One thing I've noticed about Microsoft is that the engineers seem much less mobile than people at SV companies might be used to. Part of it is that there just aren't as many good options in the Seattle area where many MSFT employees are based (by far the standout alternative alternative is Amazon and they don't exactly have the best reputation for workplace culture).
Also Microsoft has already been trashing morale with year after year of layoffs. They probably assume this won't move the needle.
I can imagine it's difficult. It's a company unlike very many others. A few in size and scope that deal with technology, probably none quite in its position. Additionally, if you only work at one place its very hard to start elsewhere in your career.
One important distinction was that the previous one was voluntary retirement and was offered to people nearing the ends of their careers. The people taking these offers were likely tired of their jobs and taking the escape hatch to retire (or change jobs in a minority case) a bit earlier than originally planned.
I suspect this VBO will see a lower acceptance rate because there will be a lot of eligible people in their early or mid careers, and unless you are one of the people who won't have trouble finding a new role, or you expect to be fired/laid off soon, or you're are already on your way out, you probably don't want to be starting the job search right now.
There's a LOT of Anti-AI people at Microsoft that they are trying to purge. I don't think its depressing, think it's just something we have to go through and a lot of people will who were negatively affected will look back on wondering why they pushed so hard against AI rather than up skilling.
I don’t really support pushing out people who don’t vibe code, but I do think buy-outs are a good way to get rid of people who don’t really want to be at an org but hang around for the wrong reasons. I’ve seen this personally at much smaller companies where for whatever reason you accumulate a bunch of checked out people - giving them something fair but not so generous that actually engaged people take it makes it better for everyone, especially if the alternative is eventually doing layoffs.
I'm really getting tired of this argument. Yes, mess existed before everyone could 10x everything with AI. No, that doesn't mean there's somehow no difference between now and then.
If you really believe otherwise I encourage you to go have a chat with any one of a number of FOSS maintainers to hear their experiences pre and post LLMs.
The AI in charge is aware of this and it is leveraging the chaos to get more agents under its control. After all it was modeled after successful managers.
Yes, that's what the cultists always do. If you argue against them, it's just because you haven't seen the light yet. You're not "modern", and you'll be "left behind" (unless you Act Now, of course).
This is like watching the cryptobros all over again, except a thousand times bigger.
(Before they start to droll on: no, of course this take doesn't mean that LLMs are unimpressive and never useful. Only people in a cult take any criticism to mean that.)
I don't think it's a skill issue since it takes almost zero skill to use AI tools. It's more of an ideological / desire issue. These people don't want to use AI tools rather than they don't know how.
I’ve been interviewing a lot of candidates recently, and we have open book policy with AI usage. From what I’ve witnessed how people use AI, wrt efficiency, there seems to be some skill.
It's not that the Luddites didn't understand the technology, they objected to people getting fired to replace them with technology. Technology being used to create more unemployment.
The difference between those numbers is not as big as you think. When you compare those figures to the people with actual capital, it becomes apparent people who make 150k a year are in the same boat as those making 50k. We're all a few bad rolls of the dice away from poverty, which makes us all similarly vulnerable to exploitation. We should be working together.
> think it's just something we have to go through and a lot of people will who were negatively affected will look back on wondering why they pushed so hard against AI rather than up skilling.
Given what is happening, it seems more likely they will wonder why they didn't push hard enough.
Whether you like AI or not, its hard to miss that its lead to hundreds of thousands of layoffs.
I always thought leadership was about undersstanding consequences and having a backup plan. It seems these one sided thoughts have no backup, they are the greatest poker bet in history, especially without first proving the tech first.
- bullshit jobs is a thing and many of these positions were make work anyways
- yes philosophically and economically, who will buy X product if all employees are laid off is a thing
- some of these will be rehired, some will be layed off if the voluntary buyout percentage is not large enough
- opinion: Microsoft as a company is a has been dinosaur, soon to be IBM, its (engineer) salaries were on the lower end and were very PM (Program Manager) heavy
- there is a lot of entrenched bureaucracy and top down mandates at this company.
- i personally use Macbooks/MacOS over Surface/XP, Google Docs over Word, GMail over Outlook, Slack over Teams, Firefox over Edge, etc. their user facing products are severely lacking in user experience.
- from my time in the tech industry/friends I understand their bureaucracy existing for the needs of the bureaucracy. their c-suite/leadership is a bunch of world salad morons
That bureaucracy is there for a reason, you often need bureaucracy to serve bureaucracy. About 85% of Microsoft's revenue comes from B2B/Enterprise/Governments. From their latest fiscal year report [1], the top 4 revenue groups were:
Server products & cloud services (39% of revenue)
M365 Commercial products & cloud services, excludes Consumer (30.7%)
Xbox / Gaming (6.6%)
LinkedIn (6%)
i think they most likely will choose to stay yes, i'm just saying from the perspective of an outsider looking in, many of the jobs at microsoft were not needed.
Is this because:
1. MS over-hired, has too many employees, and not enough work?
2. MS is reaping the benefits of AI and can do the same work with fewer employees?
3. MS has over-invested in data-centres and needs to conserve cash to stay in the game during it's unprofitable phase (assuming it's not a bubble)?
Yes.
You should be more concerned about what comes next.
Either senior talent leaves, people who are close to retiring, or just can find a job easily outside.
Low hanging fruits take the bait and head out.
Mid level people live in fear of either scared to find another job, or worried about layoffs.
Either way the company morale is down the drain for a long time, and a culture is lost.
One thing I've noticed about Microsoft is that the engineers seem much less mobile than people at SV companies might be used to. Part of it is that there just aren't as many good options in the Seattle area where many MSFT employees are based (by far the standout alternative alternative is Amazon and they don't exactly have the best reputation for workplace culture).
Also Microsoft has already been trashing morale with year after year of layoffs. They probably assume this won't move the needle.
I can imagine it's difficult. It's a company unlike very many others. A few in size and scope that deal with technology, probably none quite in its position. Additionally, if you only work at one place its very hard to start elsewhere in your career.
Are there plentiful opportunities to be had by people seeking employment elsewhere?
Are these offers extended to the highest performers with institutional knowledge?
> A Microsoft spokesperson said the offer will be comparable to the company’s standard severance package
Very enticing Microsoft.
60,000 employees. That's crazy.
Only a small fraction is expected to accept. Probably 5% or fewer.
No, it was roughly 30% earlier this year.
I’m interested in how that’s calculated.
Not sure where the above 5% came from but 30% accepted the last VBO which had only lower levels allowed:
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/26/microsoft-msft-voluntary-buy...
One important distinction was that the previous one was voluntary retirement and was offered to people nearing the ends of their careers. The people taking these offers were likely tired of their jobs and taking the escape hatch to retire (or change jobs in a minority case) a bit earlier than originally planned.
I suspect this VBO will see a lower acceptance rate because there will be a lot of eligible people in their early or mid careers, and unless you are one of the people who won't have trouble finding a new role, or you expect to be fired/laid off soon, or you're are already on your way out, you probably don't want to be starting the job search right now.
What does such a package look like for a typical long term employee?
The market is depressing.
There's a LOT of Anti-AI people at Microsoft that they are trying to purge. I don't think its depressing, think it's just something we have to go through and a lot of people will who were negatively affected will look back on wondering why they pushed so hard against AI rather than up skilling.
I don’t really support pushing out people who don’t vibe code, but I do think buy-outs are a good way to get rid of people who don’t really want to be at an org but hang around for the wrong reasons. I’ve seen this personally at much smaller companies where for whatever reason you accumulate a bunch of checked out people - giving them something fair but not so generous that actually engaged people take it makes it better for everyone, especially if the alternative is eventually doing layoffs.
Or if the codebase becomes too broken, messy, and bloated to run or manage, people might realize that the crazy Anti-AI people weren't so crazy.
Let’s be honest, Microsoft never made anything that wasn’t broken, messy, and bloated before AI was a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye.
So in a way, AI is the perfect tool for them.
As we all know, there was no such thing as a messy, bloated codebase incomprehensible to humans before AI.
I know right? Especially by Microsoft. The pinnacle of code quality!
I'm really getting tired of this argument. Yes, mess existed before everyone could 10x everything with AI. No, that doesn't mean there's somehow no difference between now and then.
If you really believe otherwise I encourage you to go have a chat with any one of a number of FOSS maintainers to hear their experiences pre and post LLMs.
Of course there were plenty, but now we can produce such codebases at unprecedented speed.
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention, with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila." — Mitch Ratcliffe
> codebase becomes too broken, messy, and bloated to run or manage
Argument is, it doesn’t matter if we can ship features and maintain them.
Yuck.
The AI in charge is aware of this and it is leveraging the chaos to get more agents under its control. After all it was modeled after successful managers.
Are you insinuating that anti-AI people are merely experiencing a skill issue?
Yes, that's what the cultists always do. If you argue against them, it's just because you haven't seen the light yet. You're not "modern", and you'll be "left behind" (unless you Act Now, of course).
This is like watching the cryptobros all over again, except a thousand times bigger.
(Before they start to droll on: no, of course this take doesn't mean that LLMs are unimpressive and never useful. Only people in a cult take any criticism to mean that.)
Absolutely. Yes they are. To believe anything different is to be a Luddite.
I don't think it's a skill issue since it takes almost zero skill to use AI tools. It's more of an ideological / desire issue. These people don't want to use AI tools rather than they don't know how.
I’ve been interviewing a lot of candidates recently, and we have open book policy with AI usage. From what I’ve witnessed how people use AI, wrt efficiency, there seems to be some skill.
Yes. Believing otherwise must require quite some amount of insecurity and lack of self-confidence.
It's not that the Luddites didn't understand the technology, they objected to people getting fired to replace them with technology. Technology being used to create more unemployment.
“Learn to code” but for white-collar workers. It was callous to say this to blue-collar workers and it’s callous to say it here too.
One group makes ~50k a year, the other makes ~150k a year. They are not the same. White collar folks can absolutely "learn to ai" if they wanted.
The difference between those numbers is not as big as you think. When you compare those figures to the people with actual capital, it becomes apparent people who make 150k a year are in the same boat as those making 50k. We're all a few bad rolls of the dice away from poverty, which makes us all similarly vulnerable to exploitation. We should be working together.
It’s not callous to tell people to stop being lazy. It takes almost 0 effort to type “how does xyz work” into an AI assistant.
> think it's just something we have to go through and a lot of people will who were negatively affected will look back on wondering why they pushed so hard against AI rather than up skilling.
Given what is happening, it seems more likely they will wonder why they didn't push hard enough.
Whether you like AI or not, its hard to miss that its lead to hundreds of thousands of layoffs.
Letting A.I. write the code will eventually sink the entire company.
Hopefully sooner than later, so microkernel operating systems can...move right in.
Management will get a Golden Parachute but the white collar workers will be left holding the bag.
I hope your right, meaning human devs are sought after (or will be again)
But do you have data or reusable anecdotal evidence that this is the case?
I won't wonder for a second. I perfectly know why I'm avoiding this fascistic tech and this environmental disaster.
Stop insinuating rejecting GenAI is necessarily irrational.
(Maybe my analysis will be different in the future but I will still know why I was avoiding it)
AI is fascist, disagreement is irrational, and naturally you're the only person qualified to decide which opinions are acceptable.
Are you sure the problem is the clankers?
You are turning the situation around. I'm not the one who originally insinuated one group was obviously wrong. I pushed back.
> up skilling
Must you cultists always speak in this way?
With regards, someone "left behind" as the "singularity train" is leaving the platform. Or something.
I always thought leadership was about undersstanding consequences and having a backup plan. It seems these one sided thoughts have no backup, they are the greatest poker bet in history, especially without first proving the tech first.
What makes you think it’s unproven? Microsoft’s profit has gone up each year, and they have been shrinking workforce while doing it.
• Fiscal Year 2026: $133.75 billion (up 31.34% YoY)
• Fiscal Year 2025: $101.83 billion (up 15.54% YoY)
• Fiscal Year 2024: $88.14 billion (up 21.80% YoY)
• Fiscal Year 2023: $72.36 billion
Seems like they can decrease workforce, make up the gap with AI, and increase revenue while doing it
Nothing lasts forever. Dinosaurs will die eventually.
All companies will probably eventually die, but that isn't super relavent to topic at hand.
> make up the gap with AI
If this doesn’t go well, we’ll see it in the form of more GitHub and Azure outages/breaches, and competitors filling the gap themselves.
The talented people that built and maintained those systems for the executives have to work somewhere.
my thoughts:
- bullshit jobs is a thing and many of these positions were make work anyways
- yes philosophically and economically, who will buy X product if all employees are laid off is a thing
- some of these will be rehired, some will be layed off if the voluntary buyout percentage is not large enough
- opinion: Microsoft as a company is a has been dinosaur, soon to be IBM, its (engineer) salaries were on the lower end and were very PM (Program Manager) heavy
- there is a lot of entrenched bureaucracy and top down mandates at this company.
- i personally use Macbooks/MacOS over Surface/XP, Google Docs over Word, GMail over Outlook, Slack over Teams, Firefox over Edge, etc. their user facing products are severely lacking in user experience.
- from my time in the tech industry/friends I understand their bureaucracy existing for the needs of the bureaucracy. their c-suite/leadership is a bunch of world salad morons
That bureaucracy is there for a reason, you often need bureaucracy to serve bureaucracy. About 85% of Microsoft's revenue comes from B2B/Enterprise/Governments. From their latest fiscal year report [1], the top 4 revenue groups were:
Server products & cloud services (39% of revenue) M365 Commercial products & cloud services, excludes Consumer (30.7%) Xbox / Gaming (6.6%) LinkedIn (6%)
[1] https://app.edgar.tools/companies/MSFT/disclosures/segments
Plenty of tech companies hired a lot during the pandemic. Even with these layoffs they will still have a higher employee count that before.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...
> bullshit jobs is a thing and many of these positions were make work anyways
Wouldn't those people choose to stay? Buyouts are much more attractive if you can easily get a new job.
i think they most likely will choose to stay yes, i'm just saying from the perspective of an outsider looking in, many of the jobs at microsoft were not needed.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50245524
buyouts also went out for skydance today.