alt Hacker NewsMicrosoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
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60k workers, 1/4 of the workers. This is a big deal. It also really puts you into a bind if you receive the offer. Do you accept, take the money, and hope you can find a job (Now competing with many other Msft employees that are looking). Do you decline and hope you don't get hit with the layoff which hits if not enough people accept?
The mass buyout offer to 25% of Microsoft's workforce comes less than a week after Microsoft President Brad Smith proclaimed to employees: 'We stand by our people. We always have. We always will.' in a video he posted to LinkedIn.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7518428...
My former boss at Microsoft told me this sort of thing is a good way to get rid of your best, most employable employees. I guess he didn’t pass the memo up the chain.
"1/4 of workforce was offered buyouts" does not mean all 60000 will accept them. "Results may vary", you know.
I saw it happening in a funny way not long time ago - company offered buyouts, but got insanely surprised when high percentage of people actually accepted it. Management thought acceptance rate would be much, much lower, but when numbers started to pour in on a 2nd day, oh man... Panic spread very quickly because people were accepting packages in fear of layoffs without such package, so management said if any layoffs will happen in 3 years period after this, same package will be offered no question asked. Cooled things a bit, but what a mess...
Take it or wait for the lay offs.
Also, good grief, flooding the market with thousands more people.
2027 is going to be wild. Stock up on beans and rice, folks.
The way these companies are run so cut-throat while also being worth a trillion dollars is such a fundamental systemic failure.
To say that it's because Microsoft overhired is a gross mis-remembering of the last 20 years.
For starters, I remember way back in the late 2000s meeting an engineer from the office team. Their entire job was focused on making buttons. Microsoft also used to employee engineers focused soley on testing software, though I've heard that has changed.
Anyway, this is a company with decades long cultural roots for enormously large teams where each person is hyper focused on tiny little pieces of a much larger product.
Also, let's not forget that they bought up 1/3 of the gaming industry.
I don't mind that Microsoft is hurting, because it makes mid products, that always seem to fail-up. However, I do mind that the people are okay that the answer is to lay people off instead of, maybe, breaking the company back up into smaller companies that preserve the stability of the workforce.
The actual memo:
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/10/26/introducing-a-vo...
Before getting wrapped up in the usual LLM vs anti-LLM narratives, note that like many of these recent layoffs, this is essentially reversing 2020-2022 net headcount growth.
IMO a lot of these layoffs are companies going from an experimental fiscal mindset to a conservative fiscal mindset - ie, rather than acquiring companies and hiring to grow into new markets, a lot of organizations are falling back on what they know works, independent of any productivity impact of LLMs.
I do appreciate that they are at least giving people some agency into the decision first, rather than ruthlessly cutting people
I don't know what the situation in the US is like, it's probably relatively well insulated. Normally, I'd expect the middle-of-the-road to stick, and the shining stars to twist, take the money and find something else in short order.
But across Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere, it's an absolute bunfight to get a new role in software at the moment. Thousands, even tens of thousands of applicants for every role on LinkedIn, in relatively short order. Invariably, if the role exists, it's too many for them to sanely process. Not just desperate applicants but qualified ones that meet the spec comfortably.
If that's coming to the US eventually, there will be lots more layoffs to come and nowhere else to jump to.
Wow. This is insane news. To think you suddenly can get by with up to 25% fewer people is truly a sign of what is to come. They probably assume much fewer will accept, but still. They probably think 10-20% will actually accept. But they're confident that they can make due with suddenly quite a bit fewer people.
microsoft should ideally be doing the reverse. hiring more workers or re-skilling.
they've the most deployed software in the world - the software is inadequate most of the times (i.e full of bugs). 2nd the software is prone to misuse cz M$ doesn't have enough people listening to customers and making software meet the needs of its users.
if there was a company that should've done the Forward deployed thingy is Microsoft.
Anyone want to spill what their buyout offer was?
Interesting. Nobody on a visa will take the offer, presumably, so it's kind of a workaround for all the immigration controversy.
The term 'Voluntary Exit Offer' reminds me of the suicide drug Quietus in P.D. James' Children of Men, which the government offers to people who no longer wish to live.
(ex-MSFT) Not surprised. I left a month ago after a chaotic year of reorgs, charter changes, no leadership nor roadmap, being crunched, being asked to de-facto manage 4 engineers with no title bump nor pay increase. Moved to a medium sized company with a compensation increase, better title, more interesting project and amazing work-life balance. I expect many of my friends and former coworkers are going to take the buyout offer as well.
Any idea why?
The "internal" memo: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-is-offering-buyout...
And what will happen to all these software engineers who are laid off, and to massss who are graduating in CS (because the same CEOs told them it's a good carrier)?
I spend a decent amount of time talking to newcomers and people on Reddit that are interested in cybersecurity/tech about the job market. There's no shortage of people who are frustrated because they can't find jobs. Fresh tech and cyber graduates are basically unemployable. People with 1-5 years experience find it extremely difficult to find work.
Layoffs like this are a huge reason for that. Talent pools are overlapping like never before. A person with 5 years of solid experience applying for tons of jobs and getting nowhere, only to realize they are competing with people with 10-15 years of experience freshly laid off from big companies. At that point, early career people are getting pushed almost completely out of the industry.
There goes Seattle Eastside housing market. At least 30% households on my street have someone at Microsoft.
Having no regard for the quality of the end user experience opens up a lot of business possibilities, LLM's or not.
The terms for this seem kind of not great tbh, unless you have been there for like multiple decades, especially in this job market.
I probably wouldn't take this and instead devote more of my time to practicing for and collecting interviews during the equivalent time period with the hopes of keeping my job at the end.
Here's where I like working with some employment security. If they want to fire me, they'll have to buy me out WHEN that happens. It's not like I need to face some dilemma between choosing a buyout or otherwise get nothing in case I'm fired.
Scary AND exciting: zoomed out, it's a sign we're entering an ENORMOUS diversification of the capabilities of the economy.
This feels like the centuries-ago transition of peasants from subsistence farmers to economically valuable consumers: thousands of Microserfs, spat out by a geriatric company that lost its ability to leverage their strengths. Their intelligence, their cognitive work product, will be their own again.
Awful for some affected folks; great for others, but SUPER great for everyone who stands to benefit from these talented folks' ejection into the great unknown of "holy shit I need to make money, lemme skate where the puck's going"
Some may even disrupt Microsoft. After all Microsoft can't force their knowledge out of their minds.
The best path is always save up enough for at least 6 months of runway if you get laid off, at a bare minimum.
Would be interesting to know how much of it is result of AI and how much because the government is looking into their H1B practices, aka how much of the people who got this offer are under H1B.
So what's the context for this? A third accept, so 20k redundancies in a year? 10% churn is very high? doesn't sound high compared to other tech companies.
Are we sure this isn't click bait
(not rhetorical, genuine question)
Let's just hope this is middle-management only, the ones who are causing all the trouble
I’m theoretically wondering what will happen to a country like USA when unemployment hits, say, 25%.
I spent ~15 years there, left at level 66. Here's the thing people don't want to hear; a lot of people there, particularly management, but others also, are either coasting or not that great.
You have the guy who wrote code in the 90's, became a dev manager, maybe is a PUM now, or still a dev manager, and basically "does emails and attends meetings", goes to the "daily triage" (which has a whole bunch of people in the room), is a member of the "war team" (they probably don't use that term any more). All these people are not "doing" anything useful and there are a lot of them at MS.
This used to work out fine, because the way the August reviews always worked (stacked rank etc.) it's very much a favorites game, "who you know". So you get a pass.
But suddenly there's a reorg and new management comes in (or a flattening; no more dev leads with 2 reports!). And they have their own set of dev leads, dev managers, etc. they want to install. So the existing management gets kicked out, those who still have buddies in other orgs will transfer there (but this gets much rarer now, as most friends from 'old Microsoft' have retired). But the "does emails & attends meetings" guy is out of a job (and is going to cry "age discrimination" because he's 50+, but the reality is he hasn't done a whole lot for a decade, and has zero useful skills now).
PMs; there are WAY too many of these, with their entire parallel org of management. There used to be almost as many PMs as devs back in the day. Other companies don't have anywhere near so many. Most of them can go; back in the day a lot of them would go to the dev's office, ask about a topic someone asked about in email, the dev says "Oh I can just reply to the thread", PM says "Nooo... let me do that" (PM wants to be the one replying to be 'visible' even though they are just a glorified status collector/forwarder).
There ARE a lot of incredible people there, and the best people I worked with at MS are just as good as the best I worked with at the FANGs. But unlike other companies (FANGs, startups) there are a LOT of a really bad/useless people there too. A lot. Although I have no faith that MS is going to lose THOSE people in this buyout.
Engineering discipline is absolutely non-existent at MS. Everything is date driven. The source tree (Source Depot) gets locked as of X date and only "test fixes" can be checked in after that. But the next ship vehicle is months away. So people keep checking in regular code as "test fixes" after the branch lock. One time it got so bad that the build was actually broken for the entire day of the branch lock, and people were force submitting in the evening (everyone expected whoever broke the build to fix it, but... they didn't, so force submit!) to make sure their changes got in before the lock.
Random unrelated funny MS story: The wiki that everyone in Bing used, got wiped out, because it was running on a machine in someone's office that got wiped when they left. We had to have everyone run a script to salvage what they could off everyone in the org's browser cache.
I better hope Microsoft’s H1B applications get denied for a few years.
That’s a lot of workers looking for work.
Is it known if this is AI related?
Or perhaps, as Zack noted, Musk showed them the way?
Give the low quality of microsoft's products, I am very ready to believe that even simple agents can do a better job.
Copilot, AI spending, missing mobile, Surface, Xbox taking their toll.
I hope these people form a group to develop software that directly competes with Microsoft or even make it free now that you have extra time. It'll keep your skills up and good for the resume.
Obviously, details are thin. I’m very curious how these offers are distributed by role and by seniority.
Pretty big, but remember that offering a buyout to 1/4 of their employees doesn't mean they're looking to get rid of that many! Not everyone's going to take the buyout, and they're not expecting them to. Their target is likely much lower.
Is there any word on which divisions/lines of business they are offering for?
It seems one quarter are eligible. The target reduction is presumably much less.
This can be interpreted as a form of soft layoffs, or it can also be interpreted as an attempt to change their labor culture. Microsoft was notorious for stacked ranking, where supposedly "low performers" were regularly culled. If you offer low performers a smooth way out, it's another form of culling without the harsh push.
This was announced back in April. Lot better than doing layoffs imo. If someone is already checked out then giving them an incentive to leave works out for both sides.
Effectively that means that getting blocked from H1B is a non-issue for Microsoft, since they already have way too many workers.
It's mentioned elsewhere in the comments, but is buried: level 70 is "Distinguished Engineer" and below, so effectively, it's available to all normies.
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/microsoft/salaries/software...
How can Microsoft justify making thousands of H1B filings when obviously there's no shortage, and in fact there is a glut, of software engineers? https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/?q=Microsoft&employer=Microsoft
They only had $281bn in revenue last year.
A quarter were asked. That seems like a lot.
It does seem a bit of a fortuitous timing, with Anthropic IPO S-1 just dropping..
Ex-MSFT here. I resigned in June, I was an L63. I spent 8 years at MSFT across two stints.
My last 18 months at MSFT were deeply unproductive. Constant reorgs, the work not being aligned to my capabilities and unfortunately just the general feeling that I was under worked and had very little opportunity for career advancement.
I would look at my colleagues and sister teams and wonder, why do they need these many people to work on something so trivial ? Or how did this person get promoted for doing that work ? I am sure envy played a part in the second question but it was legitimate. Remember, all this was before LLM tools were prevalent.
In the end, I left off my own volition. In my last 6 months, I did very little work, if at all any. I thought why am I being paid so handsomely for such little and trivial work. I did try interviewing in a few different teams but didn’t make it (Azure Files and Hyperscale DB). If I had stayed, I would have been swiftly laid off or if I was lucky enough last long till this buyout.
I think same is true for all Big Tech companies. Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.