Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce

Ex-MSFT here. I resigned in June, I was an L63. I spent 8 years at MSFT across two stints. My last 18 months at MSFT were deeply unproductive. Constant reorgs, the work not being aligned to my capabilities and unfortunately just the general feeling that I was under worked and had very little opportunity for career advancement. I would look at my colleagues and sister teams and wonder, why do they need these many people to work on something so trivial ? Or how did this person get promoted for doing that work ? I am sure envy played a part in the second question but it was legitimate. Remember, all this was before LLM tools were prevalent. In the end, I left off my own volition. In my last 6 months, I did very little work, if at all any. I thought why am I being paid so handsomely for such little and trivial work. I did try interviewing in a few different teams but didn’t make it (Azure Files and Hyperscale DB). If I had stayed, I would have been swiftly laid off or if I was lucky enough last long till this buyout. I think same is true for all Big Tech companies. Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.

60k workers, 1/4 of the workers. This is a big deal. It also really puts you into a bind if you receive the offer. Do you accept, take the money, and hope you can find a job (Now competing with many other Msft employees that are looking). Do you decline and hope you don't get hit with the layoff which hits if not enough people accept?

The mass buyout offer to 25% of Microsoft's workforce comes less than a week after Microsoft President Brad Smith proclaimed to employees: 'We stand by our people. We always have. We always will.' in a video he posted to LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7518428...

My former boss at Microsoft told me this sort of thing is a good way to get rid of your best, most employable employees. I guess he didn’t pass the memo up the chain.

The way these companies are run so cut-throat while also being worth a trillion dollars is such a fundamental systemic failure. To say that it's because Microsoft overhired is a gross mis-remembering of the last 20 years. For starters, I remember way back in the late 2000s meeting an engineer from the office team. Their entire job was focused on making buttons. Microsoft also used to employee engineers focused soley on testing software, though I've heard that has changed. Anyway, this is a company with decades long cultural roots for enormously large teams where each person is hyper focused on tiny little pieces of a much larger product. Also, let's not forget that they bought up 1/3 of the gaming industry. I don't mind that Microsoft is hurting, because it makes mid products, that always seem to fail-up. However, I do mind that the people are okay that the answer is to lay people off instead of, maybe, breaking the company back up into smaller companies that preserve the stability of the workforce.