6 ms·
Microsoft offers buyouts up to 7% of US employees
- darth_avocado 6mo ago> employees will be eligible if their years of work at Microsoft plus their age totals 70 or more, with some exceptions. Seems like a voluntarily retirement offer for older employees
- OsrsNeedsf2P 6mo agoI bet they spent a long time figuring out if it was age discrimination or not
- darth_avocado 6mo agoPeople who are 60 often get early retirement offers, don’t see this any different.
- rhyperior 6mo agoThey did not. They had already done this thinking with the 55/15 retirement option, where if you’re aged 55 or older and 15 years continuous service you could leave and keep most of your equity. And you signed a suite of “non” agreements including non-litigation.
- red-iron-pine 6mo agoany large firing / buyout / HR change will absolutely have HR + Legal thinking about it. probably doesn't need a "long time" just a week to check the regs and then to get an excel sheet together of ages + salaries
- ecshafer 6mo agoIsn't this one of the things IBM did multiple times through the late 90s and early 2000s? Is Microsoft the new IBM?
- colechristensen 6mo ago>Is Microsoft the new IBM? Lots of us thought they peaked during the Windows XP, now it looks like the Windows 10 era will be their peak beginning a long decline. There have been major missteps trying to turn Windows into a subscription/surveillance product, combined with Azure being a mess, Europe running away from American locked in products, OpenAI losing the lead and the space becomming crowded and expensive, and the console wars being won by Steam... yup Microsoft is the new IBM. Clinging on to as much enterprise and common user inertia as they can while unable to innovate and thrive in the current market. They don't have vision and they can't conjure up a monopoly.
- zamadatix 6mo agoWhen XP was new people said 2000 looked like the peak. When Vista/7 was new people said XP looked like the peak. When 10 was new people said 7 looked like the peak. Now that 11 is still the latest, guess what the prediction is? At some point one group will be right and feel extremely justified in achieving broken clock status of telling the future. Well, the folks who still argue ~2000 was peak and it has been a decline since are at least consistent... even if I agree in some ways and disagree in more in the other ways.
- AntiUSAbah 6mo agoAll of this might be true, but the numbers still match. Windows is despite of all this garbage still the de facto standard. Azure is still a way to go thing beacuse so many companies just use office365 and microsoft can be trusted. If you look at their numbers, they also grew quite fast. That might be more of their motivation though. They added 40k in just 6 years and are now at 230k.
- reaperducer 6mo agoIs Microsoft the new IBM? Microsoft is the new IBM. Google is the new Oracle. Apple is the new Sony.
- HNisCIS 6mo agoSo the goal is to get rid of the people who have all the internal knowledge?
- throwway120385 6mo agoYeah domain knowledge is expensive. Can you imagine how much it would cost to run a business where everyone knows the ins and outs of all of the customer use cases?
- freediddy 6mo agoSpeaking as a greybeard, it's not really that valuable. Younger people are just as smart, if not smarter, and they can figure it out if I get hit by a bus. There's literally nothing I know that someone younger couldn't learn or figure out.
- nickandbro 6mo agoA lot better than what Oracle offered their laid off employees which was `Severance includes 4 weeks' base salary plus 1 week per year of employment.`
- donatj 6mo agoI feel like paying your most experienced employees to quit is exactly the opposite of what Microsoft needs right now. Paying to get rid of your institutional knowledge and experience is an insane move, especially as everything is on fire.
- stego-tech 6mo agoIt depends. Sometimes these buyouts are targeted towards groups that are toxic to the growth of the organization as a whole, like folks who have been around for a hot minute and have built up a cache of power but fail to use it other than for self-preservation or glory. I've worked in places where a handful of higher-ups nearing retirement block all progress because they refuse to learn anything new and are months or years away from retirement; in those cases, these buyouts can be quite good at eliminating bad actors and freeing up roles for those you want to keep around, but can't due to headcount limits or politics. Do I think that's what Microsoft is doing here? No, not really. I think they're pulling an IBM - axing older workers generally in favor of younger ones, but done so in a way that won't result in a sueball. I agree with you that right now they need folks with institutional knowledge and experience to gradually hand over the helm to the next set of folks, and this isn't the way to go about it (that would've been all the previous rounds of wholly unnecessary layoffs). It's just a way to juice the share price through performative restructuring, in my opinion.
- rdtsc 6mo ago> years of work at Microsoft plus their age totals 70 Is that ageism? How is that different than saying if their gender is Y, their race is X or their religious belief is Z?
- ErneX 6mo agoI mean they could instead fire them, at least they can opt to this.
- rdtsc 6mo agoGoing by age, wouldn't that be breaking the law? Can't imagine they'd get more than a slap on wrist for it though, so kind of surprised they even bothered with the offer.
- ErneX 6mo agoIf it’s just by age I’d guess yes, but they always have the option to do mass layoffs including these folks + others. In Spain there’s something similar called “prejubilación” (apologies for the Spanish link but the Wikipedia entry does not have an English version): https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejubilaci%C3%B3n https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejubilaci%C3%B3n
- post-it 6mo agoBecause "number of expected working years left" is a factor in evaluating common law severance.
- barelysapient 6mo agoMicrosoft isn’t known for great judgement.
- avaer 6mo agoCan't help but notice the trend of tech companies shaving employees at an accelerating pace. Nobody wants to admit this (and there's a lot of reasons it could be temporary factors like "overhiring"), but to me this seems primarily if not exclusively driven by AI. You just can't say that to HR. The bigger question is if this keeps accelerating, can the industry and broader economy handle so many jobs disappearing, so fast?
- spwa4 6mo agoIt's driven by attempting to outinvest eachother in AI, which is very different. They're not replacing job functions by AI. They're dropping more and more stuff on the floor, abandoning it and using the money to invest in datacenters (ie. paying NVDA and a few others). But they're not replacing these employees. That may come, in the future, but it's not what's happening. This is freeing up money at any cost to products.
- 10xDev 6mo agoIt is overhiring. We are nowhere near close to some collapse: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-data-playground/ https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-data-playground/ If you try to pattern match using news headlines towards some belief, you will. But the statistics are often a lot more boring.
- stego-tech 6mo agoIt's share price juicing, plain and simple. The evidence for AI displacement is thin, while the longer-term view of American enterprise is incredibly dim (the fact data sovereignty is now common vernacular as opposed to tinfoil-hat bullshit when I started discussing it almost a decade ago is anecdotal evidence enough to me, but just go look at EU/APAC spooling up their own clouds/services for more evidence), and those in power know that the business cycle is teetering on another, larger collapse after ~15 years of growth. It's all about getting that share price as high as possible to cash out before the downturn, and making a big to-do about handing over leadership to "the next generation" before the economy implodes. Cynical? Yeah, but I fail to see evidence to the contrary yet. > The bigger question is if this keeps accelerating, can the industry and broader economy handle so many jobs disappearing, so fast? No, but smarter economies are already adapting. These companies make money through "butts in seats" licensing schemes, and their continuous layoffs and devaluing of labor in the face of constant price hikes are scaring businesses in other sectors into following suit with layoffs of their own. Eventually one or more of them will cross the trust thermocline (my money is on Microsoft), at which point numbers will collapse so fast that everyone else suffers for it as the larger economy panics. Think a bank run, but on XaaS licensing as companies downsize and cut their cloud bills, which in turn causes those companies to downsize, which slows economic engines in other tertiary industries, who then cut their headcount and licensing bills, etc, etc. It's going to be a vicious cycle, but the thinking seems to be that doing this will depress the value of technical labor (some of the last highly-paid labor out there) between a glut of supply and AI offsetting some costs, with the assumption that consumers/workers will suck it up, cut back somehow, and make it work again. Except that can't happen this time around. Fifty-odd years of American boom-bust cycles have left workers - especially younger workers - with nothing left to cut to survive. The cost of necessities is already unaffordable on current wages, and there's this expectation that we'll figure out how to cut down even further on our paychecks while still paying record prices for everything. The math doesn't work anymore, and so this downturn is going to hurt exponentially worse than the COVID, 2008, dotcom, S&L crisis, or stagflation turned out.
- cromka 6mo agoI think they're removing old rust that would crate friction in moving towards AI assisted development. Old rust which is used to higher quality of code...
- MiloSainsbury 6mo ago[dead]
- esafak 6mo agoYes, that good old high quality code Microsoft is famous for.
- sirwhinesalot 6mo agoThere is good quality stuff at Microsoft, it's just on some of the innards. NT Kernel, Direct3D, .NET Runtime. Also a lot of stuff that came out of Microsoft Research like Z3. Which also happen to be the sort of projects older devs would normally be working on.
- cromka 6mo agoThat was exactly my point. Old C++ Microsoft was good. New Electron Microsoft is shite.
- daemin 6mo agoThat makes sense that if they want to move the company to have only AI actually write code then offer retirement to people that resist this directive. Though based on the headlines that I've seen regarding Azure development I'm not confident that they would end up in a better place if this ends up happening. But maybe who knows, they might open source the NT kernel as there will be nobody left to maintain it within Microsoft.
- lateforwork 6mo agoIf you quit at age 55 or later and you have been with Microsoft for 15 years your stock continues to vest. That has always been the case. This "buyout" appears to extend that benefit to employees who are >= 50 and have been with the company for 20 years. (Or any other combination that adds up to 70, for example you are 46 and have been with the company for 24 years).
- ForgotMyUUID 6mo ago"Who is going to provide critical updates for my Win11 workstation?! Hey , Microsoft, I'd like that old guys, who built 3.11 to do that, please"
- 6thbit 6mo agoSatya is 58, plus his years at ms totals over 70, maybe he takes the buyout : )
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 6mo agoSource: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/23/microsoft-plans-first-voluntary-retirement-program-for-us-employees.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/23/microsoft-plans-first-volunt... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877184)
- JKCalhoun 6mo agoHistory suggests the axe may well fall on the remaining if a certain target head-count is not achieved. Seeing a lot of layoffs lately in tech generally. My sense is that Corporate knows something that the rest of us do not. (Or at least that Wall Street does not.)
- johnnyanmac 6mo agoI don't think most of the people they will inevitably layoff qualify for this package. age + num years work >= 70. They seem to be per-emptively shielding against age discrimination lawsuits. And yes, but no. I think we all know what's happening. No one wants to say it out loud.
- JKCalhoun 6mo agoYeah, agree. It's a clever way to cull the herd of the ones you would have difficulty laying off (due, as you say, to the appearance of age discrimination). Next up, whole teams will be axed—not individuals.
- kazinator 6mo ago[dead]
- fuckinpuppers 6mo agoHow about stop enshittifying your products, make azure not be a pile of garbage, All this is doing is delegating more work to AI handled by a lot of junior and unskilled “engineers” overseas or on h1’s Azure is a disaster. Windows just keeps getting worse. Their branding department I am convinced is staffed with nutjobs. Someone has a fetish with the word “copilot”
- tarabird90 6mo ago[flagged]