60k workers, 1/4 of the workers. This is a big deal. It also really puts you into a bind if you receive the offer. Do you accept, take the money, and hope you can find a job (Now competing with many other Msft employees that are looking). Do you decline and hope you don't get hit with the layoff which hits if not enough people accept?
My dad was a newspaper reporter in the early 2000s, so there were several dinner table conversations about this dilemma.
The buyouts were taken by superstars and low performers. The superstars moved on to other things, like working in other forms of media.
Dad didn't take several rounds of buyouts and was fine.
After suffering a stroke, he was "put out to pasture", which for a journalist means he was sent to cover city hall meetings in some suburb. Eventually, he retired with some much smaller payout than what the last buyout would have given him. The sense in the family was that the collapse of the industry denied him a dignified last decade of work. (When the industry was flush with cash, older journalists were sort of like "elder statesmen" in the newsroom. Post-internet, no longer.)
With all due respect, it's just a job, and we would do well to remember that. Chasing status and respect through work will lead to sadness (reality - expectations = happiness).
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.
A whole lot more of us are going to get involuntarily put out to pasture through no fault of our own.
I've a neighbour who declined, and then got hit by layoffs. It was quite a gamble, and they lost out big time.
Honestly, if work was to come at me with a buy-out offer, and I was in a position to be able to afford to not work for a few years, I'd probably accept. Maybe go find some non-tech work for a little bit to stretch the dollars and ensure I have health insurance.
We're in such a bubble at the moment, things are going to get really rough.
If they're doing similar to what was mentioned back in April there is some calculation about current age + years of service that could be tempting to people on the "bubble" of retirement.
I've never been involved in such a situation, but I assume part of individual's calculation is: If I indicate interest, but the company doesn't accept it or go through with it and keeps me... am I now viewed as a disloyal, detached worker?
Just because the offer is made to 25% of the workforce doesn’t mean they will all accept. These are generally very well paid jobs and the prospect of entering the job market right now isn’t going to appeal to everyone. Especially not when you have upcoming RSU vests after a recent 50% stock rally. If say a third of the employees accept then it’ll be an ~8% reduction, which is in line with a regular company-wide layoff.
Microsoft made $134B in net income in the last 4 quarters. It used to be if you worked for a company that was printing boat loads of money that you had job security.
Now, even if the company is crushing it, they'll still see employees more as a cost center instead of a revenue generator.
No, this has never been the case. Companies are and always have been very conscious of wage and salary expenses, as it's one of the most controllable categories on the P&L.
With these kinds of offers, they don't expect to get rid of 60,000. They expect to get rid of Y,000.
They make the offer to 60,000 (typically, an entire department gets this offer, including people they want to keep). Some X,000 will take the offer. If Y,000 > X,000, they they lay off the difference.
This is what I was wondering, if they have some internal math that says "15% will probably take this offer" targeting a lower number like 10k. And if they overshoot, it's not like they'll have trouble refilling positions in this economy...
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.
My dad told me his bosses were very surprised when he eagerly accepted a similar deal. IIRC, he was about 60 at the time, so would have had about 6 years early retirement given what the pension age was back then.
"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...
>so management said if any layoffs will happen in 3 years period after this, same package will be offered no question asked. Cooled things a bit, but what a mess...
Unless those funds were placed in an escrow account, I would have assumed that claim held no water.
Also just from raw corporate penny pinching. Why would they make payouts like that if they're not forced to, yes there's reputational risks of making that promise and then not following through with it but faced with a choice between that and a few lawsuits (with the usual corporate advantages of arbitration clauses and vastly more resources they're likely to win too).
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.
"This offer will be available to eligible employees in participating teams in Canada, India, the United Kingdom and the United States at level 70 and below."
it'll be part of their internal pay banding system, so it'll correspond to a certain level of seniority and a pay range. From a quick google L70 is pretty high up, up to maybe a 7 figure salary.
Entry-level software engineering positions start at level 59 at Microsoft, with first couple positions taking 2 levels per work title change (59-60 = SE, 60-61 = SE II, 62-63 = Senior SE). Take a look at levels.fyi, that could offer some info / comparison with other companies).
So "Up to" 39 weeks of base pay, let's say 9 months.
In this job market, that may not be enough time to feel comfortable and safe taking the offer (if you're a super-employable hotshot with offers awaiting in your LinkedIn, you're probably not the likely target for the offer)
Remember, people, that Microsoft is a reformed company that supports open source and DEI Anything else was flagged up to 2025. Now that they have stolen all open source they fire people.
But some people here have a short memory and already support the new thieves on the block Anthropic and OpenAI.
Whether it was a necessity or not, they hired many mediocre but dominant open source people up to around 2022 who introduced CoCs, forced the projects to move to GitHub etc. and push for permissive licenses.
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.
Pretty big, but remember that offering a buyout to 1/4 of their employees doesn't mean they're looking to get rid of that many! Not everyone's going to take the buyout, and they're not expecting them to. Their target is likely much lower.
This was announced back in April. Lot better than doing layoffs imo. If someone is already checked out then giving them an incentive to leave works out for both sides.
There's no way 25% of their total employee base are "checked out". Yes, a bunch of folks close to retirement or fed up with working there will take the deal. But with the job market as it is, a whole lot will roll the dice on keeping their job through the inevitable follow-up round of layoffs.
This is just an optics-friendly way to soften the blow of 25% layoffs.
Makes me nostalgic for when I read Coupland's Microserfs in the bookstore the month it came out and thought, this... finally, people I could feel less awkward working and being myself around, weirdness and all.
Tech is nothing like that now. Guessing a lot of people will find earlier retirement tempting with so many skills to keep up with now and AI rooting out personalities and ages subtley in the HR pool.
One of the inherent problems with capitalism is any logical person or company within a certain threshold is not going to pay for or employ people they do not have 'work' for or need. Just like you would not buy a whole bison without a freezer (single or with an extended family); it would be wasteful, regardless of how of I or others might feel a certain amout of those types of employees should be baked into the corporate model (and not as 'corporate welfare'). Most companies have dozens of employees with nebulous duties whose mere presence is something a corporation wants or needs for whatever reason. This happens often in Asia. It also happens because companies look for connections or things they cannot deal with a few days or times a year and people who can do them would not be locateable quickly or maybe want to do it; specialists, too.
Sit on your butt doing nothing for what I would not pay minimum wage for alone, all year, then essentially do a week of work or come up with a solution the company knows is worth millions, so they're largely left alone and paid well. I have, as have others I have known, had those sorts of jobs a few times (things aren't quite like that nowadays, people either get over or underpaid now, and mos of those people have retired by now, or the newer "those types" get stock in the "new model"). Often it is not a hard tech skill but a good gut in an emergency, in tech or business.
Then there is this newfangled "communist" or "socialist" model of "companies" and "work" we are seeing that have nothing to do with either of those "isms" or capitalism, where people protest layoffs and expect everyone can get a paycheck while still refusing to check their egos and selfishness at the door. Of course, the truth is "communistic" things are generally pooled and meted out among people in s "commune" where people share similar very specific values requiring trust, and a great majority of those places do not even have the concept of a paycheck.
Either way, income has to come from somewhere. I mean, I guess feudalism could make a comeback if we had a large population die off and people split their time up between farming with high tech harvesting machines and hanging out playing PS4 games off the solar panels after dark, but in general I think most of the people I have seen getting upset make little or no sense.
I mean, is the goal for firstworld and secondworld countries a handful of neuralinked (no thanks) tech overlords we beg for equal monthly monetary alotments from and a world like in "The Machine Stops"? What would you need to do for that ("Black Mirror" and credits?!).
We can't sure all be "YouTube stars" or "self-affirmation LinkedIn gurus", obviously.
Is is corporate slop speak entirely or are many of them just as flummoxed as many of us?
(disclosure: I usually do 1099 work, but I sure know what it is like to suddenly be blindsided.)
if you are one of the ones who is valued enough to keep their job, you are strong enough to go get hired at another FAANG. Do you actually still want to be there after the bloodbath that the follow-up round of layoffs causes?
when you start somewhere after their bloodbath, you don't have to deal with all the crap you would if you stay through a bloodbath (i.e. you aren't on the hook for all the legacy shit your team owned before it had a haircut)
I'd argue it's actually better to do 25 % at once and then not doing anything like it for ... decades, ideally, but years, realistically.
Spreading it out means employees spend some of their time with an ear to the ground rather than working, and teams have to deal with multiple restructurings, neither of which are good for well-being nor productivity.
But Microsoft has turned layoffs at the end/beginning of the fiscal year into an iPhone-like release schedule. It's so reliable at this point that it's a meme outside the company amongst its customers. I know for a fact each June/July I'm getting a new account team as people are shuffled around, and low performers are shown the door
Even with these buyouts, there will be layoffs next summer. And the summer after that. And the summer after that.
Text of the memo driving this, from an article posted by Business Insider [0]:
Introducing a Voluntary Exit Offer
Today, we're introducing a new Voluntary Exit Offer (VEO) to
eligible employees within participating organizations. This offer
gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the
company a new choice to make that transition now with support. It
also gives participating orgs another way to adapt their workforce
to changing needs.
The Voluntary Exit Offer reflects an important part of how we're
evolving our approach to change: creating greater flexibility and,
where possible, more ways for employees to shape their next chapter.
This builds on what we learned earlier this year through the
Voluntary Retirement Program.
What employees should know
This offer will be available to eligible employees in participating
teams in Canada, India, United Kingdom and United States at level 70
and below. This is a time-limited, voluntary program that gives
those who are eligible the opportunity to leave Microsoft with
financial support and career planning resources. Some organizations
are providing the Voluntary Exit Offer, and some are not.
Participation varies based on each business's priorities, customer
commitments, and workforce needs.
Eligible employees will receive an email with a link to their
Voluntary Exit Offer details within the next few hours.
Looking ahead
The Voluntary Exit Offer is new for us. We'll learn from it. At the
same time, we'll keep helping people focus on the work that matters
most, build new skills, and, where it makes sense, find new
opportunities across Microsoft. There is no one-size-fits-all
approach for every team or every employee. These are a few of the
ways we're trying to meet different business needs while continuing
to create opportunities for our own people to grow and contribute.
My promise is to continue to provide clarity, listen and learn, and
keep improving.
Thank you for everything you continue to do for our customers,
Microsoft, and for one another.
Amy
How banal. The first action after achieving "AGI" is not taking over the world, curing cancer, or anything fantastic like that, but rather "lowering operating expenditure"..
They've figured out that they can offer poorly performing services that suck and nobody cares. The company will continue to explore that concept until people care.
I run an org with 200k employees. We're on our 4th significant outage with M365 services in a month. We're talking major stuff -- including user data like email getting deleted by various processes. Their approach is pretty much "meh".
The 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.)
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.
A whole lot more of us are going to get involuntarily put out to pasture through no fault of our own.
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.
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.
Now, even if the company is crushing it, they'll still see employees more as a cost center instead of a revenue generator.
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.
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.
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.
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"
anyone know what level 70 means?
Also, good grief, flooding the market with thousands more people.
2027 is going to be wild. Stock up on beans and rice, folks.
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 some people here have a short memory and already support the new thieves on the block Anthropic and OpenAI.
And they did fire some of them in 2025/2026.
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.
I wonder where are all those AI apologists who have been touting here for years that jobs will not go away?
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.
It's probably taking advantage of economic arbitrage, plus healthy beliefs in what AI can maintain.
The interesting thing will be to see what new things companies who do this can achieve.
The question above whether to take it now or try to delay taking a package is an interesting thought.
25% offers != 25% layoffs
"more ways for employees to shape their next chapter".
Tech is nothing like that now. Guessing a lot of people will find earlier retirement tempting with so many skills to keep up with now and AI rooting out personalities and ages subtley in the HR pool.
Sit on your butt doing nothing for what I would not pay minimum wage for alone, all year, then essentially do a week of work or come up with a solution the company knows is worth millions, so they're largely left alone and paid well. I have, as have others I have known, had those sorts of jobs a few times (things aren't quite like that nowadays, people either get over or underpaid now, and mos of those people have retired by now, or the newer "those types" get stock in the "new model"). Often it is not a hard tech skill but a good gut in an emergency, in tech or business.
Then there is this newfangled "communist" or "socialist" model of "companies" and "work" we are seeing that have nothing to do with either of those "isms" or capitalism, where people protest layoffs and expect everyone can get a paycheck while still refusing to check their egos and selfishness at the door. Of course, the truth is "communistic" things are generally pooled and meted out among people in s "commune" where people share similar very specific values requiring trust, and a great majority of those places do not even have the concept of a paycheck.
Either way, income has to come from somewhere. I mean, I guess feudalism could make a comeback if we had a large population die off and people split their time up between farming with high tech harvesting machines and hanging out playing PS4 games off the solar panels after dark, but in general I think most of the people I have seen getting upset make little or no sense.
I mean, is the goal for firstworld and secondworld countries a handful of neuralinked (no thanks) tech overlords we beg for equal monthly monetary alotments from and a world like in "The Machine Stops"? What would you need to do for that ("Black Mirror" and credits?!).
We can't sure all be "YouTube stars" or "self-affirmation LinkedIn gurus", obviously.
Is is corporate slop speak entirely or are many of them just as flummoxed as many of us?
(disclosure: I usually do 1099 work, but I sure know what it is like to suddenly be blindsided.)
Voluntary packages tend to be accepted by the strongest employees
It’s a shitty deal for companies but shareholders love cost cutting
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.
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.
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".
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…