That said, anyone can own Microsoft stock. With respect to current employees - the common wisdom has always been not to own too much stock in your employer, with the rationale that if things aren't going well and the stock is tanking, you're likely to get laid off and then you're even worse off. But these days I'm thinking that the opposite is true, at least in bigtech: The more likely scenario is that you get laid off regardless and the stock goes up in response.

All this stock upside might put some people's compensation to their true market value, but even that is based on tenure and historical stock vests.

While there have been layoffs, companies are generally still hiring and often employees can overlap severance with a new role.

Please.

It's a fun what if, I guess.

I see MS as a US gov approved monopoly. I didn't check their SEC filings, but I suspect that US gov is a number one buyer, while various EU countries combined make number two. That's a coercion to me, not software business.

Terms like

- You won, Windows is very popular, we are going to buy it and open source it, no more ads, no more opt-out telemetry

- Same with Office

- Same with Github

- Maybe they can keep running Azure, since it's unpopular

- XBox and Kinect and all the hardware stuff can stay private since it's not a monopoly and not de-facto public infrastructure

I wish I could live to see government that is both good and powerful, you know

Other than that, I think you don't need too much dependence on them, depending on how you look at them controlling it. It being OSS personally gives it more stability since it can always be forked if they pull some nonsense.

Cash on hand is leverage in tech employment just like anywhere, but amolified during periods of structural demand shift. If one can get a year or three of easy runway, one can reskill/upskill into stuff with demand shifting into it. Right now I'm screwing around with Jetson boards and stuff like that: LLMs may cone and go but robots are here to stay.

And even the BATNA of "I'll go do OSS full time for a year" is leverage with your current employer. People with options are less likely to be fucked with in the first place.

Eh - it's a dangerous time to be a software engineer anywhere.