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.
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.
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?
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.
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
This is just an optics-friendly way to soften the blow of 25% layoffs.
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)
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?
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
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...
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...
anyone know what level 70 means?
"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.)
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.
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.
Also, good grief, flooding the market with thousands more people.
2027 is going to be wild. Stock up on beans and rice, folks.
I wonder where are all those AI apologists who have been touting here for years that jobs will not go away?
And the internal memo currently circulating actually does not mention that number so I'd be curious where it came from.
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…
Now, even if the company is crushing it, they'll still see employees more as a cost center instead of a revenue generator.
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.
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.)
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.
And people believed them?!
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"
nisegami•1h ago
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Havoc•1h ago
Voluntary packages tend to be accepted by the strongest employees
It’s a shitty deal for companies but shareholders love cost cutting
rayiner•54m ago
Grombobulous•33m ago
0gs•14m ago