Microsoft will become the latest tech giant to lay off 10,000 employees in the coming months, drastically reducing its workforce. Working in this industry feels more and more precarious every day.
The plan to cut thousands of employees was announced in a blog post on Wednesday, also shared with Microsoft employees. In it, CEO Satya Nadella noted the impact of the post-boom consumer spending decline during the pandemic and the need to “continuously deliver results while investing in long-term opportunities.”
“It’s important to note that while we are reducing roles in some areas, we will continue to hire in key strategic areas. These areas could include artificial intelligence,” Nadella said. CEOs acknowledge growing interest and advancement in technology, saying Microsoft is considering investing billions in OpenAI, the company behind the popular artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. Rumors are also circulating now.
Still, Microsoft’s future hiring plans aren’t reassuring for current employees. Microsoft will have approximately 221,000 full-time employees as of mid-2022, including 122,000 in the United States and 99,000 internationally. The newly announced job cuts will cut the company’s workforce by just under 5% of his.
Twitter’s layoffs are the most serious of thousands of cuts. Here are other places where Big Tech is bleeding.
The silver lining to this bad news is that at least Microsoft won’t be laying off as massively as Twitter did. The layoffs start today and will continue through March, hopefully giving us time to plan in case our employees end up being part of the unfortunate 5%.
“These decisions are difficult, but necessary,” Nadella said. “It is especially difficult because they affect people and their lives – our colleagues and friends. I promise to ensure that
In addition to 60 days notice of premature termination, cut employees who qualify for U.S. benefits are entitled to “above-market retirement, six months of continued medical coverage, and six months of stock incentives. continuous grant of [and] Career Transition Services.” Employees outside the United States may use whatever local law allows.
Unfortunately, large-scale tech layoffs have become commonplace over the past year, with many employees laying off from Amazon to Snap. This doesn’t take into account the famous layoffs by his Elon Musk, where Twitter quickly laid off most of his 7,500 employees.
Microsoft itself reportedly laid off 1,000 people in October, before announcing plans in September to increase the number of people in its China division by the same number.
