Microsoft To Lay Off As Many As 9,000 Employees in Latest Round

Microsoft is kicking off its fiscal year by firing thousands of employees in the largest round of layoffs since 2023, the company confirmed Wednesday. From a report: In an ongoing effort to streamline its workforce, Microsoft said that as much as 4%, or roughly 9,100, of the company's employees could be affected by Wednesday's layoffs. The move follows two waves of layoffs in May and June, which saw Microsoft fire more than 6,000 employees, almost 2,300 of whom were based in Washington.

Re:

[gweihir]

Intel only ever had their superior manufaturing process, which they had from making memory. As soon as that was gone, it became obvious how bad technologucally theor designs actually were and how far behind the competition. Conceptionally pretty much the same as Boeing, or, since that is the topic, Microsoft. These companies never really could compete, except in a dominant position. Time for them to die. They join plenty of others on the trash-heap of tech hostory. And in most cases, death was well deserved

Re:Forget that

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that's an overbroad statement. In the 1990s Intel had one of the best chip design teams in the world. In the 1980s they lucked into their market position (as the i860 and i960 demonstrated) but the 486 was so good that AMD and Cyrix took years to match it and Harris didn't bother. The 486 (pipelined), Pentium (double pipelined) and Pentium Pro (thoroughly modern) were solid advances and Pentium Pro accomplished the goal of being the fastest CPU in the world bar none. The Pentium II and 3 were nothing to write home about and Pentium 4 fell well short of expectations for reasons that should have been obvious from the get-go but the Pentium M derived designs were great again. From the early 2000s Intel shifted to saving money on employee costs and the quality of its employees started to go way down. Intel also had a huge misfire with Itanium. AMD briefly took a bunch of market share with AMD64 but Intel ground it down over time. It wasn't until Ryzen 3 that AMD had a genuinely competitive chip design again. Not sure what you mean by "memory" but the DRAM business was exited in the 1980s. Intel had a complicated, difficult time with NAND (through its JV with Micron and how it ultimately exited Dalian to SK Hynix) but it was certainly not that which was leading Intel's fab R&D efforts, it's a completely different process for NAND.

Re:

[farble1670]

These companies never really could compete, except in a dominant position

Here you go:
https://www.macrotrends.net/st... [macrotrends.net]

Steadily increasing profit over the last 15 years. Revenue was up 16% from last year, totaling 245 billion USD.

Now, my real question. I'd like to hire you for investment advice. Are you available?

Re: Forget that

[drinkypoo]

They had good design too, though the last really good design was the 80486. After that it was a bunch of pumping watts for performance, until they got to compromising security for performance.

Re:

[serviscope_minor]

The core 2 and i7s were very good. Everyone compromised speed for security without realizing it if they went for an out of order processor.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Everyone compromised speed for security without realizing it if they went for an out of order processor.

Intel did it much worse than AMD, and about the same as IBM in terms of vulnerability and performance impact of mitigation.

Core 2 was pretty decent, that's fair. But by the time the i7 came around AMD was kicking their ass at everything but single thread. Even though I am a gamer that's never been the only thing I cared about, and I've also always been cheap, so to have AMD provide dramatically more ops per buck and have very competitive processors which were outright faster in many situations has had me an

Re:

[serviscope_minor]

Core 2 was pretty decent, that's fair. But by the time the i7 came around AMD was kicking their ass at everything but single thread

Nah, the i7s were amazing when they came out albeit pricey, the best desktop CPUs, where as AMD had the best server CPUs (massive Opterons) at the time. Later, the Bulldozers were underrated but they ran hot. Intel was beating AMD at per thread performance, top per socket performance and power draw. AMD could beat intel in bang for buck but it was a bit workload dependent. Multi

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Here [youtube.com] you go.

Re: Suspicious

[tiananmen tank man]

MS recently bought a lot of game studios, I think that's where the lay offs are concentrated.

Re:

[bloodhawk]

When you buy a heap of studios you have loads of redundant middle management to cull.

Re:

[Richard Dick Head]

Truth. These fired workers will be replaced with AI (affordable Indians)

Future is bright

[caseih]

When you combine continuing layoffs by profitable companies over the last few years, AI displacing workers, and this beautiful spending bill that cuts services to millions while codifying tax breaks for the 1% and increasing the deficit by 4 trillion, the future looks bright indeed.

Re:

[RobinH]

Other than graphic designers, is AI actually displacing workers anywhere, or are companies just cutting back on their workforce, making everyone who's left do more work, and using "replaced by AI" as an excuse to deflect the blame?

Re:

[NobleNobbler]

I think it's a mix of all of it, in equal parts, with AI's usefulness making sizable, but a lowest percentage of the reason.

I don't think most people here care

[rsilvergun]

About the service cuts because they don't think it will affect them.

If you don't use those services well, you're still fucked.

Those services are literally trillions of dollars in your local economy.

What do you think is going to happen to your job when hundreds of billions of dollars just exits the US economy?

That's the thing I wish people would explain to these Trump voting morons. You're not going to make it out of this unscathed. You will probably lose your house in a few years when you are forced to mortgage it and the bank takes it. Then Trump or one of his billionaire buddies will buy it up for cheap and rent it back to somebody or just leave it empty to keep prices high.

Re:

[NobleNobbler]

I've had 2 jobs in less than 3 years (dodged a layoff by jumping to a sinking ship). I'm tired of tech and feeling like I can't plan even one year of my life out without 5 years in savings

Nothing is safe

[rsilvergun]

There is not a single safe career outside of being born rich.

Even healthcare now is under assault. Since Trump's first election we've transferred about $20 trillion with a t dollars to the 1%. And that's on top of the 55 trillion we had already transferred in the proceeding 40 years.

Our economy is just too top heavy. There isn't enough in the middle or the bottom to keep the thing going. There's no circulation of currency or wealth. It's like if capitalism was a machine and we took the oil out of it

Re:

[registrations_suck]

You're doing something wrong. I've been with the same company for ten years.

Try a non-IT company, it works for me.

Re:

[registrations_suck]

Well, 3% anyway. But it certainly beats not having a job. My health insurance is REALLY good too, which is especially important in my case.

They pay me about $135K right now. It's not horrible, but the expectations are low and things are low stress and pretty easy.

Re:

[NobleNobbler]

The two team members that were kept were also underpaid and content at coasting

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

Concerning. https://www.morganstanley.com/... [morganstanley.com]

Re:

[strikethree]

the future looks bright indeed.

Very bright indeed. So bright, that the highest SPF sunscreen won't be able to protect you as other countrys realize we are led by incompetent, greedy, amoral morons and nukes start dropping. I am thinking maybe in 3 years now?

This is a middle manager culling

[DesScorp]

As was the case with the May layoffs, Microsoft is looking to reduce the number of layers of managers that stand between individual contributors and top executives, the person said.

MS is in no way hurting. They made a profit of $26 Billion [cnbc.com] in March, far ahead of Wall Street projections.

As other companies are also specifically targeting that mid-management layer, this is a possible sign that the Cult of the MBA may be waning.

Re:

[gweihir]

Nobody said MS was "hurting". The claim is that they are a dead man walking and that claim is accurate. They will surely walk for anothe 10 or maybe even 15 years, but their products have gotten so abysmally bad that they have no long-term future.

Re:

[snowshovelboy]

Their consumer products? Thats not even half of their revenue anymore.

Re:

[gweihir]

Who says I am talking about their consumer products?

Re:

[snowshovelboy]

What products -are- you talking about, and how are they bad?

There's no such thing

[rsilvergun]

Dude this is 2025 we don't have reams and reams of middle running around doing nothing. Every manager I've worked with in the last 20 years has had regular duties on top of punching my time card

Management got it start as a means of busting unions but companies have long since turned to professional Union bustering law firms for that

When you see a bunch of middle management getting fired it's because they're getting rid of the old people and they don't want to get sued for age discrimination.

Re:

[bloodhawk]

what a load of bullshit. excess middle management is still rife across many industries, IT is no exception.

If Microsoft wants to survive

[FudRucker]

Survive as a maker of desktop operating systems they need to repent for making windows a bloated spammy pile of shit and start from scratch forget legacy and new stuff rolled into one operating system, make two operating systems one that resembles win_7 for legacy applications and one like win_10 for the cutting edge new stuff, and dont enshitify it with spammy advertising and cut the telemetry out too, I wish Microsoft would do something worthwhile again but I have a feeling they are too arrogant and compl

Re:

[gweihir]

I wish Microsoft would do something worthwhile again but I have a feeling they are too arrogant and complacent so they will continue to circle the drain until someday they finally get liquidated by their shareholders

Inded. These days they cannot get anything right. Example: Just today Teams screwed me over. I minimally increased the speaker volume and some mechanism panicked apparently at the system-signal for speaker adjustment and then I could not hear the other side anymore. Leving and rejoining (either and both sides) did not help. Audio-settings did not help. Now, there apparently used to be a setting to switch this crap off or reset it, but not anymore. Nothing helped and I had to call the other person on the pho

Re:

[Train0987]

You know the little envelope overlay that's supposed to appear on the Outlook icon in the taskbar and systray to indicate you've gotten a new email? Mine randomly stopped working about a year ago. Icon never changes. Countless reports of this happening all over the internet. No clear cause or solution.

Re:

[gweihir]

Indeed. This is essentually the same when rats and other pests start to slowly crawl into a building.

Re:If Microsoft wants to survive

[BlueScreenOfTOM]

Microsoft doesn't give two shits about Windows anymore. The only thing that matters to them is growing Azure and increasing AI (Copilot) adoption. If anything, Windows is nothing more than a Copilot delivery service now.

start from scratch forget legacy

[JcMorin]

I disagree, that would be terrible and nobody would go into their new OS that doesn't support anything that exists. The reason Windows is so in demand is BECAUSE it supports the legacy stuff, especially in the business and industrial sectors.

Re:

[FudRucker]

Thats why I suggest two operating systems, one for legacy and one for moving forward on new software, as it is now windows is getting pretty damn bloated rolling it all into one operating system and it is causing problems

Re:

[Himmy32]

make two operating systems

They basically already do, Home and Enterprise, where all of that stuff is turned off by Group Policy/MDM rules.

Can they lay off the Windows backup team?

[xack]

The biggest source of notification spam is from them. Plus Internet Explorer never harrassed you about being your default browser like Edge does.

But they want your data in the cloud

[ebunga]

For safekeeping. And while it's there, doing nothing, I mean, sure, theoretically it's encrypted, but I mean, what if we took a peek and trained our shitty AI on it? Wouldn't that be great? And all for the low low price of FREE backup. You're going to take this FREE backup whether your want it or not. Ask again in three days.

laid off; not fired. There's a difference

[mnemotronic]

Layoffs can file for unemployment and COBRA healthcare coverage. Fired people, as far as I know, can't. In the old days this distinction used to affect the chances for future employment. If you were laid off you were probably older or more compensated or both and considered to be too much weight on the balance sheet. If you were fired you were considered bad news / do-not-hire.

Re:

[virusjan]

If you are fired, you can still file for COBRA and unemployment insurance benefits so as the reason you were fired was not because of illegal activities.

Re:

[hwstar]

It depends how your state defines "Gross Misconduct".

When you are fired for cause, it can be for "Gross Misconduct"

Typically people fired for gross misconduct do not get COBRA from the company, AND they're disqualified from receiving unemployment benefits. They can however sign up for medical insurance in the Affordable Care Act's marketplace.

Some employers utilize non-compete clauses where the non-compete exclusion time is doubled or tripled if you are fired for gross misconduct. This would hamper you ev

OMG

[jvkjvk]

The largest round of layoffs since ... one whole YEAR ago! Wow. That's something!

It's almost as if they are trying to pressure more rounds of layoffs from happening through their breathless reporting.

Dead Wood Pruning the Live Wood

[BrendaEM]

Knowing Microsoft, they are likely laying off programmers and UI designers.

Azure is mature

[laughingskeptic]

Their current cloud tech plan is more of an "organizing features" plan than a "new tech" plan: https://learn.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com] their current objectives need a lot less good engineers than past cycles. Two years ago they did not have in-house support for LLM model vectors, now they have multiple solutions. It does not look like they are planning on producing any technical "big rocks" in the next 6 months in Azure.