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.
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. That's important work.
It is important work, but we have yet to find an economic model to effectively support it and the people doing the work.
(i donate to journalism orgs across the US [ProPublica, Associated Press, Tampa Bay Times, Salt Lake Tribune, Marion County Record, Muckrock], but far more and consistent financial support is needed than these orgs are receiving today)
It 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.
In the US, currently, ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US, ~400k/month, ~4.8M/year. 60k workers leaving Microsoft is a drop in the bucket, relatively speaking. But of course, they should still get as much support as possible via the packages they accept, and getting to retirement (Social Security and Medicare benefits) as pain free and least uncertainty as possible.
> Granted I know you are really talking about the local emotional effect but the granular net effect is worth the conversation too.
I vote for and support Democratic Socialist candidates, who would implement and maintain more humane and pro worker economic systems, I'm doing my part at system levels. But systems will take decades to change. It took decades to get here from Ronald Reagan and his policies. Certainly, people should never be in economic peril, but they also shouldn't tie their identity to their job, or think their job matters. The evidence is robust that the job does not matter.
(and if you think there is a problem with corporate earnings vs what workers take home, again, that is a political and labor organizing problem to solve for)
> In the US, currently, ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means...
Sure, from a raw numbers perspective it's a drop in the bucket. But not all numbers are created equal. How does the pay of these employees from Microsoft compare? You mention those of the baby boomer generation, but are all employees who may be leaving Microsoft of the same age range? What about their skillsets and the investments they and we as society of spent in their education? Those other factors matter quite a bit, so you can't just do a simple 1-1 analysis of "people".
> Certainly, people should never be in economic peril, but they also shouldn't tie their identity to their job, or think their job matters. The evidence is robust that the job does not matter.
Why? Which evidence? I think more people could have more meaning if they were self-employed, were craftsmen or artisans, and such, but this nihilistic viewpoint (which is a hallmark of anti-social/authoritarian ideologies like DSA and others) not only doesn't reflect reality but seeks to belittle those who do in fact find meaning and joy in their work. I for one like my job and have liked most of the jobs I've had. Just because an organization no longer needs you, or you no longer need it, doesn't mean that the job all of a sudden "doesn't matter".
If people don't tie their identity to the thing they spend the most time doing what will they tie it to? Should a police officer or teacher not think of themselves through the lens of their chosen profession? When you ask a professor at your university do you want to work with one who doesn't tie themselves to their work or their research? Would you want to buy produce from a farmer who sort of doesn't care about the quality of the food they grow? Do you want to fly on an airplane built by people who think their job doesn't matter?
If the org can operate without you in the role, or without the role itself, the job does not matter. The human always matters, the job does not.
> If people don't tie their identity to the thing they spend the most time doing what will they tie it to? Should a police officer or teacher not think of themselves through the lens of their chosen profession? When you ask a professor at your university do you want to work with one who doesn't tie themselves to their work or their research? Would you want to buy produce from a farmer who sort of doesn't care about the quality of the food they grow? Do you want to fly on an airplane built by people who think their job doesn't matter?
Finding meaning in the human condition and experience I suppose. Is that in your job? I argue no, but everyone will find meaning in their own way, if they find it before death. I fly on Boeing equipment occasionally (not my choice), so I definitely fly on airplanes built by companies who think building good aircraft doesn't matter. I'm sure some people at Boeing care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia of "bean counter idgaf".
I 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
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 think we should buy people out with reasonable comp and let them live the rest of their life doing something that brings them joy and happiness, even if that's volunteering in what they used to get paid for. But I'm not a policymaker.
Respect is how you feel, a good position in life is a function of your retirement benefits and financial comfort. If the market has no place for these folks anymore, and we're not offering a permanent jobs bank to keep people working who want to work (which I absolutely think we should do), "it is what it is." Sorry if they feel bad about market changes and demand for certain skills and labor.
We show respect by packaging folks out to live comfortable remainders of their life. "Thank you for your contribution and service." Lack of respect is leaving them hanging in the wind financially, not words. If you need a job to feel needed and respected after entering retirement and with sufficient financial and retiree benefits support, we'll throw a standing appointment with a therapist into the package and/or a volunteer opportunity online board/bank.
If you're looking for validation from your job or your work as a component of your identity, you're going to end up sad. That's a choice.
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 obviously depends on the specific amounts of the package as well as the timeline and personal impact of the upcoming layoffs (the latter of which you can’t know).
The company doesn’t necessarily want everyone to take the package, and they’re inevitably going to price the separation benefits such that some employees would end up better off taking it and others would end up better off not taking it.
Always? What I’ve seen is sometimes the buy out is no better than the current severance package. Might as well ride it out. The severance could in theory get worse over time but that doesn’t seem like a worthwhile reason to throw away your job. You’re also throwing away unemployment.
If you take it you're not eligible to unemployment. I think in this market, given the undefined length of employment searching at the moment, that's a major consideration.
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).
I've a neighbour who declined, and then got hit by layoffs. It was quite a gamble, and they lost out big time.
Honestly, if work was to come at me with a buy-out offer, and I was in a position to be able to afford to not work for a few years, I'd probably accept. Maybe go find some non-tech work for a little bit to stretch the dollars and ensure I have health insurance.
We're in such a bubble at the moment, things are going to get really rough.
Often, buyouts terms are more generous than layoff terms. Even if the company has a history of generous layoff terms, the next one may be less generous.
The other thing to consider is if you'll want to keep working at the company after so many people have left due to the buyout and the layoff. If not, taking the buyout and looking for a new job is likely to be better for you than not taking the buyout, not getting laid off, and looking for a new job once you conclude you don't like the new environment. For one thing, you'll probably have buyout compensation and new job compensation at the same time; for another, it may be easier to find a new job if you're in the market before the layoffs increase the hiring pool.
A couple of times in my career, I was one of those who were not given out a buyout. I was chosen to keep the lights on while the number of employees shrank every month. It sucked. I was given responsibility for systems with no documentation or than a username/password. I was called by all sorts of people I had never spoken to who had their hair on fire because the system was breaking left and right. I wished I was given the buyout; instead I was told I should be grateful I had a paycheck. No thanks.
I've never been involved in such a situation, but I assume part of individual's calculation is: If I indicate interest, but the company doesn't accept it or go through with it and keeps me... am I now viewed as a disloyal, detached worker?
I've been given such an offer. The company gave eligible employees X days to opt in and then it gave itself Y days to decide which volunteers would get buyouts. This matter of loyalty perception was certainly a live question for the employees. But also the company did iterative buyouts so in later rounds there was some evidence available to the current prospects about how employees were treated earlier. Not so much in what opportunities were withheld from the "disloyal" but in the take rate of volunteers and in the probability of being "laid off" given the receipt of an earlier buyout offer.
Ahhh, I retract my previous statement. I assumed it was "do you want to accept the offer". If it is "do you want to be considered for the offer" that's a little more complicated...
Not a problem. While it is reasonable to consider the signaling impact of all your comms at work, if you take this, they'll smile at getting closer to quota and wish you well.
Reasons to accept. Reasons to decline, but that isn't one of them.
Just because the offer is made to 25% of the workforce doesn’t mean they will all accept. These are generally very well paid jobs and the prospect of entering the job market right now isn’t going to appeal to everyone. Especially not when you have upcoming RSU vests after a recent 50% stock rally. If say a third of the employees accept then it’ll be an ~8% reduction, which is in line with a regular company-wide layoff.
There is a difference this time though. There has never been a time in last 40 years where being laid off seemed terrifying for knowledge workers in tech. It's speculative what's ahead, but man, does it LOOK bleak. Many would still come out OK, but it's not a given.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
They aren't cutting staff because they made a ton of money. They are cutting staff because they see trouble on the horizon and are positioning themselves for that. Layoffs are rarely lagging indicators. They are more often predictors of trouble coming. This bubble will explode, MSFT wants to survive it. Thats all there is to it.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
That's true. Other ways are to offer "secret" bonuses and other perks to the talent you want to keep. If the management / department wants to keep you no matter what, you will clearly notice this despite mass layoffs.
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.
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
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.
Yes and No. If you are a citizen and have “AI” experience there’s plenty of startups offering base salaries in excess of the average Microsoft total comp.
"1/4 of workforce was offered buyouts" does not mean all 60000 will accept them. "Results may vary", you know.
I saw it happening in a funny way not long time ago - company offered buyouts, but got insanely surprised when high percentage of people actually accepted it. Management thought acceptance rate would be much, much lower, but when numbers started to pour in on a 2nd day, oh man... Panic spread very quickly because people were accepting packages in fear of layoffs without such package, so management said if any layoffs will happen in 3 years period after this, same package will be offered no question asked. Cooled things a bit, but what a mess...
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Before getting wrapped up in the usual LLM vs anti-LLM narratives, note that like many of these recent layoffs, this is essentially reversing 2020-2022 net headcount growth.
IMO a lot of these layoffs are companies going from an experimental fiscal mindset to a conservative fiscal mindset - ie, rather than acquiring companies and hiring to grow into new markets, a lot of organizations are falling back on what they know works, independent of any productivity impact of LLMs.
So I checked your claim and it is accurate, in 2020 Microsoft had 163,000 while in 2022 it had 221,000.
There is a big HOWEVER. At least 2 in fact.
1. The company had been growing in the previous years, 2019, 2018, 2017 (they shrank somewhat in 2015 or 2016). In 2014 they had 29% workforce increase. So the significant growth in 2021/22 is not an aberration but rather continuation of the growth in previous years.
2. What IS an aberration is the workforce count after 2022. No growth in 2023 or 2025 (as in ZERO YoY change), and measly +7,000/3% growth in 2024. And some YoY loss in 2026 (-5,000, or 2.2%). With 2027 YoY likely showing at least some (and possibly a lot) of these 60,000.
So no, "it's just overhiring due to pandemic" was supposed to die years ago.
I also believe the Twitter exodus exposed the software engineering headcount sham for what it is. Something like 80% of the company left or was let go, and despite all the smug laughing about how the platform would go under within weeks, it just kept on going.
> Something like 80% of the company left or was let go, and despite all the smug laughing about how the platform would go under within weeks, it just kept on going
I’ve heard this claim many times and is not backed by any more evidence than “it works on my machine”.
If the company really did continue to operate in the same manner, it wouldn’t have been worth 80% less in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...), nor would it need to be rolled up and financially engineered into being part of an AI company that then gets rolled into a rocket company.
It has been losing users, safety standards have dropped and overall the platform is worse off than before. There’s a reason why no other company has done something similar with their employee counts.
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.
It kept on going, but they have been far less stable from a technical OR leadership perspective. They had a user exodus. They had advertisers leave in droves. I suspect it was a net negative change.
I strongly disagree with this take; do you think all companies are 80% SREs? Did Twitter make money by serving pages to users?
The Twitter exodus does relate to this, kind of; it's an example of the "fall back on existing revenue streams" strategy (you could call it a private equity playbook, but it's more universal than that) exaggerated by the guy acquiring it not needing more revenue and clobbering the revenue part too.
Twitter pre-Musk had an _enormous_ amount of experiments going on. They were building streaming services, clones of every social network you can think of (Spaces etc.), an entire sports brand around MLB, and so on and so on.
They also had an army of sales people who sold ads and an army of engineers building and optimizing an ad platform, which is (or was?) their actual business.
The "platform going down" narrative from both sides was 100% irrelevant to what was actually going on. "We laid off PMs, salespeople, and engineers and the system didn't crash" is a complete non-sequitor that should be obvious to anyone who's involved in software engineering or maintenance. If anything, I'd expect laying off most of any company to make it much more stable; when you don't change things you introduce fewer bugs.
twitter had an enormous trust&safety moderation org and a lot of the headcount reduction was simply automating trust&safety processes and removing humans as much as possible
This is because nobody can say how many people are needed to develop or maintain some body of software. So companies hire however many employees they can afford. When the number they can afford changes they hire more or fire some. The number of staff has pretty much nothing to do with the actual work. AI introduces another factor to the equation: it allows one person to perform N times as much softy-work as before. So even if you have no idea how many people you need (as always, see above) you do know that you can get by with 1/N.
Platform was super unreliable for a while after that - although that might be related to making all the software changes to turn it in to an even worse cesspit.
Edit: Enron Musk apologists will always crack me up.
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".
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.
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 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.
"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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
So "Up to" 39 weeks of base pay, let's say 9 months.
In this job market, that may not be enough time to feel comfortable and safe taking the offer (if you're a super-employable hotshot with offers awaiting in your LinkedIn, you're probably not the likely target for the offer)
The prior VRP shook out a number of folks who were banking their options grants -- it was like "look let's be clear, you're not moving up any more and you're checked out. Thank you for your service." I'd imagine they were happy enough with that to go a little broader. The pay scales work out to getting paid more the longer you've been there. Mentioned in the memo is employee choice, and I think that this is likely designed with that in mind - why not let people self identify without penalty when you want to reduce headcount? The goal is likely to increase morale for those who want to stay, both by showing them they have the ability to stay, and getting low morale people out the door.
You are getting downvoted but I have to believe this is at least what some of the executives are thinking, even if it proves to be a complete illusion.
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.
Pretty big, but remember that offering a buyout to 1/4 of their employees doesn't mean they're looking to get rid of that many! Not everyone's going to take the buyout, and they're not expecting them to. Their target is likely much lower.
Definitely a precursor to layoffs, but they also know that not everyone will take the offer. So if you want to reduce your workforce by X%, you offer (X+Y)% the buyout. The more attractive the offer, the smaller Y needs to be.
Personnel firms have decent experience predicting the takeup of an offer, so they make predictions about how good the offer needs to be, and they try to get close, within expenses and other considerations.
If Z people take the buyout, then, after the dust settles, you layoff the remaining X-Z people.
So it is unlikely that their target reduction is 25%.
This 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.
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!
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 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.
if you are one of the ones who is valued enough to keep their job, you are strong enough to go get hired at another FAANG. Do you actually still want to be there after the bloodbath that the follow-up round of layoffs causes?
when you start somewhere after their bloodbath, you don't have to deal with all the crap you would if you stay through a bloodbath (i.e. you aren't on the hook for all the legacy shit your team owned before it had a haircut)
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.
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.)
They've figured out that they can offer poorly performing services that suck and nobody cares. The company will continue to explore that concept until people care.
I run an org with 200k employees. We're on our 4th significant outage with M365 services in a month. We're talking major stuff -- including user data like email getting deleted by various processes. Their approach is pretty much "meh".
> The company will continue to explore that concept until people care.
MS is an entrenched monopoly which is hard to move off of, especially in times of low budgets and tough debt markets. On the other hand, LLMs are reshaping the competitive landscape and MS might be reacting to that threat, in their usual MS way.
How banal. The first action after achieving "AGI" is not taking over the world, curing cancer, or anything fantastic like that, but rather "lowering operating expenditure"..
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.
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.
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
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.)
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 donate to journalism orgs across the US [ProPublica, Associated Press, Tampa Bay Times, Salt Lake Tribune, Marion County Record, Muckrock], but far more and consistent financial support is needed than these orgs are receiving today)
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.
In the US, currently, ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US, ~400k/month, ~4.8M/year. 60k workers leaving Microsoft is a drop in the bucket, relatively speaking. But of course, they should still get as much support as possible via the packages they accept, and getting to retirement (Social Security and Medicare benefits) as pain free and least uncertainty as possible.
> Granted I know you are really talking about the local emotional effect but the granular net effect is worth the conversation too.
I vote for and support Democratic Socialist candidates, who would implement and maintain more humane and pro worker economic systems, I'm doing my part at system levels. But systems will take decades to change. It took decades to get here from Ronald Reagan and his policies. Certainly, people should never be in economic peril, but they also shouldn't tie their identity to their job, or think their job matters. The evidence is robust that the job does not matter.
(and if you think there is a problem with corporate earnings vs what workers take home, again, that is a political and labor organizing problem to solve for)
St Louis Fed: US Wages Share of GDI at 75 Year Low - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50238884 - October 2026
Pew Research: Many Americans Are Struggling to Afford Basic Necessities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50197020 - October 2026
Gallup: A majority of Americans have low-quality jobs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50195502 - October 2026
(i am once again asking to think in systems)
Sure, from a raw numbers perspective it's a drop in the bucket. But not all numbers are created equal. How does the pay of these employees from Microsoft compare? You mention those of the baby boomer generation, but are all employees who may be leaving Microsoft of the same age range? What about their skillsets and the investments they and we as society of spent in their education? Those other factors matter quite a bit, so you can't just do a simple 1-1 analysis of "people".
> Certainly, people should never be in economic peril, but they also shouldn't tie their identity to their job, or think their job matters. The evidence is robust that the job does not matter.
Why? Which evidence? I think more people could have more meaning if they were self-employed, were craftsmen or artisans, and such, but this nihilistic viewpoint (which is a hallmark of anti-social/authoritarian ideologies like DSA and others) not only doesn't reflect reality but seeks to belittle those who do in fact find meaning and joy in their work. I for one like my job and have liked most of the jobs I've had. Just because an organization no longer needs you, or you no longer need it, doesn't mean that the job all of a sudden "doesn't matter".
If people don't tie their identity to the thing they spend the most time doing what will they tie it to? Should a police officer or teacher not think of themselves through the lens of their chosen profession? When you ask a professor at your university do you want to work with one who doesn't tie themselves to their work or their research? Would you want to buy produce from a farmer who sort of doesn't care about the quality of the food they grow? Do you want to fly on an airplane built by people who think their job doesn't matter?
> If people don't tie their identity to the thing they spend the most time doing what will they tie it to? Should a police officer or teacher not think of themselves through the lens of their chosen profession? When you ask a professor at your university do you want to work with one who doesn't tie themselves to their work or their research? Would you want to buy produce from a farmer who sort of doesn't care about the quality of the food they grow? Do you want to fly on an airplane built by people who think their job doesn't matter?
Finding meaning in the human condition and experience I suppose. Is that in your job? I argue no, but everyone will find meaning in their own way, if they find it before death. I fly on Boeing equipment occasionally (not my choice), so I definitely fly on airplanes built by companies who think building good aircraft doesn't matter. I'm sure some people at Boeing care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia of "bean counter idgaf".
Our human brains unsurprisingly still default to that, and it is quite understandable imo.
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.
Respect is how you feel, a good position in life is a function of your retirement benefits and financial comfort. If the market has no place for these folks anymore, and we're not offering a permanent jobs bank to keep people working who want to work (which I absolutely think we should do), "it is what it is." Sorry if they feel bad about market changes and demand for certain skills and labor.
We show respect by packaging folks out to live comfortable remainders of their life. "Thank you for your contribution and service." Lack of respect is leaving them hanging in the wind financially, not words. If you need a job to feel needed and respected after entering retirement and with sufficient financial and retiree benefits support, we'll throw a standing appointment with a therapist into the package and/or a volunteer opportunity online board/bank.
If you're looking for validation from your job or your work as a component of your identity, you're going to end up sad. That's a choice.
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.
Ignoring specifics, the corp offers a package because they want you to take it. That means that you taking it is in their best interest.
It might also be in your own best interest, but it might also not be. That's something that needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis
The 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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
Reasons to accept. Reasons to decline, but that isn't one of them.
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 meant the layoffs due to AI, not the typical tech tech layoffs that are as old as tech itself.
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.
It's fine for them to get rid of excess weight. My guess is they could probably cut a lot more if they wanted.
Now, even if the company is crushing it, they'll still see employees more as a cost center instead of a revenue generator.
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?
Tomorrow they’ll announce that they’re going to spend $134b on new data centers.
while other divisions are sinking ship
there always a case for a yard cleanup and decluttering
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
Which hurts me to say. But engineers tend to make for terrible businessmen. (There are exceptions of course, and the opposite is _even worse_)
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.
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
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 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...
And people believed them?!
Unless those funds were placed in an escrow account, I would have assumed that claim held no water.
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.
Okay, so how many nights until the blue-eyed employees all leave the company? :p
Also, good grief, flooding the market with thousands more people.
2027 is going to be wild. Stock up on beans and rice, folks.
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.
Really, it feels like we're in a quiet depression.
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.
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.
There is a big HOWEVER. At least 2 in fact.
1. The company had been growing in the previous years, 2019, 2018, 2017 (they shrank somewhat in 2015 or 2016). In 2014 they had 29% workforce increase. So the significant growth in 2021/22 is not an aberration but rather continuation of the growth in previous years.
2. What IS an aberration is the workforce count after 2022. No growth in 2023 or 2025 (as in ZERO YoY change), and measly +7,000/3% growth in 2024. And some YoY loss in 2026 (-5,000, or 2.2%). With 2027 YoY likely showing at least some (and possibly a lot) of these 60,000.
So no, "it's just overhiring due to pandemic" was supposed to die years ago.
I’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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: Enron Musk apologists will always crack me up.
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".
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.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/10/26/introducing-a-vo...
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"
“Eligible employees will receive an email with a link to their Voluntary Exit Offer details within the next few hours.”
anyone know what level 70 means?
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.
People are playing stock valuation games these days, as they don't want the laggard label. =3
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.
To assume MS will continue coasting is a fool's errand.
The "internal" memo: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-is-offering-buyout...
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)
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.
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/microsoft/salaries/software...
You can't and won't tell me with a straight face that AI will replace them.
Personnel firms have decent experience predicting the takeup of an offer, so they make predictions about how good the offer needs to be, and they try to get close, within expenses and other considerations.
If Z people take the buyout, then, after the dust settles, you layoff the remaining X-Z people.
So it is unlikely that their target reduction is 25%.
This is just an optics-friendly way to soften the blow of 25% layoffs.
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.
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.
25% offers != 25% layoffs
Even basic things like fixing the pothole doesn't get done because, well, permits.
But some people here have a short memory and already support the new thieves on the block Anthropic and OpenAI.
And they did fire some of them in 2025/2026.
Can't read the article because of the paywall.
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?
Voluntary packages tend to be accepted by the strongest employees
It’s a shitty deal for companies but shareholders love cost cutting
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.
There's still people left there? Lol
"more ways for employees to shape their next chapter".
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.
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.)
They gained 40,000 people in 2022. It's not a totally crazy argument.
The layoffs could have nothing to do with the employees.
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".
MS is an entrenched monopoly which is hard to move off of, especially in times of low budgets and tough debt markets. On the other hand, LLMs are reshaping the competitive landscape and MS might be reacting to that threat, in their usual MS way.
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.
Given all insane bets made by previously (somewhat) reasonable and successful business owners, I wonder how much of a joke it really is...
In order to be “patient 0”, he’d have to be human in the first place…
I wonder where are all those AI apologists who have been touting here for years that jobs will not go away?
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.
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?
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.
Even with these buyouts, there will be layoffs next summer. And the summer after that. And the summer after that.
And the internal memo currently circulating actually does not mention that number so I'd be curious where it came from.