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Maybe I'm just lucky but I have a few gen Z coworkers and they are probably more often than not the voice of reason in our org (start up with 8 engineers). I think if an employee can't handle simple constructive criticism or clarifications maybe they should not be employed.

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.

> 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.

In the last few years, I ended up at a bigtech co through an acquisition, and had been someone who was a go-between for solving issues across teams by having a good understanding of everyone else's codebases, tests, build processes, deployment, infrastructure etc. This papered over the culture of siloed development, refusals to think beyond single services etc. I would submit tests and patches, along with tickets describing the bug, impact statement, fix, test coverage, risk, and make myself on-call or directly supervise deployment, etc.

Attempting to continue that in an org x25 larger was met with people firing off angry emails to executives saying their authority was being undermined and made to look bad, when long standing issues were made trivial and fixed by "someone they had never met before", and wherever they came from can they please go back to. I have no idea what a lot of these people were spending so long doing, their commit history was often full of changes that would make you go think "???". I guess it's lucrative to run out the clock year after year on a 180k package, attending meetings where you argue that things are difficult and lets meet again in 3 months? After becoming highly visible for bringing things to attention, I was offered a package to leave, I assume so they could go back to a culture of top down authority and silence.

Getting big is the same as getting old. Getting big means that they lucked into getting a cash cow and a bureaucracy springs up to manage that cash cow, kind of a necessary evil, and also attracts opportunists who think they can make the cash cow bigger (and enrich themselves in the process). So the business starts bloating up with employees.

Actually, I think there are areas of interest that come up in large companies. Microsoft started the equivalent of an FDE organization about 12 years ago. It was interesting to have the freedom to build and grow an organization from about 20 to 800 people. Working with customers and product teams to help get direct customer feedback to help evolve products was interesting. Now, 12 years later, FDEs are sort of the current buzzy role.

I suspect there is still a good amount of shedding the defensive-hiring going on from the pre-AI, low interest, high growth inflation front-loading era. Now all that is crumbling, interest is rising, growth is contracting due to several factors, and AI is clearly crushing manpower demands. What do you do under these new circumstances with an excess of staff you largely hired as capacity and defensively?

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.

Part of what scares me about hold these companies are is how they've like the Titan Cronus been allowed to keep eating their children. There's so so much missing new blood that should be here, so many interesting medium sized companies that should be adapting, figuring out this new age, but so much of our talent and brainpool is locked up deep inside one of a handful of these massive techno-feudal empires.

I've worked with a number of people who were like this at MSFT. They've all been laid off.

> I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy.

Perhaps what you perceived as someone being emotional was actually someone who spent a long time barely functioning due to things that have been happening in their life, and that small event just so happened to be a straw that broke the camel's back.

People around you are going through stuff. Everyone is. Someone's stuff is easy to carry, someone else's stuff isn't. "Back in the day" people also carried their burden with them. This is nothing new. Perhaps you never noticed because so far everyone you dealt with was great at masking, and desperately want to avoid having to see coworkers like you worsen their burden by doing what feels like kicking them while they are down.

> I think it's a fundamental rule that the competence and effectiveness of an org must fall, over time

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...

> saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy

Was it about displaying the user's birthday?

> and have fun doing it, for better or worse

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.

It feels like tech overcorrected from allowing assholes to be assholes. To now having words and tone policed constantly.

  I resigned a year ago, L65. The service I worked on was 5 engineers, within a few months’ time it was just me. Was always rated a 140 come connect season.

> 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.

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.

No thank you. I worked in multiple startups and they inherited the worst cancers of big tech: moving slowly, decisions by committees, leveling (in one startup, the founder decided to have six engineering levels in a company with less than 10 engineers). Compound with low pay and erratic behavior of founders, I had seen more than enough.

I work in oil and gas manufacturing and we are slow dinosaurs when it comes to adapting or using new technology.

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.

> When you work for stablished company most of the work is refinements

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.

Yeah, at least in the pre-AI times I was writing way less code than in my startup days. but like 10 to 1000x people actually interacted with them.

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.

> following new rules or regulations

I'm ISO27001'ing my company and I wonder if some day, we'll find a better way than written policies, procedures, forms, evidence and audits. To me, it seems like our current world's biggest flaw: We're losing 2/3rd of our workforce to maintaining procedures, they make the work boring and unbearable, and they're not even efficient, even if they do provide upside in systematically organizing things. Standards (when pushed to procedures, forms and audite) are the regression-to-the-mean of collective organizations.

> how many people would work on a typical Microsoft product, and what sort of calibre are they?

There are high talent density orgs at MSFT too. I do not want to give the impression that everyone at MSFT is low calibre. I was at the beginning of the Security org being formed (back then it was a tiny part of E+D). I was a minion who witnessed Security transforming into a 10B+ USD business so there are very qualified people at MSFT. We went from a few hundred devs and PMs to ~10K devs, PMs, Support etc to work on a mature business. There are a host of talented people still at MSFT, also MS continues to publish impactful research in AI, Systems etc. The great Leslie Lamport is still at MSFT. I am not comparing myself to these titans, I am nowhere near that level but just saying that there are oodles of talent at MSFT.

On the other hand, here is an example that is illustrative of the sort of people I encountered towards the end of my tenure. My last manager who was one big reason behind me resigning once told me in my 1-on-1 that I should count myself lucky to be employed at MSFT and that other developers would kill to join MSFT. This was someone who had started his career in TCS, Wipro etc and then worked at a bunch of networking companies who presumably didn't pay that well. Everyone at MSFT is decently paid because the stock is doing well and long may that continue . My last team/org was a 30M$+ business with only one customer, we had maybe ~300 people altogether in the US, UK and India. It felt like we were always support engineers for this one big whale of a customer and we were trying to "pivot" to get more customers but that always seemed fanciful as the product was expressly designed for one customer. MSFT acqui-hired from this customer multiple execs and developers to sell said product to the same customer. I am missing a lot of key details as I wasn't at the inception of this product but the whole org seemed dysfunctional, inefficient and certainly I had low-morale. There just wasn't as much work for that many people.

When I submitted my resignation, they actually tried to retain me! I was befuddled to say the least, I hadn't been that productive at all but I guess they just needed warm bodies to work on some other misguided initiative. Personally, I had enough. I forewent my last tranche of sign-on stocks (a non-trivial amount) but was glad to see the back of this org. It was deleterious to my career, I was so pissed that I didn't even send a farewell email. I don;t blame anyone but myself, I hold myself accountable for my career but this was what I perceived.

Apologies, this felt like a rant and it is partly one. But I never had a frank conversation about this with anyone after I left. My fiance is a Doctor so she can't understand all this but my fellow colleagues in tech will.

Disagree. The only part an AI can't do is the people aligning and box drawing. The implementation part is trivial. That's who will get replaced.

I didn't get it wrong. I am okay to play politics if there's a prize worth taking, working on impactful products or learning new skills but if all there is to grab is titles or better pay then playing politics is playing the short game.

I am merely 30-years old, hopefully I have a long career or at-least as long as possible but playing politics to play the short game is very short sighted to say the least.

If I want politics, I would rather just re-watch Game of Thrones.

I always joked that when a company grows past 20 people it goes from being a table top game or crpg and it morphs into an MMO, but with DoTA/LoL mentality internally.

That's a good book, but I'd argue that in a pure free market without intervention, monopolies would be disappointingly common (and why some level of regulation should exist).

That's not what we're seeing. Companies grow big enough to take over entire sectors of the economy, the economy of scale works against smaller competitors.

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.

I dont know which Big Tech you work at but at “my” Big Tech we are working crazy hours. And thats with very heavy use of AI.

But it was like this pre-AI, as well. I don't think I spent a significant amount of the work week coding since I was an L3 15 years ago. And even then it was clear that impact (and thus promos and raises) was inversely correlated to the amount of the week spent coding.

What I'm seeing on my teams is everyone being more overworked than ever because the coding part happens SO quickly now that there's no friction to slow down all the nonstop "team alignment and box drawing" work that someone else in this thread alluded to.

The only counter-point here is, I think a lot of larger orgs operated like this before AI. Pointless meetings, a lot of people only really working a few hours a week. It's the classic Office Space portrayal. Or Big Head at Hooli just hanging out on the roof in Silicon Valley. It's real. So I understand the temptation to say "this can't last", but yet...

This is why I think communism would make sense in our current reality. If everyone got paid the same, then it would be fairer than what we have now where everyone gets paid a random amount with no correlation with skill or effort.

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.

This inefficiency is highly destructive because of how the system compounds wealth. You end up with random people with zero value-creation skills and zero vision having millions or billions of dollars and deciding everyone else's lives.

I work at google and our team has too much work and is expanding constantly. Anyone I meet in GCP is working 45 hours a week minimum. It's not a death march but I've yet to meet the people who just don't do anything.

Maybe they were L3s? Maybe it's EU?

I am speaking of the time from 2024 to mid-2025. While upper management was pushing developers to use Copilot, it was still not prevalent.

Post mid-2025, there were mandates to use it wherever we could.

So glad we can finally notice this! :)

Middle Management Machivallianism

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).

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)

> Maybe go find some non-tech work for a little bit to stretch the dollars and ensure I have health insurance.

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

Not to start an argument, but do you really think you could easily find non-tech work that also provides health insurance? I get a little triggered at this line of thinking. People often day dream about working as a Costco receipt checker without realizing you literally have to work your way up from seasonal to part-time to full-time over years. And that's assuming you can even get hired as a seasonal worker with a 5+ year unemployment gap on your Resume (your SWE career).

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.

Wouldn't they also get layoff severance? Or was the amount significantly lower than tbe buyout would have been?

I have doubts that this is suitable as a generalized statement like that.

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

It obviously depends on the specific amounts of the package as well as the timeline and personal impact of the upcoming layoffs (the latter of which you can’t know).

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.

Always? What I’ve seen is sometimes the buy out is no better than the current severance package. Might as well ride it out. The severance could in theory get worse over time but that doesn’t seem like a worthwhile reason to throw away your job. You’re also throwing away unemployment.

If you take it you're not eligible to unemployment. I think in this market, given the undefined length of employment searching at the moment, that's a major consideration.

They did VEPs at Google at my org a year ago and nothing has happened yet.

Sometimes--very rarely--one's ethics may dictate not taking it, as with the "fork" email to U.S. Federal Government employees. Or when an early-stage company layoff is being done in tandem with a buyback/tender to reduce employee ownership before the board does something crazy.

Most of the time, though, you're right. Take it.

If it was true, then companies would offer less and less money until it stopped being true

Eh, the voluntary severance offered at Google in various European countries recently was less than the negotiated payout for mandatory layoffs. And most of the headcount from people who took it was backfilled, too.

At Google they did voluntary buyouts and gave managers BACKFILLs.

It wasn't a 'instead of layoffs' it was 'ok if you're burned out, here's your exit'.

That is a fantastic package; you'd have to be daft or blindly proud to not bite on that

Having been in a company for many years, that every so often had these packages, I disagree.

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).

Can you still get unemployment too?

Hah not always. I worked at a bank where they offered this and I applied and I was denied and told I was essential.

It doesn't say "everyone in sales" so it's not clear.

Can't be software engineers, from what I learned they were never really paid commensurate to value they delivered. So it must be quite economical to keep them around.

I've been given such an offer. The company gave eligible employees X days to opt in and then it gave itself Y days to decide which volunteers would get buyouts. This matter of loyalty perception was certainly a live question for the employees. But also the company did iterative buyouts so in later rounds there was some evidence available to the current prospects about how employees were treated earlier. Not so much in what opportunities were withheld from the "disloyal" but in the take rate of volunteers and in the probability of being "laid off" given the receipt of an earlier buyout offer.

Anecdotal, but I had an acquaintance try to use the buyout and was point blank told by management "it's not for you".

Company sends you offer first

At Google it was really rare to be denied, and if they did then it was kinda a negotiating chip for you - if you're so important to the company they won't let you leave, then are they going to pay you accordingly?

Not a problem. While it is reasonable to consider the signaling impact of all your comms at work, if you take this, they'll smile at getting closer to quota and wish you well.

Reasons to accept. Reasons to decline, but that isn't one of them.

There is a difference this time though. There has never been a time in last 40 years where being laid off seemed terrifying for knowledge workers in tech. It's speculative what's ahead, but man, does it LOOK bleak. Many would still come out OK, but it's not a given.

Like with any deal, it's important to be able to run the numbers at any time.

The worst case scenario is not taking the offer then getting let go for performance, which means zero severance, health insurance terminated same day.

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.

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.

AI adoption is a huge shift from labor to capital. Its history repeating, now instead of muscle power being replaced its brain power.

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.

this is definitely about over investment in AI, regardless of whether it was smart or not. They need to recover those monies.

Big companies are notoriously overweight and need to trim down continuously. Microsoft is already a big bureaucracy and nothing like the start-up mentality it had throughout the 80's and 90's.

It's fine for them to get rid of excess weight. My guess is they could probably cut a lot more if they wanted.

1/4 becomes a de facto standard, the companies will be expected to follow starting right now.

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...

You can tell what proportion they want to take the offer by how generous the offer is. And indeed:

> 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...

Including people they want to keep? What if all the people they wanted to keep accepted while those they didn't want to keep stayed? Certainly makes no sense.

A rational company would not buy out an employee that they're going to be rehiring.

Is 2 weeks per year really that generous.

Lying is in the job description. I'm convinced that to rise (or be groomed and practically anointed through nepotism and corruption) to that level in business, you have to trade a part of your humanity. There comes a point where wealth and power changes you and I'm convinced that the aspiration of it is really a form of concealed, socially acceptable sociopathy.

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.

Literally the exact thing the CEO of my old Berlin based startup said before our team was laid off / replaced with AI.

Yes 100%

> The truth of the matter I think is that you do not actually need the best.

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...

What management thinks is good and what employees, especially engineering type employees, think is good are usually counter.

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.

That is a rule for a good project manager. When work is simple, you don't need bright people. You just need average guys. But when work is cutting edge, you need very talented people.

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.

Companies want to get rid of the bottom 25% of the employees at all times. These offers often get taken advantage by half of those and half of others who are more capable & find it opportunistic to do something better. If that latter half had stayed, they would have outperformed their pay. If the company needs to re-hire that lost output in employees, it's a net negative. If they can guarantee that the ones who stayed plus AI outweighs the time to onboard and institutional knowledge lost, sure seems reasonable but high risk for a large company that is allowed to play it safer.

> The truth of the matter I think is that you do not actually need the best.

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.

This is true if you are running a car wash. Even the mid tier employees satisfactorily do the job and customers can be given what they paid for. You are competing on geographic location and ability to do a very easy task repeatedly over and over. You get another chance to sell your product every single day, and you can adjust your prices up and down to find the sweet spot because the sales cycle repeats every day.

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.

It didn't seem that obvious a term as you described it here, but a bit of googling gave the background:

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

MS did a round of layoffs that was specifically targeting low performance last year: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/08/microsoft-confirms-performan... and there's no reason to believe they wouldn't do it again. I doubt that anyone there is unaware that hanging on isn't a realistic option if they're not delivering.

You get the same with government jobs. Anyone smart leaves and gets a better job, so you’re left with the dregs.

I termed it "Sh*t floats" when I was in the Navy.

They're also the ones that create the most money.

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.

In theory that's a manager's responsibility, but managers get (effectively) punished for firing people so that never happens in practice.

9 figure signing bonuses are a horrible problem to have

Not true, the market is exceptional for the best in tech. The problem arises when some employees think they are the best - despite the facts not lining up.

Yes and No. If you are a citizen and have “AI” experience there’s plenty of startups offering base salaries in excess of the average Microsoft total comp.

Definitely not. We are no better at finding good employees than we ever were. It's the human biases that make it bad, not the technology.

Ah yes, the old “well we won’t hire you anyway” argument, that’s a good one

Failing to live up to a business promise runs afoul of promissory estoppel: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/promissory_estoppel.asp

If this claim was in writing then it's legally binding in most U.S. states. Technically it's legally binding even if it's not written but in those cases it's harder to prove.

Right? When management demonstrates their inability to plan for repercussions, how am I to believe a pinky promise covering the next three years?

> And people believed them?!

Probably because they could sue them for not keeping their word.

It was more than 3 years ago, but as far as I know, they did honor the agreement. Some people took early retirement packages closer to the end of that three-year period and they got the same deal.

So if we get the same acceptance rate. This would be about a 10% reduction in headcount.

Hi David. Yep, it was.

Because the company wouldn't have the money by that point? Seems unlikely. Or because it was an outright lie? Could be grounds for a lawsuit.

hey! we said no questions asked!

It's sort of weird in a world that has moved to an DevOps-style ethos for most development.

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.

The FAGMAN companies got caught colluding to depress wages by avoiding hiring people already employed by the others, so they learned to accomplish the same thing without writing it down by having these periodic huge layoffs across the entire industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

They (the industry) have always wanted to find a way to do this. Tools like Rational Rose and Visual Basic were touted as being able to do this. Sending work overseas is another way. AI is just the next in line.

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.

>Software engineers

This Microsoft deal for the large part is not being offered to software engineering orgs.

Only works if employees can't found something new. Which might be the case right now.

Really, it feels like we're in a quiet depression.

If they actually had a need for those software engineers right now, they wouldn't play that game. (Or rather, if they could make more money by having them create something than they could save on wages from playing the game.)

But at that point, they almost should be laying off engineers, even without playing any such game.

To me it does not seem like any bigger conspiracy than people always wanted to pay less and earn more at the same time.

Seems like a good way to avoid the bad PR. This offer will be disproportionately taken by citizens and avoided by visa workers.

Can’t claim MS is firing citizens and replacing them with H1Bs, if they are leaving voluntarily.

I highly doubt it’s a factor. If we learned anything in the last 10 years, is that you can’t unflood the zone with facts. The administration is going to say what they are going to say and signal to their target audience. Corporations are going to do what they need to do. Their target audiences barely overlap.

I'm not aware of this. But if I were to speculate, maybe they feel some freedom because they thing the midterms will be a change.

Our smartest, most capable Exit Offer yet.

The new Office, 25% slimmer

It could be an enterprise product bundled with some MS365 SKUs. They know a lot of MS customers would need such thing in coming years.

queue the don draper meme

"Shareholders will love it! Our company has never told staff to get stuffed better!"

This sounds like satire, but I don't think we're far off from major tech companies announcing layoffs alongside new products at keynotes. After all, their purpose is to drive consumer and investor hype.

Someone posted the terms on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/microsoft/comments/1xg0c5o/microsof...

> 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.

Gotta read the link:

“Eligible employees will receive an email with a link to their Voluntary Exit Offer details within the next few hours.”

Level 70 for IC devs is a distinguished engineer (at other companies), only one job level is above 70 for ICs.

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.

Very few people are level 70. It means VP or Distinguished Engineer. Probably far less than <1% of the company. These people are making over $1m a year most likely, if not more. For Microsoft, that is big money. They don't pay like Meta or the AI labs. We are more comparable in pay to Amazon and other 2nd/3rd tier big tech companies.

I'm taking it to mean everyone below (or perhaps even including) VP, because I thought they topped out at 68 for normies.

Leaked Microsoft pay guidelines – salary, hiring bonus, stock awards by level - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37912673 - October 2023 (216 comments)

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).

The article mentions „ vice president level and below“

levels.fyi

2014 was the year they acquired minecraft/mojang and nokia, which may have accounted for a lot of that growth. Also 2022 was the Activision/Blizzard acquisition which would have been well over 10k new employees...

I believe this number is FTE's and not contractors. That's a whole different story, and I don't think those numbers are public. After a layoff at big tech, you see an influx of contractors. I would not be surprised if it was 50/50 at this point.

What’s the reason for the stagnation/decline since 2022?

60k workers is only ~18 billion. Maybe 36 billion. Maybe even 72.

That's small potatoes vs their new excess capex spend of 100sB/y.

> Something like 80% of the company left or was let go, and despite all the smug laughing about how the platform would go under within weeks, it just kept on going

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.

they were doing far more than propping up twitter. they were also doing tons of engineering on the side like bootstrap, and shaping fundamental internet technologies.

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.

I strongly disagree with this take; do you think all companies are 80% SREs? Did Twitter make money by serving pages to users?

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.

Keep in mind that we don't know how many engineers from his other companies have worked or are working on Twitter since it (a) went private, then (b) merged with SpaceX. So the "I fired 80% of my staff and nothing happened" meme is a bit incomplete

It kept on going, but they have been far less stable from a technical OR leadership perspective. They had a user exodus. They had advertisers leave in droves. I suspect it was a net negative change.

Price's Law (more of an observation than a law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law impacts and software with large teams are no exception. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34736936 )

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.

Trying to do anything other than posting on the platform is a mess. Advertising dashboards etc were broken for so long that I gave up trying all together.

Also look at their recent account merging efforts and all the problems people have encountered and posted about on the platform itself.

You can see from the replies (highly political responses that are focused on the EM angle rather than particularly caring about the twitter angle) that really don't like this answer. Unfortunately for them it's true. After some initial stumbles after the firings (which journalists were practically cheering from the rooftops), today it seems to be much the same as it was before all that. And that makes reddit types really really mad.

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.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-firing-wor...

This is because nobody can say how many people are needed to develop or maintain some body of software. So companies hire however many employees they can afford. When the number they can afford changes they hire more or fire some. The number of staff has pretty much nothing to do with the actual work. AI introduces another factor to the equation: it allows one person to perform N times as much softy-work as before. So even if you have no idea how many people you need (as always, see above) you do know that you can get by with 1/N.

I'm sure their dau decline and actually blocking most usage (non-logged in users) has helped a lot.

Twitter lost 80% of the value for their shareholders so what the heck are you on about man?

Platform was super unreliable for a while after that - although that might be related to making all the software changes to turn it in to an even worse cesspit.

Edit: Enron Musk apologists will always crack me up.

There is enough until the company hits the early 2020 approximate headcount, adjusted for business changes in that time. The exact adjustment is hard to know, but in general, if a company was growing at, say, 10% per year, prior to the covid-craziness, then one would expect something like that natural growth to continue. Very generally speaking.

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.

a lot of places, including Microsoft, drastically cut or are in the process of cutting down on WFH also means what, vast distances between teams, coworkers, buildings, cafeteria, etc (for campus based companies). How many of these places that are "going back to office" (or have already) are doing more in-person and less or no Zoom/Teams meetings now, anyway?

AI investment is also money not spent on salaries. LLM ROI is hotly debated, but it's no secret that companies are diverting money to it regardless.

With the almost 10x share price run-up of the last few years, an offer of fully-vesting is going to sound pretty good to a lot of people.

If you re hiring remote across EU I know a dev with actual experience who can still engineer using his own brain (me) :p

Do you restrict your hiring to candidates with fluent Swedish?

How's the market there, out of curiosity? Good enough to compensate London's housing costs?

Wouldn't surprise me if they still have layoffs after this.

Right and they're a picture of health, with their junk bond rating etc.

Of their engineers or lawyers division? ;)

it's not just windows.

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.

Windows is dead to consumers. Linux market share is skyrocketing.

To assume MS will continue coasting is a fool's errand.

looks like their normal layoff package

nondisclosure of compensation package and disparagement clauses are usually on the contracts as well. People don't want to tip off the H1B guy he makes 40% less than the dude standing next to him. =3

> 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

"Up to" can suddenly become much less once you realize company paid healthcare premiums now come out of your paycheck.

> In this job market, that may not be enough

Could still be much better than a sudden layoff though.

Increased productivity makes employees more valuable, not less.

You are getting downvoted but I have to believe this is at least what some of the executives are thinking, even if it proves to be a complete illusion.

You’re getting downvoted because for most of us this is our biggest nightmare

Coincides with an EMNLP keynote sharing a tweet saying “big lab people now ignore NeurIPS/iclr/ etc papers and regard them as full of lies”.

Well, AI research outside of frontier labs had a good run. Gonna suck when competing with the other 30% unemployment white collar workers. When you say what work you used to do, some of them may end up trying to be violent towards one who is seen as having worked on the tech that killed the golden goose.

Right. And this unemployment will also cascade, because small businesses will go bankrupt after loosing their customers.

The Seattle "Eastside" is not really Seattle, it's Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland, Issaquah and Sammamish - overpriced suburbs. I live in one of them and work at MSFT.

It's not the end of the world. Seattle is incredibly expensive, however the market is down this year and listings sitting on the market for months and months. The problem is influx of people who need to sell because they lost their job or accepted the buyout - it can ruin their life further down the line.

One of my last productive acts when I was at microsoft was to get a two-line change committed in windows to a tree outside my org. It took two full months just to propagate the change up the very fragile and fractured tree of repos from my team's to WINMAIN and from WINMAIN back down to the owning team's org, and my efforts were required every step of the way. It was truly soul-crushing.

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.

Come now, Windows Terminal can execute your commands in less than a weekend ;)

Definitely a precursor to layoffs, but they also know that not everyone will take the offer. So if you want to reduce your workforce by X%, you offer (X+Y)% the buyout. The more attractive the offer, the smaller Y needs to be.

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%.

That was my experience at Automattic. When we were offered nine months’ pay to leave, I still believed things would improve, so I chose the “stability” of staying. In hindsight, that was a costly mistake.

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

Don't call me Shirley.

I have but it's rarely done by buyouts or with same IC mass layoffs. There is also generally less managers.

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.

For non-Americans: IC = Independent contributor = employee without people reporting to them

The same reason you’ve never seen the US Congress meaningfully change anything about their role, compensation, etc.

In my experience it's more the case that 70% of employees are checked out

It is much better than optics friendly, because it gives the affected people a chance to determine their own destiny.

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.

>This many layoffs is likely far beyond "checked out" employees.

25% offers != 25% 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?

Or maybe, every tech company is still shedding the overhiring they did during the Covid years.

They have net income in the billions per quarter

Maybe they are shedding workforce to spend more on AI infrastructure like many of the other layoffs to remain competitive.

The layoffs could have nothing to do with the employees.

Both can be true:

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.

Of course it’s a joke.

In order to be “patient 0”, he’d have to be human in the first place…

Yes, but you don't know if you'll be laid off. The subsequent offer may well be "you get to keep your job".

If you choose to hang on you have to work for 6 months.

Yeah, this is the dumbest thing you can do. It's a message to the strongest people to leave on their own terms.

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.

Excluded: marketing, commercial business, security, quantum

> Maybe it's a cull of core Windows/Office SDE and/or Azure.

There's still people left there? Lol

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.

Not to say that this is isn't huge, but it's _up_to_ 25%, given that some will accept and some won't.

And the internal memo currently circulating actually does not mention that number so I'd be curious where it came from.

Isn't average corporate worker attrition at 11-12%? so they could achieve that much just with hiring freeze.

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.

And they did fire some of them in 2025/2026.

Buy, like they dud with Github.