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.
The big tech companies are getting old. I think it's a fundamental rule that the competence and effectiveness of an org must fall, over time, driven by the fact that a person will more readily hire someone they can understand than someone that is more intelligent/competent/effective. This causes a slow degradation.
I also think there's been a drastic shift in the working culture of tech/engineering spaces, in general, over the last 15 years. From my experience, it's definitely drifted away from a bunch of nerds solving problems to something more towards emotional/personal/politics. I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy. "Back in my day" people would just state facts, point out flaws, and argue a bit, and have fun doing it, for better or worse.
Maybe I'm just lucky but I have a few gen Z coworkers and they are probably more often than not the voice of reason in our org (start up with 8 engineers). I think if an employee can't handle simple constructive criticism or clarifications maybe they should not be employed.
I did used to work for a consulting firm about a decade ago, and I was leading a staff augmentation project with another company and I was once chastised for saying "hey guys" in a chat because there were women in the group. I was encouraged to use "y'all" but not wanting to sound like I was from the south, I just used "peeps" which was somehow okay.
I'm all for inclusive language but I thought that was a bridge too far.
A coworker was asked in a meeting how he was holding up after pulling an epic two day sprint to deliver a project that saved our butts. He replied “I felt like jumping out of a window.”
Someone reported him for not warning the room about suicidal ideation before saying it and not considering that it might be triggering. He was actually reprimanded.
Unfortunately typical of the place. I left soon after.
Reminds me of that one time my partner mentioned "Latino" in a meeting, referring to people from Central and South America in broad terms (this was a marketing meeting, where customers are naturally grouped together along various dimensions).
She was told to not use "Latino"; but to use "LatinX" instead. What hurt more was the implication that she was being insensitive.
When I learned of it, I asked my Mexican friends which one they preferred. None of them had heard of "LatinX" and were as confused as I was.
> I think if an employee can't handle simple constructive criticism or clarifications maybe they should not be employed.
and then
> I was encouraged to use "y'all" [..] I thought that was a bridge too far.
I wonder if there might be a small bias on your part. The criticism you deem constructive everyone shall endure, but the other criticism you deem a bridge too far you yourself shall not endure.
If we want to trace back the etymology of the term "guy" we would unearth some interesting facts. The most infamous "Guy" of the 17th century is Guy Fawkes, would-be Catholic terrorist.
Guy Fawkes is most notorious in the UK today as the progenitor of Guy Fawkes Night, where children solicit "a penny for the Guy?" and the funds raised ostensibly go to construct and burn a large straw effigy of Guy, in order to celebrate his defeat and the survival of the Parliament. He was executed, not by burning but by hanging, but nevertheless Guy Fawkes is the original Burning Man.
Guy Fawkes Night was imported to the United States during our independence, and it became Pope Night, a night of mayhem and anti-Catholic vandalism and hooliganism. George Washington once told his military troops to knock it off with the Pope Night shenanigans, because it was alienating Canadians.
So the term "guy" became genericized, beginning in Australia it seems, to refer to a grubby lower-class Catholic boy. After a few centuries of circulating in this way, it lost most of its derogatory connotation and became a generic way to refer to men or boys, and by extension, girls and women.
I don't take offense at being called "guy", nor would I if I were female, and especially because today in the USA, it is so generic and inoffensive. Nobody recalls its sordid roots, even if Pope Night is making a resurgence around here.
The Gen Z and Alphas will save us. As a late Gen X, most of our cohorts were bogged down eating for boomers to die and are lost causes in big companies.
> From my experience, it's definitely drifted away from a bunch of nerds solving problems to something more towards emotional/personal/politics. I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy. "Back in my day" people would just state facts, point out flaws, and argue a bit, and have fun doing it, for better or worse.
In the last few years, I ended up at a bigtech co through an acquisition, and had been someone who was a go-between for solving issues across teams by having a good understanding of everyone else's codebases, tests, build processes, deployment, infrastructure etc. This papered over the culture of siloed development, refusals to think beyond single services etc. I would submit tests and patches, along with tickets describing the bug, impact statement, fix, test coverage, risk, and make myself on-call or directly supervise deployment, etc.
Attempting to continue that in an org x25 larger was met with people firing off angry emails to executives saying their authority was being undermined and made to look bad, when long standing issues were made trivial and fixed by "someone they had never met before", and wherever they came from can they please go back to. I have no idea what a lot of these people were spending so long doing, their commit history was often full of changes that would make you go think "???". I guess it's lucrative to run out the clock year after year on a 180k package, attending meetings where you argue that things are difficult and lets meet again in 3 months? After becoming highly visible for bringing things to attention, I was offered a package to leave, I assume so they could go back to a culture of top down authority and silence.
> After becoming highly visible for bringing things to attention, I was offered a package to leave, I assume so they could go back to a culture of top down authority and silence.
If we asked your coworkers to tell us what happened, would they say "he was easy to work with and so generous with their time by fixing issues all over the org"?
Getting big is the same as getting old. Getting big means that they lucked into getting a cash cow and a bureaucracy springs up to manage that cash cow, kind of a necessary evil, and also attracts opportunists who think they can make the cash cow bigger (and enrich themselves in the process). So the business starts bloating up with employees.
Actually, I think there are areas of interest that come up in large companies. Microsoft started the equivalent of an FDE organization about 12 years ago. It was interesting to have the freedom to build and grow an organization from about 20 to 800 people. Working with customers and product teams to help get direct customer feedback to help evolve products was interesting. Now, 12 years later, FDEs are sort of the current buzzy role.
I suspect there is still a good amount of shedding the defensive-hiring going on from the pre-AI, low interest, high growth inflation front-loading era. Now all that is crumbling, interest is rising, growth is contracting due to several factors, and AI is clearly crushing manpower demands. What do you do under these new circumstances with an excess of staff you largely hired as capacity and defensively?
It may be a bit controversial, but I believe the male tectonic shifts going in right now under our feet are also driving much of the shift regarding “immigration” because billionaires don’t need immigrants as much anymore and they’re also causing systemic problems in things like the housing market. In fact from what I’m hearing, there is concern that immigration is now becoming a potential cost due to the major changes in society rather than a profit center by scaling up marginal returns from every immigrant you can import by hook or crook, i.e., the more people you import, the more you can undermine salaries and increase revenues and thus, profits.
> they’re also causing systemic problems in things like the housing market
The rest of your post sounded rational. This part doesn’t.
Failure to build more units (NIMBY) and properties being held as investments (non-US nationals are significant in some markets) are the two causes I would point to. Of course every additional family that needs housing drives up the cost a little, but I really don’t think that can be responsible for the massive increases in housing valuation.
> I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy.
Perhaps what you perceived as someone being emotional was actually someone who spent a long time barely functioning due to things that have been happening in their life, and that small event just so happened to be a straw that broke the camel's back.
People around you are going through stuff. Everyone is. Someone's stuff is easy to carry, someone else's stuff isn't. "Back in the day" people also carried their burden with them. This is nothing new. Perhaps you never noticed because so far everyone you dealt with was great at masking, and desperately want to avoid having to see coworkers like you worsen their burden by doing what feels like kicking them while they are down.
Part of what scares me about hold these companies are is how they've like the Titan Cronus been allowed to keep eating their children. There's so so much missing new blood that should be here, so many interesting medium sized companies that should be adapting, figuring out this new age, but so much of our talent and brainpool is locked up deep inside one of a handful of these massive techno-feudal empires.
Most giants in highly technological areas don’t evolve, almost by definition. They get to a point where they’re mature companies just operating an existing business, and that’s diametrically opposed to developing new businesses.
Sure, they can spend money on R&D, but then they’re competing with every other new venture in the world - the only benefit they have is money, but collectively, everyone else has more money than they do.
This is why when private equity takes over a mature business, they almost always shut down any R&D the company is doing. Silly mature business, that’s not the reason for your existence!
>IBM, GE... how many former American giants failed to evolve.
"How many failed to evolve", on its own, is a bad metric for success, because it misses the how many new giants the US economy managed to create, which IMHO is the more important metric of a healthy economy.
Companies are like people, the old ones die out and are replaced by new young ones, as it should be. Worst you can do is be like Europe where all you do is try to keep ancient dying companies on life support for the sake of "stability", instead of creating new ones to replace them, which is also a fitting metaphor for EU demographics where a third of the state's budget goes to keeping boomers pensions higher than the salary of average worker(in France).
Like how "the boys" in engineering would made jokes about having sex with the female office manager in the middle of meetings. It was only a great time for certain people.
Reminds me of when Douglas Crockford got removed as a keynote speaker because he made other people uncomfortable because he used the term "gonads" and also did a muscle flex when talking about WeakMap vs StrongMap.
The assholes are still there. Complaining about language does nothing to get rid of the assholes. They're completely orthogonal activities.
If you wanted to get rid of the assholes - incredibly difficult, because they take many forms - you'd have to reinvent corporate culture in the US to make it less extractive and performative and more substance-based and cooperative.
I resigned a year ago, L65. The service I worked on was 5 engineers, within a few months’ time it was just me. Was always rated a 140 come connect season.
On call 24/7/365.
My mental health took such a beating that I resigned without giving two weeks.
Multiple reorgs (7 in last three years).
HR moving requirements for what it takes to get rated a 100.
Service security review was just me. Guy asked where the rest of the team was. I shared it was just me and said he’s seeing same thing across all the services he reviews, wondered where everyone was going.
Place ended up being stage four cancer and haven’t regretted my decision at all.
I resigned a year ago, L65. The service I worked on was 5 engineers, within a few months’ time it was just me. Was always rated a 140 come connect season.
> 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.
No thank you. I worked in multiple startups and they inherited the worst cancers of big tech: moving slowly, decisions by committees, leveling (in one startup, the founder decided to have six engineering levels in a company with less than 10 engineers). Compound with low pay and erratic behavior of founders, I had seen more than enough.
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.
What sucks about these situations is that middle managers want arbitrary things. Their imagination is tainted by existing inefficient processes and systems; they cannot see past these flawed abstractions. So when you ask them what they want, they say stuff like "faster horses" and then spend months debating the color and genders of the horses and what shape the carriage should be... The person who wants to sell them a "car" has no hope.
> 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.
Android and Google Maps were both acquisitions, and Chrome was initially based on WebKit. I don't know when exactly Google started focusing on refinements, but I think it was before 2008.
That is not to say that nothing since then has been impressive, but I do think it's fair to call just about all of it incremental.
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'm ISO27001'ing my company and I wonder if some day, we'll find a better way than written policies, procedures, forms, evidence and audits. To me, it seems like our current world's biggest flaw: We're losing 2/3rd of our workforce to maintaining procedures, they make the work boring and unbearable, and they're not even efficient, even if they do provide upside in systematically organizing things. Standards (when pushed to procedures, forms and audite) are the regression-to-the-mean of collective organizations.
Senior ICs spend all their time either in meetings or on their way to meetings because there are so many teams to "align". It might be okay in the normal days: organizations grow, and we need people specialized in navigating company dynamics. But as we are facing the tsunami of AI, it is increasingly risky to stay a professional meeting goer and box drawer as an IC. The only way to derisk the situation is to go to a company that moves fast, and learn how to build next generation of software with AI, or building the AI infra.
I assume that the demand will change. Say, a new generation of companies to replace the old. Besides, those who do have practical experience on building AI-native applications or building AI infra may be in higher demand as well. That is, maybe our experience will become not as valuable as before, therefore we'd need to refresh our experience with a different pace.
arguably the meeting overhead is actually just people trading domain knowledge. an ai agent can go read their whole code base instead of having that meeting. its not clear how all this shakes out
There is a massive amount of overhead in any big company. Each person can manage only so many people, and so that really puts limits on how much you can flatten the middle management layer.
Combine that with each company having effectively invented “Not Invented Here” before anyone else in the world had heard of that term, and you have massive amounts of bloat.
Two jobs ago, I was working at AWS on the EC2-Chronos team that was responsible for managing all NTP time sync across all Amazon and AWS regions, availability zones, and data centers. Including the classified and isolated regions. The people I worked with were some of the best I’ve ever known, and I thought we had really good managers. I even liked my skip-level manager. And I knew some of the others as well, and had even spent a fair amount of time listening to Peter DeSantis and other internationally known luminaries on the weekly ops calls.
From Peter on down, I never saw anything or anyone that I would call bloat. If anything, I felt that his organization was too lean.
Problem was, while I had extensive experience with the NTP protocol going back to 2003, it turned out that > 99.999% of the daily job involved dealing with ancient proprietary build and deployment tools that were created twenty years ago, and had done nothing but accumulate cruft since then. And I think that was true for just about everyone who worked at AWS. There are much more modern tools and methods that have been created in the decades since, but people in AWS weren’t allowed to use them, because they weren’t the blessed proprietary tools.
And RTO had to come from somewhere. And after that, it was mandatory co-location with your boss.
And then some person thought it would be a good idea to start measuring performance by lines of code committed per developer per week, and everyone had to commit code. Didn’t we kill that idea like nearly twenty years ago, too?
Anyway, I got out of there as fast as I could.
There are things that are deeply, deeply wrong at Amazon. And AWS. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the low-level technical people.
Thanks for sharing your experience. What you have written resonated deeply with my experience across a range of large companies.
Ironically, every large company I have worked for has chosen Microsoft partially because of their size and a perception that they have an enormous amount of top talent developing best-in-class products.
My reaction to that has been that, if a company is so large, then they can't all be in the top percentiles of talent. And when you look at how many products they have, relative to the number of software engineers they have, their can't be that many software engineers dedicated to any given product.
So I'm curious: how many people would work on a typical Microsoft product, and what sort of calibre are they?
> how many people would work on a typical Microsoft product, and what sort of calibre are they?
There are high talent density orgs at MSFT too. I do not want to give the impression that everyone at MSFT is low calibre. I was at the beginning of the Security org being formed (back then it was a tiny part of E+D). I was a minion who witnessed Security transforming into a 10B+ USD business so there are very qualified people at MSFT. We went from a few hundred devs and PMs to ~10K devs, PMs, Support etc to work on a mature business. There are a host of talented people still at MSFT, also MS continues to publish impactful research in AI, Systems etc. The great Leslie Lamport is still at MSFT. I am not comparing myself to these titans, I am nowhere near that level but just saying that there are oodles of talent at MSFT.
On the other hand, here is an example that is illustrative of the sort of people I encountered towards the end of my tenure. My last manager who was one big reason behind me resigning once told me in my 1-on-1 that I should count myself lucky to be employed at MSFT and that other developers would kill to join MSFT. This was someone who had started his career in TCS, Wipro etc and then worked at a bunch of networking companies who presumably didn't pay that well. Everyone at MSFT is decently paid because the stock is doing well and long may that continue . My last team/org was a 30M$+ business with only one customer, we had maybe ~300 people altogether in the US, UK and India. It felt like we were always support engineers for this one big whale of a customer and we were trying to "pivot" to get more customers but that always seemed fanciful as the product was expressly designed for one customer. MSFT acqui-hired from this customer multiple execs and developers to sell said product to the same customer.
I am missing a lot of key details as I wasn't at the inception of this product but the whole org seemed dysfunctional, inefficient and certainly I had low-morale. There just wasn't as much work for that many people.
When I submitted my resignation, they actually tried to retain me! I was befuddled to say the least, I hadn't been that productive at all but I guess they just needed warm bodies to work on some other misguided initiative. Personally, I had enough. I forewent my last tranche of sign-on stocks (a non-trivial amount) but was glad to see the back of this org. It was deleterious to my career, I was so pissed that I didn't even send a farewell email. I don;t blame anyone but myself, I hold myself accountable for my career but this was what I perceived.
Apologies, this felt like a rant and it is partly one. But I never had a frank conversation about this with anyone after I left. My fiance is a Doctor so she can't understand all this but my fellow colleagues in tech will.
I didn't get it wrong. I am okay to play politics if there's a prize worth taking, working on impactful products or learning new skills but if all there is to grab is titles or better pay then playing politics is playing the short game.
I am merely 30-years old, hopefully I have a long career or at-least as long as possible but playing politics to play the short game is very short sighted to say the least.
If I want politics, I would rather just re-watch Game of Thrones.
I always joked that when a company grows past 20 people it goes from being a table top game or crpg and it morphs into an MMO, but with DoTA/LoL mentality internally.
That's a good book, but I'd argue that in a pure free market without intervention, monopolies would be disappointingly common (and why some level of regulation should exist).
I believe the exact opposite: you need collusion with the state to establish a monopoly. And you don’t have a pure free market as long as there is a state that puts its heavy hand on the scale to favour one group over another.
The free market has its flaws, but many blame it for the ills caused by corruption and lobbying of politicians.
There has never been a truly free market anywhere in the world, let alone ‘pure’, so I don’t see why you use this adjective at all.
> I'd argue that in a pure free market without intervention, monopolies would be disappointingly common
How? If a monopoly were to emerge in what was a pure free market, it would become the government, and its rules would become regulation on the market. And thus the pure free market could no longer exist. Monopolies and free markets cannot coexist.
That's not what we're seeing. Companies grow big enough to take over entire sectors of the economy, the economy of scale works against smaller competitors.
And once you're big enough, you can just offload your inefficiencies onto the consumer (the "enshittification" stage). As long as you're not _terribly_ bad, competitors won't be able to overcome your network effects.
What _really_ held companies from taking over the world was the inherent overheads of distributed corporate structures. Before computers, you couldn't really manage a horizontal company with offices in hundreds of different cities. Network effects were also less pronounced.
Internet-enabled companies like Google (or Yandex, Baidu, etc.) are a really great example. The early Internet was about as close to a perfect free market as possible. And in every case (Google in the US, Yandex in Russia, Baidu in China) the same thing happened: one large company ended up dominating and then gobbling up all the competitors.
I strongly agree, I work in big tech right now and I feel almost like a charity case. Before Opus 5.5 my work would involve maybe a few hours of coding per week and pointless meetings. Now it’s few minutes of Opus 5.5 prompting and more pointless meetings. And im being paid very well for this, not gonna complain but this can’t last.
But it was like this pre-AI, as well. I don't think I spent a significant amount of the work week coding since I was an L3 15 years ago. And even then it was clear that impact (and thus promos and raises) was inversely correlated to the amount of the week spent coding.
What I'm seeing on my teams is everyone being more overworked than ever because the coding part happens SO quickly now that there's no friction to slow down all the nonstop "team alignment and box drawing" work that someone else in this thread alluded to.
The only counter-point here is, I think a lot of larger orgs operated like this before AI. Pointless meetings, a lot of people only really working a few hours a week. It's the classic Office Space portrayal. Or Big Head at Hooli just hanging out on the roof in Silicon Valley. It's real. So I understand the temptation to say "this can't last", but yet...
>Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.
I've worked at Australia largest bank and airline companies, it's insane the amount of people who are either:
* Being paid to do nothing. Manager at the bank would spend whole day going from meeting to coffee then ask you if things are done already to be delivered as "his/her team"
* Are in position without qualification. They couldn't understand the basics of common sense.
The thing is, if you know somebody who knows somebody, that is it.
Now working at one of the telcos here, bro, it's pure circus.
This is why I think communism would make sense in our current reality. If everyone got paid the same, then it would be fairer than what we have now where everyone gets paid a random amount with no correlation with skill or effort.
Capitalism made sense with small companies where each individual had more or less direct exposure to the markets. One bad employee would drag down the company. You couldn't hide or manipulate your way to the top if you weren't good at creating value and skilled people could actually start their own companies and compete. Now with huge corporations which own the economy, the markets don't work to begin with, and also, people within the big corporations are rewarded randomly at best or worse; in a counter-productive manner.
This inefficiency is highly destructive because of how the system compounds wealth. You end up with random people with zero value-creation skills and zero vision having millions or billions of dollars and deciding everyone else's lives.
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.
These big tech companies aren't meritocratic at any level from hiring to promotion. It's all nepotism and funny business going on behind the scenes.
One time I interviewed for a job at a big tech company during COVID/woke era and I had selected a dropdown option under 'Ethnicity' in the application form saying that I was from a "Caribbean ethnic group" which is technically true and I flew through all the interview stages and technical tests until the final interview where I had to meet with the CTO which they said was just a formality... They had dangled the biggest salary package of my life; it was like 2 times what I normally get... But then the CTO didn't show up; I spoke to some senior dev instead; conversation was not technical and I think I was quite pleasant so I don't think I did anything wrong there but I didn't get a job offer.
Unfortunately, the drop-down did not allow me to specify 'White Caribbean ethnic group" - Technically I'm a descendant of white settlers who settled the Caribbeans 500 years ago. My guess is they were not a big fan of the white variety of ethnic Carribbeans.
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.
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.
The issue is that several career tracks have some form of low pay, filtering, or outright hazing when you start out, with the promise that if you stick with the program, you will end your career at the top. Medicine, law, etc. If that promise is taken away, a lot of people on the job and in the education pipeline would be questioning whether it was worth the pain points (and not thinking about reforming and improving the entry level experience, lol). In the US this is one of the fears around socialized medicine.
Another problem is those career arcs are so long, where in something like tech or consulting, if you stick with it for 5-8 years you historically have a lot of seniority over new hires.
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
Some things are more than just jobs - they are callings. Journalism and teaching are two. People wouldn't do them if they were just jobs, because they don't pay enough to cover the headaches.
Is that due respect? That may be your perception of work now, but how many people have much of their self esteem bound up in the work they do at their current place? I want employees and coworkers like that. But what you’re talking about is both life under Late Stage Capitalism and also a bit of blindness as though someone being squeezed by the death of newspapers could just find a different newspaper job.
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.
I’ve been in the industry a long time and benefits at FAANG are not great. Deductibles are high, subsidy pretty average, overall package weak. Earlier in my career I paid nothing for insurance, had a lot of fringe benefits, and I was genuinely grateful for the perks. I’ve looked at ACA alternatives compared to my FAANG benefits and it wasn’t a huge difference frankly - better on the margin but nothing to write home about, at least in my local market.
The fact people have to find a job not for money but for health insurance is about as dystopian as I can imagine. Toil just to not get sick and go broke, not because you need the money. What a sad world we built for ourselves.
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.
This is all a bit out there, but I moved to New Zealand on a working holiday visa, and within two weeks of settling down in a particular spot (after a two month road trip), I had two job offers, one very relaxed retail, and one tech-adjacent for a small civil engineering firm. I'm making about a quarter the take home I did in the US, but I've cut my expenses a lot (bought my car in cash, carpool to work to save gas money, rent a room in a house instead of a whole apartment, no food delivery), and I'm using this time to reevaluate my values and work on building a lifestyle that does not rely on earning a six figure salary.
My plan when I return is to get my EMT and moonlight as an ER tech while doing prerequisites for PA school or maybe medical physics.
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).
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.
buyouts usually imply a far more generous offer than just termination and severance.
also means they can dodge any NDA / wrongful termination / bad behavior issues on the way out. sign the doc and play nice and get $$$.
keep in mind the US doesn't have great protections in that regard, so "severance" may be them allowing you to collect the last of your crap on the way out and paying you through the end of the week.
Layoff severance isn't great and it's very common for companies to use the performance system to get rid of people. Suddenly someone stops meeting expectations and are gone within weeks.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Sometimes--very rarely--one's ethics may dictate not taking it, as with the "fork" email to U.S. Federal Government employees. Or when an early-stage company layoff is being done in tandem with a buyback/tender to reduce employee ownership before the board does something crazy.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
The worst case scenario is not taking the offer then getting let go for performance, which means zero severance, health insurance terminated same day.
That's generally not legal in the U.S. or most of the EU. The company would have to establish a very significant paper trail to establish that these individual "performance-based" layoffs were not part of a layoff subject to WARN regulations (or their European equivalents which are even stricter). The hurdle is so large that no company has successfully pulled off such a feat, and many of the companies that tried ended up paying significantly more in penalties to their local Depts of Labor than they would have saved with this stunt.
I don't really know the legality of it, but I can tell you that last year around April there was quite a big wave of sudden performance terminations within Microsoft and these people did not get severance. I know because I was a manager of one of these people and had to deliver the news. I know that many of these people had had a below 100 rating on their previous performance review, but we were unaware at the time that this meant a death sentence for these employees several months later when we got the email a few days in advance of the termination. It was hundreds, if not thousands of affected people.
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?
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
You can tell what proportion they want to take the offer by how generous the offer is. And indeed:
> The Redmond, Washington-based company is expecting a lower proportion to accept the voluntary exit offer because the employees included in the offer are younger and no additional incentive is given beyond standard severance for their length of service, the person familiar said. Typical take-up levels for buyouts in tech are between 3 per cent and 5 per cent, they added.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The mistake is to believe anything coming from executives. They are not your friends.
I was in a startup during Covid. The CEO said: "unlike many startups, we just got a round of investment so we are in a really good situation and we won't have to let go anyone, you can be reassured". A week later, they fired a whole team and a few other employees.
Executives are not your friends, and they are not paid to tell you the truth.
Lying is in the job description. I'm convinced that to rise (or be groomed and practically anointed through nepotism and corruption) to that level in business, you have to trade a part of your humanity. There comes a point where wealth and power changes you and I'm convinced that the aspiration of it is really a form of concealed, socially acceptable sociopathy.
So yes. They are not only not your friends, they're outright hostile and you should trust nothing they say and approach every interaction with them as a game and try your best to at least break even.
They likely view you with deep contempt and derision, if they acknowledge that you have any measure of self worth at all. You should act accordingly.
I remember when Microsoft really started going downhill almost 4 years ago. I've done well personally, but the way that things have been going in that time I would have been happy to leave. I've always been in the 120-140 range every year for performance while I watch people who didn't deserve it either get laid off due to poor business decisions or fired for reasons beyond their control.
I did not get the choice to just leave with a buyout today and really wish I did. I'd be happy to go. I am not really sure I even want to work in this industry anymore which is unfortunate because I've been in it for pretty much my entire adult life. I have other interests though so I'm sure I'd find something to occupy my time.
This company follows trends and rarely sets them these days and the meme of Microsoft's corporate structure with each org pointing guns at each other isn't too far off from the truth. It doesn't always translate to good long-term strategy or even decent products in recent years.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"Microsoft also used to employee engineers focused soley on testing software"
Is this weird in any way? I live in EU land, but this does not seem too uncommon. As a developer Ive had assignments where I only wrote unit test, another where I was reponsible for daily CI running well (though both moved towards development eventually). I heard just the other day about a competitor where you did not write your own test code.
It's sort of weird in a world that has moved to an DevOps-style ethos for most development.
But yes, before that it would be not at all unusual to have “test engineers” or other technical staff whose entire responsibility laid with setting up test environments and running QA of products. These people did not do product dev, though they may have been involved in writing supporting test platform libraries or even maintaining test infrastructure (like IBM Jazz).
Even today in the U.S. companies that haven’t fully jumped onto newer development practices probably still have QA and/or test departments.
Isn't this still a thing? "Software Engineer in Test" being the newer term?
I just checked LinkedIn and they have quite a few job listings in this vein. Which makes sense: in the "AI and YOLO" development lifecycle, automated testing is more important than ever.
"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.
Weren't Microsoft just caught cheating trying to hire H1B's without looking for US based applicants first?
Given that they are now saying they have 25% too many employees, perhaps they should be banned from hiring H1B's altogether until they're rehired however many they end up letting go ...
> Weren't Microsoft just caught cheating trying to hire H1B's without looking for US based applicants first?
No they weren't. If this administration had strong reasons to believe Microsoft cheated and engaged in fraudulent practices, the DoJ would have opened an investigation leading to punitive measures. It's a dog whistle and red meat for "the base."
> Given that they are now saying they have 25% too many employees, perhaps they should be banned from hiring H1B's altogether until they're rehired however many they end up letting go ...
That's not going to happen. It's easier for them to send the jobs offshore. You could support banning American companies from hiring in other companies in addition to immigration. I'm sure that will work out great for the US.
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.
If they actually had a need for those software engineers right now, they wouldn't play that game. (Or rather, if they could make more money by having them create something than they could save on wages from playing the game.)
But at that point, they almost should be laying off engineers, even without playing any such game.
"There are recessions where you need to switch from equities into bonds. And there are recessions where you need to stock up on beans and shotgun shells."
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 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.
"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.
2014 was the year they acquired minecraft/mojang and nokia, which may have accounted for a lot of that growth. Also 2022 was the Activision/Blizzard acquisition which would have been well over 10k new employees...
I believe this number is FTE's and not contractors. That's a whole different story, and I don't think those numbers are public. After a layoff at big tech, you see an influx of contractors. I would not be surprised if it was 50/50 at this point.
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.
> 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.
The Financial Times report is behind a paywall so I'm not sure how that evaluation was reached. Also there are a bunch of bizarre financial shenanigans Musk has freely pulled with zero scrutiny. Hard to gauge the full impact of the layoffs when the person at the helm is profoundly amoral and has no scruples about lying.
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.
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.
This is so true. Twitter built TikTok three years before TikTok itself launched. (Vine)
If you aren't growing and building, then obviously you don't need the same amount of people only to maintain what you have. It doesn't take that many people to fix bugs, renew SSL certificates and plug security holes.
Game studios knew this since forever. Once you finish building, if you aren't building something new, then you're laying off. It's not a new thing Twitter/Musk has just discovered. Odd that whenever this is discussed, it's framed as if Twitter-then is the same thing as Twitter-now, minus most of its employees and doing just fine.
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
Keep in mind that we don't know how many engineers from his other companies have worked or are working on Twitter since it (a) went private, then (b) merged with SpaceX. So the "I fired 80% of my staff and nothing happened" meme is a bit incomplete
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.
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.
You can see from the replies (highly political responses that are focused on the EM angle rather than particularly caring about the twitter angle) that really don't like this answer. Unfortunately for them it's true. After some initial stumbles after the firings (which journalists were practically cheering from the rooftops), today it seems to be much the same as it was before all that. And that makes reddit types really really mad.
I suspect this is what got Meta and other companies at least considering whether they would benefit from doing this at a much smaller scale, because there were some mass firings the next year at other companies, but this could have just been in the pipes anyway due to overhiring before.
I don't think this is true. Twitter is able to support roughly as many users as before on only 20% of the employees, but those users aren't Twitter's customers. Their customers were the advertisers who paid them money to advertise to those users. And the majority of Twitter's staff before the acquisition were working for those customers- either keeping conversations to be the sorts of things advertisers wanted to be associated with or categorizing and data-mining the messages that had been sent to figure out the ads to show users or building a advertising management platform for those customers to use or maintaining relationships with all of the advertisers.
After the acquisition, advertising revenue dramatically dropped (to a low of about 1/3 in 2025 though it has apparently recovered up to only down about 50%!), because all of those functions were gutted. This is why Twitter tried to switch to "buying a blue-check" and other premium features (e.g. access to Grok), because they had fired all of the people necessary to run a real advertising business and they needed revenue.
And I know that you don't need that many employees to support Twitter's customer facing business because Bluesky does basically the same thing (message storage/search backend+web app+two mobile apps) and they worked for over a year on just 20 million in total raises (and no advertising or any other revenue)- they did a Series B in 2025 that raised over 100 million, but they were operational for over a year on just 20 million in raise. So yeah, it doesn't take that many people to just present the messages of users to other users, but what Twitter did was to cut back on what they did for their customers and accept the big drop in revenue that came with it, and that's not really proof of anything.
>today it seems to be much the same as it was before all that
User numbers are down 20% since the acquisition, ad revenue is halved and the value of the company has collapsed. Where is the politics? The only political thing was the acquisition itself. It ceased to function as a growth and market based company and effectively became a propaganda outlet, EM is highly relevant in that this was the actual point.
As a product the entire platform has stagnated, which is what you'd expect if you let most people go and just use it as an arm for election influence.
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.
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.
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.
We are recruiting in Sweden and apparently its very hard finding good candidates. Most are fresh from very short (2 years) educations or other special cases as opposed to having had 4-5 years of university and maybe some experience.
Fun thing though, we recently let a consultant go due to relying too much on LLMs.
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
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)
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.
I recently took a contract with big tech after working with startups for about a year ( I was at this big corp a year ago)
Maybe it’s the small sample size, but from what I’ve seen, the thing hurting velocity more than anything is the fact that teams have too many “cooks”.
The way work is delegated is a bit broken when in reality the engineer who knows the code base or problem best should scope the work and just delegate it to their agents.
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.
Scary AND exciting: zoomed out, 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.
What could happen, even in countries with strong socialist worker protections (western europe) or high cost of living (US, europe, many others), is that labour will become cheaper again. We'll be "poorer", less able to import, but on the other hand may be able to do more locally. We may also see larger economic class differences, as you essentially said youself.
In a way this could be a downgrade, we'll be less incentivived to optimized or automate, and will be able to just throw bodies at problems.
(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
I was making over market rate on H1B. The petition process forces the employer to pay market rate or above.
Also the transfer petition is very easy and it usually takes 2-4 weeks. You can argue that changing jobs is higher friction for H1B workers, but if you are offered more salary elsewhere but decide to stay, well, that’s kind of on you, not the H1B process.
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 "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.
Not necessarily. If there aren't enough tasks to make use of the increased productivity of the employees, it makes them less valuable, because the company can get away with fewer employees.
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.
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.
And the worst thing is that, when Microsoft turns around and begins recruiting again, people will just forget this and accept the golden handcuffs once more. Techies aren't as smart as they think they are. They are just a slightly more expensive cog. But a cog nonetheless. And all cogs can be replaced.
This is the beginning of the end of big tech. I interned at MSFT Research and was shocked at how much money is thrown at a dart board hoping something sticks. The talent there was much better off psychologically and probably long term financially joining or founding a startup. Excited to see smaller companies pick up the revenue big tech will lose.
Unfortunately MSR as you knew it is gone. The Technology and Research division has been quietly shuttered and the org is now reporting up through Azure Security. It's been slowly parted out over the last 9 months and its one few departments in C+AI where most if not all employees are being given the severance offer.
Coincides with an EMNLP keynote sharing a tweet saying “big lab people now ignore NeurIPS/iclr/ etc papers and regard them as full of lies”.
Well, AI research outside of frontier labs had a good run. Gonna suck when competing with the other 30% unemployment white collar workers. When you say what work you used to do, some of them may end up trying to be violent towards one who is seen as having worked on the tech that killed the golden goose.
The hungry needs to eat. If majority are hungry and everything is concentrated in a small group of people, they’ll eat them. Has happened before with lower than 25% rate.
Right now, a hiccup in Chinese production of a certain IC may make buying toilet paper harder in Germany! It’s naive to think that such drastic changes (mass unemployment) will not be extremely turbulent (to put it mildly).
I spent ~15 years there, left at level 66. Here's the thing people don't want to hear; a lot of people there, particularly management, but others also, are either coasting or not that great.
You have the guy who wrote code in the 90's, became a dev manager, maybe is a PUM now, or still a dev manager, and basically "does emails and attends meetings", goes to the "daily triage" (which has a whole bunch of people in the room), is a member of the "war team" (they probably don't use that term any more). All these people are not "doing" anything useful and there are a lot of them at MS.
This used to work out fine, because the way the August reviews always worked (stacked rank etc.) it's very much a favorites game, "who you know". So you get a pass.
But suddenly there's a reorg and new management comes in (or a flattening; no more dev leads with 2 reports!). And they have their own set of dev leads, dev managers, etc. they want to install. So the existing management gets kicked out, those who still have buddies in other orgs will transfer there (but this gets much rarer now, as most friends from 'old Microsoft' have retired). But the "does emails & attends meetings" guy is out of a job (and is going to cry "age discrimination" because he's 50+, but the reality is he hasn't done a whole lot for a decade, and has zero useful skills now).
PMs; there are WAY too many of these, with their entire parallel org of management. There used to be almost as many PMs as devs back in the day. Other companies don't have anywhere near so many. Most of them can go; back in the day a lot of them would go to the dev's office, ask about a topic someone asked about in email, the dev says "Oh I can just reply to the thread", PM says "Nooo... let me do that" (PM wants to be the one replying to be 'visible' even though they are just a glorified status collector/forwarder).
There ARE a lot of incredible people there, and the best people I worked with at MS are just as good as the best I worked with at the FANGs. But unlike other companies (FANGs, startups) there are a LOT of a really bad/useless people there too. A lot. Although I have no faith that MS is going to lose THOSE people in this buyout.
Engineering discipline is absolutely non-existent at MS. Everything is date driven. The source tree (Source Depot) gets locked as of X date and only "test fixes" can be checked in after that. But the next ship vehicle is months away. So people keep checking in regular code as "test fixes" after the branch lock. One time it got so bad that the build was actually broken for the entire day of the branch lock, and people were force submitting in the evening (everyone expected whoever broke the build to fix it, but... they didn't, so force submit!) to make sure their changes got in before the lock.
Random unrelated funny MS story: The wiki that everyone in Bing used, got wiped out, because it was running on a machine in someone's office that got wiped when they left. We had to have everyone run a script to salvage what they could off everyone in the org's browser cache.
I mostly agree with your assessment of the culture. I have been here for 6.5 years and have never seen source tree, I work in Azure and everything is in Azure Devops and we commit and deploy chaotically.
Curious if they still do the daily triage and war rooms. I left in 2010 but those practices seemed like a remnant of the 90s era desktop computing paradigm than web or cloud.
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.
And what will happen to all these software engineers who are laid off, and to massss who are graduating in CS (because the same CEOs told them it's a good carrier)?
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 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.
The Seattle "Eastside" is not really Seattle, it's Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland, Issaquah and Sammamish - overpriced suburbs. I live in one of them and work at MSFT.
It's not the end of the world. Seattle is incredibly expensive, however the market is down this year and listings sitting on the market for months and months. The problem is influx of people who need to sell because they lost their job or accepted the buyout - it can ruin their life further down the line.
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!
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.
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%.
That was my experience at Automattic. When we were offered nine months’ pay to leave, I still believed things would improve, so I chose the “stability” of staying. In hindsight, that was a costly mistake.
A few months later, I was laid off anyway, with severance nowhere near what either of the two buyout offers had included. I regret passing up the offer because I trusted the company and believed things would get better. I spent several months out of work, burned through my savings, and am still feeling the financial effects today.
That doesn’t tell us what this company’s target is, but a voluntary buyout certainly doesn’t rule out layoffs later. If I were facing that choice again, I’d take the buyout in a heartbeat
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 think it's time we all start talking about a 4day workweek. these tech oligarchs love to talk about sharing AI with the world, well if it increases productivity, don't lay off employees, SHARE the productivity gains by reducing the workweek. We're all going to be completely replaced in the not far future, but the companies are so cut-throat, it all must go straight to the shareholders.
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.
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?
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.
There's no doubt big tech is/was bloated. It was (relatively) cheap to stack and retain talent just so your competition couldn't get them. There was also an era where VPs and directors had direct incentives to grow their orgs as large as possible.
The opportunity cost is higher now (companies are actually spending money on capex), and changes in productivity due to AI mean that simply hoarding talented developers isn't as useful any more. Before, you could keep people "busy" doing things that didn't really produce anything useful, and still find ways to justify it. VPs and directors are now being rewarded for "doing more with less" - not just shipping the largest organization.
I think overall SWE numbers will continue to slowly climb, but I think we're going to see more big tech unwind bloated staff numbers.
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".
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 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?
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.)
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
11-12% annually, so yeah a year long hiring freeze might get you to the right number. The problem is that it gives you no flexibility or control over who attrits, and removes your ability to keep critical roles filled.
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.
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
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.
The guidelines are here https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and everyone is asked to read them when signing up to HN. Please take a moment to read them properly and make the effort to observe them if you want to participate here.
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.
The big tech companies are getting old. I think it's a fundamental rule that the competence and effectiveness of an org must fall, over time, driven by the fact that a person will more readily hire someone they can understand than someone that is more intelligent/competent/effective. This causes a slow degradation.
I also think there's been a drastic shift in the working culture of tech/engineering spaces, in general, over the last 15 years. From my experience, it's definitely drifted away from a bunch of nerds solving problems to something more towards emotional/personal/politics. I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy. "Back in my day" people would just state facts, point out flaws, and argue a bit, and have fun doing it, for better or worse.
Maybe I'm just lucky but I have a few gen Z coworkers and they are probably more often than not the voice of reason in our org (start up with 8 engineers). I think if an employee can't handle simple constructive criticism or clarifications maybe they should not be employed.
I did used to work for a consulting firm about a decade ago, and I was leading a staff augmentation project with another company and I was once chastised for saying "hey guys" in a chat because there were women in the group. I was encouraged to use "y'all" but not wanting to sound like I was from the south, I just used "peeps" which was somehow okay.
I'm all for inclusive language but I thought that was a bridge too far.
A coworker was asked in a meeting how he was holding up after pulling an epic two day sprint to deliver a project that saved our butts. He replied “I felt like jumping out of a window.”
Someone reported him for not warning the room about suicidal ideation before saying it and not considering that it might be triggering. He was actually reprimanded.
Unfortunately typical of the place. I left soon after.
Reminds me of that one time my partner mentioned "Latino" in a meeting, referring to people from Central and South America in broad terms (this was a marketing meeting, where customers are naturally grouped together along various dimensions).
She was told to not use "Latino"; but to use "LatinX" instead. What hurt more was the implication that she was being insensitive.
When I learned of it, I asked my Mexican friends which one they preferred. None of them had heard of "LatinX" and were as confused as I was.
> I think if an employee can't handle simple constructive criticism or clarifications maybe they should not be employed.
and then
> I was encouraged to use "y'all" [..] I thought that was a bridge too far.
I wonder if there might be a small bias on your part. The criticism you deem constructive everyone shall endure, but the other criticism you deem a bridge too far you yourself shall not endure.
Both of these issues come because our ancestors messed up changing the language.
Centuries ago, "thou" was singular second person and "you" was plural second person.
"Thou" got abandoned and "you" lost its original meaning to replace "thou" as the new singular second person.
"You guys" or "y'all" are simply attempts to re-introduce a needed pronoun.
I go for “yinz” then, and tell them not to discriminate against my Pittsburgh area heritage
Odd, the dictionary definition (here: webster's) is literally:
> guy: (...) person —used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex
If we want to trace back the etymology of the term "guy" we would unearth some interesting facts. The most infamous "Guy" of the 17th century is Guy Fawkes, would-be Catholic terrorist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes
Guy Fawkes is most notorious in the UK today as the progenitor of Guy Fawkes Night, where children solicit "a penny for the Guy?" and the funds raised ostensibly go to construct and burn a large straw effigy of Guy, in order to celebrate his defeat and the survival of the Parliament. He was executed, not by burning but by hanging, but nevertheless Guy Fawkes is the original Burning Man.
Guy Fawkes Night was imported to the United States during our independence, and it became Pope Night, a night of mayhem and anti-Catholic vandalism and hooliganism. George Washington once told his military troops to knock it off with the Pope Night shenanigans, because it was alienating Canadians.
So the term "guy" became genericized, beginning in Australia it seems, to refer to a grubby lower-class Catholic boy. After a few centuries of circulating in this way, it lost most of its derogatory connotation and became a generic way to refer to men or boys, and by extension, girls and women.
I don't take offense at being called "guy", nor would I if I were female, and especially because today in the USA, it is so generic and inoffensive. Nobody recalls its sordid roots, even if Pope Night is making a resurgence around here.
Just holler
Can you use "hey everyone" or does that offend schizophrenics?
The Gen Z and Alphas will save us. As a late Gen X, most of our cohorts were bogged down eating for boomers to die and are lost causes in big companies.
> From my experience, it's definitely drifted away from a bunch of nerds solving problems to something more towards emotional/personal/politics. I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy. "Back in my day" people would just state facts, point out flaws, and argue a bit, and have fun doing it, for better or worse.
In the last few years, I ended up at a bigtech co through an acquisition, and had been someone who was a go-between for solving issues across teams by having a good understanding of everyone else's codebases, tests, build processes, deployment, infrastructure etc. This papered over the culture of siloed development, refusals to think beyond single services etc. I would submit tests and patches, along with tickets describing the bug, impact statement, fix, test coverage, risk, and make myself on-call or directly supervise deployment, etc.
Attempting to continue that in an org x25 larger was met with people firing off angry emails to executives saying their authority was being undermined and made to look bad, when long standing issues were made trivial and fixed by "someone they had never met before", and wherever they came from can they please go back to. I have no idea what a lot of these people were spending so long doing, their commit history was often full of changes that would make you go think "???". I guess it's lucrative to run out the clock year after year on a 180k package, attending meetings where you argue that things are difficult and lets meet again in 3 months? After becoming highly visible for bringing things to attention, I was offered a package to leave, I assume so they could go back to a culture of top down authority and silence.
> After becoming highly visible for bringing things to attention, I was offered a package to leave, I assume so they could go back to a culture of top down authority and silence.
If we asked your coworkers to tell us what happened, would they say "he was easy to work with and so generous with their time by fixing issues all over the org"?
Or would they say something completely different?
Getting big is the same as getting old. Getting big means that they lucked into getting a cash cow and a bureaucracy springs up to manage that cash cow, kind of a necessary evil, and also attracts opportunists who think they can make the cash cow bigger (and enrich themselves in the process). So the business starts bloating up with employees.
Professional executives.
Actually, I think there are areas of interest that come up in large companies. Microsoft started the equivalent of an FDE organization about 12 years ago. It was interesting to have the freedom to build and grow an organization from about 20 to 800 people. Working with customers and product teams to help get direct customer feedback to help evolve products was interesting. Now, 12 years later, FDEs are sort of the current buzzy role.
FDE allows execs to covertly circumvent their internal bureaucracy to ship faster. It will be interesting to see what execs make of that data.
I suspect there is still a good amount of shedding the defensive-hiring going on from the pre-AI, low interest, high growth inflation front-loading era. Now all that is crumbling, interest is rising, growth is contracting due to several factors, and AI is clearly crushing manpower demands. What do you do under these new circumstances with an excess of staff you largely hired as capacity and defensively?
It may be a bit controversial, but I believe the male tectonic shifts going in right now under our feet are also driving much of the shift regarding “immigration” because billionaires don’t need immigrants as much anymore and they’re also causing systemic problems in things like the housing market. In fact from what I’m hearing, there is concern that immigration is now becoming a potential cost due to the major changes in society rather than a profit center by scaling up marginal returns from every immigrant you can import by hook or crook, i.e., the more people you import, the more you can undermine salaries and increase revenues and thus, profits.
> they’re also causing systemic problems in things like the housing market
The rest of your post sounded rational. This part doesn’t.
Failure to build more units (NIMBY) and properties being held as investments (non-US nationals are significant in some markets) are the two causes I would point to. Of course every additional family that needs housing drives up the cost a little, but I really don’t think that can be responsible for the massive increases in housing valuation.
> I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy.
Perhaps what you perceived as someone being emotional was actually someone who spent a long time barely functioning due to things that have been happening in their life, and that small event just so happened to be a straw that broke the camel's back.
People around you are going through stuff. Everyone is. Someone's stuff is easy to carry, someone else's stuff isn't. "Back in the day" people also carried their burden with them. This is nothing new. Perhaps you never noticed because so far everyone you dealt with was great at masking, and desperately want to avoid having to see coworkers like you worsen their burden by doing what feels like kicking them while they are down.
I can’t tell if you’re trolling.
Of course we should be compassionate, but anyone needs to be able to function enough so that they can internalise criticism and evolve.
Part of what scares me about hold these companies are is how they've like the Titan Cronus been allowed to keep eating their children. There's so so much missing new blood that should be here, so many interesting medium sized companies that should be adapting, figuring out this new age, but so much of our talent and brainpool is locked up deep inside one of a handful of these massive techno-feudal empires.
The only thing I’m looking for from antitrust is a moratorium of a few companies from buying their competition.
I've worked with a number of people who were like this at MSFT. They've all been laid off.
> I think it's a fundamental rule that the competence and effectiveness of an org must fall, over time
IBM, GE... how many former American giants failed to evolve.
I go back to this article on the failure of US steel: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-inno...
Most giants in highly technological areas don’t evolve, almost by definition. They get to a point where they’re mature companies just operating an existing business, and that’s diametrically opposed to developing new businesses.
Sure, they can spend money on R&D, but then they’re competing with every other new venture in the world - the only benefit they have is money, but collectively, everyone else has more money than they do.
This is why when private equity takes over a mature business, they almost always shut down any R&D the company is doing. Silly mature business, that’s not the reason for your existence!
>IBM, GE... how many former American giants failed to evolve.
"How many failed to evolve", on its own, is a bad metric for success, because it misses the how many new giants the US economy managed to create, which IMHO is the more important metric of a healthy economy.
Companies are like people, the old ones die out and are replaced by new young ones, as it should be. Worst you can do is be like Europe where all you do is try to keep ancient dying companies on life support for the sake of "stability", instead of creating new ones to replace them, which is also a fitting metaphor for EU demographics where a third of the state's budget goes to keeping boomers pensions higher than the salary of average worker(in France).
> saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy
Was it about displaying the user's birthday?
not being able to find true love is pretty emotional tbf
> and have fun doing it, for better or worse
Like how "the boys" in engineering would made jokes about having sex with the female office manager in the middle of meetings. It was only a great time for certain people.
It feels like tech overcorrected from allowing assholes to be assholes. To now having words and tone policed constantly.
Reminds me of when Douglas Crockford got removed as a keynote speaker because he made other people uncomfortable because he used the term "gonads" and also did a muscle flex when talking about WeakMap vs StrongMap.
https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/50u77r/douglas_...
The assholes are still there. Complaining about language does nothing to get rid of the assholes. They're completely orthogonal activities.
If you wanted to get rid of the assholes - incredibly difficult, because they take many forms - you'd have to reinvent corporate culture in the US to make it less extractive and performative and more substance-based and cooperative.
One person's over-correction is another person's "finally". Norms change; it's as reasonable for that to happen as it is to complain about it.
I resigned a year ago, L65. The service I worked on was 5 engineers, within a few months’ time it was just me. Was always rated a 140 come connect season.
On call 24/7/365.
My mental health took such a beating that I resigned without giving two weeks.
Multiple reorgs (7 in last three years).
HR moving requirements for what it takes to get rated a 100.
Service security review was just me. Guy asked where the rest of the team was. I shared it was just me and said he’s seeing same thing across all the services he reviews, wondered where everyone was going.
Place ended up being stage four cancer and haven’t regretted my decision at all.
How do they work after the last person leaves?
> 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.
No thank you. I worked in multiple startups and they inherited the worst cancers of big tech: moving slowly, decisions by committees, leveling (in one startup, the founder decided to have six engineering levels in a company with less than 10 engineers). Compound with low pay and erratic behavior of founders, I had seen more than enough.
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.
What sucks about these situations is that middle managers want arbitrary things. Their imagination is tainted by existing inefficient processes and systems; they cannot see past these flawed abstractions. So when you ask them what they want, they say stuff like "faster horses" and then spend months debating the color and genders of the horses and what shape the carriage should be... The person who wants to sell them a "car" has no hope.
> 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.
Android and Google Maps were both acquisitions, and Chrome was initially based on WebKit. I don't know when exactly Google started focusing on refinements, but I think it was before 2008.
That is not to say that nothing since then has been impressive, but I do think it's fair to call just about all of it incremental.
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.
> following new rules or regulations
I'm ISO27001'ing my company and I wonder if some day, we'll find a better way than written policies, procedures, forms, evidence and audits. To me, it seems like our current world's biggest flaw: We're losing 2/3rd of our workforce to maintaining procedures, they make the work boring and unbearable, and they're not even efficient, even if they do provide upside in systematically organizing things. Standards (when pushed to procedures, forms and audite) are the regression-to-the-mean of collective organizations.
Senior ICs spend all their time either in meetings or on their way to meetings because there are so many teams to "align". It might be okay in the normal days: organizations grow, and we need people specialized in navigating company dynamics. But as we are facing the tsunami of AI, it is increasingly risky to stay a professional meeting goer and box drawer as an IC. The only way to derisk the situation is to go to a company that moves fast, and learn how to build next generation of software with AI, or building the AI infra.
Disagree. The only part an AI can't do is the people aligning and box drawing. The implementation part is trivial. That's who will get replaced.
I assume that the demand will change. Say, a new generation of companies to replace the old. Besides, those who do have practical experience on building AI-native applications or building AI infra may be in higher demand as well. That is, maybe our experience will become not as valuable as before, therefore we'd need to refresh our experience with a different pace.
arguably the meeting overhead is actually just people trading domain knowledge. an ai agent can go read their whole code base instead of having that meeting. its not clear how all this shakes out
There is a massive amount of overhead in any big company. Each person can manage only so many people, and so that really puts limits on how much you can flatten the middle management layer.
Combine that with each company having effectively invented “Not Invented Here” before anyone else in the world had heard of that term, and you have massive amounts of bloat.
Two jobs ago, I was working at AWS on the EC2-Chronos team that was responsible for managing all NTP time sync across all Amazon and AWS regions, availability zones, and data centers. Including the classified and isolated regions. The people I worked with were some of the best I’ve ever known, and I thought we had really good managers. I even liked my skip-level manager. And I knew some of the others as well, and had even spent a fair amount of time listening to Peter DeSantis and other internationally known luminaries on the weekly ops calls.
From Peter on down, I never saw anything or anyone that I would call bloat. If anything, I felt that his organization was too lean.
Problem was, while I had extensive experience with the NTP protocol going back to 2003, it turned out that > 99.999% of the daily job involved dealing with ancient proprietary build and deployment tools that were created twenty years ago, and had done nothing but accumulate cruft since then. And I think that was true for just about everyone who worked at AWS. There are much more modern tools and methods that have been created in the decades since, but people in AWS weren’t allowed to use them, because they weren’t the blessed proprietary tools.
And RTO had to come from somewhere. And after that, it was mandatory co-location with your boss.
And then some person thought it would be a good idea to start measuring performance by lines of code committed per developer per week, and everyone had to commit code. Didn’t we kill that idea like nearly twenty years ago, too?
Anyway, I got out of there as fast as I could.
There are things that are deeply, deeply wrong at Amazon. And AWS. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the low-level technical people.
Thanks for sharing your experience. What you have written resonated deeply with my experience across a range of large companies.
Ironically, every large company I have worked for has chosen Microsoft partially because of their size and a perception that they have an enormous amount of top talent developing best-in-class products.
My reaction to that has been that, if a company is so large, then they can't all be in the top percentiles of talent. And when you look at how many products they have, relative to the number of software engineers they have, their can't be that many software engineers dedicated to any given product.
So I'm curious: how many people would work on a typical Microsoft product, and what sort of calibre are they?
> how many people would work on a typical Microsoft product, and what sort of calibre are they?
There are high talent density orgs at MSFT too. I do not want to give the impression that everyone at MSFT is low calibre. I was at the beginning of the Security org being formed (back then it was a tiny part of E+D). I was a minion who witnessed Security transforming into a 10B+ USD business so there are very qualified people at MSFT. We went from a few hundred devs and PMs to ~10K devs, PMs, Support etc to work on a mature business. There are a host of talented people still at MSFT, also MS continues to publish impactful research in AI, Systems etc. The great Leslie Lamport is still at MSFT. I am not comparing myself to these titans, I am nowhere near that level but just saying that there are oodles of talent at MSFT.
On the other hand, here is an example that is illustrative of the sort of people I encountered towards the end of my tenure. My last manager who was one big reason behind me resigning once told me in my 1-on-1 that I should count myself lucky to be employed at MSFT and that other developers would kill to join MSFT. This was someone who had started his career in TCS, Wipro etc and then worked at a bunch of networking companies who presumably didn't pay that well. Everyone at MSFT is decently paid because the stock is doing well and long may that continue . My last team/org was a 30M$+ business with only one customer, we had maybe ~300 people altogether in the US, UK and India. It felt like we were always support engineers for this one big whale of a customer and we were trying to "pivot" to get more customers but that always seemed fanciful as the product was expressly designed for one customer. MSFT acqui-hired from this customer multiple execs and developers to sell said product to the same customer. I am missing a lot of key details as I wasn't at the inception of this product but the whole org seemed dysfunctional, inefficient and certainly I had low-morale. There just wasn't as much work for that many people.
When I submitted my resignation, they actually tried to retain me! I was befuddled to say the least, I hadn't been that productive at all but I guess they just needed warm bodies to work on some other misguided initiative. Personally, I had enough. I forewent my last tranche of sign-on stocks (a non-trivial amount) but was glad to see the back of this org. It was deleterious to my career, I was so pissed that I didn't even send a farewell email. I don;t blame anyone but myself, I hold myself accountable for my career but this was what I perceived.
Apologies, this felt like a rant and it is partly one. But I never had a frank conversation about this with anyone after I left. My fiance is a Doctor so she can't understand all this but my fellow colleagues in tech will.
You got it all wrong my friend. In a big dysfunctional org like that the key thing is to focus on the role play and politics.
I didn't get it wrong. I am okay to play politics if there's a prize worth taking, working on impactful products or learning new skills but if all there is to grab is titles or better pay then playing politics is playing the short game.
I am merely 30-years old, hopefully I have a long career or at-least as long as possible but playing politics to play the short game is very short sighted to say the least.
If I want politics, I would rather just re-watch Game of Thrones.
I always joked that when a company grows past 20 people it goes from being a table top game or crpg and it morphs into an MMO, but with DoTA/LoL mentality internally.
This is why companies (in a free market) do not grow big enough to take over the world. "The Innovators Dilemma" is a good book on the topic.
That's a good book, but I'd argue that in a pure free market without intervention, monopolies would be disappointingly common (and why some level of regulation should exist).
Absolute free market, like any other idea taken extreme, is cancerous.
How do you know that it would all evolve to a handful of companies? I hear your sentiment all the time, people just assume it is true.
I believe the exact opposite: you need collusion with the state to establish a monopoly. And you don’t have a pure free market as long as there is a state that puts its heavy hand on the scale to favour one group over another.
The free market has its flaws, but many blame it for the ills caused by corruption and lobbying of politicians.
There has never been a truly free market anywhere in the world, let alone ‘pure’, so I don’t see why you use this adjective at all.
> I'd argue that in a pure free market without intervention, monopolies would be disappointingly common
How? If a monopoly were to emerge in what was a pure free market, it would become the government, and its rules would become regulation on the market. And thus the pure free market could no longer exist. Monopolies and free markets cannot coexist.
That's not what we're seeing. Companies grow big enough to take over entire sectors of the economy, the economy of scale works against smaller competitors.
And once you're big enough, you can just offload your inefficiencies onto the consumer (the "enshittification" stage). As long as you're not _terribly_ bad, competitors won't be able to overcome your network effects.
What _really_ held companies from taking over the world was the inherent overheads of distributed corporate structures. Before computers, you couldn't really manage a horizontal company with offices in hundreds of different cities. Network effects were also less pronounced.
Internet-enabled companies like Google (or Yandex, Baidu, etc.) are a really great example. The early Internet was about as close to a perfect free market as possible. And in every case (Google in the US, Yandex in Russia, Baidu in China) the same thing happened: one large company ended up dominating and then gobbling up all the competitors.
So what happened to Sears, IBM, RCA, GE, Kodak, etc.?
Why are the biggest companies of recent origin?
I strongly agree, I work in big tech right now and I feel almost like a charity case. Before Opus 5.5 my work would involve maybe a few hours of coding per week and pointless meetings. Now it’s few minutes of Opus 5.5 prompting and more pointless meetings. And im being paid very well for this, not gonna complain but this can’t last.
I dont know which Big Tech you work at but at “my” Big Tech we are working crazy hours. And thats with very heavy use of AI.
But it was like this pre-AI, as well. I don't think I spent a significant amount of the work week coding since I was an L3 15 years ago. And even then it was clear that impact (and thus promos and raises) was inversely correlated to the amount of the week spent coding.
What I'm seeing on my teams is everyone being more overworked than ever because the coding part happens SO quickly now that there's no friction to slow down all the nonstop "team alignment and box drawing" work that someone else in this thread alluded to.
The only counter-point here is, I think a lot of larger orgs operated like this before AI. Pointless meetings, a lot of people only really working a few hours a week. It's the classic Office Space portrayal. Or Big Head at Hooli just hanging out on the roof in Silicon Valley. It's real. So I understand the temptation to say "this can't last", but yet...
>Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.
I've worked at Australia largest bank and airline companies, it's insane the amount of people who are either:
* Being paid to do nothing. Manager at the bank would spend whole day going from meeting to coffee then ask you if things are done already to be delivered as "his/her team"
* Are in position without qualification. They couldn't understand the basics of common sense.
The thing is, if you know somebody who knows somebody, that is it.
Now working at one of the telcos here, bro, it's pure circus.
This is why I think communism would make sense in our current reality. If everyone got paid the same, then it would be fairer than what we have now where everyone gets paid a random amount with no correlation with skill or effort.
Capitalism made sense with small companies where each individual had more or less direct exposure to the markets. One bad employee would drag down the company. You couldn't hide or manipulate your way to the top if you weren't good at creating value and skilled people could actually start their own companies and compete. Now with huge corporations which own the economy, the markets don't work to begin with, and also, people within the big corporations are rewarded randomly at best or worse; in a counter-productive manner.
This inefficiency is highly destructive because of how the system compounds wealth. You end up with random people with zero value-creation skills and zero vision having millions or billions of dollars and deciding everyone else's lives.
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.
Not a Googler, but from what I've heard from colleagues at GCP, it's is a very different organization than much of the rest of Google.
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.
> I would look at my colleagues and sister teams and wonder, why do they need these many people to work on something so trivial
And yet nobody has time to do anything except to tell everyone they don't have time to do anything.
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! :)
These big tech companies aren't meritocratic at any level from hiring to promotion. It's all nepotism and funny business going on behind the scenes.
One time I interviewed for a job at a big tech company during COVID/woke era and I had selected a dropdown option under 'Ethnicity' in the application form saying that I was from a "Caribbean ethnic group" which is technically true and I flew through all the interview stages and technical tests until the final interview where I had to meet with the CTO which they said was just a formality... They had dangled the biggest salary package of my life; it was like 2 times what I normally get... But then the CTO didn't show up; I spoke to some senior dev instead; conversation was not technical and I think I was quite pleasant so I don't think I did anything wrong there but I didn't get a job offer.
Unfortunately, the drop-down did not allow me to specify 'White Caribbean ethnic group" - Technically I'm a descendant of white settlers who settled the Caribbeans 500 years ago. My guess is they were not a big fan of the white variety of ethnic Carribbeans.
Middle Management Machivallianism
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.
>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.
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.
The issue is that several career tracks have some form of low pay, filtering, or outright hazing when you start out, with the promise that if you stick with the program, you will end your career at the top. Medicine, law, etc. If that promise is taken away, a lot of people on the job and in the education pipeline would be questioning whether it was worth the pain points (and not thinking about reforming and improving the entry level experience, lol). In the US this is one of the fears around socialized medicine.
Another problem is those career arcs are so long, where in something like tech or consulting, if you stick with it for 5-8 years you historically have a lot of seniority over new hires.
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
Some things are more than just jobs - they are callings. Journalism and teaching are two. People wouldn't do them if they were just jobs, because they don't pay enough to cover the headaches.
ya the trick is to have negative expectations.
Hah I know a professor that retired and never stopped working on his projects. He just stopped handling paperwork at the university.
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.
> 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.
Is that due respect? That may be your perception of work now, but how many people have much of their self esteem bound up in the work they do at their current place? I want employees and coworkers like that. But what you’re talking about is both life under Late Stage Capitalism and also a bit of blindness as though someone being squeezed by the death of newspapers could just find a different newspaper job.
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.
> Maybe go find some non-tech work for a little bit to stretch the dollars and ensure I have health insurance.
son let me tell you about health care coverage at non-FAANG companies... it ain't great.
and the market is brutal out there. you're gonna have to try hard to get a Home Depot job
> you're gonna have to try hard to get a Home Depot job
Things are definitely weird because the current unemployment rate isn't far off 50 year lows: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
> son let me tell you about health care coverage at non-FAANG companies... it ain't great
Union job will get you good health insurance.
Software probably isn’t that, but if you need health insurance more than cash, be strategic.
If you’re getting screwed on the compensation and it’s important enough to you, think outside the box about the area you work in.
> you're gonna have to try hard to get a Home Depot job
Only the most desperate SWE/HN poster is looking for hourly jobs at Home Depot. I think this is bogus.
I've worked at plenty of non-FAANG companies. Only at those companies, in fact. The health care coverage was fine at most of them.
I’ve been in the industry a long time and benefits at FAANG are not great. Deductibles are high, subsidy pretty average, overall package weak. Earlier in my career I paid nothing for insurance, had a lot of fringe benefits, and I was genuinely grateful for the perks. I’ve looked at ACA alternatives compared to my FAANG benefits and it wasn’t a huge difference frankly - better on the margin but nothing to write home about, at least in my local market.
The fact people have to find a job not for money but for health insurance is about as dystopian as I can imagine. Toil just to not get sick and go broke, not because you need the money. What a sad world we built for ourselves.
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.
This is all a bit out there, but I moved to New Zealand on a working holiday visa, and within two weeks of settling down in a particular spot (after a two month road trip), I had two job offers, one very relaxed retail, and one tech-adjacent for a small civil engineering firm. I'm making about a quarter the take home I did in the US, but I've cut my expenses a lot (bought my car in cash, carpool to work to save gas money, rent a room in a house instead of a whole apartment, no food delivery), and I'm using this time to reevaluate my values and work on building a lifestyle that does not rely on earning a six figure salary.
My plan when I return is to get my EMT and moonlight as an ER tech while doing prerequisites for PA school or maybe medical physics.
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).
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.
buyouts usually imply a far more generous offer than just termination and severance.
also means they can dodge any NDA / wrongful termination / bad behavior issues on the way out. sign the doc and play nice and get $$$.
keep in mind the US doesn't have great protections in that regard, so "severance" may be them allowing you to collect the last of your crap on the way out and paying you through the end of the week.
Layoff severance isn't great and it's very common for companies to use the performance system to get rid of people. Suddenly someone stops meeting expectations and are gone within weeks.
The first layoff or in this case the first buyout is probably the most generous one.
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
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.
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?
> I have doubts that this is suitable as a generalized statement like that.
I had doubts too, but it is in ALL CAPS so it must be true?
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
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.
Unemployment isn’t very much, is it?
I'm not sure if that's true.
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.
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.
They did VEPs at Google at my org a year ago and nothing has happened yet.
Sometimes--very rarely--one's ethics may dictate not taking it, as with the "fork" email to U.S. Federal Government employees. Or when an early-stage company layoff is being done in tandem with a buyback/tender to reduce employee ownership before the board does something crazy.
Most of the time, though, you're right. Take it.
If it was true, then companies would offer less and less money until it stopped being true
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'.
That is a fantastic package; you'd have to be daft or blindly proud to not bite on that
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 you still get unemployment too?
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. :)
> 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.
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.
Not sure I understand. If getting laid off in the current environment is extra terrifying then why will people volunteer to get laid off?
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...
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
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.
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.
The worst case scenario is not taking the offer then getting let go for performance, which means zero severance, health insurance terminated same day.
That's generally not legal in the U.S. or most of the EU. The company would have to establish a very significant paper trail to establish that these individual "performance-based" layoffs were not part of a layoff subject to WARN regulations (or their European equivalents which are even stricter). The hurdle is so large that no company has successfully pulled off such a feat, and many of the companies that tried ended up paying significantly more in penalties to their local Depts of Labor than they would have saved with this stunt.
I don't really know the legality of it, but I can tell you that last year around April there was quite a big wave of sudden performance terminations within Microsoft and these people did not get severance. I know because I was a manager of one of these people and had to deliver the news. I know that many of these people had had a below 100 rating on their previous performance review, but we were unaware at the time that this meant a death sentence for these employees several months later when we got the email a few days in advance of the termination. It was hundreds, if not thousands of affected people.
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?
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)
And one of, if not the most, expensive costs
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.
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.
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.
Such a gross analogy to conflate obesity with supporting slightly more people than you need to financially.
1/4 becomes a de facto standard, the companies will be expected to follow starting right now.
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
You can tell what proportion they want to take the offer by how generous the offer is. And indeed:
> The Redmond, Washington-based company is expecting a lower proportion to accept the voluntary exit offer because the employees included in the offer are younger and no additional incentive is given beyond standard severance for their length of service, the person familiar said. Typical take-up levels for buyouts in tech are between 3 per cent and 5 per cent, they added.
https://www.ft.com/content/2ef29406-f2f8-413f-81f6-5ae098c97...
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Yes, but companies realise the important cogs much later in the process.
> A rational company
I've never worked at a rational company. I'm not sure that's a thing.
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.
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.
Is 2 weeks per year really that generous.
The mistake is to believe anything coming from executives. They are not your friends.
I was in a startup during Covid. The CEO said: "unlike many startups, we just got a round of investment so we are in a really good situation and we won't have to let go anyone, you can be reassured". A week later, they fired a whole team and a few other employees.
Executives are not your friends, and they are not paid to tell you the truth.
Lying is in the job description. I'm convinced that to rise (or be groomed and practically anointed through nepotism and corruption) to that level in business, you have to trade a part of your humanity. There comes a point where wealth and power changes you and I'm convinced that the aspiration of it is really a form of concealed, socially acceptable sociopathy.
So yes. They are not only not your friends, they're outright hostile and you should trust nothing they say and approach every interaction with them as a game and try your best to at least break even.
They likely view you with deep contempt and derision, if they acknowledge that you have any measure of self worth at all. You should act accordingly.
What a sad, miserable take. This is not at all my experience.
Literally the exact thing the CEO of my old Berlin based startup said before our team was laid off / replaced with AI.
I remember when Microsoft really started going downhill almost 4 years ago. I've done well personally, but the way that things have been going in that time I would have been happy to leave. I've always been in the 120-140 range every year for performance while I watch people who didn't deserve it either get laid off due to poor business decisions or fired for reasons beyond their control.
I did not get the choice to just leave with a buyout today and really wish I did. I'd be happy to go. I am not really sure I even want to work in this industry anymore which is unfortunate because I've been in it for pretty much my entire adult life. I have other interests though so I'm sure I'd find something to occupy my time.
This company follows trends and rarely sets them these days and the meme of Microsoft's corporate structure with each org pointing guns at each other isn't too far off from the truth. It doesn't always translate to good long-term strategy or even decent products in recent years.
That's what the money is for.
Do you feel that statement is in conflict with this action?
Yes 100%
Is it too cynical to think that "our people" means the shareholders?
All the people simping in the comments a few days ago lol.
Oh don’t worry, a company representative will definitely be standing next to you as you’re walked out the door.
I mean, two out of three isn’t bad, right?
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
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_)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
This is why it was only offered to 60k people. The best performers are likely not given the option.
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.
9 figure signing bonuses are a horrible problem to have
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.
Are you one of the best in tech?
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.
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.
"Microsoft also used to employee engineers focused soley on testing software"
Is this weird in any way? I live in EU land, but this does not seem too uncommon. As a developer Ive had assignments where I only wrote unit test, another where I was reponsible for daily CI running well (though both moved towards development eventually). I heard just the other day about a competitor where you did not write your own test code.
It's sort of weird in a world that has moved to an DevOps-style ethos for most development.
But yes, before that it would be not at all unusual to have “test engineers” or other technical staff whose entire responsibility laid with setting up test environments and running QA of products. These people did not do product dev, though they may have been involved in writing supporting test platform libraries or even maintaining test infrastructure (like IBM Jazz).
Even today in the U.S. companies that haven’t fully jumped onto newer development practices probably still have QA and/or test departments.
Isn't this still a thing? "Software Engineer in Test" being the newer term?
I just checked LinkedIn and they have quite a few job listings in this vein. Which makes sense: in the "AI and YOLO" development lifecycle, automated testing is more important than ever.
60k workers is only ~18 billion. Maybe 36 billion. Maybe even 72.
That's small potatoes vs their new excess capex spend of 100sB/y.
This isn't the end.
> breaking the company back up into smaller companies that preserve the stability of the workforce.
Blasphemy! Bring the torches!
> worth a trillion dollars
You mean 3.96T dollars, right?
"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?!
Failing to live up to a business promise runs afoul of promissory estoppel: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/promissory_estoppel.asp
There is plenty of room for uncertainty where promissory estoppel and right-to-work laws intersect.
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?
> And people believed them?!
Probably because they could sue them for not keeping their word.
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 if we get the same acceptance rate. This would be about a 10% reduction in headcount.
Was this Shaw?
Hi David. Yep, it was.
>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.
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.
hey! we said no questions asked!
Weren't Microsoft just caught cheating trying to hire H1B's without looking for US based applicants first?
Given that they are now saying they have 25% too many employees, perhaps they should be banned from hiring H1B's altogether until they're rehired however many they end up letting go ...
> Weren't Microsoft just caught cheating trying to hire H1B's without looking for US based applicants first?
No they weren't. If this administration had strong reasons to believe Microsoft cheated and engaged in fraudulent practices, the DoJ would have opened an investigation leading to punitive measures. It's a dog whistle and red meat for "the base."
> Given that they are now saying they have 25% too many employees, perhaps they should be banned from hiring H1B's altogether until they're rehired however many they end up letting go ...
That's not going to happen. It's easier for them to send the jobs offshore. You could support banning American companies from hiring in other companies in addition to immigration. I'm sure that will work out great for the US.
Ah yes, the old “well we won’t hire you anyway” argument, that’s a good one
I don't know why they would do that. Just look at all the names and locations of the people keeping the lights on in their public Azure repos..
Spoiler; they just staff up directly overseas now.
lol, wonder if this one will be flagged too.
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...
> The FAGMAN companies
For sardonic reasons, I prefer "MANNA".
It seems heavenly until the wailing and gnashing of teeth begin.
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
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.
>Software engineers
This Microsoft deal for the large part is not being offered to software engineering orgs.
The measurers? Software engineers have a lot of extra time to measure things now and are still much more valuable..
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.
Definitely
If they actually had a need for those software engineers right now, they wouldn't play that game. (Or rather, if they could make more money by having them create something than they could save on wages from playing the game.)
But at that point, they almost should be laying off engineers, even without playing any such game.
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/
"There are recessions where you need to switch from equities into bonds. And there are recessions where you need to stock up on beans and shotgun shells."
Why is MS doing this after the latest troubles with VP Vance regarding layoffs?
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 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.
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.
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.
And we think you're gonna love it.
_wait_
One more thing: Don't hit the door on your way out!
The new Office, 25% slimmer
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
"Shareholders will love it! Our company has never told staff to get stuffed better!"
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.
"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 know what you're saying, but I wonder how many people there are even on HN who wouldn't consider US$1M/year to be "big money".
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)
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).
The article mentions „ vice president level and below“
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.
2014 was the year they acquired minecraft/mojang and nokia, which may have accounted for a lot of that growth. Also 2022 was the Activision/Blizzard acquisition which would have been well over 10k new employees...
Mojang was tiny, they had all of 40 employees. Nokia, on the other hand, was enormous, with 25,000.
I believe this number is FTE's and not contractors. That's a whole different story, and I don't think those numbers are public. After a layoff at big tech, you see an influx of contractors. I would not be surprised if it was 50/50 at this point.
What’s the reason for the stagnation/decline since 2022?
The usual answer for the macro trend is “the end of ZIRP”.
60k workers is only ~18 billion. Maybe 36 billion. Maybe even 72.
That's small potatoes vs their new excess capex spend of 100sB/y.
Maybe making the business look more lean/efficient to prep for upcoming bond/debt/whatever mechanism they'll use to get those 100sB/y...
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.
Users are coming back. These aren't the sort of users to come back to a dying platform
https://x.com/firefox
https://x.com/marcoarment
https://x.com/viticci
https://x.com/CaseyNewton
https://x.com/gruber
> 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.
There was also a report saying X is back to its original valuation https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elo...
The Financial Times report is behind a paywall so I'm not sure how that evaluation was reached. Also there are a bunch of bizarre financial shenanigans Musk has freely pulled with zero scrutiny. Hard to gauge the full impact of the layoffs when the person at the helm is profoundly amoral and has no scruples about lying.
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.
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.
This is so true. Twitter built TikTok three years before TikTok itself launched. (Vine)
If you aren't growing and building, then obviously you don't need the same amount of people only to maintain what you have. It doesn't take that many people to fix bugs, renew SSL certificates and plug security holes.
Game studios knew this since forever. Once you finish building, if you aren't building something new, then you're laying off. It's not a new thing Twitter/Musk has just discovered. Odd that whenever this is discussed, it's framed as if Twitter-then is the same thing as Twitter-now, minus most of its employees and doing just fine.
Exactly. As an SRE I can wrap up my job and leave within the quarter if changes and growth stop.
Laying off all those people didn't tank the site, it tanked the business!
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
Keep in mind that we don't know how many engineers from his other companies have worked or are working on Twitter since it (a) went private, then (b) merged with SpaceX. So the "I fired 80% of my staff and nothing happened" meme is a bit incomplete
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
You can see from the replies (highly political responses that are focused on the EM angle rather than particularly caring about the twitter angle) that really don't like this answer. Unfortunately for them it's true. After some initial stumbles after the firings (which journalists were practically cheering from the rooftops), today it seems to be much the same as it was before all that. And that makes reddit types really really mad.
I suspect this is what got Meta and other companies at least considering whether they would benefit from doing this at a much smaller scale, because there were some mass firings the next year at other companies, but this could have just been in the pipes anyway due to overhiring before.
I don't think this is true. Twitter is able to support roughly as many users as before on only 20% of the employees, but those users aren't Twitter's customers. Their customers were the advertisers who paid them money to advertise to those users. And the majority of Twitter's staff before the acquisition were working for those customers- either keeping conversations to be the sorts of things advertisers wanted to be associated with or categorizing and data-mining the messages that had been sent to figure out the ads to show users or building a advertising management platform for those customers to use or maintaining relationships with all of the advertisers.
After the acquisition, advertising revenue dramatically dropped (to a low of about 1/3 in 2025 though it has apparently recovered up to only down about 50%!), because all of those functions were gutted. This is why Twitter tried to switch to "buying a blue-check" and other premium features (e.g. access to Grok), because they had fired all of the people necessary to run a real advertising business and they needed revenue.
And I know that you don't need that many employees to support Twitter's customer facing business because Bluesky does basically the same thing (message storage/search backend+web app+two mobile apps) and they worked for over a year on just 20 million in total raises (and no advertising or any other revenue)- they did a Series B in 2025 that raised over 100 million, but they were operational for over a year on just 20 million in raise. So yeah, it doesn't take that many people to just present the messages of users to other users, but what Twitter did was to cut back on what they did for their customers and accept the big drop in revenue that came with it, and that's not really proof of anything.
>today it seems to be much the same as it was before all that
User numbers are down 20% since the acquisition, ad revenue is halved and the value of the company has collapsed. Where is the politics? The only political thing was the acquisition itself. It ceased to function as a growth and market based company and effectively became a propaganda outlet, EM is highly relevant in that this was the actual point.
As a product the entire platform has stagnated, which is what you'd expect if you let most people go and just use it as an arm for election influence.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-firing-wor...
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.
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.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91552571/elon-musk-twitter-x-dea...
Wut?
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.
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".
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.
A very small fraction will actually take it. You're wrongly considering the headline number.
With the almost 10x share price run-up of the last few years, an offer of fully-vesting is going to sound pretty good to a lot of people.
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.
We are recruiting in Sweden and apparently its very hard finding good candidates. Most are fresh from very short (2 years) educations or other special cases as opposed to having had 4-5 years of university and maybe some experience.
Fun thing though, we recently let a consultant go due to relying too much on LLMs.
If you re hiring remote across EU I know a dev with actual experience who can still engineer using his own brain (me) :p
Do you restrict your hiring to candidates with fluent Swedish?
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
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)
In London, lots of jobs (at least for senior SWEs)
How's the market there, out of curiosity? Good enough to compensate London's housing costs?
Really? I feel the opposite way
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
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
I recently took a contract with big tech after working with startups for about a year ( I was at this big corp a year ago)
Maybe it’s the small sample size, but from what I’ve seen, the thing hurting velocity more than anything is the fact that teams have too many “cooks”.
The way work is delegated is a bit broken when in reality the engineer who knows the code base or problem best should scope the work and just delegate it to their agents.
I can’t image how things look on the BI side.
Conversion rate will almost certainly be far from 100%
Imagine it's more like a net 10% will leave, which is in line with many layoffs (acknowledging Microsoft's size makes this a large number)
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.
They are..not!
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
Of their engineers or lawyers division? ;)
Interesting. Nobody on a visa will take the offer, presumably, so it's kind of a workaround for all the immigration controversy.
they'll just get forced out
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
Scary AND exciting: zoomed out, 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.
What could happen, even in countries with strong socialist worker protections (western europe) or high cost of living (US, europe, many others), is that labour will become cheaper again. We'll be "poorer", less able to import, but on the other hand may be able to do more locally. We may also see larger economic class differences, as you essentially said youself.
In a way this could be a downgrade, we'll be less incentivived to optimized or automate, and will be able to just throw bodies at problems.
https://archive.ph/PBEOK
(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.
This fake news won’t die.
I was making over market rate on H1B. The petition process forces the employer to pay market rate or above.
Also the transfer petition is very easy and it usually takes 2-4 weeks. You can argue that changing jobs is higher friction for H1B workers, but if you are offered more salary elsewhere but decide to stay, well, that’s kind of on you, not the H1B process.
surely this is a sign GitHub uptime is about to improve.
Underrated joke
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.)
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)
> you're probably not the likely target for the offer
but if I was that employable, and offered that severance, I'd not give it one second's thought
and that's the problem, these severance packages are more often taken by the best people in the company
"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.
Not necessarily. If there aren't enough tasks to make use of the increased productivity of the employees, it makes them less valuable, because the company can get away with fewer employees.
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
Having no regard for the quality of the end user experience opens up a lot of business possibilities, LLM's or not.
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.
And the worst thing is that, when Microsoft turns around and begins recruiting again, people will just forget this and accept the golden handcuffs once more. Techies aren't as smart as they think they are. They are just a slightly more expensive cog. But a cog nonetheless. And all cogs can be replaced.
This is the beginning of the end of big tech. I interned at MSFT Research and was shocked at how much money is thrown at a dart board hoping something sticks. The talent there was much better off psychologically and probably long term financially joining or founding a startup. Excited to see smaller companies pick up the revenue big tech will lose.
Unfortunately MSR as you knew it is gone. The Technology and Research division has been quietly shuttered and the org is now reporting up through Azure Security. It's been slowly parted out over the last 9 months and its one few departments in C+AI where most if not all employees are being given the severance offer.
Coincides with an EMNLP keynote sharing a tweet saying “big lab people now ignore NeurIPS/iclr/ etc papers and regard them as full of lies”.
Well, AI research outside of frontier labs had a good run. Gonna suck when competing with the other 30% unemployment white collar workers. When you say what work you used to do, some of them may end up trying to be violent towards one who is seen as having worked on the tech that killed the golden goose.
30 years ago it was IBM in these stories, and Microsoft was the rising star.
In 30 years we’ll be reading these stories about Anthropic.
It’s the nature of the industry.
I’m theoretically wondering what will happen to a country like USA when unemployment hits, say, 25%.
The hungry needs to eat. If majority are hungry and everything is concentrated in a small group of people, they’ll eat them. Has happened before with lower than 25% rate.
Right. And this unemployment will also cascade, because small businesses will go bankrupt after loosing their customers.
Right now, a hiccup in Chinese production of a certain IC may make buying toilet paper harder in Germany! It’s naive to think that such drastic changes (mass unemployment) will not be extremely turbulent (to put it mildly).
I spent ~15 years there, left at level 66. Here's the thing people don't want to hear; a lot of people there, particularly management, but others also, are either coasting or not that great.
You have the guy who wrote code in the 90's, became a dev manager, maybe is a PUM now, or still a dev manager, and basically "does emails and attends meetings", goes to the "daily triage" (which has a whole bunch of people in the room), is a member of the "war team" (they probably don't use that term any more). All these people are not "doing" anything useful and there are a lot of them at MS.
This used to work out fine, because the way the August reviews always worked (stacked rank etc.) it's very much a favorites game, "who you know". So you get a pass.
But suddenly there's a reorg and new management comes in (or a flattening; no more dev leads with 2 reports!). And they have their own set of dev leads, dev managers, etc. they want to install. So the existing management gets kicked out, those who still have buddies in other orgs will transfer there (but this gets much rarer now, as most friends from 'old Microsoft' have retired). But the "does emails & attends meetings" guy is out of a job (and is going to cry "age discrimination" because he's 50+, but the reality is he hasn't done a whole lot for a decade, and has zero useful skills now).
PMs; there are WAY too many of these, with their entire parallel org of management. There used to be almost as many PMs as devs back in the day. Other companies don't have anywhere near so many. Most of them can go; back in the day a lot of them would go to the dev's office, ask about a topic someone asked about in email, the dev says "Oh I can just reply to the thread", PM says "Nooo... let me do that" (PM wants to be the one replying to be 'visible' even though they are just a glorified status collector/forwarder).
There ARE a lot of incredible people there, and the best people I worked with at MS are just as good as the best I worked with at the FANGs. But unlike other companies (FANGs, startups) there are a LOT of a really bad/useless people there too. A lot. Although I have no faith that MS is going to lose THOSE people in this buyout.
Engineering discipline is absolutely non-existent at MS. Everything is date driven. The source tree (Source Depot) gets locked as of X date and only "test fixes" can be checked in after that. But the next ship vehicle is months away. So people keep checking in regular code as "test fixes" after the branch lock. One time it got so bad that the build was actually broken for the entire day of the branch lock, and people were force submitting in the evening (everyone expected whoever broke the build to fix it, but... they didn't, so force submit!) to make sure their changes got in before the lock.
Random unrelated funny MS story: The wiki that everyone in Bing used, got wiped out, because it was running on a machine in someone's office that got wiped when they left. We had to have everyone run a script to salvage what they could off everyone in the org's browser cache.
I mostly agree with your assessment of the culture. I have been here for 6.5 years and have never seen source tree, I work in Azure and everything is in Azure Devops and we commit and deploy chaotically.
Might want to change that to “spent 15 years there, ~15 years ago” :)
Curious if they still do the daily triage and war rooms. I left in 2010 but those practices seemed like a remnant of the 90s era desktop computing paradigm than web or cloud.
This is what economic recession looks like, right?
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.
Typical bloated Tech company with probably lots of managers who comes off the back of a master degree and happy to create lots of meaningless meeting
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.
It would be funny if all these engineers start making open source versions of what they were working on.
And what will happen to all these software engineers who are laid off, and to massss who are graduating in CS (because the same CEOs told them it's a good carrier)?
They simply are readjusted to their natural socioeconomic place.
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 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.
Sadly, the stock is up on this news.
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
The Seattle "Eastside" is not really Seattle, it's Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland, Issaquah and Sammamish - overpriced suburbs. I live in one of them and work at MSFT.
It's not the end of the world. Seattle is incredibly expensive, however the market is down this year and listings sitting on the market for months and months. The problem is influx of people who need to sell because they lost their job or accepted the buyout - it can ruin their life further down the line.
Give the low quality of microsoft's products, I am very ready to believe that even simple agents can do a better job.
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.
It sounds like you're assuming the poor quality is a result of developer incompetence rather than deliberate management decisions.
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.
Welp, that explains why they ghosted me after the interviews. And they went very well.
I guess they spent all their money on AI
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)
Obviously, details are thin. I’m very curious how these offers are distributed by role and by seniority.
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
That was my experience at Automattic. When we were offered nine months’ pay to leave, I still believed things would improve, so I chose the “stability” of staying. In hindsight, that was a costly mistake.
A few months later, I was laid off anyway, with severance nowhere near what either of the two buyout offers had included. I regret passing up the offer because I trusted the company and believed things would get better. I spent several months out of work, burned through my savings, and am still feeling the financial effects today.
That doesn’t tell us what this company’s target is, but a voluntary buyout certainly doesn’t rule out layoffs later. If I were facing that choice again, I’d take the buyout in a heartbeat
Let's just hope this is middle-management only, the ones who are causing all the trouble
Shirley, you're kidding.
Don't call me Shirley.
I've never middle management cut to same levels as IC. I dont know why that is though.
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.
For non-Americans: IC = Independent contributor = employee without people reporting to them
The same reason you’ve never seen the US Congress meaningfully change anything about their role, compensation, etc.
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 think it's time we all start talking about a 4day workweek. these tech oligarchs love to talk about sharing AI with the world, well if it increases productivity, don't lay off employees, SHARE the productivity gains by reducing the workweek. We're all going to be completely replaced in the not far future, but the companies are so cut-throat, it all must go straight to the shareholders.
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...
It seems one quarter are eligible. The target reduction is presumably much less.
The best path is always save up enough for at least 6 months of runway if you get laid off, at a bare minimum.
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?
How much did Satya lose on that sports "prediction market" Sweeney keeps advertising to our kids?
Effectively that means that getting blocked from H1B is a non-issue for Microsoft, since they already have way too many workers.
Hahaha
I better hope Microsoft’s H1B applications get denied for a few years.
That’s a lot of workers looking for work.
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.
Is there any word on which divisions/lines of business they are offering for?
Is it known if this is AI related?
Or perhaps, as Zack noted, Musk showed them the way?
Copilot, AI spending, missing mobile, Surface, Xbox taking their toll.
> In response to the AI-driven platform shift, Microsoft is trying to reskill and relocate workers and is still hiring
Damn, I’m glad I’m not a developer.
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.
They only had $281bn in revenue last year.
Won't somebody please think of the poor fortune 10 companies
There's no doubt big tech is/was bloated. It was (relatively) cheap to stack and retain talent just so your competition couldn't get them. There was also an era where VPs and directors had direct incentives to grow their orgs as large as possible.
The opportunity cost is higher now (companies are actually spending money on capex), and changes in productivity due to AI mean that simply hoarding talented developers isn't as useful any more. Before, you could keep people "busy" doing things that didn't really produce anything useful, and still find ways to justify it. VPs and directors are now being rewarded for "doing more with less" - not just shipping the largest organization.
I think overall SWE numbers will continue to slowly climb, but I think we're going to see more big tech unwind bloated staff numbers.
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..
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.
This is why I bought real estate in the bull market of the last decade.
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.
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.
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".
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…
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.)
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?
> 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.
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.
> everyone but the US is now looking to divest from them as fast as possible
This! EU is now in full "decoupling" mode, many future contracts are now under reviews and plans how to preserve sovereignty.
Btw seeing what ArtCraft does it is now really realistic. Will it be SuSe + Mistral, or a kind of ArtCraft like vibe coded solutions?
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
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.
11-12% annually, so yeah a year long hiring freeze might get you to the right number. The problem is that it gives you no flexibility or control over who attrits, and removes your ability to keep critical roles filled.
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
This is the biggest recent tech news over even maybe the last five years. This isn’t like Twitter, where the layoffs were arbitrary
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.
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.
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...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.
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