Microsoft is offering about a quarter of its workforce money to walk away. The company has offered 60,000 of its roughly 223,000 workers a buyout or “voluntary exit offer” to step away from their jobs, according to Bloomberg. Those who choose to stick around could face layoffs later.
The offer, shared with Microsoft employees by Chief People Officer Amy Coleman, has been given to employees who are “level 70 and below,” which includes some employees with vice president titles and general managers, and applies to people in the United States, Canada, India, and the United Kingdom.
“This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support,” Coleman wrote in the notice. Later in the letter, Coleman notes that employees who take the offer will be offered “financial support” and “career planning resources,” which seems like an acknowledgement that you’ll need to keep working, just not with Microsoft.
The company has been on something of a trend of layoffs lately, including offering a similar buyout to its retirement-age employees earlier this year. According to Bloomberg, about 30% of the 8,750 or so people who were extended that offer decided to take it and head into retirement early, cutting the company’s headcount by about 2,600. It followed that up with a straight layoff, axing about 4,800 people, including roughly 1,600 from its Xbox division, to reduce its total workforce by about 2%.
According to Coleman, the new buyout program “gives participating organizations another way to adapt their workforce to changing needs,” which is great for the organizations and not exactly a concern of the people who will have to lose their jobs because of it.
While Bloomberg noted that about 60,000 people will get the buyout offer, Microsoft expects a fraction of people to actually take it. Microsoft confirmed to Gizmodo that approximately 60,000 people would be eligible for the buyout option.
Microsoft’s buyout program comes just days before its next quarterly earnings report, which will have lots of attention as Wall Street continues to look for signs that the billions of dollars poured into artificial intelligence spending haven’t been for naught. The promise of a shrinking workforce will surely bring the shareholders joy regardless, but this playbook is starting to get stale. Tech companies throughout the industry have been shaving down their payroll while promising that investments in AI will eventually pay off in a way that will see productivity skyrocket even as headcount drops.
So far, they’ve really nailed the cutting people part. The AI-driven productivity revolution that’s supposed to justify it remains a work in progress.
