alt Hacker News> Isn't this the company that is trying to get rid of 25% of their employees?
Just clarifying this in general, when a company makes a voluntary offer to some segment of employees, especially at this size, it is a statistics game of how many people accept the buy out.
They did not make the offer to 25% of the employees to downsize by 25%, they did it to downsize by 5% (or something like that), and then made the offer based on how many they expect to accept. This is specifically covered in this line of the geekwire article:
> Microsoft didn’t provide a projection for how many employees will accept, but the company told GeekWire it anticipates a much smaller share than the roughly 30% who took its earlier voluntary retirement offer, which went to longtime employees more likely to take the deal.
They probably expect 10-20% of those offered to take it, which would result in a 2.5-5% total downsizing.
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Yeah - I get it. Just poking the bear a bit. We've had some major incidents this year from multiple vendors, it has been aggravating.
The fact that it is always Big Even Number shows how stupid it is. Imagine if it was serious like "23.5176%" then you'd know they actually did their homework on leaning up operations instead of just cutting off limbs and seeing if it can still walk or not.
Why do they offer these buy outs at all, doesn't the US have at will employment?
Or is this just a gesture of goodwill to avoid people jumping the ship on their own?