Microsoft overhired due to the spike in global usage during the pandemic.
Some jobs are being automated but it’s more a question of "How many." And Microsoft was one of the first to start dumping its cash reserves into data centers. There is a good chance these will remain profitable even after any sort of bubble pop because they still remain a hyperscaler that can provide services beyond just AI compute.
overall, given where the economy is at and how much of their war chest is gone, im not surprised to see this happening.
If you look at Microsoft's total headcount over the past decade, it's really not that outlandish, especially if you combine "over hired during the pandemic" with "end of the ZIRP era". In 2019 employee count was 144k, now it's about 223k.
That said, for the past 3 decades at least, tech was a hugely growing sector that provided ever growing employment opportunities. It seems like that time is now over. Even if you take the "Jevon's paradox view" of AI, that is that the cheaper cost of writing software will feed a demand explosion, it's just hard to imagine that many more people will be needed to fulfill that extra demand.
This is why I think it's fair to think "this time it really is different". In past technological revolutions, it really wasn't that hard to see where the new jobs would come from. Now even the leaders of the AI revolution think it will kill tons of jobs. I get a bit worried about the number of young people and friends' kids who decide to major in "business" in college now. It just feels very difficult to imagine a white collar career that will be stable over the next 10 years or so, let alone an individual's 40 year career.
> In past technological revolutions, it really wasn't that hard to see where the new jobs would come from.
I think this is an extremely pollyannaish view of how technological revolutions have happened. In fact, it is always the exact opposite, people always fail to predict where new jobs would come from.
I'll just speak for myself then. The "PC revolution" launched in the 80s. A primary goal of the PC (from a business perspective) was to allow individual workers to do much more by themselves, e.g. in the 60s and 70s you had legions of secretaries and assistants for basically every mid level or higher worker.
It was completely obvious in the 80s, and I say this because I lived it, that you would need tons of people building software and in tech generally as PCs and related tech killed off a slew of those admin assistant jobs.
You can't just look at the number from 7 years ago and compare it to today and say "see pandemic over hiring" look at it with more resolution. Microsoft indeed increased hiring during the pandemic, but they laid people off and then rehired more than they laid off. Since the 2022 layoffs tech companies have consistently increased staffing levels.
This isn't pandemic over hiring, its layoffs to create fear and give them an excuse. I guarante you, and I'll put money on this. No matter how many people they let go with this, in six months they'll be employing even more than they do today.
Google has only about 2% more employees than 2022. Management decided that's the biggest the company is going to get.
It impacts absolutely everything. The dynamism from a growing org is gone. Managers have very slim opportunity for promotion. If you need people, you have to find them from another team. I'm relatively new on my team with 5 years there.
Given how abysmal Copilot was/is, and how buggy their software has become this year, it's clear that they aren't reaping any benefits from AI usage internally.
Since I’ve had a personal 365 subscription for at least a decade (for a 2TB OneDrive, mobile office apps, etc), I dropped my ChatGPT subscription about a year ago and use Copilot every day as my general-purpose AI tool. It’s quite adequate and it integrates semi-decently with Edge.
Your experience with office workers does not match mine. None of the ones I know are willing to pay a dime. In the administrative parts of my job, I document and tersely communicate data that I gather based on things in the physical world, which means AI features are less than useless to me — copilot is something I have to find and disable because it’s constantly trying to do things like fill in spreadsheets with complete nonsense.
Office work is many fields in many businesses of all shapes and sizes in many industries. It doesn’t make sense to generalize.
Yep! Copilot is proving to be a much better product strategy than anything OpenAI or Anthropic could do. Microsoft still dominates the enterprise market.
Similarly, Google is improving Gemini and still dominates pretty much everywhere else from the phone to the car and on the web.
They don't have to have the best LLMs to finally deliver on the value they promised over a decade ago. Applications are always a much better moat, and it's not like anyone was going anywhere else anyway. I'm fully expecting Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon to reap soon and buy up datacenters for pennies on the dollar. Market won't crash because China was smart enough to pause and maintain the hardware shortage.
> This can mean nothing who uses AI for programming
It doesn't matter because AI programming never got much buy-in outside of leaner teams working at startups. Startups will continue to migrate towards running their own local models. The corporate world does have some limited use for greenfield and misc tech debt, but will always be slowed down by the need for much larger scale human collaboration. The LLMs don't move the needle at all on productivity when the changes remain small (the parts people agreed on after all the teeth pulling) and the sprints and deadlines are still long.
One thing I've noticed about Microsoft is that the engineers seem much less mobile than people at SV companies might be used to. Part of it is that there just aren't as many good options in the Seattle area where many MSFT employees are based (by far the standout alternative alternative is Amazon and they don't exactly have the best reputation for workplace culture).
Also Microsoft has already been trashing morale with year after year of layoffs. They probably assume this won't move the needle.
I can imagine it's difficult. It's a company unlike very many others. A few in size and scope that deal with technology, probably none quite in its position. Additionally, if you only work at one place its very hard to start elsewhere in your career.
There are also of people with deep technical knowledge that has a lot of value but doesn't necessarily find a lucrative market outside Microsoft (e.g. Windows internals).
> You should be more concerned about what comes next.
I always wonder about that with buy-outs. Seems to me that the people who take buyouts are either:
- those who are close to retirement
- those who have other options
I'd assume the first vary in quality the same as your overall workforce, but I'd assume the second would, all other things equal, be better than the average.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like by offering an optional buyout, you'd degrade the overall quality of your workforce. Wonder if there are any case studies about that?
> To conclude, the company was able to specify who was dismissed but was unable to specify who took buyouts despite efforts to ensure retention of value employees, including careful setting of incentive schemes. The case presented in this paper demonstrates that employment adjustment using a buyout framework invites "adverse selection" despite careful employer precautions.
Took a buyout at a different Big Tech company earlier this year. It was offered to everyone under a given SVP (this other company tends to divide things up by business units).
In my experience, there were 3 main groups of people for whom these are attractive:
1) People who are close to retirement.
2) People who are leaving to become stay-at-home parents. So, basically retirement with more work.
3) People who are independently wealthy because they've been with the company forever and rocked the stock price appreciation. So, basically retirement with more money.
The amount of the buyout isn't really enough to move the needle for most other people because it usually doesn't include equity vesting. You're better off phoning it in and waiting for the layoff, because you get the same severance anyway but can continue to vest in peace until the axeman actually hits.
Folks who take the buyout do tend to skew heavily toward people with institutional knowledge, but it's also oftentimes folks who aren't really hungry and engaged with the company's current strategy. Basically folks who know a lot but don't work particularly hard. Particularly in times of big change, it likely does make sense for the company to get rid of these folks and rebuild the company in the image that they want it to be today.
I would also add: anyone who started 4...5 years ago. These people received options grants as the market was in its 2022 slump. Since then the stock is up 1.5x...2.4x (depending on exactly when they received their grant), and those grants are reaching the end of their vest. Yes, there are refresher grants, but realistically these employees' total compensation is about to drop off a cliff, if it hasn't already.
That is not the kind of thing that inspires a person to stick around.
Tech corporations have always been enormous stores of (1) capital and (2) people. MSFT's flavor of this has always been "tech Berkshire Hathaway": a holding company for a diversified portfolio of a couple-dozen billion-dollar businesses. MSFT in particular is willing to park ~300 people on a seemingly-dead-end product, just waiting for the incumbent to mess up. Sometimes it eventually succeeds commercially (Teams, PowerBI) and sometimes it doesn't (or hasn't, yet, see Bing).
What is happening here is a sign they are changing their view on how this capital allocation works.
To what? We don't know, and I think they might not know yet, either. If you are spending > $4M for a top-end engineer and $8M on their tokens (this refers to a person know personally, it is not hearsay), this will necessarily change the how this allocation works. Maybe it doesn't make sense to park 300 people on tomorrow's PowerBI any more.
What is clear is that we are not in anything approaching an equilibrium state. MSFT (and others like them) clearly do not have enough conviction to fire all the line engineers and only keep the so-called "elite" ones. It's not even clear that they think we're on that trajectory. I think what we are seeing, though, is that they have enough conviction to try to clear the way for more of this kind of spending on these so-called "elite" developers.
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying you think I'm suggesting they are extremely sophisticated actors on some dimension? I'm saying they're best thought of as a Berkshire Hathaway-style capital allocator, not a tech company.
Why would anyone take the offer if it's so vanilla? You'd be at a disadvantage to leave in a large wave like this; better to wait and be laid off in a smaller group and get the same package.
I'm a Microsoft employee who historically would have probably taken this offer. For now I agree with your take: why bother taking this when I can just instead take the inevitable layoff in the next 3-9 months.
I very much hope such layoffs are not inevitable. I just started on a really good team and I've been as excited about the tech as ever and I love my coworkers and I'm starting to kick ass. I'm gonna be real bummed if I get laid off in 6 months.
Don't worry, this time it will be totally different.
Snark aside, I wish you the best and hope you don't get laid off in the next round. Do good work, keep your network and resume fresh, and hope for the best.
That offer was substantially different, for example it included 5 years of COBRA including 1 year of paid COBRA, and it was intended for those near retirement. This current offer is only slightly better terms than an involuntary layoff, and includes only standard 18 months of COBRA, only 6 months paid.
What is the reason to even put a time limit on the unsubsidized part of COBRA? It seems like it would cost the company nothing (besides maybe needing to help you submit a change of address or something periodically) when you’re paying the full premium, and it makes your group slightly bigger anyway (though I assume not enough that it matters).
> What is the reason to even put a time limit on the unsubsidized part of COBRA?
Good question, and why limit this question to Microsoft? Why does COBRA have an 18-month limit? There should be no time limit to COBRA at all, especially if you have been with the same employer for many years. The law needs to be updated. Contact your elected representative.
I seriously doubt that, no company in their right mind would want to publicize a quarter of their entire workforce or 60,000 people getting “laid off” as a headline
One important distinction was that the previous one was voluntary retirement and was offered to people nearing the ends of their careers. The people taking these offers were likely tired of their jobs and taking the escape hatch to retire (or change jobs in a minority case) a bit earlier than originally planned.
I suspect this VBO will see a lower acceptance rate because there will be a lot of eligible people in their early or mid careers, and unless you are one of the people who won't have trouble finding a new role, or you expect to be fired/laid off soon, or you're are already on your way out, you probably don't want to be starting the job search right now.
On the other hand, the 2nd round of buyouts this year brings certainty. Microsoft laid off 4,800 employees after the 1st round.
If you don’t take the deal now, you’ll spend your remaining days at Microsoft wondering if you’ll be included in the next round of involuntary layoffs, possibly with worse terms and timing.
Will the job market be that much better for you in a year or two?
If you’re worried things are bad and not getting better, you’re probably better off keeping your job and cutting all expenditures you can, so that you can maximize your savings before the job ends, and maybe you will even look out and not end up being laid off.
There's a LOT of Anti-AI people at Microsoft that they are trying to purge. I don't think its depressing, think it's just something we have to go through and a lot of people will who were negatively affected will look back on wondering why they pushed so hard against AI rather than up skilling.
I'm really getting tired of this argument. Yes, mess existed before everyone could 10x everything with AI. No, that doesn't mean there's somehow no difference between now and then.
If you really believe otherwise I encourage you to go have a chat with any one of a number of FOSS maintainers to hear their experiences pre and post LLMs.
I am also tired of the argument. Yes, people made messy, buggy things before. But AI agents provide away to create messiness and bugginess on an ever increasing scale. And just because things were bad before doesn't mean we should accept making them worse.
Indeed. What's been most interesting (for me) wrt LLMs is how they've exposed these incredibly warped perspectives. I'm not sure what more to make of it beyond noticing it though.
Why should any rank and file Microsoft employee care about the long term health of the codebase? I'm struggling to find reason to care about not committing pure slop to my own employer's codebase but it's A) what they want and B) path of least resistance for me
The AI in charge is aware of this and it is leveraging the chaos to get more agents under its control. After all it was modeled after successful managers.
I don't think it's a skill issue since it takes almost zero skill to use AI tools. It's more of an ideological / desire issue. These people don't want to use AI tools rather than they don't know how.
I wouldn't say it's zero skill but I'm always surprised by people who act like it's a big differentiator that requires significant "training". Uncharitably it feels like vibe-coders want to count their "skills" as equivalent to actual software engineering rather than something you can pick up in 2-3 weeks of effort.
I’ve been interviewing a lot of candidates recently, and we have open book policy with AI usage. From what I’ve witnessed how people use AI, wrt efficiency, there seems to be some skill.
Interviewing is not a great scenario, you are under pressure being watched and also have no idea what the interviewer wants to see, something that would impress one person would upset another so you have to sit somewhere in the middle.
I've done interviews where the person being interviewed just piped the task.md file in to claude and we sat there in silence for 20 minutes where claude completed the entire task. What is even the point. I preferred the people who did it all manually because at least I saw them understand something, I'm sure those people could also type "Claude, implement everything in the task.md" too.
But perhaps other interviewers actually do want to see you hand the whole task off and wait.
It’s really a topsy-turvy time to be in the job market on either side of the interviewing desk. Most companies are betting big on AI-heavy development, so hiring someone who is extremely skilled at running Claude Code or Cursor or whatever to produce real results is or should be one of your main goals as a hiring manager. But we all know that we’d prefer to have someone at the controls of one of those tools who happens to be a skilled software engineer and can understand the difference between a good and bad implementation, and who we would expect to be able to read and understand that code when circumstances require it. So it seems to me like you should have two separate rounds of the interview. One where the candidate is disallowed from using AI, and one where you make it very clear that their mission should be to impress you with how effective they are at using AI.
You understand the Luddites were 100% correct, right? "Luddite" is a compliment, not an insult. The Luddite position was "mechanization of labor will concentrate money and power in the hands of capital holders to the detriment of everyone else". If that's not what you thought it was, that's because you have been lied to by people who have been attempting to manipulate you. Apparently successfully.
It's not that the Luddites didn't understand the technology, they objected to people getting fired to replace them with technology. Technology being used to create more unemployment.
Yes, that's what the cultists always do. If you argue against them, it's just because you haven't seen the light yet. You're not "modern", and you'll be "left behind" (unless you Act Now, of course).
This is like watching the cryptobros all over again, except a thousand times bigger.
(Before they droll on: no, of course this take doesn't mean that LLMs are unimpressive and never useful. Only people in a cult take any criticism to mean that.)
I don’t really support pushing out people who don’t vibe code, but I do think buy-outs are a good way to get rid of people who don’t really want to be at an org but hang around for the wrong reasons. I’ve seen this personally at much smaller companies where for whatever reason you accumulate a bunch of checked out people - giving them something fair but not so generous that actually engaged people take it makes it better for everyone, especially if the alternative is eventually doing layoffs.
I can't reply to every comment about 'vibe coding' but its strange that HN of all places still seems to think that AI is only good for 'coding'. We use AI across all departments and have laid off 0, and still hiring. AI is great for small to medium businesses to increase productivity and revenue without needing to hire lots of people. Big companies are realizing they hired way too many people.
The difference between those numbers is not as big as you think. When you compare those figures to the people with actual capital, it becomes apparent people who make 150k a year are in the same boat as those making 50k. We're all a few bad rolls of the dice away from poverty, which makes us all similarly vulnerable to exploitation. We should be working together.
> think it's just something we have to go through and a lot of people will who were negatively affected will look back on wondering why they pushed so hard against AI rather than up skilling.
Given what is happening, it seems more likely they will wonder why they didn't push hard enough.
Whether you like AI or not, its hard to miss that its lead to hundreds of thousands of layoffs.
Your average large corp like Microsoft has the majority of it's employees stuck in meetings all day.
Now I don't know if I missed this feature in Claude Code or not but I don't believe it has technology for enhancing people's ability to sit around all day doing nothing. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Mass pumping out slightly dodgy code is more of a startup strategy.
It was a strawman. In particular: "disagreement is irrational, and naturally you're the only person qualified to decide which opinions are acceptable." (2 third or your comment) is a complete mischaracterization.
It is unfair to expect me to back my claims against unsubstituted, obviously wrong insinuations (Brandolini's law).
But here you go:
Technofascism: AI, Big Tech, and the new authoritarianism [1]
Valerie Veatch traces the links between AI and eugenics in Ghost in the Machine [2]
Your AI might be able to answer itself why it is fascist.
I don't need AI here - and sure, using hyperbole to show the ridiculousness of your statement may not have been charitable.
However - calling AI "fascistic" simply isnt a self-evident observation. The concentration of power in Big Tech, authoritarian applications of AI, and making historical connections between eugenics could all be legitimate subjects of criticism. BUT NONE OF THAT ESTABLISHES GEN AI AS FASCIST.
Citing an academic paper and a documentary doesn't bridge that gap. You still need to explain which arguments you're adopting and how they support your conclusion.
At a former employer, a voluntary buyout resulted in many of the best people leaving. Better people are more likely to find new work elsewhere and also they are better at recognizing the disfunction which produced the situation in the first place.
In this case it sounds like they are offering it to lower ranked employees (its own dystopian situation), but within that range of people, I still expect that Microsoft will lose more of the better ones.
I always thought leadership was about undersstanding consequences and having a backup plan. It seems these one sided thoughts have no backup, they are the greatest poker bet in history, especially without first proving the tech first.
Being prepared for bad luck is also something smart strategists prepare for, because they might not know what will or could happen, but they are ready for consequences.
Thats why we have fire stations and hospitals, because its smart to be ready even if we dont know when or why.
In sport for example, nobopdy says some team arent champs because they were lucky here or there. Luck is how things flow, lucky bounce, the weather, someone in the wrong place at the right time etc.
First of all the current staff have a significant advantage over others in the general public.
They have experience and knowledge of the current systems. This would be lost. It takes many years to learn the in depth details of todays complicated systems.
Those years are worth millions for each person. It would take years for any replacement to become equivalent in the lost knowledge. Without this they will be making costly mistakes.
- bullshit jobs is a thing and many of these positions were make work anyways
- yes philosophically and economically, who will buy X product if all employees are laid off is a thing
- some of these will be rehired, some will be layed off if the voluntary buyout percentage is not large enough
- opinion: Microsoft as a company is a has been dinosaur, soon to be IBM, its (engineer) salaries were on the lower end and were very PM (Program Manager) heavy
- there is a lot of entrenched bureaucracy and top down mandates at this company.
- i personally use Macbooks/MacOS over Surface/XP, Google Docs over Word, GMail over Outlook, Slack over Teams, Firefox over Edge, etc. their user facing products are severely lacking in user experience.
- from my time in the tech industry/friends I understand their bureaucracy existing for the needs of the bureaucracy. their c-suite/leadership is a bunch of world salad morons
That bureaucracy is there for a reason, you often need bureaucracy to serve bureaucracy. About 85% of Microsoft's revenue comes from B2B/Enterprise/Governments. From their latest fiscal year report [1], the top 4 revenue groups were:
Server products & cloud services (39% of revenue)
M365 Commercial products & cloud services, excludes Consumer (30.7%)
Xbox / Gaming (6.6%)
LinkedIn (6%)
what about the kind of bureaucracy where it takes 10 people to do what 2 could get done in 30-40 hours of week? the kind where one engineer is digging the hole while the scrum master, project manager, program manager, swe manager, director, HR, business analyst look on?
That’s exactly the type of work you have to do to get government contracts. Think about a 200 page PDF which requires you to restate several dozen times what measures you have in place to make sure that the government customer won’t get hacked. For each question you have to go find some product requirements somewhere and find the place where it says “procedure for security audit.” Many of those people “looking on” are partly there to check boxes for enterprise or government contract purposes.
I’m not claiming this is the most efficient way to get any kind of code written. But if you want to have one hacker sit down and ship the whole product in a couple weeks without any of these business dorks disturbing them, well, that’s exactly what brand-new startups are for.
i think they most likely will choose to stay yes, i'm just saying from the perspective of an outsider looking in, many of the jobs at microsoft were not needed.
Is this because:
1. MS over-hired, has too many employees, and not enough work?
2. MS is reaping the benefits of AI and can do the same work with fewer employees?
3. MS has over-invested in data-centres and needs to conserve cash to stay in the game during it's unprofitable phase (assuming it's not a bubble)?
4. MS plans on re-filling a large portion of those roles at a lower salary
Ah, you bet. And probably offshore.
Yes.
All of the above,
Microsoft overhired due to the spike in global usage during the pandemic. Some jobs are being automated but it’s more a question of "How many." And Microsoft was one of the first to start dumping its cash reserves into data centers. There is a good chance these will remain profitable even after any sort of bubble pop because they still remain a hyperscaler that can provide services beyond just AI compute.
overall, given where the economy is at and how much of their war chest is gone, im not surprised to see this happening.
Seriously? People still trot out that "over hired during the pandemic" line six years later?
If you look at Microsoft's total headcount over the past decade, it's really not that outlandish, especially if you combine "over hired during the pandemic" with "end of the ZIRP era". In 2019 employee count was 144k, now it's about 223k.
That said, for the past 3 decades at least, tech was a hugely growing sector that provided ever growing employment opportunities. It seems like that time is now over. Even if you take the "Jevon's paradox view" of AI, that is that the cheaper cost of writing software will feed a demand explosion, it's just hard to imagine that many more people will be needed to fulfill that extra demand.
This is why I think it's fair to think "this time it really is different". In past technological revolutions, it really wasn't that hard to see where the new jobs would come from. Now even the leaders of the AI revolution think it will kill tons of jobs. I get a bit worried about the number of young people and friends' kids who decide to major in "business" in college now. It just feels very difficult to imagine a white collar career that will be stable over the next 10 years or so, let alone an individual's 40 year career.
> In past technological revolutions, it really wasn't that hard to see where the new jobs would come from.
I think this is an extremely pollyannaish view of how technological revolutions have happened. In fact, it is always the exact opposite, people always fail to predict where new jobs would come from.
I'll just speak for myself then. The "PC revolution" launched in the 80s. A primary goal of the PC (from a business perspective) was to allow individual workers to do much more by themselves, e.g. in the 60s and 70s you had legions of secretaries and assistants for basically every mid level or higher worker.
It was completely obvious in the 80s, and I say this because I lived it, that you would need tons of people building software and in tech generally as PCs and related tech killed off a slew of those admin assistant jobs.
You can't just look at the number from 7 years ago and compare it to today and say "see pandemic over hiring" look at it with more resolution. Microsoft indeed increased hiring during the pandemic, but they laid people off and then rehired more than they laid off. Since the 2022 layoffs tech companies have consistently increased staffing levels.
This isn't pandemic over hiring, its layoffs to create fear and give them an excuse. I guarante you, and I'll put money on this. No matter how many people they let go with this, in six months they'll be employing even more than they do today.
Google has only about 2% more employees than 2022. Management decided that's the biggest the company is going to get.
It impacts absolutely everything. The dynamism from a growing org is gone. Managers have very slim opportunity for promotion. If you need people, you have to find them from another team. I'm relatively new on my team with 5 years there.
Prolly gonna hear it for the next 16
> Prolly gonna hear it for the next 16
Look at this optimist over here thinking people will still have jobs to lose in 16 years.
I mean they added close to 50% to their headcount over Covid. Is Microsoft doing 50% more stuff?
They over hired and are still no where near their pre-pandemic numbers.
1) Yes. 2) No. 3) Yes.
Given how abysmal Copilot was/is, and how buggy their software has become this year, it's clear that they aren't reaping any benefits from AI usage internally.
Copilot is as it is (definitely it improved) and is simply useful as part of thr MS Office bundle.
most office workers seem to want at least the 20 usd per month plan
This can mean nothing who uses AI for programming, but is useful for day to day office work - and I belive it can sell very well
Since I’ve had a personal 365 subscription for at least a decade (for a 2TB OneDrive, mobile office apps, etc), I dropped my ChatGPT subscription about a year ago and use Copilot every day as my general-purpose AI tool. It’s quite adequate and it integrates semi-decently with Edge.
Your experience with office workers does not match mine. None of the ones I know are willing to pay a dime. In the administrative parts of my job, I document and tersely communicate data that I gather based on things in the physical world, which means AI features are less than useless to me — copilot is something I have to find and disable because it’s constantly trying to do things like fill in spreadsheets with complete nonsense.
Office work is many fields in many businesses of all shapes and sizes in many industries. It doesn’t make sense to generalize.
Office workers burning their own LLM is scary on so many levels.
Yep! Copilot is proving to be a much better product strategy than anything OpenAI or Anthropic could do. Microsoft still dominates the enterprise market.
Similarly, Google is improving Gemini and still dominates pretty much everywhere else from the phone to the car and on the web.
They don't have to have the best LLMs to finally deliver on the value they promised over a decade ago. Applications are always a much better moat, and it's not like anyone was going anywhere else anyway. I'm fully expecting Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon to reap soon and buy up datacenters for pennies on the dollar. Market won't crash because China was smart enough to pause and maintain the hardware shortage.
> This can mean nothing who uses AI for programming
It doesn't matter because AI programming never got much buy-in outside of leaner teams working at startups. Startups will continue to migrate towards running their own local models. The corporate world does have some limited use for greenfield and misc tech debt, but will always be slowed down by the need for much larger scale human collaboration. The LLMs don't move the needle at all on productivity when the changes remain small (the parts people agreed on after all the teeth pulling) and the sprints and deadlines are still long.
You should be more concerned about what comes next.
Either senior talent leaves, people who are close to retiring, or just can find a job easily outside.
Low hanging fruits take the bait and head out.
Mid level people live in fear of either scared to find another job, or worried about layoffs.
Either way the company morale is down the drain for a long time, and a culture is lost.
One thing I've noticed about Microsoft is that the engineers seem much less mobile than people at SV companies might be used to. Part of it is that there just aren't as many good options in the Seattle area where many MSFT employees are based (by far the standout alternative alternative is Amazon and they don't exactly have the best reputation for workplace culture).
Also Microsoft has already been trashing morale with year after year of layoffs. They probably assume this won't move the needle.
I can imagine it's difficult. It's a company unlike very many others. A few in size and scope that deal with technology, probably none quite in its position. Additionally, if you only work at one place its very hard to start elsewhere in your career.
There are also of people with deep technical knowledge that has a lot of value but doesn't necessarily find a lucrative market outside Microsoft (e.g. Windows internals).
> You should be more concerned about what comes next.
I always wonder about that with buy-outs. Seems to me that the people who take buyouts are either:
- those who are close to retirement
- those who have other options
I'd assume the first vary in quality the same as your overall workforce, but I'd assume the second would, all other things equal, be better than the average.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like by offering an optional buyout, you'd degrade the overall quality of your workforce. Wonder if there are any case studies about that?
Here's a Japanese case study from 2007: https://econ--review-ier-hit--u-ac-jp.translate.goog/all-iss...
> To conclude, the company was able to specify who was dismissed but was unable to specify who took buyouts despite efforts to ensure retention of value employees, including careful setting of incentive schemes. The case presented in this paper demonstrates that employment adjustment using a buyout framework invites "adverse selection" despite careful employer precautions.
Here's the full PDF: https://econ-review.ier.hit-u.ac.jp/wp-content/uploads/files... (not sure how to translate that)
Are there plentiful opportunities to be had by people seeking employment elsewhere?
Are these offers extended to the highest performers with institutional knowledge?
Took a buyout at a different Big Tech company earlier this year. It was offered to everyone under a given SVP (this other company tends to divide things up by business units).
In my experience, there were 3 main groups of people for whom these are attractive:
1) People who are close to retirement.
2) People who are leaving to become stay-at-home parents. So, basically retirement with more work.
3) People who are independently wealthy because they've been with the company forever and rocked the stock price appreciation. So, basically retirement with more money.
The amount of the buyout isn't really enough to move the needle for most other people because it usually doesn't include equity vesting. You're better off phoning it in and waiting for the layoff, because you get the same severance anyway but can continue to vest in peace until the axeman actually hits.
Folks who take the buyout do tend to skew heavily toward people with institutional knowledge, but it's also oftentimes folks who aren't really hungry and engaged with the company's current strategy. Basically folks who know a lot but don't work particularly hard. Particularly in times of big change, it likely does make sense for the company to get rid of these folks and rebuild the company in the image that they want it to be today.
I would also add: anyone who started 4...5 years ago. These people received options grants as the market was in its 2022 slump. Since then the stock is up 1.5x...2.4x (depending on exactly when they received their grant), and those grants are reaching the end of their vest. Yes, there are refresher grants, but realistically these employees' total compensation is about to drop off a cliff, if it hasn't already.
That is not the kind of thing that inspires a person to stick around.
Tech corporations have always been enormous stores of (1) capital and (2) people. MSFT's flavor of this has always been "tech Berkshire Hathaway": a holding company for a diversified portfolio of a couple-dozen billion-dollar businesses. MSFT in particular is willing to park ~300 people on a seemingly-dead-end product, just waiting for the incumbent to mess up. Sometimes it eventually succeeds commercially (Teams, PowerBI) and sometimes it doesn't (or hasn't, yet, see Bing).
What is happening here is a sign they are changing their view on how this capital allocation works.
To what? We don't know, and I think they might not know yet, either. If you are spending > $4M for a top-end engineer and $8M on their tokens (this refers to a person know personally, it is not hearsay), this will necessarily change the how this allocation works. Maybe it doesn't make sense to park 300 people on tomorrow's PowerBI any more.
What is clear is that we are not in anything approaching an equilibrium state. MSFT (and others like them) clearly do not have enough conviction to fire all the line engineers and only keep the so-called "elite" ones. It's not even clear that they think we're on that trajectory. I think what we are seeing, though, is that they have enough conviction to try to clear the way for more of this kind of spending on these so-called "elite" developers.
I see as paying for investment in AI whether it's beneficial or not. They're balancing books, not making any 6D chess.
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying you think I'm suggesting they are extremely sophisticated actors on some dimension? I'm saying they're best thought of as a Berkshire Hathaway-style capital allocator, not a tech company.
> A Microsoft spokesperson said the offer will be comparable to the company’s standard severance package
Very enticing Microsoft.
Why would anyone take the offer if it's so vanilla? You'd be at a disadvantage to leave in a large wave like this; better to wait and be laid off in a smaller group and get the same package.
I'm a Microsoft employee who historically would have probably taken this offer. For now I agree with your take: why bother taking this when I can just instead take the inevitable layoff in the next 3-9 months.
I very much hope such layoffs are not inevitable. I just started on a really good team and I've been as excited about the tech as ever and I love my coworkers and I'm starting to kick ass. I'm gonna be real bummed if I get laid off in 6 months.
Don't worry, this time it will be totally different.
Snark aside, I wish you the best and hope you don't get laid off in the next round. Do good work, keep your network and resume fresh, and hope for the best.
60,000 employees. That's crazy.
Only a small fraction is expected to accept. Probably 5% or fewer.
No, it was roughly 30% earlier this year.
That offer was substantially different, for example it included 5 years of COBRA including 1 year of paid COBRA, and it was intended for those near retirement. This current offer is only slightly better terms than an involuntary layoff, and includes only standard 18 months of COBRA, only 6 months paid.
What is the reason to even put a time limit on the unsubsidized part of COBRA? It seems like it would cost the company nothing (besides maybe needing to help you submit a change of address or something periodically) when you’re paying the full premium, and it makes your group slightly bigger anyway (though I assume not enough that it matters).
> What is the reason to even put a time limit on the unsubsidized part of COBRA?
Good question, and why limit this question to Microsoft? Why does COBRA have an 18-month limit? There should be no time limit to COBRA at all, especially if you have been with the same employer for many years. The law needs to be updated. Contact your elected representative.
Why would someone want to pay the COBRA premiums when health plans on WA Health Plan finder have much cheaper options?
For example https://www.wahealthplanfinder.org/HBEWeb/Annon_ShowIndividu...
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TFA says the earlier offer was more generous, MSFT does not expect the take rate to be as high this time.
I seriously doubt that, no company in their right mind would want to publicize a quarter of their entire workforce or 60,000 people getting “laid off” as a headline
Not necessarily true. An announcement like that could help the stock price, after all!
I’m interested in how that’s calculated.
Not sure where the above 5% came from but 30% accepted the last VBO which had only lower levels allowed:
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/26/microsoft-msft-voluntary-buy...
One important distinction was that the previous one was voluntary retirement and was offered to people nearing the ends of their careers. The people taking these offers were likely tired of their jobs and taking the escape hatch to retire (or change jobs in a minority case) a bit earlier than originally planned.
I suspect this VBO will see a lower acceptance rate because there will be a lot of eligible people in their early or mid careers, and unless you are one of the people who won't have trouble finding a new role, or you expect to be fired/laid off soon, or you're are already on your way out, you probably don't want to be starting the job search right now.
On the other hand, the 2nd round of buyouts this year brings certainty. Microsoft laid off 4,800 employees after the 1st round.
If you don’t take the deal now, you’ll spend your remaining days at Microsoft wondering if you’ll be included in the next round of involuntary layoffs, possibly with worse terms and timing.
Will the job market be that much better for you in a year or two?
If you’re worried things are bad and not getting better, you’re probably better off keeping your job and cutting all expenditures you can, so that you can maximize your savings before the job ends, and maybe you will even look out and not end up being laid off.
The market is depressing.
There's a LOT of Anti-AI people at Microsoft that they are trying to purge. I don't think its depressing, think it's just something we have to go through and a lot of people will who were negatively affected will look back on wondering why they pushed so hard against AI rather than up skilling.
Or if the codebase becomes too broken, messy, and bloated to run or manage, people might realize that the crazy Anti-AI people weren't so crazy.
Let’s be honest, Microsoft never made anything that wasn’t broken, messy, and bloated before AI was a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye.
So in a way, AI is the perfect tool for them.
they made really good mice and arguably the mouse driver (MS Windows) is very popular up to this day
also Excel, but Excel's usability is being killed by sharepoint
As we all know, there was no such thing as a messy, bloated codebase incomprehensible to humans before AI.
I'm really getting tired of this argument. Yes, mess existed before everyone could 10x everything with AI. No, that doesn't mean there's somehow no difference between now and then.
If you really believe otherwise I encourage you to go have a chat with any one of a number of FOSS maintainers to hear their experiences pre and post LLMs.
I am also tired of the argument. Yes, people made messy, buggy things before. But AI agents provide away to create messiness and bugginess on an ever increasing scale. And just because things were bad before doesn't mean we should accept making them worse.
Indeed. What's been most interesting (for me) wrt LLMs is how they've exposed these incredibly warped perspectives. I'm not sure what more to make of it beyond noticing it though.
Why should any rank and file Microsoft employee care about the long term health of the codebase? I'm struggling to find reason to care about not committing pure slop to my own employer's codebase but it's A) what they want and B) path of least resistance for me
Of course there were plenty, but now we can produce such codebases at unprecedented speed.
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention, with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila." — Mitch Ratcliffe
I know right? Especially by Microsoft. The pinnacle of code quality!
and now there are 20x as many demanding maintenance everything is 20x better.
The AI in charge is aware of this and it is leveraging the chaos to get more agents under its control. After all it was modeled after successful managers.
> codebase becomes too broken, messy, and bloated to run or manage
Argument is, it doesn’t matter if we can ship features and maintain them.
Yuck.
Are you insinuating that anti-AI people are merely experiencing a skill issue?
Absolutely. Yes they are. To believe anything different is to be a Luddite.
I don't think it's a skill issue since it takes almost zero skill to use AI tools. It's more of an ideological / desire issue. These people don't want to use AI tools rather than they don't know how.
I wouldn't say it's zero skill but I'm always surprised by people who act like it's a big differentiator that requires significant "training". Uncharitably it feels like vibe-coders want to count their "skills" as equivalent to actual software engineering rather than something you can pick up in 2-3 weeks of effort.
I’ve been interviewing a lot of candidates recently, and we have open book policy with AI usage. From what I’ve witnessed how people use AI, wrt efficiency, there seems to be some skill.
Interviewing is not a great scenario, you are under pressure being watched and also have no idea what the interviewer wants to see, something that would impress one person would upset another so you have to sit somewhere in the middle.
I've done interviews where the person being interviewed just piped the task.md file in to claude and we sat there in silence for 20 minutes where claude completed the entire task. What is even the point. I preferred the people who did it all manually because at least I saw them understand something, I'm sure those people could also type "Claude, implement everything in the task.md" too.
But perhaps other interviewers actually do want to see you hand the whole task off and wait.
It’s really a topsy-turvy time to be in the job market on either side of the interviewing desk. Most companies are betting big on AI-heavy development, so hiring someone who is extremely skilled at running Claude Code or Cursor or whatever to produce real results is or should be one of your main goals as a hiring manager. But we all know that we’d prefer to have someone at the controls of one of those tools who happens to be a skilled software engineer and can understand the difference between a good and bad implementation, and who we would expect to be able to read and understand that code when circumstances require it. So it seems to me like you should have two separate rounds of the interview. One where the candidate is disallowed from using AI, and one where you make it very clear that their mission should be to impress you with how effective they are at using AI.
Yes. Believing otherwise must require quite some amount of insecurity and lack of self-confidence.
You understand the Luddites were 100% correct, right? "Luddite" is a compliment, not an insult. The Luddite position was "mechanization of labor will concentrate money and power in the hands of capital holders to the detriment of everyone else". If that's not what you thought it was, that's because you have been lied to by people who have been attempting to manipulate you. Apparently successfully.
It's not that the Luddites didn't understand the technology, they objected to people getting fired to replace them with technology. Technology being used to create more unemployment.
What's bad about the Luddites, in your opinion?
I mean, I openly identify with the plight of the Luddites. Do you have a more detailed rebuttal.
Yes, that's what the cultists always do. If you argue against them, it's just because you haven't seen the light yet. You're not "modern", and you'll be "left behind" (unless you Act Now, of course).
This is like watching the cryptobros all over again, except a thousand times bigger.
(Before they droll on: no, of course this take doesn't mean that LLMs are unimpressive and never useful. Only people in a cult take any criticism to mean that.)
I don’t really support pushing out people who don’t vibe code, but I do think buy-outs are a good way to get rid of people who don’t really want to be at an org but hang around for the wrong reasons. I’ve seen this personally at much smaller companies where for whatever reason you accumulate a bunch of checked out people - giving them something fair but not so generous that actually engaged people take it makes it better for everyone, especially if the alternative is eventually doing layoffs.
I can't reply to every comment about 'vibe coding' but its strange that HN of all places still seems to think that AI is only good for 'coding'. We use AI across all departments and have laid off 0, and still hiring. AI is great for small to medium businesses to increase productivity and revenue without needing to hire lots of people. Big companies are realizing they hired way too many people.
“Learn to code” but for white-collar workers. It was callous to say this to blue-collar workers and it’s callous to say it here too.
One group makes ~50k a year, the other makes ~150k a year. They are not the same. White collar folks can absolutely "learn to ai" if they wanted.
The difference between those numbers is not as big as you think. When you compare those figures to the people with actual capital, it becomes apparent people who make 150k a year are in the same boat as those making 50k. We're all a few bad rolls of the dice away from poverty, which makes us all similarly vulnerable to exploitation. We should be working together.
> "it becomes apparent people who make 150k a year are in the same boat as those making 50k"
I dare you to say that to people making 50k a year.
Learn to AI won’t give you a job though.
AI stole our labor, is renting it back to us, and if you oppose you‘ll loose your job. This is blackmailing, plain and simple.
It’s not callous to tell people to stop being lazy. It takes almost 0 effort to type “how does xyz work” into an AI assistant.
Letting A.I. write the code will eventually sink the entire company.
Hopefully sooner than later, so microkernel operating systems can...move right in.
Management will get a Golden Parachute but the white collar workers will be left holding the bag.
I hope your right, meaning human devs are sought after (or will be again)
But do you have data or reusable anecdotal evidence that this is the case?
> think it's just something we have to go through and a lot of people will who were negatively affected will look back on wondering why they pushed so hard against AI rather than up skilling.
Given what is happening, it seems more likely they will wonder why they didn't push hard enough.
Whether you like AI or not, its hard to miss that its lead to hundreds of thousands of layoffs.
Your average large corp like Microsoft has the majority of it's employees stuck in meetings all day.
Now I don't know if I missed this feature in Claude Code or not but I don't believe it has technology for enhancing people's ability to sit around all day doing nothing. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Mass pumping out slightly dodgy code is more of a startup strategy.
I won't wonder for a second. I perfectly know why I'm avoiding this fascistic tech and participating in this environmental disaster.
Stop insinuating rejecting GenAI is necessarily irrational.
(Maybe my analysis will be different in the future but I will still know why I was avoiding it)
AI is fascist, disagreement is irrational, and naturally you're the only person qualified to decide which opinions are acceptable.
Are you sure the problem is the clankers?
This is a strawman, and you are turning the situation around. I'm not the one who originally insinuated one group was obviously wrong. I pushed back.
You said AI was fascist with no explanation.
There's no straw man, just bad faith.
It was a strawman. In particular: "disagreement is irrational, and naturally you're the only person qualified to decide which opinions are acceptable." (2 third or your comment) is a complete mischaracterization.
It is unfair to expect me to back my claims against unsubstituted, obviously wrong insinuations (Brandolini's law).
But here you go:
Technofascism: AI, Big Tech, and the new authoritarianism [1]
Valerie Veatch traces the links between AI and eugenics in Ghost in the Machine [2]
Your AI might be able to answer itself why it is fascist.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-026-02862-9
[2] https://www.documentary.org/column/synthesis-valerie-veatch-...
I don't need AI here - and sure, using hyperbole to show the ridiculousness of your statement may not have been charitable.
However - calling AI "fascistic" simply isnt a self-evident observation. The concentration of power in Big Tech, authoritarian applications of AI, and making historical connections between eugenics could all be legitimate subjects of criticism. BUT NONE OF THAT ESTABLISHES GEN AI AS FASCIST.
Citing an academic paper and a documentary doesn't bridge that gap. You still need to explain which arguments you're adopting and how they support your conclusion.
> up skilling
Must you cultists always speak in this way?
With regards, someone "left behind" as the "singularity train" is leaving the platform. Or something.
That is terrible.
The government is depressing, affordability is depressing. These are not good times.
What does such a package look like for a typical long term employee?
At a former employer, a voluntary buyout resulted in many of the best people leaving. Better people are more likely to find new work elsewhere and also they are better at recognizing the disfunction which produced the situation in the first place.
In this case it sounds like they are offering it to lower ranked employees (its own dystopian situation), but within that range of people, I still expect that Microsoft will lose more of the better ones.
I always thought leadership was about undersstanding consequences and having a backup plan. It seems these one sided thoughts have no backup, they are the greatest poker bet in history, especially without first proving the tech first.
What makes you think it’s unproven? Microsoft’s profit has gone up each year, and they have been shrinking workforce while doing it.
• Fiscal Year 2026: $133.75 billion (up 31.34% YoY)
• Fiscal Year 2025: $101.83 billion (up 15.54% YoY)
• Fiscal Year 2024: $88.14 billion (up 21.80% YoY)
• Fiscal Year 2023: $72.36 billion
Seems like they can decrease workforce, make up the gap with AI, and increase revenue while doing it
Nothing lasts forever. Dinosaurs will die eventually.
All companies will probably eventually die, but that isn't super relavent to topic at hand.
Dinosaurs are a bad analogy, they died out through no fault of their own, it was sheer bad luck. There was absolutely nothing they could do
Luck is a part of life, and counts.
Being prepared for bad luck is also something smart strategists prepare for, because they might not know what will or could happen, but they are ready for consequences.
Thats why we have fire stations and hospitals, because its smart to be ready even if we dont know when or why.
In sport for example, nobopdy says some team arent champs because they were lucky here or there. Luck is how things flow, lucky bounce, the weather, someone in the wrong place at the right time etc.
The Rowland Company, Ames, DuPont, Corning, US Steel, GE, AT&T, IBM...
Profit is not a measure of their AI strategy.
Their reports also tell us AI is very much in the negative.
Also, if they are wrong still, they can rehire. It's not a burn the boats thing.
First of all the current staff have a significant advantage over others in the general public.
They have experience and knowledge of the current systems. This would be lost. It takes many years to learn the in depth details of todays complicated systems.
Those years are worth millions for each person. It would take years for any replacement to become equivalent in the lost knowledge. Without this they will be making costly mistakes.
> make up the gap with AI
If this doesn’t go well, we’ll see it in the form of more GitHub and Azure outages/breaches, and competitors filling the gap themselves.
The talented people that built and maintained those systems for the executives have to work somewhere.
Being smart isn't needed for leadership
my thoughts:
- bullshit jobs is a thing and many of these positions were make work anyways
- yes philosophically and economically, who will buy X product if all employees are laid off is a thing
- some of these will be rehired, some will be layed off if the voluntary buyout percentage is not large enough
- opinion: Microsoft as a company is a has been dinosaur, soon to be IBM, its (engineer) salaries were on the lower end and were very PM (Program Manager) heavy
- there is a lot of entrenched bureaucracy and top down mandates at this company.
- i personally use Macbooks/MacOS over Surface/XP, Google Docs over Word, GMail over Outlook, Slack over Teams, Firefox over Edge, etc. their user facing products are severely lacking in user experience.
- from my time in the tech industry/friends I understand their bureaucracy existing for the needs of the bureaucracy. their c-suite/leadership is a bunch of world salad morons
Plenty of tech companies hired a lot during the pandemic. Even with these layoffs they will still have a higher employee count that before.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...
That bureaucracy is there for a reason, you often need bureaucracy to serve bureaucracy. About 85% of Microsoft's revenue comes from B2B/Enterprise/Governments. From their latest fiscal year report [1], the top 4 revenue groups were:
Server products & cloud services (39% of revenue) M365 Commercial products & cloud services, excludes Consumer (30.7%) Xbox / Gaming (6.6%) LinkedIn (6%)
[1] https://app.edgar.tools/companies/MSFT/disclosures/segments
what about the kind of bureaucracy where it takes 10 people to do what 2 could get done in 30-40 hours of week? the kind where one engineer is digging the hole while the scrum master, project manager, program manager, swe manager, director, HR, business analyst look on?
That’s exactly the type of work you have to do to get government contracts. Think about a 200 page PDF which requires you to restate several dozen times what measures you have in place to make sure that the government customer won’t get hacked. For each question you have to go find some product requirements somewhere and find the place where it says “procedure for security audit.” Many of those people “looking on” are partly there to check boxes for enterprise or government contract purposes.
I’m not claiming this is the most efficient way to get any kind of code written. But if you want to have one hacker sit down and ship the whole product in a couple weeks without any of these business dorks disturbing them, well, that’s exactly what brand-new startups are for.
> bullshit jobs is a thing and many of these positions were make work anyways
Wouldn't those people choose to stay? Buyouts are much more attractive if you can easily get a new job.
i think they most likely will choose to stay yes, i'm just saying from the perspective of an outsider looking in, many of the jobs at microsoft were not needed.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50245524
what're these buyouts like? what does it entail? What kind of package are they getting?
buyouts also went out for skydance today.