need to first realize a world in which people weren't equal parts encouraged and forced to put most of their time and effort into one, which would require somewhat different economic arrangements than presently exist
Hah I know a professor that retired and never stopped working on his projects. He just stopped handling paperwork at the university.
The dream, when possible: to continue to perform work one enjoys without an economic requirement or component. It would be great if we could do this for more people, whenever possible, via systems.
> it's just a job
Considering what you're responding to, it sounds like you're suggesting people over 55 don't deserve to be respected or have a good position in life.
> I think we should buy people out with reasonable comp and let them live the rest of their life doing something that brings them joy and happiness, even if that's volunteering in what they used to get paid for. But I'm not a policymaker.
Respect is how you feel, a good position in life is a function of your retirement benefits and financial comfort. If the market has no place for these folks anymore, and we're not offering a permanent jobs bank to keep people working who want to work (which I absolutely think we should do), "it is what it is." Sorry if they feel bad about market changes and demand for certain skills and labor.
We show respect by packaging folks out to live comfortable remainders of their life. "Thank you for your contribution and service." Lack of respect is leaving them hanging in the wind financially, not words. If you need a job to feel needed and respected after entering retirement and with sufficient financial and retiree benefits support, we'll throw a standing appointment with a therapist into the package and/or a volunteer opportunity online board/bank.
If you're looking for validation from your job or your work as a component of your identity, you're going to end up sad. That's a choice. Make better choices if you don't want to be sad.
Either every doctor, nurse, firefighter, teacher, FBI agent, reverend, and social worker I know is wrong, or you are.
With all due respect, you're a kid, and not very knowledgeable about the world of careers that differ from yours.
Now, go code something nice.
I've a neighbour who declined, and then got hit by layoffs. It was quite a gamble, and they lost out big time.
Honestly, if work was to come at me with a buy-out offer, and I was in a position to be able to afford to not work for a few years, I'd probably accept. Maybe go find some non-tech work for a little bit to stretch the dollars and ensure I have health insurance.
We're in such a bubble at the moment, things are going to get really rough.
Wouldn't they also get layoff severance? Or was the amount significantly lower than tbe buyout would have been?
Often, buyouts terms are more generous than layoff terms. Even if the company has a history of generous layoff terms, the next one may be less generous.
The other thing to consider is if you'll want to keep working at the company after so many people have left due to the buyout and the layoff. If not, taking the buyout and looking for a new job is likely to be better for you than not taking the buyout, not getting laid off, and looking for a new job once you conclude you don't like the new environment. For one thing, you'll probably have buyout compensation and new job compensation at the same time; for another, it may be easier to find a new job if you're in the market before the layoffs increase the hiring pool.
Not to start an argument, but do you really think you could easily find non-tech work that also provides health insurance? I get a little triggered at this line of thinking. People often day dream about working as a Costco receipt checker without realizing you literally have to work your way up from seasonal to part-time to full-time over years. And that's assuming you can even get hired as a seasonal worker with a 5+ year unemployment gap on your Resume (your SWE career).
I'm realizing I'm a little bit too passionate about this lol but I would love to hear if you have a specific plan or goal in mind so I can copy it. For me BaristaFIRE would be ideal, but with so many friends going through the layoff/unemployment cycle and hearing their experiences I've concluded it's much more pragmatic to stay in tech.
> with so many friends going through the layoff/unemployment cycle and hearing their experiences I've concluded it's much more pragmatic to stay in tech.
If so many of your friends are becoming unemployed, isn't this a sign of things to come? If people keep getting laid off in tech, what is the motivation to stay there if you might be next?
Like you, I'm confused by the dreams people post about working low-paid jobs if they're laid off. If the job market is flooded with tech workers, all these jobs will become even more competitive than before, and wages will fall. If you think your own career in tech is actually in danger (as in, you don't think you have any skills that couldn't be fully automated in the near future), I think the best option is getting some different education to put some barrier of certification between yourself and the rest of the desperate job market. But it should be something that's highly employable and difficult to automate, which is a scope that keeps narrowing.
87% of full-time private sector workers have access to employer-subsidized healthcare. On average employers pay 82% of the cost for an individual and 73% of the cost of a family. To use BestBuy as an example: Reddit threads suggest costs range from $100/month (as of 2021) to $250/month (as of 2025).
I'm going to guess Best Buy's health insurance (for retail employees) is terrible.
When they offer a package YOU ALWAYS TAKE IT. It means that layoffs are coming.
My friend's company offered a voluntary severance package to a bunch of employees. She was talking to one of her employees and she knew that he was going to get laid off if he didn't take the package but was unable to advise him. I think the voluntary severance was 2 years medical, 2 years of vesting, many months of pay, etc. But he decided not to take the offer and was laid off for a much worse package a few months later.
ALWAYS TAKE THE VOLUNTARY SEVERANCE.
I have doubts that this is suitable as a generalized statement like that.
Ignoring specifics, the corp offers a package because they want you to take it. That means that you taking it is in their best interest.
It might also be in your own best interest, but it might also not be. That's something that needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis
The interests might be aligned albeit for different reasons. A corporation laying off a huge number of employees is facing reputational damage or regulatory consequences. That doesn’t mean you gain any benefit from their pain. Maybe you could sue for wrongful termination and keep your job?
It really depends on who it's being offered to - if it is literally EVERYONE you need to evaluate it on a case-to-case, but if it's a small targeted group, you probably should take it.
Also if you're a manager you should be able to make it pretty clear.
A lowly line manager is not going to have any actual visibility into the VP-level machinations that decide the size and scope of layoffs.
But if they have half a clue they'll still be able to figure out which way the wind is blowing.
Source: a lowly line manager who has seen and survived a number of these.
It obviously depends on the specific amounts of the package as well as the timeline and personal impact of the upcoming layoffs (the latter of which you can’t know).
The company doesn’t necessarily want everyone to take the package, and they’re inevitably going to price the separation benefits such that some employees would end up better off taking it and others would end up better off not taking it.
Heh, wouldn't they get a shock if everybody did though
Always? What I’ve seen is sometimes the buy out is no better than the current severance package. Might as well ride it out. The severance could in theory get worse over time but that doesn’t seem like a worthwhile reason to throw away your job. You’re also throwing away unemployment.
If you take it you're not eligible to unemployment. I think in this market, given the undefined length of employment searching at the moment, that's a major consideration.
For most Microsoft employees, the maximum unemployment benefits in most states are a rounding error vs the buyout offer. Here in Missouri it's $320, maxed to 20 weeks. So for most local employees that might get this letter, It's less than a month of salary, and that without accounting for months of health benefits, which I bet the buyout includes.
That's $320/week, to be clear.
Unemployment isn’t very much, is it?
Yeah, it’s really not for us, it’s more about tiding over a laid-off retail worker so they don’t get evicted. Not allowing someone with a mortgage in Cupertino or Redmond and little savings to keep their lifestyle mostly intact with just a little belt-tightening.
And I’m not saying that in a grumpy way. Yes we do have much higher salaries, and because of that it’s reasonable that it’s on us to save up for this type of rainy day, in accordance with our own personal risk assessment.
It’s honestly something I spent 15 years rarely thinking about, because while I’ve seen many RIFs, I was never worried since getting a new job was as easy as just responding to a few of the messages that constantly came in via LinkedIn or email. No longer.
Ah tech money.
Not everyone has options and unemployment can be the difference between being on the street or eating ramen.
Weird comment when the context is about whether a TECH employee should take the buyout offer vs unemployment...?
Microsoft employs more than highly paid programmers. There are sales, janitors, cooks, admins, drivers, shipping, etc
I would assume a lot of the types of people you're talking about are in fact not Microsoft employees, it's way more common these days to hire people like on-site cooks through agencies that effectively make them contractors for Microsoft. This notice is definitely about "corporate" employees, and I believe another comment noted that in a different source it's stated that sales and marketing are not even being offered this deal.
It's possible you don't live in the US...?
Generally, in the US, unemployment lasts a few months tops. Regardless of how long you worked, or how long you will be without work.
Eh, the voluntary severance offered at Google in various European countries recently was less than the negotiated payout for mandatory layoffs. And most of the headcount from people who took it was backfilled, too.
At Google they did voluntary buyouts and gave managers BACKFILLs.
It wasn't a 'instead of layoffs' it was 'ok if you're burned out, here's your exit'.
Hah not always. I worked at a bank where they offered this and I applied and I was denied and told I was essential.
Such a great moment to ask for a raise. :)
Having been in a company for many years, that every so often had these packages, I disagree.
Yes, of course it means layoffs are coming. This isn't a conspiracy. The whole point of these packages is "We want people to leave. The more people who take the package, the fewer the number that is laid off."
If the package is going to only a small percentage of the company, then yes, it's a sign they'll get rid of you. When it's offered to such a large number, then it's just a lottery to see who'll lose their jobs. Like all lotteries, the chances of you being impacted are low (e.g. 10% was the max in my case).
Well, it’s often a big payout though, and taking it can be a nice bit of cash if you can line up a new job quickly. But I’d be the first to admit that likelihood seems to have plummeted for everyone (except for the geniuses who develop the AI models themselves, who are in a ton of demand.)
> Certain pools of employees, including some focused on data centers, sales and marketing, aren’t eligible, the spokesperson said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-26/microsoft...
Sales alone is some 25 % of Microsoft expenditures, so are these 60k about 50 % of what's left?
It doesn't say "everyone in sales" so it's not clear.
Can't be software engineers, from what I learned they were never really paid commensurate to value they delivered. So it must be quite economical to keep them around.
A couple of times in my career, I was one of those who were not given out a buyout. I was chosen to keep the lights on while the number of employees shrank every month. It sucked. I was given responsibility for systems with no documentation or than a username/password. I was called by all sorts of people I had never spoken to who had their hair on fire because the system was breaking left and right. I wished I was given the buyout; instead I was told I should be grateful I had a paycheck. No thanks.
Probably trying to entice people who are close to making a FIRE move (or even just close to normal retirement) to go ahead and do it.
If you still need a job, I don't see it as being very attractive in this environment, unless you're quite senior with very marketable skills.
I've never been involved in such a situation, but I assume part of individual's calculation is: If I indicate interest, but the company doesn't accept it or go through with it and keeps me... am I now viewed as a disloyal, detached worker?
I've been given such an offer. The company gave eligible employees X days to opt in and then it gave itself Y days to decide which volunteers would get buyouts. This matter of loyalty perception was certainly a live question for the employees. But also the company did iterative buyouts so in later rounds there was some evidence available to the current prospects about how employees were treated earlier. Not so much in what opportunities were withheld from the "disloyal" but in the take rate of volunteers and in the probability of being "laid off" given the receipt of an earlier buyout offer.
Ahhh, I retract my previous statement. I assumed it was "do you want to accept the offer". If it is "do you want to be considered for the offer" that's a little more complicated...
very much this. I was denied 2 rounds in 2008. I knew too many of the systems to risk losing me. Was sort of ok with it in at the time, and the length of the recession made me really happy in retrospect. Today I recognize offering to be let go as risky, since upper management may see you as a flight risk, which changes future layoffs and makes you slightly more likely to be included.
At Google it was really rare to be denied, and if they did then it was kinda a negotiating chip for you - if you're so important to the company they won't let you leave, then are they going to pay you accordingly?
Anecdotal, but I had an acquaintance try to use the buyout and was point blank told by management "it's not for you".
Company sends you offer first
Not a problem. While it is reasonable to consider the signaling impact of all your comms at work, if you take this, they'll smile at getting closer to quota and wish you well.
Reasons to accept. Reasons to decline, but that isn't one of them.
Just because the offer is made to 25% of the workforce doesn’t mean they will all accept. These are generally very well paid jobs and the prospect of entering the job market right now isn’t going to appeal to everyone. Especially not when you have upcoming RSU vests after a recent 50% stock rally. If say a third of the employees accept then it’ll be an ~8% reduction, which is in line with a regular company-wide layoff.
There is a difference this time though. There has never been a time in last 40 years where being laid off seemed terrifying for knowledge workers in tech. It's speculative what's ahead, but man, does it LOOK bleak. Many would still come out OK, but it's not a given.
Things during dotcom crash looked at least this bleak. Easily. It felt like every company on earth (at least in tech) was crashing and firing people. Even high-flyers like Google absolutely stopped hiring.
If you were lucky, you got laid off with a severance. If you weren't, you showed up to work one day and the doors were locked with no notice.
> There has never been a time in last 40 years where being laid off seemed terrifying for knowledge workers in tech.
How about the last several times all of big tech was laying off tons of people at the same time?
I'm not going to disagree with "this time it's different", but I've seen this fear several times before. This time it's AI that's going to take our jobs, and maybe that will happen, but it's not the first threat.
It's incomparable the difference now compared with say layoffs in 2022
Back then, you might think the market was a bit cooler, but talented engineers were still in massive demand. Growth in tech was stalling but a massive reduction in demand was very unlikely
This time there's a real chance that in 10 years we have 50% or less the number of software engineers today, if the job title still even exists as we know it
> How about the last several times all of big tech was laying off tons of people at the same time?
I meant the layoffs due to AI, not the typical tech tech layoffs that are as old as tech itself.
But there are not that many layoffs clearly due to Ai, this one sure is not
You literally said: "There has never been a time in last 40 years..."
So now you are claiming that AI has been causing tech layoffs for 40 years now?
Not sure I understand. If getting laid off in the current environment is extra terrifying then why will people volunteer to get laid off?
If they're doing similar to what was mentioned back in April there is some calculation about current age + years of service that could be tempting to people on the "bubble" of retirement.
Like with any deal, it's important to be able to run the numbers at any time.
The worst case scenario is not taking the offer then getting let go for performance, which means zero severance, health insurance terminated same day. This has been happening at Microsoft for the last few years, sometimes in large waves. Many of these people were not egregious non-performers, just people who had been marked as not quite meeting expectations, and thought they had another chance.
Phew, scary! But it maybe a very real question to ask ourselves. 2027 may be the year when all companies do the same and follow the MSFT model.
Big companies are notoriously overweight and need to trim down continuously. Microsoft is already a big bureaucracy and nothing like the start-up mentality it had throughout the 80's and 90's.
It's fine for them to get rid of excess weight. My guess is they could probably cut a lot more if they wanted.
1/4 becomes a de facto standard, the companies will be expected to follow starting right now.
I have been through a similar situation at a former employer, during the aftermath of 2008 crisis, and is complicated.
Exactly as you place it, the way they found out to push for buyouts was to terminate existing positions.
Everyone was forced to decide between taking the buyout, or apply to internal positions instead, naturally the later was much more complicated than just taking the money.
If you get the offer take it and start your own company with it. There's no use in staying if you're not wanted and even though you'll get a severance package it won't amount to much more than a couple months back pay.
Didn’t Microsoft have an issue with VP Vance regarding layoffs and all the perm processing were stopped. So why is MS doing this which will bring more trouble.
With these kinds of offers, they don't expect to get rid of 60,000. They expect to get rid of Y,000.
They make the offer to 60,000 (typically, an entire department gets this offer, including people they want to keep). Some X,000 will take the offer. If Y,000 > X,000, they they lay off the difference.
This is what I was wondering, if they have some internal math that says "15% will probably take this offer" targeting a lower number like 10k. And if they overshoot, it's not like they'll have trouble refilling positions in this economy...
You say that but the economy seems pretty strong to me, we have lower than average unemployment with above average job listings. It's harder if you're on visa otherwise it's pretty competitive
?s/economy/tech job market/g
In general, and especially for the technical roles, they are probably going to have trouble finding relatively similar compensation.
Including people they want to keep? What if all the people they wanted to keep accepted while those they didn't want to keep stayed? Certainly makes no sense.
I imagine they don't extend the offer to specific people they want to keep.
I'm still not sure what the advantage to the company of an offer like this is versus layoffs where management gets to choose who leaves, unless they feel the "loyalty test" of deciding to stay is worth more than their own evaluation of employee performance.
The advantage is this:
1. Some C-suite asshole wants headcount in your division reduced by, say, 5% next year. He has zero visibility into anyone's performance, or any of the projects anyone is actually working on.
2. His subordinate directors could do random, or targeted layoffs to hit that 5%, but this ruins morale for everyone who survives.
3. ...Or, they could make this offer, let people leave on their own, try to convince any stars who want to take it to stay, don't do any backfill. Then, hopefully, between the voluntary layoffs and no backfill, you might hit that 5% reduction, and not have to do involuntary layoffs. (Or if you do, they would be much smaller.)
4. This is less disruptive for teams and managers, because with voluntary layoffs, they have time to plan for these people leaving, instead of showing up to work on Thursday, and being told that 5 people on their team were given the pink slip this morning.
5. This is also, obviously, less disruptive for employees who take the offer (as they can control their exit, and get a payout), and less disruptive for anyone who doesn't take the offer (lower odds of showing up to work on Thursday, and getting a pink slip).
> What if all the people they wanted to keep accepted while those they didn't want to keep stayed
That's not an outcome they'd like, but it's an outcome they have to accept, in order to not piss off everyone else.
1. For anyone they want to keep who takes them up on the offer, they always have a chance to try to convince those people to not take the buyout offer.
2. If you make the buyout offer conditional to particular individuals, it will sow resentment and division.
It's generally better for the employees and the employer to do this kind of blanket buyout. If they voluntarily hit the reduction targets, nobody needs to be laid off. If they don't, the layoffs will be there, but smaller. If the 'wrong' people want the buyout, there's still a chance to convince them to stay. If they don't want to stay after the convincing, it's probably best for them to go on their way.
Microsoft made $134B in net income in the last 4 quarters. It used to be if you worked for a company that was printing boat loads of money that you had job security.
Now, even if the company is crushing it, they'll still see employees more as a cost center instead of a revenue generator.
No, this has never been the case. Companies are and always have been very conscious of wage and salary expenses, as it's one of the most controllable categories on the P&L.
They are making $600k in net income per employee. 10+ years ago, I'd never seen a mass layoff at any company making that kind of money per employee.
Their net income is up more than 2x in just the last 5 years. 10 years ago, Microsoft only had $85B in revenue, now they are up to $134B in net income, and they need to let 25% of the company leave?
If I have a team of 20, making a lot of money, but I think I can do the exact same job with 15 because of AI productivity gains, should I keep the other 5 employed for the vibes?
The total net income doesn't matter: The move is management saying they are overstaffed for the work they think they need.
Assume Microsoft is expecting just a third of people to take the offer. It's just too many people to want to move to a different division that needs more labor: It's basically entire divisions that they'd have to create from whole cloth.
> If I have a team of 20, making a lot of money, but I think I can do the exact same job with 15 because of AI productivity gains, should I keep the other 5 employed for the vibes?
yes, because, (a) you would be an amoral company otherwise and (b) the productivity and work quality of those remaining 15 will plummet if you don't and AI won't save you in the end: you'll build faster and cheaper, but the quality of your products will enter a downward spiral it will be hard or impossible to exit from.
Why amoral? If a an employee costs the company more than they make, it means the owner of the company is essentially donating his money to the employee. Is it amoral to not do that? What if the owner wants to donate the money to cancer research instead?
To expand on this, a company’s purpose should go beyond simply generating profit for its owners, imho; among other things, it should also include a duty of care toward its employees. Society instills a strong work ethic in us from childhood, teaching us that contributing to the greater good is our individual duty. Before the plague of neoliberalism, there was an expectation that companies would have a positive impact on society, too. Nothing, except greed, forbids to return to those values.
Companies should also be legally barred from hiring for three years if they engage in layoffs. Mergers should also be off the table for the same period.
It's deleterious to the economy. As the recent Microsoft game studio apocalypse shows, mergers are also extremely deleterious. It would be better to have a dozen game studios employing people and competing rather than one shit company cutting expenses and reducing products going to market.
> now they are up to $134B in net income, and they need to let 25% of the company leave?
Tomorrow they’ll announce that they’re going to spend $134b on new data centers.
Contrast that with NVIDIA's princely $2.5M net income per employee.
profitable divisions are making more than that per employee
while other divisions are sinking ship
there always a case for a yard cleanup and decluttering
But like if your company is making money hand over foot you didn't typically cut staff by 25%. You could just as easily do a hiring freeze and get out ahead of it. I mean if your profit metric is showing all green and growing you have to be really cold to say we need to fire 1/4 people now why? (to maximize shareholders short term value of course)
> I mean if your profit metric is showing all green and growing you have to be really cold to say we need to fire 1/4 people now why? (to maximize shareholders short term value of course)
Yes, it's cold, but in the grand scheme of things, it's good for the society if companies are efficient and the economy is efficient. An efficient economy means that we can produce and consume more per hour worked.
Such behavior by companies may not be in my self-interest but that's another matter.
They aren't cutting staff because they made a ton of money. They are cutting staff because they see trouble on the horizon and are positioning themselves for that. Layoffs are rarely lagging indicators. They are more often predictors of trouble coming. This bubble will explode, MSFT wants to survive it. Thats all there is to it.
This may be so but what others in this thread are trying to point out is that this is a relative novelty. Decades ago, layoffs were something that hapened at struggling companies trying to stave off bankruptcy (or already in it). It is a major cultural change to treat employees so casually as fat to be trimmed.
AI adoption is a huge shift from labor to capital. Its history repeating, now instead of muscle power being replaced its brain power.
The amount of capex flying around requires raising funds, there have been dozens of stories recently about investors demanding higher rates for AI bonds. MSFT et al need to get their balance sheets in order to get good rates. Also, everyone is waiting for the bubble to burst, getting the house in order ahead of it is very prudent.
this is definitely about over investment in AI, regardless of whether it was smart or not. They need to recover those monies.
> Do you decline and hope you don't get hit with the layoff which hits if not enough people accept?
If they need your skills after restructuring, you will be offered your old job back and get to pocket the buyout money.
If they don't need your skills, you're going to get fired anyway.
At least that's how any rational company would handle it. Employees are supposedly hired because they contribute to the company, not to fill seats.
A rational company would not buy out an employee that they're going to be rehiring.
You cannot act with perfect information when you're making an offer to 25% of a company that size. If they were able to and willing to plan this on a per-person basis, they wouldn't be in the position of mass-buyouts.
It's very common in these situations to target every org in the company with a goal of X% reduction. If a small fraction of these teams now need extra headcount, easy enough to allow those teams to hire. Usually you don't keep the severance if you return in under X days.
I've personally been laid off, only for the post-re-org team to hire several people, including asking to rehire me. It's rare, and those affected should probably plan to find new jobs, but it happens.
typically in that case the boomerang is they come back but as a consultant. just doing the same thing they were doing before but at a different rate. usually higher to cover health ins plus a bit of a bonus.
But with the job market the way it is, they could re-hire at a lower compensation?
The buyout is generating unknown information. How well does the company perform without x random employees removed.
Yes, but companies realise the important cogs much later in the process.
The mass buyout offer to 25% of Microsoft's workforce comes less than a week after Microsoft President Brad Smith proclaimed to employees: 'We stand by our people. We always have. We always will.' in a video he posted to LinkedIn.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7518428...
To be fair, such "voluntary exits" with a generous severance package are well above the practices of most US companies, where great numbers of employees are fired without warnings and with little compensation.
So there is some truth in the claims of the MS President.
That's what the money is for.
Do you feel that statement is in conflict with this action?
My former boss at Microsoft told me this sort of thing is a good way to get rid of your best, most employable employees. I guess he didn’t pass the memo up the chain.
The truth of the matter I think is that you do not actually need the best.
Most of the time, anyway.
As far as business is concerned, the thing often runs better with mid people with less leverage. They just do their job, don't have any ideas and you can squeeze them.
Because it's not all the best that are leaving. Just the ones not stuck with a mortgage or similar stuff. This cuts the wings of very capable people and completely strips them off their bargaining power. Which is very useful to management.
> The truth of the matter I think is that you do not actually need the best.
Not all employees need to be the "best". But if you are a top tier company in a given field like Microsoft, you need the best minds to stay top tier, otherwise you will descend. But on the other hand you don't need the lower tier performers to stay top tier except for scaling reasons because the supply for top tier performers is a very small pool...
You can still keep some of the best minds, but you do not need them on every team and every project.
I might be wrong, but I doubt that these mass buyouts were also offered to those that are strategically relevant. Though I guess that can happen if that specific branch of the management tree is bad at their jobs
Other ways are to offer "secret" bonuses and perks to the talent you want to keep. If the management / department wants to keep you no matter what, you will clearly notice this despite mass layoffs.
I think you are right. Besides this "Best" category is also fluid. Best of 2000's is not best in 2020s for a business.
This also works as price discovery mechanism for both parties. Best employee can take a break and apply later for different job, profile, growth industry etc. Companies also find better to hire what they think best at market price instead of honorary best which are there for long time.
The last ms team I was on before I quit changed quite a few over the years as the business and requirements changed. I learned a lot about what I enjoy and where I thrive. Where I had done well for a few years the business had become something that was better suited for others. It was best for me and the team that I left and they find someone better suited for the current and future work.
Even now with agentic work there are areas I am able to do well and some areas im not. It's definitely always changing.
You sound like you don't really know much about teams and leadership.
Getting rid of your best means you'll also make sure that the rest of them slowly, but surely leave and never come back. Good people will not work with average people which results in long term failure to compete for the company.
There's a reason why all tech industry leaders have focused on getting a *consistent* and *even* pool of good workers to establish themselves there (against wisdom of the MBA crowd you're repeating here).
It is detracting from the conversation to dismiss people like this just because they say something you do not personally agree with.
Or rather because they share observations about the world you might not like.
I'm not dismissing people, I'm dismissing your poorly thought out opinion.
This is what a discussion is - and besides me not liking it, it's also flawed and dismissive of people.
U-huh. I don't think that what you're doing here is warranted or correct.
Having checked your CV, I can see why you're probably doing it, but that's still.. not great. Maybe you should've also checked mine before running with these strong opinions.
What management thinks is good and what employees, especially engineering type employees, think is good are usually counter.
The execs want to run the most profit to cost they can squeeze out, usually short term. The employees see the value in the senior and knowledge rich staff with higher costs long term.
Arguably, management might be more often than not more right in their assessment.
Which hurts me to say. But engineers tend to make for terrible businessmen. (There are exceptions of course, and the opposite is _even worse_)
Companies want to get rid of the bottom 25% of the employees at all times. These offers often get taken advantage by half of those and half of others who are more capable & find it opportunistic to do something better. If that latter half had stayed, they would have outperformed their pay. If the company needs to re-hire that lost output in employees, it's a net negative. If they can guarantee that the ones who stayed plus AI outweighs the time to onboard and institutional knowledge lost, sure seems reasonable but high risk for a large company that is allowed to play it safer.
I think by now companies are not under any illusion that they can precisely pinpoint bottom 25% of employees. Their reasonable efforts are about separating out few folks they absolutely want to keep in business continuity sense. Rest below average, average, above average, "best" are fair game.
That is a rule for a good project manager. When work is simple, you don't need bright people. You just need average guys. But when work is cutting edge, you need very talented people.
I think the efforts on cutting edge works has been reduced and redirected to more market-dominating trends like LLM optimizations. This is a bet. Cut off the finger for a stronger arm. And I think this bet will fail. But I thought the same about this new Gemini after Bard, and boy I was wrong.
> The truth of the matter I think is that you do not actually need the best.
That is true for monopolies. Once you get a monopoly, you do not need to compete anymore. Lower the salaries. Make products worse. Increase prices. Monopolies do not need to care. We used to break them because that. Nowadays, bots just will tell you that they are monopolies because they are "so good". So, here we are.
This is true if you are running a car wash. Even the mid tier employees satisfactorily do the job and customers can be given what they paid for. You are competing on geographic location and ability to do a very easy task repeatedly over and over. You get another chance to sell your product every single day, and you can adjust your prices up and down to find the sweet spot because the sales cycle repeats every day.
It is not true if you are determining the correct feature to add to microsoft's money making products. That requires deep knowledge of users and the industry and the existing product. It requires understanding the industry and users far in advance, the turnaround time for a feature in Windows or Azure is likely 6 months or longer, sometimes years. It requires acumen and an ability to think about customers and the market and sales. Microsoft doesn't have 5000 people who can do this. They probably don't have 1000. These people can go start their own business or consulting firm today. There are lots of people they worked with in the past who know how good they are so they can get another job.
The same is true for engineering. Out of 500 engineers, there are 10-20 that are doing the really important work that you can't just find someone else to do. They know everything about the system and everyone comes to them for advice or to get explanations about how things are put together and why. You can't just find some average engineer and put them in the same desk as these 10-20 and magically things are fine, the mid tier person doesn't have the years of experience nor the potential to fill this role even if they did have the experience.
> That requires deep knowledge of users and the industry and the existing product.
I.. uh. I hate to break it to you, but that's not as deep of a moat as this reads like you would believe it is.
Engineers (like me, fwiw) would love to believe all these things about themselves, but they're not really true.
Of course, there is a difference, but the difference just doesn't matter all that much in the real world. Markets do not care.
Which isn't to say that people shouldn't know their worth. But it is to say that one can better defend their worth when armed with an accurate assessment of reality.
I dunno how prevalant this term is, but people at my last robotics company called it the "dead sea effect." Those who can, leave. Those who can't, hang on.
It didn't seem that obvious a term as you described it here, but a bit of googling gave the background:
It's effectively that the more desirable elements leave, the less desirable parts stay behind and get more concentrated... So the bad employees are the salt in the dead sea
It was coined by this chap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Webster#Career
MS did a round of layoffs that was specifically targeting low performance last year: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/08/microsoft-confirms-performan... and there's no reason to believe they wouldn't do it again. I doubt that anyone there is unaware that hanging on isn't a realistic option if they're not delivering.
You get the same with government jobs. Anyone smart leaves and gets a better job, so you’re left with the dregs.
I termed it "Sh*t floats" when I was in the Navy.
My dad told me his bosses were very surprised when he eagerly accepted a similar deal. IIRC, he was about 60 at the time, so would have had about 6 years early retirement given what the pension age was back then.
Well they’re the ones that cost the most money!
They're also the ones that create the most money.
Ultimately, you can only take equity away from people like that for so long. We're taking the people who actually create the value and firing them so that we can satisfy the hangers-on, meaning shareholders who often 1) don't know they even own MS and 2) are often diversified as to make a real problem with Microsoft not a dealbreaker for their financial goals.
This is why it was only offered to 60k people. The best performers are likely not given the option.
I guess unfortunately there isn't an easy way to just "only fire the employees responsible for making Teams suck".
In theory that's a manager's responsibility, but managers get (effectively) punished for firing people so that never happens in practice.
there’s a difference between a memo passed and a memo read. (let alone a memo acted upon.)
Market is horrible even for 'best employees' . Best employees arent that different from mid employees these days because everyone is slinging the same slop.
Not true, the market is exceptional for the best in tech. The problem arises when some employees think they are the best - despite the facts not lining up.
I don't believe you. I literally can't get an interview, but I joined a mature startup through a subcontracting gig to make ends meet, and a month in they're asking if they can just hire me. The hiring process is broken.
You were promoted to perm employee a month in. How does that contradict my earlier statement? The broken hiring process in tech is something entirely different - it was broken 10 years ago, 20 years ago, nothing new
Yes and No. If you are a citizen and have “AI” experience there’s plenty of startups offering base salaries in excess of the average Microsoft total comp.
Maybe something has changed between now and then? Say, some kind of a technology that allows to select eligible employees better.
Definitely not. We are no better at finding good employees than we ever were. It's the human biases that make it bad, not the technology.
"We" as in "industry in general" or "we" as in "HR at my company"? Although, I'd be more interested in what Microsoft does.
We as in humans in general.
"1/4 of workforce was offered buyouts" does not mean all 60000 will accept them. "Results may vary", you know.
I saw it happening in a funny way not long time ago - company offered buyouts, but got insanely surprised when high percentage of people actually accepted it. Management thought acceptance rate would be much, much lower, but when numbers started to pour in on a 2nd day, oh man... Panic spread very quickly because people were accepting packages in fear of layoffs without such package, so management said if any layoffs will happen in 3 years period after this, same package will be offered no question asked. Cooled things a bit, but what a mess...
> management said if any layoffs will happen in 3 years period after this, same package will be offered no question asked.
And people believed them?!
If this claim was in writing then it's legally binding in most U.S. states. Technically it's legally binding even if it's not written but in those cases it's harder to prove.
Right? When management demonstrates their inability to plan for repercussions, how am I to believe a pinky promise covering the next three years?
It was more than 3 years ago, but as far as I know, they did honor the agreement. Some people took early retirement packages closer to the end of that three-year period and they got the same deal.
> And people believed them?!
Probably because they could sue them for not keeping their word.
30% was the quoted number for the acceptance rate of the earlier VRP, which was mostly long tenured employees who were at retirement age, or close to it. I would be surprised if this gets a significant acceptance from the younger employees. OTOH, older employees who didn't accept the earlier VRP and were regretting that decision may jump at this offer.
>so management said if any layoffs will happen in 3 years period after this, same package will be offered no question asked. Cooled things a bit, but what a mess...
Unless those funds were placed in an escrow account, I would have assumed that claim held no water.
Because the company wouldn't have the money by that point? Seems unlikely. Or because it was an outright lie? Could be grounds for a lawsuit.
Also just from raw corporate penny pinching. Why would they make payouts like that if they're not forced to, yes there's reputational risks of making that promise and then not following through with it but faced with a choice between that and a few lawsuits (with the usual corporate advantages of arbitration clauses and vastly more resources they're likely to win too) a corporation looking to shed people is likely to take the win of reducing their severance payouts.
> Could be grounds for a lawsuit.
And?
Litigation is a rich man's game. Companies almost always have more resources to dedicate to litigation than individual employees, especially if those individual employees have been laid off and are now without an income.
The company knows this, the employees know this, the company knows the employees know this, and vice-versa.
> The company knows this, the employees know this, the company knows the employees know this, and vice-versa.
Okay, so how many nights until the blue-eyed employees all leave the company? :p
A promise like that just isn't binding, things can change in 2 years, the managers themselves may have moved and been replaced with different people. A bird in the hand is worth many birds three years from now.
Management at a certain level speaks with the legally binding authority of the company. Management at any level carries some legal authority.
You can't say, "Well, we hired a new CEO, so all those old agreements are null and void."
hey! we said no questions asked!
Is it known if this is AI related?
Or perhaps, as Zack confirmed, Musk showed that they can cut 80% and keep going?
Take it or wait for the lay offs.
Also, good grief, flooding the market with thousands more people.
2027 is going to be wild. Stock up on beans and rice, folks.
Tinfoil hat thoroughly fixed upon my head, but a part of me kind of thinks that this might have been a long-game from big tech in the same vein as Grapes of Wrath.
Software engineers make a lot of money, at least historically because of supply/demand mechanics. By suddenly and continuously flooding the market with lots and lots of software engineers, you effectively can bring down wages, since if people are unemployed long enough they're likely to take a lower salary.
The FAGMAN companies got caught colluding to depress wages by avoiding hiring people already employed by the others, so they learned to accomplish the same thing without writing it down by having these periodic huge layoffs across the entire industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
I remember hearing about that.
Of course, this is just when they got caught doing it. Who knows how often it happens where they don't.
> The FAGMAN companies
Buahahahaaha
>Software engineers
This Microsoft deal for the large part is not being offered to software engineering orgs.
They (the industry) have always wanted to find a way to do this. Tools like Rational Rose and Visual Basic were touted as being able to do this. Sending work overseas is another way. AI is just the next in line.
I don't know what the overall answer is, but I would say that if you have high demand skills, you can still earn a living.
Only works if employees can't found something new. Which might be the case right now.
Really, it feels like we're in a quiet depression.
The 3% growth in the us market is virtually (90%+?) all in AI company valuations/investment. It is a depression, that hasnt been announced. Wait till after midterms for the blame to be leveled with the announcement.
Yep. We'll be told to argue over our collective political beliefs while corporations and billionaires continue to drive the economy for the 99% into the crapper. It's a machine that cannot stop until we all have nothing left.
Looks pretty good for the 50%:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mehoinusa672n
Definitely
To me it does not seem like any bigger conspiracy than people always wanted to pay less and earn more at the same time.
I was looking at the graph a few days ago. Doesn't look great https://www.hnhiringtrends.com/
Why is MS doing this after the latest troubles with VP Vance regarding layoffs?
I highly doubt it’s a factor. If we learned anything in the last 10 years, is that you can’t unflood the zone with facts. The administration is going to say what they are going to say and signal to their target audience. Corporations are going to do what they need to do. Their target audiences barely overlap.
Seems like a good way to avoid the bad PR. This offer will be disproportionately taken by citizens and avoided by visa workers.
Can’t claim MS is firing citizens and replacing them with H1Bs, if they are leaving voluntarily.
I'm not aware of this. But if I were to speculate, maybe they feel some freedom because they thing the midterms will be a change.
Maybe, but they would have months before the results of the midterms practically affect them.
This is micro scary but macro exciting; in the large, and zoomed out from this one instance, it's a sign we're entering an ENORMOUS diversification of the capabilities of the economy.
This feels like the centuries-ago transition of peasants from subsistence farmers to economically valuable consumers: thousands of Microserfs, spat out by a geriatric company that lost its ability to leverage their strengths. Their intelligence, their cognitive work product, will be their own again.
Awful for some affected folks; great for others, but SUPER great for everyone who stands to benefit from these talented folks' ejection into the great unknown of "holy shit I need to make money, lemme skate where the puck's going"
Some may even disrupt Microsoft. After all Microsoft can't force their knowledge out of their minds.
The way these companies are run so cut-throat while also being worth a trillion dollars is such a fundamental systemic failure.
To say that it's because Microsoft overhired is a gross mis-remembering of the last 20 years.
For starters, I remember way back in the late 2000s meeting an engineer from the office team. Their entire job was focused on making buttons. Microsoft also used to employee engineers focused soley on testing software, though I've heard that has changed.
Anyway, this is a company with decades long cultural roots for enormously large teams where each person is hyper focused on tiny little pieces of a much larger product.
Also, let's not forget that they bought up 1/3 of the gaming industry.
I don't mind that Microsoft is hurting, because it makes mid products, that always seem to fail-up. However, I do mind that the people are okay that the answer is to lay people off instead of, maybe, breaking the company back up into smaller companies that preserve the stability of the workforce.
The actual memo:
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/10/26/introducing-a-vo...
> Introducing a Voluntary Exit Offer
Headline is making me laugh cause it sounds like a press announcement for a new product
"The new Microsoft Voluntary Exit Offer, thinner, and lighter, with 20% slimmer bezels than before"
Our smartest, most capable Exit Offer yet.
One more thing: Don't hit the door on your way out!
It could be an enterprise product bundled with some MS365 SKUs. They know a lot of MS customers would need such thing in coming years.
queue the don draper meme
cue
too late, it's queued up. Currently playing : "Co-pilot's greatest hits"
First up: Recall
This sounds like satire, but I don't think we're far off from major tech companies announcing layoffs alongside new products at keynotes. After all, their purpose is to drive consumer and investor hype.
Someone posted the internal version of it on Reddit. Not all orgs are eligible for VEP. And some are only partially eligible. So the 60,000 number is going to disproportionately hit certain parts of the company.
The interesting question is what it means for the ineligible part of the company. Are they simply going to get another iteration of VEP later, or are they going to be hit by brutal layoffs at some point in the near future?
What are the terms of the severance? Last time didn't they offer accelerated vesting, etc?
Someone posted the terms on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/microsoft/comments/1xg0c5o/microsof...
> 1–2 weeks’ pay per semester of tenure, based on level; six months of fully covered COBRA (remaining 12 months paid by you) and two vesting events in February and May.
> L65-L67 get 4w of pay per year of service, while L64 and below get 2w per year. I’ve been with MS for 10 years, so I qualify for the max payout of 39w.
> Eligibility this time is up to L70, not sure what the package is for L68-70.
Gotta read the link:
“Eligible employees will receive an email with a link to their Voluntary Exit Offer details within the next few hours.”
I did read the entire article. I was wondering if further information was released or if employees on this post had further details.
It seems to depend on your level (above or below L65 which is first Principal rung). 12 months of health insurance is nice, but the pay seems to be between 3-9 months worth of pay depending on various factors.
It's something like - 3 months base salary - plus either 2 weeks or 1 month of pay per year of service (the former if you are at principal level or above) - 12 months health insurance
Thank you, was there another article that went out that detailed this? I couldn't find anything specific myself.
"This offer will be available to eligible employees in participating teams in Canada, India, the United Kingdom and the United States at level 70 and below."
anyone know what level 70 means?
Level 70 for IC devs is a distinguished engineer (at other companies), only one job level is above 70 for ICs.
it'll be part of their internal pay banding system, so it'll correspond to a certain level of seniority and a pay range. From a quick google L70 is pretty high up, up to maybe a 7 figure salary.
In that case, I'm guessing it means that you likely have a contract lawyer or person who negotiates your company exit rather than an impersonal email.
Very few people are level 70. It means VP or Distinguished Engineer. Probably far less than <1% of the company. These people are making over $1m a year most likely, if not more. For Microsoft, that is big money. They don't pay like Meta or the AI labs. We are more comparable in pay to Amazon and other 2nd/3rd tier big tech companies.
I'm taking it to mean everyone below (or perhaps even including) VP, because I thought they topped out at 68 for normies.
Leaked Microsoft pay guidelines – salary, hiring bonus, stock awards by level - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37912673 - October 2023 (216 comments)
The article mentions „ vice president level and below“
Entry-level software engineering positions start at level 59 at Microsoft, with first couple positions taking 2 levels per work title change (59-60 = SE, 60-61 = SE II, 62-63 = Senior SE). Take a look at levels.fyi, that could offer some info / comparison with other companies).
levels.fyi
Before getting wrapped up in the usual LLM vs anti-LLM narratives, note that like many of these recent layoffs, this is essentially reversing 2020-2022 net headcount growth.
IMO a lot of these layoffs are companies going from an experimental fiscal mindset to a conservative fiscal mindset - ie, rather than acquiring companies and hiring to grow into new markets, a lot of organizations are falling back on what they know works, independent of any productivity impact of LLMs.
So I checked your claim and it is accurate, in 2020 Microsoft had 163,000 while in 2022 it had 221,000.
There is a big HOWEVER. At least 2 in fact.
1. The company had been growing in the previous years, 2019, 2018, 2017 (they shrank somewhat in 2015 or 2016). In 2014 they had 29% workforce increase. So the significant growth in 2021/22 is not an aberration but rather continuation of the growth in previous years.
2. What IS an aberration is the workforce count after 2022. No growth in 2023 or 2025 (as in ZERO YoY change), and measly +7,000/3% growth in 2024. And some YoY loss in 2026 (-5,000, or 2.2%). With 2027 YoY likely showing at least some (and possibly a lot) of these 60,000.
So no, "it's just overhiring due to pandemic" was supposed to die years ago.
I also believe the Twitter exodus exposed the software engineering headcount sham for what it is. Something like 80% of the company left or was let go, and despite all the smug laughing about how the platform would go under within weeks, it just kept on going.
> Something like 80% of the company left or was let go, and despite all the smug laughing about how the platform would go under within weeks, it just kept on going
I’ve heard this claim many times and is not backed by any more evidence than “it works on my machine”.
If the company really did continue to operate in the same manner, it wouldn’t have been worth 80% less in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...), nor would it need to be rolled up and financially engineered into being part of an AI company that then gets rolled into a rocket company.
It has been losing users, safety standards have dropped and overall the platform is worse off than before. There’s a reason why no other company has done something similar with their employee counts.
I think Twitter is worth less mainly because Musk removed some kinds of censorship and by doing that, scared advertisers. Not because the layoffs actually caused any significant technical issues. I don't think they did, since from a technical perspective X works just fine right now.
I want to agree with you. But I cannot.
The matter of the fact is that most governments and newspapers publish on twitter (now X) still. It also serves the purpose of amplifying Musk to a large audience.
If you wanted to transform a public forum into a right -wing echo chamber, then the transformation is a massive success and the platform continues to achieve all relevant objectives.
You’re ignoring the context of the comment here. The parent uses an example of Twitter doing better after laying off 81% of the staff to suggest that other companies could do the same.
While you’re right in that the platform has its uses, other companies cannot do the same. Which is why it’s important to talk about objective success metrics. Sure if you want to fire 80% staff at Microsoft and have a transformation where they only cater to half the user base then they can do it. But they will also not be taking in the same profits as before.
Good points. Viewing it from the lens of the original business model or mission, it's a disaster.
I don't think it's right, but I can see how a billionaire just completely overrides the company mission and business model after they buy enough shares or something.
Maybe there are other non-obvious use-cases for other companies, where you're effectively buying the user base to then pull the rug.
A lot of the original customers will just accept such a change. See Twitter or GitHub.
> If the company really did continue to operate in the same manner, it wouldn’t have been worth 80% less in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...), nor would it need to be rolled up and financially engineered into being part of an AI company that then gets rolled into a rocket company.
Musk paid an absurd premium for the company. Far more than it was worth. It was intended to force the board to sell. So an 80% estimated drop (it’s private so it’s a very rough estimate and I won’t go into the various reasons you should not accept it at face value), sounds scary but it’s by design.
Twitter as a company was doing quite poorly leading up to the acquisition. It lost more than $1.3B in the two preceding years. A big downgrade from its previous $1B+ annual reported profits.
As for the 81% headcount reduction, Musk confirmed that, but if you think he’s lying about that for some reason, CNBC investigated it. Journalists examined internal Twitter records and reported approximately 1,300 actively working employees, with another 1,400 still receiving pay but no longer working. CNBC also interviewed two recent employees who corroborated the scale of the reductions. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
Prior to acquisition, Twitter's SEC filings confirmed more than 7,500 full-time employees.
I don’t see why this claim is so unbelievable. Twitter was famous for its army of social media staff whose entire day comprised two meeting between matcha tea and meditation. https://youtube.com/watch?v=buF4hB5_rFs
Musk just fired everyone who wasn’t an engineer and it turns out the engineers keep the lights on.
I don’t see anything in what you wrote really support that Twitter did well after firing 80% of its staff.
As for this:
> Twitter as a company was doing quite poorly leading up to the acquisition
This is objectively false. 2020 revenue for Twitter was $3.71B while 2021 came in at $5.07B. The company was on a growth trajectory and path to profitability.
In fact, after the acquisition, the ad revenue dropped by a lot. https://www.businessinsider.com/x-revenues-plunged-months-af...
All of this is public information.
That hbn user has had these delusions for at least two years. They are not interested in evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42000121
they were doing far more than propping up twitter. they were also doing tons of engineering on the side like bootstrap, and shaping fundamental internet technologies.
Musk, in traditional private equity ways, killed anything that wasnt immediately making money. Then he made it pay to play and monetized the hell out of it. All of that BEFORE he opened the far-right floodgates.
Now its a shell of its former self and coasting on the momentum it once enjoyed.
Trying to do anything other than posting on the platform is a mess. Advertising dashboards etc were broken for so long that I gave up trying all together.
Also look at their recent account merging efforts and all the problems people have encountered and posted about on the platform itself.
It kept on going, but they have been far less stable from a technical OR leadership perspective. They had a user exodus. They had advertisers leave in droves. I suspect it was a net negative change.
I strongly disagree with this take; do you think all companies are 80% SREs? Did Twitter make money by serving pages to users?
The Twitter exodus does relate to this, kind of; it's an example of the "fall back on existing revenue streams" strategy (you could call it a private equity playbook, but it's more universal than that) exaggerated by the guy acquiring it not needing more revenue and clobbering the revenue part too.
Twitter pre-Musk had an _enormous_ amount of experiments going on. They were building streaming services, clones of every social network you can think of (Spaces etc.), an entire sports brand around MLB, and so on and so on.
They also had an army of sales people who sold ads and an army of engineers building and optimizing an ad platform, which is (or was?) their actual business.
The "platform going down" narrative from both sides was 100% irrelevant to what was actually going on. "We laid off PMs, salespeople, and engineers and the system didn't crash" is a complete non-sequitor that should be obvious to anyone who's involved in software engineering or maintenance. If anything, I'd expect laying off most of any company to make it much more stable; when you don't change things you introduce fewer bugs.
twitter had an enormous trust&safety moderation org and a lot of the headcount reduction was simply automating trust&safety processes and removing humans as much as possible
Sadly that didn't seem to work out very well for women and children.
Price's Law (more of an observation than a law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law impacts and software with large teams are no exception. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34736936 )
50% of the output is produced by the square root of the team size.
In bloated organizations, there is a lot of fat to cut.
> In bloated organizations, there is a lot of fat to cut.
The problem is that the bigger and more bloated a company is, the harder it becomes to tell what is fat and what isn’t.
> the bigger and more bloated a company is, the harder it becomes to tell what is fat and what isn’t
In fact, this condition might be the cleanest definition of "bloat".
> In bloated organizations, there is a lot of fat to cut.
A tautology, and therefore devoid of information.
If you had claimed "In very large organizations...", you might have been saying something.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-firing-wor...
I'm sure their dau decline and actually blocking most usage (non-logged in users) has helped a lot.
Twitter lost 80% of the value for their shareholders so what the heck are you on about man?
True, but there's one very happy shareholder and that's enough. The rest of them are just holding the bag.
This is because nobody can say how many people are needed to develop or maintain some body of software. So companies hire however many employees they can afford. When the number they can afford changes they hire more or fire some. The number of staff has pretty much nothing to do with the actual work. AI introduces another factor to the equation: it allows one person to perform N times as much softy-work as before. So even if you have no idea how many people you need (as always, see above) you do know that you can get by with 1/N.
Platform was super unreliable for a while after that - although that might be related to making all the software changes to turn it in to an even worse cesspit.
Edit: Enron Musk apologists will always crack me up.
I've heard this "reversing covid-era headcount growth" for every layoff for the past 4 years, how much headcount growth is there to reverse?
There is enough until the company hits the early 2020 approximate headcount, adjusted for business changes in that time. The exact adjustment is hard to know, but in general, if a company was growing at, say, 10% per year, prior to the covid-craziness, then one would expect something like that natural growth to continue. Very generally speaking.
For example, Google had been growing somewhat quickly for decades prior to 2020, but in 2021 and 2022 it grew by over sixty-thousand people, and the crazy growth actually started in 2020, so even more than that. Sixty thousand!
Undoing that takes a very long time--they should have been much smarter about it. You need four rounds of twelve-thousand person RIFs (whether layoffs or buyouts) to get back to the earlier growth trajectory. Each round generates several stories that hit HN.
Is this MS still dropping back to pre-Covid? I would bet at least some of it is.
> There is enough until the company hits the early 2020 approximate headcount
This is an incorrect way of looking at it. Microsoft was growing at approximately 10-15% headcount year over year prior to COVID. If they reverted to the approximate 2020 headcount that would mean an overall decline in growth in comparison to a situation where COVID did not exist.
>if a company was growing at, say, 10% per year, prior to the covid-craziness, then one would expect something like that natural growth to continue
A company growing 10% per year would be around 7x larger 20 years later. There's a limit on how big companies can get.
Is there? GE, back in the days, did everything, and looking at Samsung as a percentage of South Korea's economy, would say, absent any government regulation like anti-trust, there really isn't. Berkshire Hathaway is one such conglomerate in the US today.
a lot of places, including Microsoft, drastically cut or are in the process of cutting down on WFH also means what, vast distances between teams, coworkers, buildings, cafeteria, etc (for campus based companies). How many of these places that are "going back to office" (or have already) are doing more in-person and less or no Zoom/Teams meetings now, anyway?
It's probably because of bonds interest rates. And we will probably see more of those on the next few months.
AI investment is also money not spent on salaries. LLM ROI is hotly debated, but it's no secret that companies are diverting money to it regardless.
yes but going back to 2019 staffing with 2026 revenue is a pretty seismic shift
Yes. By and large the talks of LLM as the reason for all the layoffs across big tech are just a marketing spin. Companies are going through rounds of cost reduction for reasons that are as old as the invention of the stock market.
I always think of that line from Doctorow: "If you want to know how Amazon will treat its coders once they can be readily replaced, just look at Amazon warehouse workers and drivers".
A very small fraction will actually take it. You're wrongly considering the headline number.
it's not just experimental fiscal mindsets, cash was a lot cheaper then. funding was cheaper. now it's less. LLMs don't help but some of these headcounts were taking advantage of the free/cheap debt.
https://wallhop.io/https://www.seattletimes.com/business/mic...
I do appreciate that they are at least giving people some agency into the decision first, rather than ruthlessly cutting people
Except they’ve already had layoffs.
Wouldn't surprise me if they still have layoffs after this.
depends on how many choose to take this offer. it is clear Microsoft thinks it doesn't need 60k people
I wouldn’t agree with your last sentence, corporate HR already knows typical rates of acceptance for buyout deals. They aren’t assuming 100% take up.
There goes Seattle Eastside housing market. At least 30% households on my street have someone at Microsoft.
Housing prices in urban areas going down is not really the end of the world right? Seattle is incredibly expensive
Wow. This is insane news. To think you suddenly can get by with up to 25% fewer people is truly a sign of what is to come. They probably assume much fewer will accept, but still. They probably think 10-20% will actually accept. But they're confident that they can make due with suddenly quite a bit fewer people.
>To think you suddenly can get by with up to 25% fewer people.
Not necessarily the reasoning. It might also be that they think their slice of the pie is about to become much smaller, for example.
Would love to have some insider knowledge on this decision.
they know for sure many fewer will accept. there's probably a clause in there that only so many people will be allowed to accept
Oracle has cut 13% of its people in about two years.
Right and they're a picture of health, with their junk bond rating etc.
It is impossible to quantify if they are now 13% less evil.
People are playing stock valuation games these days, as they don't want the laggard label. =3
> It is impossible to quantify if they are now 13% less evil.
We could, but we would need access to Larry Ellison and a scale.
microsoft should ideally be doing the reverse. hiring more workers or re-skilling.
they've the most deployed software in the world - the software is inadequate most of the times (i.e full of bugs). 2nd the software is prone to misuse cz M$ doesn't have enough people listening to customers and making software meet the needs of its users.
if there was a company that should've done the Forward deployed thingy is Microsoft.
Microsoft has done Forward Deployed Engineers; they just weren't call that. Nowadays, most of consultants are focused on Azure since that's where money is.
Windows ecosystem is not Microsoft focus. It's in supported phase where Microsoft will make some updates to it, but they are not spending a ton of money or attention on it.
it's not just windows.
looking at azure - the traditional .net shops will insist on mssql instead of cosmosdb - when cosmosdb might fit their needs.
so many things wrong in the m$ ecosystem that could be fixed with m$ showing a little bit of care and deploying knowledgable engineers or resources to empower their customers.
No, companies don't use CosmosDB because it's NoSQL and plenty of Devs can and will screw that up. Not great when you are paying per transaction.
However, I know many which have switched MSSQL to Postgres/MySQL happily. Azure supports those well.
Azure using SRE here.
Why would they spend money to improve a product that they know people will keep buying regardless of its quality?
Windows is dead to consumers. Linux market share is skyrocketing.
To assume MS will continue coasting is a fool's errand.
And Microsoft totally doesn't care. Azure supports Linux fine, DotNet supports Linux and everyone on $NonMicrosoftThing is likely still using O365.
I'm not sure if these are the absolute best numbers, but this shows Windows at ~76% market share for desktop OSes. I've seen other numbers that have them at 66%. MacOS is the second place. Linux is third.[0]
The consumer market both does and doesn't matter to Microsoft. There are certainly more options besides Windows for the average person looking to buy their next device (assuming they'll even get a full desktop/laptop computer) and that will continue to be the case moving forward. If you look at what drives most of MS's decisions on Windows, business-wise, it's not a desire to capture more of the consumer desktop market. It's a desire to maintain the enterprise and to use that as a jumping-off point for more revenue-earning opportunities like 365 or Azure. They know they are far, far safer there and have the connections with clients that matter. Your CTO will not be throwing together a slide deck to justify spending a large slice of the budget on switching away from Windows, at least not anytime soon, because it means throwing out a lot of other stuff like Active Directory, SharePoint, and the like that no one wants to think about.
[0]https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
They are not failing on account of having insufficient workers.
they re doing that.. in india
I don't know what the situation in the US is like, it's probably relatively well insulated. Normally, I'd expect the middle-of-the-road to stick, and the shining stars to twist, take the money and find something else in short order.
But across Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere, it's an absolute bunfight to get a new role in software at the moment. Thousands, even tens of thousands of applicants for every role on LinkedIn, in relatively short order. Invariably, if the role exists, it's too many for them to sanely process. Not just desperate applicants but qualified ones that meet the spec comfortably.
If that's coming to the US eventually, there will be lots more layoffs to come and nowhere else to jump to.
Not true. Things are harder than precovid era but it’s still relatively fine to get a job as software engineer (perhaps except for juniors, but that’s worldwide)
This is not true at all. Last year maybe, right now it's better. Still a little harder if you're into dev and one single stack, but still not as catastrophic as you describe
(ex-MSFT) Not surprised. I left a month ago after a chaotic year of reorgs, charter changes, no leadership nor roadmap, being crunched, being asked to de-facto manage 4 engineers with no title bump nor pay increase. Moved to a medium sized company with a compensation increase, better title, more interesting project and amazing work-life balance. I expect many of my friends and former coworkers are going to take the buyout offer as well.
Anyone want to spill what their buyout offer was?
Someone posted the terms on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/microsoft/comments/1xg0c5o/microsof...
> 1–2 weeks’ pay per semester of tenure, based on level; six months of fully covered COBRA (remaining 12 months paid by you) and two vesting events in February and May.
> L65-L67 get 4w of pay per year of service, while L64 and below get 2w per year. I’ve been with MS for 10 years, so I qualify for the max payout of 39w.
> Eligibility this time is up to L70, not sure what the package is for L68-70.
looks like their normal layoff package
They probably not allowed, because of NDA
nondisclosure of compensation package and disparagement clauses are usually on the contracts as well. People don't want to tip off the H1B guy he makes 40% less than the dude standing next to him. =3
> nondisclosure of compensation package and disparagement clauses are usually on the contracts as well.
If your comp package has a non-disclosure clause it's illegal. You cannot be asked not to discuss salary in the US.
> People don't want to tip off
That's why it's illegal to be prevented from discussing salary. Discuss your coworkers - you might be the one being underpaid.
ymmv, things like employee at-will contracts are illegal in my area, technically unenforceable, and yet everyone still signs the form.
Fun times =3
YMMV = Your milage is controlled by law, and cannot vary.
You can sign broken contract freely - it's unenforceable, so you can sign whatever paper HR hands to you, and only when you're retaliated against do you need to care. Which coincidentally is when you stop needing to be cooperative anyways.
Don't "YMMV" your way out of laws that protect you.
I spend a decent amount of time talking to newcomers and people on Reddit that are interested in cybersecurity/tech about the job market. There's no shortage of people who are frustrated because they can't find jobs. Fresh tech and cyber graduates are basically unemployable. People with 1-5 years experience find it extremely difficult to find work.
Layoffs like this are a huge reason for that. Talent pools are overlapping like never before. A person with 5 years of solid experience applying for tons of jobs and getting nowhere, only to realize they are competing with people with 10-15 years of experience freshly laid off from big companies. At that point, early career people are getting pushed almost completely out of the industry.
surely this is a sign GitHub uptime is about to improve.
Underrated joke
Any idea why?
The "internal" memo: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-is-offering-buyout...
So "Up to" 39 weeks of base pay, let's say 9 months.
In this job market, that may not be enough time to feel comfortable and safe taking the offer (if you're a super-employable hotshot with offers awaiting in your LinkedIn, you're probably not the likely target for the offer)
"Up to" can suddenly become much less once you realize company paid healthcare premiums now come out of your paycheck.
> In this job market, that may not be enough
Could still be much better than a sudden layoff though.
The prior VRP shook out a number of folks who were banking their options grants -- it was like "look let's be clear, you're not moving up any more and you're checked out. Thank you for your service." I'd imagine they were happy enough with that to go a little broader. The pay scales work out to getting paid more the longer you've been there. Mentioned in the memo is employee choice, and I think that this is likely designed with that in mind - why not let people self identify without penalty when you want to reduce headcount? The goal is likely to increase morale for those who want to stay, both by showing them they have the ability to stay, and getting low morale people out the door.
Perhaps because of increased productivity with LLMs, especially for developers?
Increased productivity makes employees more valuable, not less.
You are getting downvoted but I have to believe this is at least what some of the executives are thinking, even if it proves to be a complete illusion.
You’re getting downvoted because for most of us this is our biggest nightmare
The term 'Voluntary Exit Offer' reminds me of the suicide drug Quietus in P.D. James' Children of Men, which the government offers to people who no longer wish to live.
In a few years, assisted suicide will probably be offered as a feature of offboarding packages.
"Your work is done. Why wait?" - (to paraphrase George Eastman's suicide note.)
Interesting. Nobody on a visa will take the offer, presumably, so it's kind of a workaround for all the immigration controversy.
So what's the context for this? A third accept, so 20k redundancies in a year? 10% churn is very high? doesn't sound high compared to other tech companies.
Are we sure this isn't click bait
(not rhetorical, genuine question)
Copilot, AI spending, missing mobile, Surface, Xbox taking their toll.
The terms for this seem kind of not great tbh, unless you have been there for like multiple decades, especially in this job market.
I probably wouldn't take this and instead devote more of my time to practicing for and collecting interviews during the equivalent time period with the hopes of keeping my job at the end.
You underestimate how many old-timers are there at MSFT. I don’t imply any negative connotations to that.
But these are the most lucratively paid employees. These are also the same folks that are used to working at the same company and who might find it trying to interview elsewhere.
Having no regard for the quality of the end user experience opens up a lot of business possibilities, LLM's or not.
Here's where I like working with some employment security. If they want to fire me, they'll have to buy me out WHEN that happens. It's not like I need to face some dilemma between choosing a buyout or otherwise get nothing in case I'm fired.
Would be interesting to know how much of it is result of AI and how much because the government is looking into their H1B practices, aka how much of the people who got this offer are under H1B.
I’m theoretically wondering what will happen to a country like USA when unemployment hits, say, 25%.
Let's just hope this is middle-management only, the ones who are causing all the trouble
I've never middle management cut to same levels as IC. I dont know why that is though.
For non-Americans: IC = Independent contributor = employee without people reporting to them
I have but it's rarely done by buyouts or with same IC mass layoffs. There is also generally less managers.
Most of time, it's after all IC, they look at what's left, decide what moves to make and lay off the managers.
However, I have seen more and more where managers are told what's happening and they find new jobs before layoffs.
The same reason you’ve never seen the US Congress meaningfully change anything about their role, compensation, etc.
Shirley, you're kidding.
Don't call me Shirley.
Yeah, it’s definitely not the devs who get LLMs to do all their work but still act like it takes the same number of story points or time as the before times
Is there any word on which divisions/lines of business they are offering for?
I hope these people form a group to develop software that directly competes with Microsoft or even make it free now that you have extra time. It'll keep your skills up and good for the resume.
Give the low quality of microsoft's products, I am very ready to believe that even simple agents can do a better job.
It sounds like you're assuming the poor quality is a result of developer incompetence rather than deliberate management decisions.
The engineers are fine. The system is a mess. It reminds me of the recent post about "SimCity - but with permits."
Even basic things like fixing the pothole doesn't get done because, well, permits.
One of my last productive acts when I was at microsoft was to get a two-line change committed in windows to a tree outside my org. It took two full months just to propagate the change up the very fragile and fractured tree of repos from my team's to WINMAIN and from WINMAIN back down to the owning team's org, and my efforts were required every step of the way. It was truly soul-crushing.
Edit: this was in the windows vista days and I hope/expect they have overhauled that entire process in a major way, because things were at a near standstill.
Then again, if/when they do lay off so many employees, then Microsoft is putting themselves in the position that eventually they will "have no choice" but to depend more and more on agents to do as much of the work as possible...which i predict means that their products will dip in quality even further, at least until models, agents, etc. can markedly improve...so, a continuation or worsening of the quality. The future looks bleak in a few different ways; oof!
They don't think it be like it is, but it do.
An LLM, a decent prompter, and a weekend could certainly out perform Windows Terminal.
Come now, Windows Terminal can execute your commands in less than a weekend ;)
It takes human talent to make a product as actively irritating as Teams or the Windows 11 Start Menu.
Pretty big, but remember that offering a buyout to 1/4 of their employees doesn't mean they're looking to get rid of that many! Not everyone's going to take the buyout, and they're not expecting them to. Their target is likely much lower.
this is a precursor to layoffs though, no? and the total reduction across layoffs and buyouts is likely 1/4?
Definitely a precursor to layoffs, but they also know that not everyone will take the offer. So if you want to reduce your workforce by X%, you offer (X+Y)% the buyout. The more attractive the offer, the smaller Y needs to be.
Personnel firms have decent experience predicting the takeup of an offer, so they make predictions about how good the offer needs to be, and they try to get close, within expenses and other considerations.
If Z people take the buyout, then, after the dust settles, you layoff the remaining X-Z people.
So it is unlikely that their target reduction is 25%.
gotcha, that makes sense
Obviously, details are thin. I’m very curious how these offers are distributed by role and by seniority.
This can be interpreted as a form of soft layoffs, or it can also be interpreted as an attempt to change their labor culture. Microsoft was notorious for stacked ranking, where supposedly "low performers" were regularly culled. If you offer low performers a smooth way out, it's another form of culling without the harsh push.
It seems one quarter are eligible. The target reduction is presumably much less.
This was announced back in April. Lot better than doing layoffs imo. If someone is already checked out then giving them an incentive to leave works out for both sides.
There's no way 25% of their total employee base are "checked out". Yes, a bunch of folks close to retirement or fed up with working there will take the deal. But with the job market as it is, a whole lot will roll the dice on keeping their job through the inevitable follow-up round of layoffs.
This is just an optics-friendly way to soften the blow of 25% layoffs.
In my experience it's more the case that 70% of employees are checked out
This is my experience too, although probably not checked out enough to take a voluntary severance. Most people just want to chill and work at a steady pace. That kind of work ethic is fine for most industries, but not tech companies unfortunately.
It is much better than optics friendly, because it gives the affected people a chance to determine their own destiny.
Layoffs absolutely suck, and there is likely more pain on the way, but if the alternatives are voluntary buyouts + layoffs vs plain layoffs, the first is much better.
I think the April instance was a different one all-together but that was also followed with layoffs in July. Seems they expect less than 30% of the 60,000 to take the deal?
https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-makes-new-voluntary-...
MS has had many rounds of layoffs already in the past 2-3 years. If there was anyone visibly checked out, they'd have been gone quite a while ago.
In April, 7% was the announced figure. This is several times higher.
This many layoffs is likely far beyond "checked out" employees.
It's probably taking advantage of economic arbitrage, plus healthy beliefs in what AI can maintain.
The interesting thing will be to see what new things companies who do this can achieve.
The question above whether to take it now or try to delay taking a package is an interesting thought.
>This many layoffs is likely far beyond "checked out" employees.
25% offers != 25% layoffs
Good point. up to 25% is no small number either.
After offers, they could enforce any percentage of layoffs up to 25%, no?
Offers often come before layoffs, no?
It's mentioned elsewhere in the comments, but is buried: level 70 is "Distinguished Engineer" and below, so effectively, it's available to all normies.
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/microsoft/salaries/software...
They only had $281bn in revenue last year.
Won't somebody please think of the poor fortune 10 companies
Remember, people, that Microsoft is a reformed company that supports open source and DEI Anything else was flagged up to 2025. Now that they have stolen all open source they fire people.
But some people here have a short memory and already support the new thieves on the block Anthropic and OpenAI.
Are you saying they had to hire people to "steal open source"?
Whether it was a necessity or not, they hired many mediocre but dominant open source people up to around 2022 who introduced CoCs, forced the projects to move to GitHub etc. and push for permissive licenses.
And they did fire some of them in 2025/2026.
Buy, like they dud with Github.
A quarter were asked. That seems like a lot.
It does seem a bit of a fortuitous timing, with Anthropic IPO S-1 just dropping..
Effectively that means that getting blocked from H1B is a non-issue for Microsoft, since they already have way too many workers.
Hahaha
Presumably AI is making everyone, particularly sales & marketing more productive. While at the same time, their customers are building more things, and selling more things.
Why a force reduction?
Ignore AI for a second. If you had a magic wand, that would help everyone at your company produce more, sell more, and all of your customers are producing and selling more, would that be a growth phase?
You know what MS also did on Friday? Used auto update to wipe out all Mac Office 2021 Licenses to try to trick people in to 365 subs.
Paywalled so I can’t see the details but was it offered to 25% assuming much less would actually accept? I have to assume a minority take the deal
About a third took the last buyout offer.
Is there any reason not to take the buyout?
The fact that you will be jobless in this economy.
I can’t think of many companies that would be better to work for than Microsoft in terms of compensation.
It's 9 months. They probably won't do layoffs again for 6 months and you will get a package then for more than 3 months. Makes sense to hang on.
If you choose to hang on you have to work for 6 months.
In this sort of situation, always take the first offer. Subsequent offers are always worse.
Yes, but you don't know if you'll be laid off. The subsequent offer may well be "you get to keep your job".
if you are one of the ones who is valued enough to keep their job, you are strong enough to go get hired at another FAANG. Do you actually still want to be there after the bloodbath that the follow-up round of layoffs causes?
Do you expect other FAANG to not have bloodbaths of their own?
when you start somewhere after their bloodbath, you don't have to deal with all the crap you would if you stay through a bloodbath (i.e. you aren't on the hook for all the legacy shit your team owned before it had a haircut)
Traditional if you know you’re a shitty employee that can’t find a new job you stay.
Voluntary packages tend to be accepted by the strongest employees
It’s a shitty deal for companies but shareholders love cost cutting
Yeah, this is the dumbest thing you can do. It's a message to the strongest people to leave on their own terms.
no job?
if you prefer being fired!
> At the same time, we'll keep helping people focus on the work that matters most, build new skills, and, where it makes sense, find new opportunities across Microsoft.
Anthropic is already doing this - some software engineers have redeployed into research roles, for example. “Redeploying” is going to be the latest HR trend I think.
Microsoft laying off (and yes, this is a layoff, no matter how it's spun) 25% of the entire freaking company is not a sign of a healthy organization.
You can't and won't tell me with a straight face that AI will replace them.
They are not laying off 25%. Not everyone will take the buyout.
My hot take is that we're headed to an economic freefall and/or depression. They're trying to get ahead of it.
The writing was on the wall for a long time. All of big tech (and many midsize tech too) have way too many employees. In the AI era is just more absurd than it was before. I always appreciate companies that take care of their employees this way so kudos to Microsoft. We haven't seen the package they are offering yet but I'm assuming it'd going to be very good, esp for those who have been there for a while.
Maybe Microsoft achieved AGI internally.
or maybe they just need to lower their operating expenditure because they're spending too much money...
Or maybe, every tech company is still shedding the overhiring they did during the Covid years.
A hundred years from now, COVID overhiring will still be the excuse trotted out in every layoff cycle.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...
They gained 40,000 people in 2022. It's not a totally crazy argument.
They have net income in the billions per quarter
Maybe they are shedding workforce to spend more on AI infrastructure like many of the other layoffs to remain competitive.
The layoffs could have nothing to do with the employees.
They've figured out that they can offer poorly performing services that suck and nobody cares. The company will continue to explore that concept until people care.
I run an org with 200k employees. We're on our 4th significant outage with M365 services in a month. We're talking major stuff -- including user data like email getting deleted by various processes. Their approach is pretty much "meh".
> The company will continue to explore that concept until people care.
MS is an entrenched monopoly which is hard to move off of, especially in times of low budgets and tough debt markets. On the other hand, LLMs are reshaping the competitive landscape and MS might be reacting to that threat, in their usual MS way.
Both can be true:
1) "AGI" has been achieved internally which means...
2) ...we need to lower "operating expenditure" which includes i.e (human employees) so that the AI agents can take over.
Lastly, they will use the remaining capital to build homes (data centers) for these AI agents.
How banal. The first action after achieving "AGI" is not taking over the world, curing cancer, or anything fantastic like that, but rather "lowering operating expenditure"..
if they had actually reached AGI they would simply fire +90% of employees and make a huge announcement
There is a joke "When it comes to AI psychosis, Sam Altman was likely patient 0"
Given all insane bets made by previously (somewhat) reasonable and successful business owners, I wonder how much of a joke it really is...
Of course it’s a joke.
In order to be “patient 0”, he’d have to be human in the first place…
Look at this corporate-slop-speak for how they say "we're firing people":
"more ways for employees to shape their next chapter".
You get a choice to get probably huge pay-check, like between half of the year and year of salary to leave.
It's good trade off.
Some are probably being set up for retirement. I wouldn't feel too bad. You should probably be more worried about yourself.
Makes me nostalgic for when I read Coupland's Microserfs in the bookstore the month it came out and thought, this... finally, people I could feel less awkward working and being myself around, weirdness and all.
Tech is nothing like that now. Guessing a lot of people will find earlier retirement tempting with so many skills to keep up with now and AI rooting out personalities and ages subtley in the HR pool.
One of the inherent problems with capitalism is any logical person or company within a certain threshold is not going to pay for or employ people they do not have 'work' for or need. Just like you would not buy a whole bison without a freezer (single or with an extended family); it would be wasteful, regardless of how of I or others might feel a certain amout of those types of employees should be baked into the corporate model (and not as 'corporate welfare'). Most companies have dozens of employees with nebulous duties whose mere presence is something a corporation wants or needs for whatever reason. This happens often in Asia. It also happens because companies look for connections or things they cannot deal with a few days or times a year and people who can do them would not be locateable quickly or maybe want to do it; specialists, too.
Sit on your butt doing nothing for what I would not pay minimum wage for alone, all year, then essentially do a week of work or come up with a solution the company knows is worth millions, so they're largely left alone and paid well. I have, as have others I have known, had those sorts of jobs a few times (things aren't quite like that nowadays, people either get over or underpaid now, and mos of those people have retired by now, or the newer "those types" get stock in the "new model"). Often it is not a hard tech skill but a good gut in an emergency, in tech or business.
Then there is this newfangled "communist" or "socialist" model of "companies" and "work" we are seeing that have nothing to do with either of those "isms" or capitalism, where people protest layoffs and expect everyone can get a paycheck while still refusing to check their egos and selfishness at the door. Of course, the truth is "communistic" things are generally pooled and meted out among people in s "commune" where people share similar very specific values requiring trust, and a great majority of those places do not even have the concept of a paycheck.
Either way, income has to come from somewhere. I mean, I guess feudalism could make a comeback if we had a large population die off and people split their time up between farming with high tech harvesting machines and hanging out playing PS4 games off the solar panels after dark, but in general I think most of the people I have seen getting upset make little or no sense.
I mean, is the goal for firstworld and secondworld countries a handful of neuralinked (no thanks) tech overlords we beg for equal monthly monetary alotments from and a world like in "The Machine Stops"? What would you need to do for that ("Black Mirror" and credits?!).
We can't sure all be "YouTube stars" or "self-affirmation LinkedIn gurus", obviously.
Is is corporate slop speak entirely or are many of them just as flummoxed as many of us?
(disclosure: I usually do 1099 work, but I sure know what it is like to suddenly be blindsided.)
This is the biggest recent tech news over even maybe the last five years. This isn’t like Twitter, where the layoffs were arbitrary
How can Microsoft justify making thousands of H1B filings when obviously there's no shortage, and in fact there is a glut, of software engineers? https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/?q=Microsoft&employer=Microsoft
It depends on the role, not every position is fungible.
Why do recruiters keep contacting me even though I’m retired?
> Why do recruiters keep contacting me even though I’m retired?
Maybe your retired flag hasn't propagated the system yet?
Maybe they're just casting a really large net?
Also, it costs them nothing and maybe they occasionally get someone to unretire.
Sure, and I may agree. But if there was a glut of engineers that would seem simpler for them.
Jesus. 25% is ... a lot.
Especially all at once..
They could have done 10% a year for the next 2-3 years, but the immediate financial gratification wouldn’t be satisfied
Copilot going to pick up the slack of 25% of the workforce?
I'd argue it's actually better to do 25 % at once and then not doing anything like it for ... decades, ideally, but years, realistically.
Spreading it out means employees spend some of their time with an ear to the ground rather than working, and teams have to deal with multiple restructurings, neither of which are good for well-being nor productivity.
But Microsoft has turned layoffs at the end/beginning of the fiscal year into an iPhone-like release schedule. It's so reliable at this point that it's a meme outside the company amongst its customers. I know for a fact each June/July I'm getting a new account team as people are shuffled around, and low performers are shown the door
Even with these buyouts, there will be layoffs next summer. And the summer after that. And the summer after that.
Yeah, but they've been running layoffs (sometimes more than even yearly) since what, 2022? 2023 at the latest.
Not to say that this is isn't huge, but it's _up_to_ 25%, given that some will accept and some won't.
And the internal memo currently circulating actually does not mention that number so I'd be curious where it came from.
Business Insider says it came from a Microsoft spokesperson. In the absence of an explicit number in a press release, I'd be inclined to believe it.
Isn't average corporate worker attrition at 11-12%? so they could achieve that much just with hiring freeze.
Well, the MSFT stock is up on the news today. Not the effect the hiring freeze is known for.
It’s way too much to be believable
How does the job role break down for these 60k workers? Are they mostly devs? Other roles?
Can't read the article because of the paywall.
You are all getting a first row seat to watching the death of an industry.
I wonder where are all those AI apologists who have been touting here for years that jobs will not go away?
No one said there wouldn't be churn. It's like if in 1999 a company had 10,000 webmasters - those roles are simply being phased out. New roles are being added and will be added, but they won't be the same or require the exact same skills, for better or worse.
Rapid technological advancement is always painful. Extrapolating that to "death of the industry" is awfully reductive and I haven't seen any signs of that. As others have pointed out, Big Tech layoffs have only reverted the shotgun-blast hiring of ~2020-2022.
Yeah, there is no way this will not make the horrible issues at Microsoft even a tiny bit better.
Azure is an epic shitshow (to be fair, GCP is even worse, but eh). Github is seriously struggling staying up and alive. Windows updates are posing more of a danger for business continuity than the security issues they fix, which is a challenge in itself. Windows itself is being made irrelevant as more and more software moves for SaaS web models and the gaming flank is being eaten left and right by SteamOS/Proton/WINE, what's left of Windows Embedded after CE got terminated looong ago (that was the foundation for a lot of HMI stuff) is being replaced by Android or straight Linux on Raspberry Pi style devices. Office 365 is buggy as hell (and in the case of Outlook, a horribly bloated Electron mess). Wide masses resent Windows itself for the bloatware, espionage and advertising that's forced down your throat.
And to make the already bad situation even worse, the Trump government made American Big Tech their bitch and everyone but the US is now looking to divest from them as fast as possible.
It'll be interesting to see what orgs are excluded. Maybe it's a cull of Xbox. Maybe it's a cull of core Windows/Office SDE and/or Azure.
Excluded: marketing, commercial business, security, quantum
> Maybe it's a cull of core Windows/Office SDE and/or Azure.
There's still people left there? Lol
Wow, while I think that large headcount often leads to terrible products (looks at Apple for the last 5 years), MS platforms and software are SO BAD and more un-supervised AI slop code isn't going to fix it. I never want anyone to lose their job but this seems like a massive reduction.
Copilot, AI spending, missing mobile, Surface, Xbox taking their toll. Apple, Google, going up Microsoft going down.
Paywall.
Text of the memo driving this, from an article posted by Business Insider [0]: Introducing a Voluntary Exit Offer
[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-is-offering-buyout...