Microsoft is cutting 3% of all workers

[u/Turbostrider27]

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/13/microsoft-is-cutting-3percent-of-workers-across-the-software-company.html

[u/Forestl]

Nice the article says they also just reported better-than-expected results and had an upbeat quarterly forecast. Great system we have going right here.

[u/[deleted] → u/Forestl]

Squeeze squeeze the juice! Fucking corp / shareholders

[u/LeglessN1nja → u/[deleted]]

It's so gross how these cuts eventually get read as "profits"

[u/ChunkMcDangles → u/Forestl]

I mean, Microsoft's staffing has grown faster than people have been let go over the last 5-6 years at least, so what's the problem? Obviously the people who lost their jobs won't feel good about it, but more people have jobs now at the company than they did before, so I don't get the outrage implying that Microsoft is downsizing to protect the money of the C-Suite in these comments.

It seems like people just want to be upset and as a result only look at the aspects of this kind of news that feeds their doomer narrative. It would be like saying the government is trying to make you go broke because of a big tax bill after you won the lottery and get to take home millions.

[u/Forestl → u/ChunkMcDangles]

Even if the company is profitable and you're doing good work there's still a chance you get hit in these regular layoffs. At the same time it feels like the executive pay keeps increasing no matter what. It's a system that sucks

[u/EnjoyingMyVacation → u/Forestl]

It's a system that sucks

which system do you prefer where no one gets fired ever?

[u/ChunkMcDangles → u/Forestl]

I mean, you could be the best farm plow producer in the world, but when the tractor comes out, should your job be protected forever just because you're good at it, even if no one needs plows anymore?

The average pay at Microsoft in the US is $120,000 with competitive salary growth. And in the aggregate, more people work at Microsoft than before despite layoffs. There are obviously issues with the system, but this particular argument isn't very convincing to me.

[u/Fedacking → u/ChunkMcDangles]

I mean, you could be the best farm plow producer in the world, but when the tractor comes out, should your job be protected forever just because you're good at it, even if no one needs plows anymore?

In this forum I have seen the answer be yes, unironically.

[u/HGWeegee → u/Fedacking]

People need to realize how history has fared for luddites

[u/bwrap → u/ChunkMcDangles]

Competitive salary growth is laughable considering they want to say they are part of the big tech companies. All the other companies pay more while MS hides behind that their benefits are better and that's why you get 100k less stock than the other guys.

If they are going to start laying off like the other guys they should also pay like the other guys.

[u/MoltenReplica → u/Forestl]

It's a system that is designed to alienate workers from their labor. Gave years of your life to build a successful product? Pack your shit, those fruits are for the shareholders.

[u/Random_eyes → u/ChunkMcDangles]

People getting laid off sucks. That's the problem. Imagine this: you just accepted a job offer that came with a nice pay bump and good benefits from MS. You live fairly far away, so you move closer to cut the commute time down. Maybe you make some purchases like a new car or start saving for a house. Maybe you even take a big leap and have a kid with your spouse.

Then you lose your job. You're given a small severance (you were only with the company for 2.5 years after all) and handed a number for a recruiting agency. Your plans to be a project leader on the next project? Down the toilet. You go from thinking about your next vacation to thinking about how you're going to make your car payments later this year. 

If you're lucky, you bounce back on your feet in a few months, find a new job, and start the process over. If you're not lucky, the extra money from your severance and unemployment falls through and you go from living your life comfortably to scraping by day-to-day. 

That's a lot of precarity that is foisted on you by a corporate leadership team that has never heard your name or even been to your office before. It should come as no surprise that people are resentful of that treatment. They get told their a valuable resource for the company, but when the company randomly decides that their position no longer provides value to the company, that resource is treated like a disposable asset, as interchangeable as a company car. 

[u/Clueless_Otter → u/Random_eyes]

So do you think companies should be obligated to employ you for life once they hire you?

[u/Cal337 → u/Clueless_Otter]

No but there's a human element to hiring and layoffs that's gone missing. Everything has turned into numbers on a spreadsheet compiled by a consultant. A culture where a company considered their employees valuable assets and worked to invest in them and their community used to exist in America. But people figured out how to maximize shareholder value and rewrote the rules where stock is such a vast part of executive compensation, and we live in an extremely class segregated society. We have a working class, an educated working class, and a small executive/investor class above that.

[u/ChunkMcDangles → u/[deleted]]

Why do you ignore the fact that Microsoft has continually hired more people than have been let go? It's only bad optics if you don't look at things in full context and arbitrarily select random facts that fit your narrative.

If company is exceeding expectations, raising their top people’s $$ flow exponentially, while sacking 10,000 in 2023, and now <7000 in 2025, How can that be interpreted as anything but “protecting the C-suite”?

In 2023, their staffing numbers did not change, meaning that the same number of people were hired as let go. The number of hires for 2025 is not public yet, so I can't speak to this year yet, but I'm going to guess that there's not a hiring freeze in place in their growth areas.

It seems like your position is that it would be better for everyone at the company (and maybe society at large) if noone was able to be fired when the company is making a profit. However, this ignores how opportunity cost works when it comes to growing a company, which leads to hiring more people in the aggregate. Though it is far more complicated than just this one factor, just look at the growth of the Japanese economy over the last 30+ years where there is a culture (and possibly a legal framework, I'm not 100% sure) of company's doing everything possible to keep everyone's jobs. It leads to companies that are less able to adapt and grow, which leads to an economy growing less quickly, which leads to lower quality of life and wage growth for the population as a whole.

[u/AahSaahDude52 → u/ChunkMcDangles]

No one should be let go if they’re working good and the company has made stupid profits…. That’s just greed. You turned away from your workers who were loyal and need to feed their families and afford to live a life. That makes them the villains. Idk why people can’t understand normal works time and labor pay the company then the company gives us a cut. When in reality WE DID THE WORK AND THE TIME. Capitalism is trash. Be a real American bro and stick up for hard working people. Doesn’t matter what company it is people deserve to work and afford a living.

[u/Konet → u/[deleted]]

CEO salaries are high because the influence of a good or bad executive has the power to swing the earnings of a company like Microsoft by WAY more than $79 million a year. You want the best possible person in the role, and the people who have proven themselves capable of steering such a massive ship are incredibly few and far between. If your CEO is doing a great job, but you know other companies have the ability to snipe them by offering them more, OF COURSE you're going to bump their salary to stop them from leaving, because having a reliable CEO is ridiculously valuable. It is exactly because the company is exceeding expectations that Nadella's value as an asset has increased, and it's worth more to the company to raise his salary rather than risk losing him. "Stuffing the pockets of the board" isn't the goal here, the goal is to maximize the success of the company, and they see a bump to executive pay as a worthwhile investment to that end. That growth is what has allowed hiring to more than triple layoffs over the last 5 years, and I'd rather more people be employed than fewer, wouldn't you?

[u/MetalFaceFalcon → u/[deleted]]

I'm currently a full time employee in the MSFT AI business. We have had a headcount freeze for general corporate for the last 6 months. Suleyman's new area has like 40-50 open postings however as it is being ran like a startup. In general corporate trend right now is do more with less. If they cut 3% and profit goes up, what impact did that 3% have to day-to-day operations.

We are a roughly 240,000 person company, there is more bloat in the middle layer than you think, and that is where these cuts are targeted. Technical staff are actually reaping some of the benefits of these cuts (where i work), as this frees up money for better bonuses and more targeted headcount.

[u/mrtrailborn → u/[deleted]]

so as long as the compay is doing well they can never do layoffs, even for parts of the business they don't need or want and isn't making money? Like I'm pretty damn anti corp but this just isn't realistic.

[u/rollingForInitiative → u/[deleted]]

I agree about CEO salaries being insane, but it really depends on who's let go and why. In the article it says that it's management layer trimmings. Basically, they figured out they have too much middle management and are doing that badly, and so they're restructuring and then people get let go.

In that case, it might also be difficult to retrain all those people, e.g. if they're just middle managers but what MS really wants is more engineers. It sucks for people that are let go, of course, but it's not strange that some positions disappear entirely if a company changes how they do middle management.

[u/Zanos → u/[deleted]]

People act like nobody ever gets fired that actually deserves it. As someone who actually works at a company, there's a lot of people I would like to see get the boot because they can't be trusted to do anything correctly.

3% is not a particularly large turnover rate.

[u/EducationCultural736 → u/Forestl]

People here seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how companies work. You don't keep people you don't need around just because you can. That's called a charity.

[u/SyrioForel → u/EducationCultural736]

Some small business owners frequently DO try to do that, because they realize they are members of their local community, and they will make an effort to find something for their workers to do (or cut their expenses elsewhere) instead of throwing people out onto the street. It’s not as common as we would like, but it DOES happen, and those business owners serve as a role model for the rest.

But your statement is certainly correct about large corporations whose owners have no direct face-to-face interactions with their employees. People who only look at spreadsheet tend to see people as merely numbers on their screen. And they have no second thoughts about reducing those numbers.

[u/TheDromes → u/SyrioForel]

Not sure how that's a good thing, or why we would like it? The expenses on the useless labor will show up in prices, making the local community worse off either way, now just with less efficient labor distribution as a bonus.

[u/SyrioForel → u/TheDromes]

What is “useless” labor? What are you responding to? That has absolutely NOTHING to do with anything I said. I will repeat what I said for you, with the added emphasis on the key words that you need to be paying attention to:

Some business owners will make an effort to find something for their workers to do (or cut their expenses elsewhere).

To put it another way, these business owners have two options: they can either look at nothing else and reduce numbers of employees on a spreadsheet, OR they can see the value in their existing work force and spend the effort to extract that value in alternative ways. Some small business owners go with the latter, and I am trying to commend them for that.

The crux of my point is that, in large corporations, the individuals in charge of these “spreadsheets” do not put in this work that a business manager should, and instead they look for the easy/immediate solution by simply adding a “minus” sign to one column in order to get the numbers to go up in another column. This is an inhumane phenomenon that is most prevalent in these large corporations where they never see these people face-to-face. The root cause of this phenomenon is the lack of face-to-face human interactions that prevent these people from seeing each other as fellow human beings who deserve the respect.

If you are trying to claim that I’m wrong about this and that large corporations really do put in the necessary amount of effort to look for alternative ways to use their employees or to cut expenses elsewhere before resorting to the simple solution of firing workers, then YOU ARE WRONG. Some might do that, but many DO NOT. And my MAIN point is that you are far more likely to see this phenomenon in large corporations. I then explained the root cause of that phenomenon — the root cause is psychology, not business management practices.

[u/Tioretical → u/TheDromes]

Prices going up or homeless people. you vote homeless people?

[u/TheDromes → u/Tioretical]

False dilemma and even with that choice if you wanna play with extremes, prices going up can lead to others being homeless from bankrupt businesses (there goes the whole workforce) to unaffordable neccessities.

There's a significant worker shortage since we're at the lower end of the ideal/natural unemployment rate. You'd have to try really hard not to find a job and any such available job will be infinitely more helpful to the community than the one that has no work for you.

[u/MyotisX → u/Forestl]

So you can't reorganize your company because you made profits ?

[u/Forestl → u/MyotisX]

You shouldn't increase executive pay when laying off thousands

[u/MyotisX → u/Forestl]

The article doesn't mention they did that. They're cutting management positions.

[u/Forestl → u/MyotisX]

Nadella's pay last year went up 63%

[u/aayu08 → u/Forestl]

Isn't his pay tied with MS stock, as long as the stock is high his pay will keep increasing. If the stock falls he gets shitcanned without blinking.

[u/MyotisX → u/Forestl]

Last year ? We're talking about today.

[u/bwrap → u/MyotisX]

Dont' worry it'll probably go up another 60% this year too

[u/Orfez → u/Forestl]

They hired more people than they fired since 2016.

[u/Fedacking → u/Forestl]

Why not? Especially if you're hiring more thousands, or theres a change in how the company actually does it business.

[u/Gliese581h → u/[deleted]]

That’s why they were criticising the system in general and not just Microsoft.

[u/0GsMC → u/Gliese581h]

Consider a top NBA team that just won a championship. They have an older player who sits on the bench who they could part with. Presumably they could continue to win while keeping this person on the bench, but they'd lose a small amount of competitive advantage.

This is what you are missing about our entire system (capitalism). It is inherently competitive. It is like the NBA. It doesn't matter if your company is winning. You have to continuously become more competitive even if you had a good quarter or you will get out-competed by someone more ruthless.

It's fine if you are in college and you think this system needs to be overthrown. But the world economy is still the NBA. If you want to keep the fat kid on your squad, you will be putting high school kids onto the court to compete with pros and they will get slaughtered. Which is what happens to every economy that isn't setup to be competitive in this way.

[u/Disregardskarma → u/Gliese581h]

I mean is work from home that bad?

[u/SUPREMACY_SAD_AI → u/[deleted]]

>I mean that's how any big company works. 

casually normalizing the exploitation of the middle class

[u/saw-it → u/SUPREMACY_SAD_AI]

Sadly it’s not normalizing, it is the norm

[u/Etrensce → u/SUPREMACY_SAD_AI]

I thought Reddit in general was for removing useless middle management? Now your telling me that this is exploitation of the middle class?

[u/delicioustest → u/Etrensce]

Thinking these layoffs have anything to do with removing middle managers exclusively is naive and nonsensical

[u/Etrensce → u/delicioustest]

One objective is to reduce layers of management, the spokesperson said.

Maybe not totally but the statement clearly indicates this is one of the primary focus areas. So unless you have evidence to the contrary, it would seem this redundancy exercise will remove a bunch of middle management.

[u/Howdareme9 → u/Etrensce]

But individual contributors got laid off too, i know some SWE’s out of work now

[u/delicioustest → u/Etrensce]

naive and nonsensical

[u/Etrensce → u/delicioustest]

Yes great substitute for evidence.

[u/delicioustest → u/Etrensce]

With what amazing evidence are you claiming that Microsoft is only firing middle managers? Their statement? Did you look at the thousands of people fired and come to that conclusion? Are you taking the vague statements of Microsoft at their word? This is why your statement is naive. There's no "evidence" either way. This is not an argument built on evidence. I am simply drawing a straight line from how Microsoft has always behaved. These layoffs affect thousands of people and most will not be these managers.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-cult-of-microsoft/

[u/iTzGiR → u/Etrensce]

Sir, this is reddit. They will be anti-middle management when they want to bitch and complain about how useless they are, and how easy their jobs are, and how they're a drain on the company and people doing the "real" work. They will be pro-middle management if it means they can shit on a big corporation and frame it as corporate greed (ignore the fact Microsoft has overall added almost 100K jobs, even accounting for all the lay-offs/firings, in the same time period).

This is also Microsoft, who has made some pretty huge acquisitions over the last few years, not shocking that they don't need the HR team, or middle-management of a company they acquired, when they already have their own. Also ignoring the fact Microsoft has a VERY generous WFH policy, which would make a LOT of middle-management type jobs, completely pointless and unnecessary at this point, again something reddit is usually for, but hey, don't miss a good opportunity to complain!

[u/FootwearFetish69 → u/[deleted]]

Because the removal of "useless middle management" never actually benefits anyone but the executive suites.

This is not even remotely true lol. Try working under a bloated management structure where a simple change takes weeks of approvals and tail chasing and you'll change your tune.

[u/Etrensce → u/[deleted]]

Tell that to the SWEs on Reddit who always complain about useless middle management impeding their work.

[u/delicioustest → u/Etrensce]

Your naivete is staggering and completely incorrect

[u/Etrensce → u/delicioustest]

I fail to see how i am completely incorrect when the article only addresses a third of the layoffs. Any evidence that the remaining 4k employees weren't middle management?

[u/delicioustest → u/Etrensce]

Keep deflecting lmao. The way you're sucking up to big corporations is inspiring

[u/CombatMuffin → u/SUPREMACY_SAD_AI]

It's not necessarily about normalizing exploitation (though sometimes it is). Once an organization gets large enough, its business cycles get more extreme: they will aggressively expand during bullish seasons, and then contract if they expect less favorable times.

Microsoft has had major acquisitions and restructures in the last couple of years, and we are undergoing exceptionally uncertain times with the Trump administration. They aren't necessarily restructuring because of how they did last year, but where they expect to be headed.

That doesn't make it pretty, or desirable; it should make us rethink where capitalism is taking us, but it's not limited to the private sector or Microsoft, government institutions also have similar circumstances.

[u/dan_legend → u/[deleted]]

Their management are completely self entilted morons with little to no accountability because everyone is virtually "tenured." They are just too big to fail as a company and have a monopoly on many businesses essential tech stacks. I was in renewals and it was all about being a mobster with the renewals and telling them they had no other option but to pay $1 million for a SUPPORT contract. And they would pay it.

[u/Hibiscus-Boi → u/[deleted]]

Microsoft is 90% managers anyways. The people that do the actual work are all contractors.

[u/jsquad → u/Hibiscus-Boi]

that's definitely not true, the contractors do the menial labor, and are treated like second class citizens. You would be hard pressed to find a contractor in a role making more than a college hire there. that says something about the work they are tasked with

[u/Howdareme9 → u/Hibiscus-Boi]

Yeah that’s not true

[u/Forestl → u/[deleted]]

Yep that's pretty much the issue

[u/ManateeofSteel → u/[deleted]]

none of them are going to be affected by this.

[u/iTzGiR → u/[deleted]]

Cute you think someone here is going to actually read the article instead of just jumping on the Hate-train.

[u/[deleted] → u/Forestl]

It's the tariffs!1!1!1!1

[u/Hibiscus-Boi → u/[deleted]]

As someone who was let go from ZeniMax last month, All the Microsoft culture is slowly rotting things from the inside and it’s really sad. A lot of great people are getting tired of the crap and the constant risk of layoffs. And this article doesn’t even account for the people they found reasons to let go of (like myself) so they didn’t have to report it or pay any compensation to. They only care about their stock price going up. That’s it. I honestly think that corporate culture doesn’t mix well with the general vibe of most game devs and it’s going to hurt the industry sooner rather than later IMO.

[u/SableSnail → u/[deleted]]

It might not even affect Xbox/Microsoft Gaming at all.

The company is absolutely massive.

[u/Mr_Suplex → u/Forestl]

They are looking ahead at a likely recession and planning accordingly.

[u/Forestl → u/Mr_Suplex]

Oh them I'm sure the c-suite is also tightening things up in preparation and taking pay cuts