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 think theres just MUCH more depression over the much more visible reality that your upper managers don't care about you or the work you put out. Especially now with AI companies pitching them a salivating dream of doing the work of 100 with 10.
The internet and free information showed them up for what they really were: biased cavemen like everyone else, and the aura vanished.
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.
What I would say, and perhaps what you actually mean, or if not then at least what you might now consider, is you shouldn't give anyone else the right to declare your sense of worth, including an employer.
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.
If Microsoft is 40% based in the US the US probably would see 20K people in high salery positions get cut if its somewhat evenly leveled. They are still okay with reducing 1/4 people (they are offering a buyout so I am holding off on the F bomb).
The invest into AI is something like $6T if it hasn't produced $6T in value it better produce it in cuts. If you expect its just going to Microsoft laying off great the government is fine but if other companies in the next months cut high paid position it hits the country in non trivial ways. But You are correct its not just going to effect the US it and that dampens the magntitude but its still a massive reduction of force for a major company
Muh job creators! You can't tax your way to growth!
Well actually, they are now job destroyers. Tax the fuckers.
In the US, currently, ~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US, ~400k/month, ~4.8M/year. 60k workers leaving Microsoft is a drop in the bucket, relatively speaking. But of course, they should still get as much support as possible via the packages they accept, and getting to retirement (Social Security and Medicare benefits) as pain free and least uncertainty as possible.
> Granted I know you are really talking about the local emotional effect but the granular net effect is worth the conversation too.
I vote for and support Democratic Socialist candidates, who would implement and maintain more humane and pro worker economic systems, I'm doing my part at system levels. But systems will take decades to change. It took decades to get here from Ronald Reagan and his policies. Certainly, people should never be in economic peril, but they also shouldn't tie their identity to their job, or think their job matters. The evidence is robust that the job does not matter.
(and if you think there is a problem with corporate earnings vs what workers take home, again, that is a political and labor organizing problem to solve for)
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)
I don't really think DSA had much that would help the economy beside the basic mainstream democrat tastes. Democrats generally speaking want less monopolies, better healthcare insurance (mostly a public option) and reasonable taxation but the DSA takes things to 11 with just politically unviable rhetoric in my opinion. But most of all, I think the ideas from the DSA that work doesn't matter as long as people are taken care is likely to cost a lot people.
The Mechanic takes pride that he can fix stuff. The engineer takes pride that they can design a system. Doctors take pride that they are the reason people don't die. If you take away pride you harm a lot of people this is arguable what got the democrats (republicans voted for this too) where they are today in that they embraced Free Trade regardless of the cost. It created a rust belt that is brain washed into blaming Democrats for 100% of the harm. Fox news helps in accomplishing that that too but I think a lot of the DSA is steeped in that MAGA like style of never engage in what harms the ideology thinking and that spooks me away from that group agressively.
There are labor shortages throughout the developed world, due to structural demographics. This will not change in our lifetime due to global demographic trajectories. This will push wages up. This is good. Wages paid are shareholder returns not paid.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713865 (citations)
Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49352811 - August 2026
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival - https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe... - SUERF Policy Note, Issue No 197, October 2020
We agree to disagree on DSA policies. I want the Scandinavian model to protect people. IDGAF about profits, people first, full stop. Their support is very high amongst the under 35, and 2M 55+ voters age out every year. Progress is a function of time and electorate turnover. Old people with old ideas die out, and are replaced by young people with different ideas.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48781479 (citations in subthread)
Can you stop big companies from making these cuts? No, at least not without unions and laws to make it harder. So, in the short term, help these people land softly and in the long term, build better systems so that people who want to contribute have some place to from a place of economic security. That’s it’s. Feelings are irrelevant, only outcomes matter (imho).
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. If it is your job, and you are involuntarily retired, my condolences. I fly on Boeing equipment occasionally (not my choice), so I definitely fly on airplanes built by companies who think building good aircraft doesn't matter. I'm sure some people at Boeing care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia of "bean counter idgaf".
Society, broadly speaking, runs on everyone doing just good enough in the aggregate to keep the system running. Some systems are better than others (Japan institutionalizing perfectionism, for example).
Blueberries grow in the wild, ergo farmers don't matter.
> Finding meaning in the human condition and experience I suppose. Is that in your job? I argue no, but everyone will find meaning in their own way, if they find it before death.
So why are you prematurely defining what meaning should be for everyone? That's one of the problems with these authoritarian ideologies.
> I fly on Boeing equipment occasionally (not my choice), so I definitely fly on airplanes built by companies who think building good aircraft doesn't matter. I'm sure some people at Boeing care, but not enough to overcome institutional inertia of "bean counter idgaf".
I don't understand this at all. Clearly they care a lot or else these planes would be crashing and stuff. If you think they don't care and you're saying flying on the aircraft sucks because they don't care, then maybe they should care more about their jobs and then it would be a better experience, which sort of runs counter to your thesis here.
(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)
We had an economic model that supported both the people and the work; the current economic model supports neither.
I would submit that this one of a great many reasons why the current economic model is problematic.
Go find a newspaper from 2000 or earlier. It will have whole sections (20 pages or so each) of advertising for jobs, real-estate and other classifieds. In some places every government job had to be advertised in the newspaper.
All that paid for the newspaper. Usually before it was even printed.
Thats the source of cost you need to replace.
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.
Our human brains unsurprisingly still default to that, and it is quite understandable imo.
Now, go code something nice.
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. Make better choices if you don't want to be sad.
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.
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
Things are definitely weird because the current unemployment rate isn't far off 50 year lows: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
Anyway, this has been explained a lot in the literature, unemployment rates are a poor measure of the difficulty of finding a job.
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.
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.
tl:dr One round of layoffs isn't bad if you're staying, but subsequent rounds can make you miserable.
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.
I know its very similar to the equivalent amount of cash but it feels a lot different. I feel like half my desire to work is connected to healthcare for the family.
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.
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.
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.
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
Also if you're a manager you should be able to make it pretty clear.
But if they have half a clue they'll still be able to figure out which way the wind is blowing.
Source: a lowly line manager who has seen and survived a number of these.
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.
And I’m not saying that in a grumpy way. Yes we do have much higher salaries, and because of that it’s reasonable that it’s on us to save up for this type of rainy day, in accordance with our own personal risk assessment.
It’s honestly something I spent 15 years rarely thinking about, because while I’ve seen many RIFs, I was never worried since getting a new job was as easy as just responding to a few of the messages that constantly came in via LinkedIn or email. No longer.
Not everyone has options and unemployment can be the difference between being on the street or eating ramen.
Most of the time, though, you're right. Take it.
It wasn't a 'instead of layoffs' it was 'ok if you're burned out, here's your exit'.
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).
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.
I was actually thrilled with my cola that year along with the required vacation time.
Honestly it was a very weird time. Less than a year prior I had worked in a real estate office, and there was a lot of scary stuff already starting to happen.
Reasons to accept. Reasons to decline, but that isn't one of them.
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.
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.
Back then, you might think the market was a bit cooler, but talented engineers were still in massive demand. Growth in tech was stalling but a massive reduction in demand was very unlikely
This time there's a real chance that in 10 years we have 50% or less the number of software engineers today, if the job title still even exists as we know it
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.
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?
The total net income doesn't matter: The move is management saying they are overstaffed for the work they think they need.
Assume Microsoft is expecting just a third of people to take the offer. It's just too many people to want to move to a different division that needs more labor: It's basically entire divisions that they'd have to create from whole cloth.
yes, because, (a) you would be an amoral company otherwise and (b) the productivity and work quality of those remaining 15 will plummet if you don't and AI won't save you in the end: you'll build faster and cheaper, but the quality of your products will enter a downward spiral it will be hard or impossible to exit from.
It's deleterious to the economy. As the recent Microsoft game studio apocalypse shows, mergers are also extremely deleterious. It would be better to have a dozen game studios employing people and competing rather than one shit company cutting expenses and reducing products going to market.
Enforceability is a problem; it's always been trivial to re-write a job description.
I like this. I was trying to think of some way to allow layoffs for struggling companies but not reward layoffs for companies that are making a profit, who just want to make more. My idea was more around the executive team being unable to take a salary or having to fire the CEO or something, nothing which as I worked through in my head seemed workable.
What should actually happen is everyone should be paid the same amount while doing 75% of the work they were doing before, but unfortunately there are no serious power structures like unions which could ensure that technological gains actually improve people's lives in that way.
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
Yes, it's cold, but in the grand scheme of things, it's good for the society if companies are efficient and the economy is efficient. An efficient economy means that we can produce and consume more per hour worked.
Such behavior by companies may not be in my self-interest but that's another matter.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
I'm still not sure what the advantage to the company of an offer like this is versus layoffs where management gets to choose who leaves, unless they feel the "loyalty test" of deciding to stay is worth more than their own evaluation of employee performance.
1. Some C-suite asshole wants headcount in your division reduced by, say, 5% next year. He has zero visibility into anyone's performance, or any of the projects anyone is actually working on.
2. His subordinate directors could do random, or targeted layoffs to hit that 5%, but this ruins morale for everyone who survives, and is rather awful for those that don't.
3. ...Or, they could make this offer, let people leave on their own, try to convince any stars who want to take it to stay, don't do any backfill. Then, hopefully, between the voluntary layoffs and no backfill, you might hit that 5% reduction, and not have to do involuntary layoffs. (Or if you do, they would be much smaller.)
4. This is less disruptive for teams and managers, because with voluntary layoffs, they have time to plan for these people leaving, instead of showing up to work on Thursday, and being told that 5 people on their team were given the pink slip this morning.
5. This is also, obviously, less disruptive for employees who take the offer (as they can control their exit, and get a payout), and less disruptive for anyone who doesn't take the offer (lower odds of showing up to work on Thursday, and getting a pink slip).
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.
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.
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.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7518428...
So there is some truth in the claims of the MS President.
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.
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.
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.
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
This also works as price discovery mechanism for both parties. Best employee can take a break and apply later for different job, profile, growth industry etc. Companies also find better to hire what they think best at market price instead of honorary best which are there for long time.
Even now with agentic work there are areas I am able to do well and some areas im not. It's definitely always changing.
Getting rid of your best means you'll also make sure that the rest of them slowly, but surely leave and never come back. Good people will not work with average people which results in long term failure to compete for the company.
There's a reason why all tech industry leaders have focused on getting a *consistent* and *even* pool of good workers to establish themselves there (against wisdom of the MBA crowd you're repeating here).
Or rather because they share observations about the world you might not like.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
You, probably, talk about something else.
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.
There's a reason corporations almost always settle lawsuits (if they aren't dismissed).
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
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's small potatoes vs their new excess capex spend of 100sB/y.
This isn't the end.
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.
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.
Really, it feels like we're in a quiet depression.
Besides "sounds cool with shock value online"
A real GDP decline of over 10% year over year for more than 1 year is the biggest signal. Ofc, I noticed the US Federal Government has been cooking the books since at least H. W. Bush (maybe longer) by including tech stock potential gains as part of GDP. Take out tech stocks, the US economy looks like it will to historians.
Even in the modern day, an economic depression is associated with massive unemployment, deflation, reductions in the trifecta of industrial output + consumer spending + international trade, with the final kicker being reduced credit availability. Currently, interest rates are relatively high (historically middling) which has effectively restricted consumer credit, while the national credit rating has fallen.
This Microsoft deal for the large part is not being offered to software engineering orgs.
But at that point, they almost should be laying off engineers, even without playing any such game.
Can’t claim MS is firing citizens and replacing them with H1Bs, if they are leaving voluntarily.
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"
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.
“Eligible employees will receive an email with a link to their Voluntary Exit Offer details within the next few hours.”
It's something like - 3 months base salary - plus either 2 weeks or 1 month of pay per year of service (the former if you are at principal level or above) - 12 months health insurance
anyone know what level 70 means?
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.
That's small potatoes vs their new excess capex spend of 100sB/y.
> like many of these recent layoffs, this is essentially reversing 2020-2022 net headcount growth.
which I took as "this is just reversing Covid overhiring". Which I'm tired of hearing. MSFT might have grown faster in 2021/22, but have stopped hiring for pretty much 4 consecutive years since.
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.
Also, it is now full of bots and grifters, plus Musk’s own promoted tweets with whatever political thing he’s obsessed with at the moment showing up in everyone’s timelines.
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.
While you’re right in that the platform has its uses, other companies cannot do the same. Which is why it’s important to talk about objective success metrics. Sure if you want to fire 80% staff at Microsoft and have a transformation where they only cater to half the user base then they can do it. But they will also not be taking in the same profits as before.
I don't think it's right, but I can see how a billionaire just completely overrides the company mission and business model after they buy enough shares or something.
Maybe there are other non-obvious use-cases for other companies, where you're effectively buying the user base to then pull the rug.
A lot of the original customers will just accept such a change. See Twitter or GitHub.
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.
As for this:
> Twitter as a company was doing quite poorly leading up to the acquisition
This is objectively false. 2020 revenue for Twitter was $3.71B while 2021 came in at $5.07B. The company was on a growth trajectory and path to profitability.
In fact, after the acquisition, the ad revenue dropped by a lot. https://www.businessinsider.com/x-revenues-plunged-months-af...
All of this is public information.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also look at their recent account merging efforts and all the problems people have encountered and posted about on the platform itself.
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.
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.
And the answer is, "Calculate what would have happened without Covid, assuming previous growth patterns, and compare that to current headcount."
So they would revert to the 2020 headcount plus a guess as to non-covid influenced headcount. A reasonable guess there is "about the same amount on average as pre-Covid growth."
A company growing 10% per year would be around 7x larger 20 years later. There's a limit on how big companies can get.
Yes, there is. Read Coase's seminal paper, The Nature of the Firm. Companies function by replacing market mechanisms with bureaucratic administration. That finds its end when internal coordination or misallocation of resources incurs more cost than it saves in transaction costs.
Conglomerates therefore have a ceiling in size, and it's the reason why unwinding them generally increases market value for the sum of its individual companies (in finance parlance: "conglomerate discount"). It's also why the Soviet Union didn't run very well, and very large conglomerates are usually the consequence of political/economic arrangements.
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".
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.
Fun thing though, we recently let a consultant go due to relying too much on LLMs.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
However, I know many which have switched MSSQL to Postgres/MySQL happily. Azure supports those well.
Azure using SRE here.
To assume MS will continue coasting is a fool's errand.
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...
> 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.
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.
Fun times =3
You can sign broken contract freely - it's unenforceable, so you can sign whatever paper HR hands to you, and only when you're retaliated against do you need to care. Which coincidentally is when you stop needing to be cooperative anyways.
Don't "YMMV" your way out of laws that protect you.
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)
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
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.
In 30 years we’ll be reading these stories about Anthropic.
It’s the nature of the industry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are we sure this isn't click bait
(not rhetorical, genuine question)
Even basic things like fixing the pothole doesn't get done because, well, permits.
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.
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%.
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
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.
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?
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.
https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-makes-new-voluntary-...
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.
Damn, I’m glad I’m not a developer.
Or perhaps, as Zack noted, Musk showed them the way?
1. I'm not drunk but lucid enough to write
2. Part of the software development lifecycle is that software eventually dies. Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Apple, and others are dinosaurs—institutions increasingly invested in preserving yesterday's technology rather than building. Fuck that.
3. And Jesus nf Christ. I thought Windows Vista was bad. REcknoning is coming. I hope it hits hard enough that it wipes that smug grin off Satya's fucking face
mods if any - or other replies - I'm new here as a poster, not sure if I'm violating rules. Not doing so intentionally - but breaking rules if any is easier than asking chat jippity if they exist at all.
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/microsoft/salaries/software...
That’s a lot of workers looking for work.
It does seem a bit of a fortuitous timing, with Anthropic IPO S-1 just dropping..
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…
"more ways for employees to shape their next chapter".
It's good trade off.
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.)
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?
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.
You can't and won't tell me with a straight face that AI will replace them.
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.
Can't read the article because of the paywall.
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.
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?
There's still people left there? Lol
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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.
But some people here have a short memory and already support the new thieves on the block Anthropic and OpenAI.
My last 18 months at MSFT were deeply unproductive. Constant reorgs, the work not being aligned to my capabilities and unfortunately just the general feeling that I was under worked and had very little opportunity for career advancement.
I would look at my colleagues and sister teams and wonder, why do they need these many people to work on something so trivial ? Or how did this person get promoted for doing that work ? I am sure envy played a part in the second question but it was legitimate. Remember, all this was before LLM tools were prevalent.
In the end, I left off my own volition. In my last 6 months, I did very little work, if at all any. I thought why am I being paid so handsomely for such little and trivial work. I did try interviewing in a few different teams but didn’t make it (Azure Files and Hyperscale DB). If I had stayed, I would have been swiftly laid off or if I was lucky enough last long till this buyout.
I think same is true for all Big Tech companies. Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.
I 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.
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.
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 remember reading about some similar thing with French and the French president’s wife responding that the language was beautiful the way it was and they don’t need outsiders telling them how to gender (or not) their words.
And no it's not just privileged white people. My Spanish teacher was a Colombiana and she always pointed out the innate patriarchal traits of the Spanish language while rolling her eyes.
Nonetheless I appreciate a perspective from someone who has an affiliation with the culture term refers to.
I'd recommend getting out a bit more or reading a bit more:
> According to Google Trends, it was first seen online in 2004,[7][21][22] and first appeared in academic literature around 2013 "in a Puerto Rican psychological periodical to challenge the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish language."[20][23] Contrarily, it has been claimed that usage of the term "started in online chat rooms and listservs in the 1990s" and that its first appearance in academic literature was in the Fall 2004 volume of the journal Feministas Unidas.[24][25] In the rest of the United States, it was first used in activist and LGBT circles as a way to expand on earlier attempts at gender-inclusive forms of the grammatically masculine Latino, such as Latino/a and Latin@.[21] A similar use of 'x' in the term Mx. may have been an influence or model for the development of Latinx.[10]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx
> Despite the increase in awareness, use of the term to describe oneself has not greatly increased over time.[4] As of 2018, use of the term Latinx was limited nearly exclusively to the United States.[29] Manuel Vargas writes that people from Latin America ordinarily would not think of themselves using the term unless they reside in the United States.[29]
Maybe it didn't technically originate in privileged English speakers but it certainly seems to have arisen in popularity among them.
As someone who lives in a 99% hispanic region in the US, I've never heard anyone use this term to identify themselves. We're right on the border and that sort of thing seems to mainly happen in larger cities north of here.
To the extent that the term has become widespread, it seems to have piggybacked on other diversity and inclusion efforts. People who identify as Latino/Latina seem overwhelmingly to dislike the term.
> Among Hispanic and Latino Americans, knowledge of the term is not widespread, and reception to the term as a potential classifier for the entire Hispanic/Latino population has been overwhelmingly negative. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that roughly half of U.S. Hispanics were not aware of the term Latinx; of those aware of it, 75% said it should not be used to describe the Hispanic or Latino population, preferring instead the terms "Latino" and "Hispanic" by large margins.
Ironically, the also relatively uncommon “Latine” is in decline but still more popular than Latinx for all of recorded Google trends history. Except in the US. Of course.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=latinx,L...
9/10 Latinos would roll their eyes and get back to doing actual work, they don't have time to be offended.
It's all a performance to them anyway, and I'm not playing the game.
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.
People get lumped into "guys" and feel excluded. That's such a different bar than feeling offended.
It's ok for you to say, "I'm sorry my language makes you feel excluded, but I'm not going to change" and it's ok for someone to think less of you as a result.
Why does everyone jump to the idea that people who want more inclusive language are offended? Or that the critique being offered here is that the language is offensive?
(Granted, sometimes that is the critique. Plenty of casual racism or ableism is offensive. But that's not the case with "guys".)
As a woman in this industry, being told that using “guys” to address mixed groups is non-inclusive/insufficiently considerate/worth thinking less of me for (just wow) is much worse than being addressed by “guys” when I’m in a mixed group.
Like… we have real problems with equality in tech, right?
People deliberately choosing not to try to honor those preferences are making a choice with a small impact. No one is claiming it's a big deal. But honoring preferences can make people feel unhappy.
As can honoring a preference that you find silly.
It turns out, this is pretty simple human negotiation stuff -- we can all express a preference and we can all choose to not honor it. And we have to be comfortable with the idea someone might think less of someone else a little bit as a result.
"I interpret a commonly used word or phrase as meaning something other than what the dictionary says that it means, and differently from what pretty much everyone, for hundreds of years, has intended it to mean when they say it, and so every time I hear it used by anyone that makes me unhappy so please stop using that word or phrase around me" is a pretty strange request that some people might find a bit unreasonable. At least it might not be too hard for some to constantly remember to alter their vocabulary around specific people.
In terms of human negotiation, part of working in a professional environment, or any large group of mixed company, involves understanding that you may not have your every preference catered to and that for some preferences it can even be impolite to impose on the group by asking them to take your weird hang up into account. The strength/impact of the preference, the size of the group and how well you all know each other will have to factor into that though.
I suspect that "I'll just try to remember and understand that people who say 'you guys' use it to mean what the dictionary says that it means" is a more reasonable position than "Every one of the 200,000+ people who work for the same company that I work for should alter their vocabulary to accommodate my personal preference because I want to cling to a non-standard definition of that particular phrase and I'll judge anyone who refuses to comply"
Yes.
> solve
No that's not solving anything.
“I’m not going to do that. Moving on.”
Other folks, myself included, do feel excluded by "guys" as a gender neutral term. I'm not offended, but I do appreciate when people offer something else.
But to your later point, I don't think it's either/or. We can do both.
I’m sorry that you find it exclusionary. What I find exclusionary is people telling me that it’s justifiable to think less of me for using that term, or comparing continuing to use the term to their grandmother who still uses the N word.
For what it’s worth I have stopped using “you guys” at work except for in “safe spaces” because I don’t want to deal with this sort of judgement. But I find the “it costs you nothing!” defense of word policing to be completely unconvincing.
On the flip side, someone unwilling to do even the “small stuff” pretty much already lost the goodwill that they would be willing to do the “big stuff.”
Put another way, if you ask someone to take a small step for you, and they refuse, would you feel like they are more or less likely to take a big step?
You are, in essence, saying, "I want you to think differently."
I made no claim that it costs nothing. Changing language use is non trivial. Which is why I never demand it. I make a preference known, you can act on it or not.
I made the claim that: a) it does not offend me and b) I prefer others not use it and c) if I've expressed my preference and you choose not to honor that preference, it will diminish my opinions towards you.
This is how preferences work. We communicate them. Others find the request reasonable or not and act accordingly. If my preference was no music playing in desk areas, and you played music in the desk area, I'd think less of you as a result. If you gave me a nickname and I asked you not to use it, and you still used it, I'd think less of you.
This is both trivially true (I recognize that everyone has the right to form their own opinions of everything) and still counter to things I assume you believe (such as: people shouldn’t make assumptions about others based on their gender or skin color).
I do want you to think differently. I want you to think that people who continue to use a phrase widely considered to be gender neutral are not in fact your enemies. Some of them probably are your allies.
For what it’s worth, if I knew you in real life and you made that preference known to me, I would try to respect it, but that respect would depend on the closeness of our relationship. It’s hard to remember every preference of someone you meet once every two months, but I don’t like to be an asshole and try to respect the preferences of people I interact with.
The problem though is that somewhere along the line, continuing to use “you guys” became a sort of reverse shibboleth among a certain set of people who try to use things like whether someone uses “you guys” or whether they have their pronouns set on their profile to determine whether they are allies or, presumably, enemies. And yeah, I do object to that sort of mindset.
I try my best not to offend anyone at work, but policing my language to match the preferences of everyone around me would be exhausting. I grew up speaking a non-prestige dialect. I have a lifetime of experience policing my words. It can be exhausting. It’s easy to underestimate the mental cost if you speak a prestige dialect.
I spent a few decades being made fun of for saying y’all. I now find it a bit weird people who would have made fun of me for using it 20 years ago now use it themselves. I’m not offended by it, but my preference would be that non-southerners don’t use it.
However, I realize that it would be a bit much to ask that of everyone I interact with. And if I did it would be insane to label people who didn’t comply assholes.
I prefer that people that people don’t use learnings instead of lessons. I prefer not to be referred to as a USian. But I don’t expect people to follow my preferences.
I would also take issue with reasonableness of the request. You concede it does not offend you, and that it's merely a preference. I also have a myriad of preferences about speech: the intonation, accent, the grammatical constructions, the words, etc. To ask of other people, whom I don't even know intimately, to match my preferences is something else altogether. It's to impose my preferences over that person's dialect or ideolect, which is also rightly frowned upon.
If this level of pedantry can be considered acceptable, how on earth do these folks justify/cope with terminology used in "empowerment" initiatives who often use very non-inclusive wording more so than "guys".
I've also worked with a woman who was extremely displeased to be greeted with "you guys". I found her absolutely insufferable.
The reason it feels bad to people who use "you guys" in a gender neutral way is what it says about the offended person. The offended person has a pet peeve, and if you don't accommodate it, it will be a problem. That's pretty much the definition of an insufferable person.
A person who is well-regulated wouldn't make a stink over something so trivial. Which then tells you that the person is going to make a similar stink over other trivial things. Ad infinitum.
You are reading into the words a message that was never intended, and that is on you, not the speaker.
Now you make him think twice about what he’s saying, of course he’s going to nitpick everything.
anyway I have always considered Hey guys as gender neutral.
Merriam Webster seems to agree by listing this as a secondary meaning.
used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex saw her and the rest of the guys.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/guy
and then
Somehow you missed: They did deal with it. The one they criticized did not.
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.
> All y'all is used in the Southern United States when a speaker wishes to include everyone being addressed. Y'all may refer to an indefinite set of members of a group, but all y'all definitively includes everyone in the group.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/all_y%27all
Also, is it just me or does that Wikipedia entry have zero citations? I thought Wikipedia was allergic to citation-free claims..
I'm guessing it's regional and/or group specific.
> guy: (...) person —used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex
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.
I'm sceptical of this alleged Australian connection. As far as I'm aware, the term started in England, spread to the US, and it is in the US that its usage really took off. In Australia, "guy"/"guys" as a term for a male or gender-neutral person was imported from the US in the second half of the 20th century.
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.
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.
The other big issue is density is expensive; it costs much more to build an apartment at the 10th floor than a detached house. Combine that with density being inherently a bit shit, you get less quality and less housing for the money spent.
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...
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!
"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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/50u77r/douglas_...
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.
The people who are loyal to the company, and believe in the mission, and obedient to the leadership, they are the ones most likely to amend their language and adopt the new terms. They will apologize for their mistakes and correct themselves. This will be looked upon with widespread favor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair
Others will not comply. Perhaps they are too old and set in their ways, or they just don't care about other people's feelings, or they are disobedient to the leadership already, and disloyal to the company. For whatever reason, they are the ones who will begin to distinguish themselves with language. When the rest of the company has adopted the acceptable terms, the Missing Stair people will be left behind. Then, they can simply be treated as Missing Stairs.
The bad apples don't necessarily need to be fired or exiled. Simply having a way to distinguish them in a crowd is very helpful in any organization.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
For example, the software industry. It's pretty much completely unregulated. Prices for software have gone to zero. Software engineers routinely become millionaires, and some billionaires.
Lack of regulation in tech causes real harm, like addiction, social issues and misinformation,not to mention issues with cyber bullying and suicide in teens.
Do some people make out like bandits with billions or millions of dollars, sure but I don't think that's a good barometer for progress or prosperity.
To paraphrase Doctor Who "Human progress isn't measured by industry, it's measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege"
And by that measure we are still cavemen.
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.
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.
Why are the biggest companies of recent origin?
They never had a chance to expand in the post-computer era. GE was really close, but they switched to the "do everything" model a bit too early. Before computers, your only option was to have a financial stake in other companies, and this doesn't provide enough control.
As for IBM, I think it just lacks the ambition to do anything drastic. You don't get _automatic_ world takeover, you need to work for it. But others are giving a good run for it, just look at the recent acquisitions by Oracle.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe they were L3s? Maybe it's EU?
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.
And yet nobody has time to do anything except to tell everyone they don't have time to do anything.
Post mid-2025, there were mandates to use it wherever we could.
Or they wont stop talking in meetings, but produce no real work
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.
I was joking, but this just became an even bigger joke.