Microsoft offers buyouts up to 7% of US employees

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/23/microsoft-offers-buyout-for-up-to-7-of-u-s-employees/

by darth_avocado • 3 months ago

87 92 3 months ago

techcrunch.com

darth_avocado4• 3 months 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• 3 months ago

I bet they spent a long time figuring out if it was age discrimination or not

darth_avocado4• 3 months ago

People who are 60 often get early retirement offers, don’t see this any different.

rhyperior• 3 months ago

They 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• 3 months ago

any 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• 3 months ago

Isn't this one of the things IBM did multiple times through the late 90s and early 2000s? Is Microsoft the new IBM?

colechristensen• 3 months 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• 3 months ago

When 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• 3 months ago

All 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• 3 months ago

Is Microsoft the new IBM?

Microsoft is the new IBM.

Google is the new Oracle.

Apple is the new Sony.

HNisCIS• 3 months ago

So the goal is to get rid of the people who have all the internal knowledge?

throwway120385• 3 months ago

Yeah 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• 3 months ago

Speaking 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.

aggakake• 3 months ago

Microsoft uses React Native in their Start menu because the kids don't know Windows programming anymore.

johnnyanmac5• 3 months ago

There's literally nothing I know that someone younger couldn't learn or figure out.

Learn, yes. Will they get the time and training for that, given that they are taking on 30+ year legacy code? I'm less confident.

avidiax• 3 months ago

I think it was perhaps useful, at least in knowing which things are Chesterton's Fence. I doubt that AI can figure that out, since it's not always possible for humans to figure that out either.

But with AI, simple codebase understanding or even just paving over everything, including the fence, is potentially easy, and getting easier each month.

Certainly, a certain amount of senior experience is needed. The AI lacks taste and discretion. But the greybeard sensibilities the come with increasing seniority will probably hold back the new pace of things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

daemin3• 3 months ago

Ah, but can they tell the same tales as you can? Maybe in time when their beard starts getting grey in it, but that time is not now.

croes• 3 months ago

There is a difference between figuring out and already knowing. Especially if time is a limiting factor

darth_avocado4• 3 months ago

They’re probably not the only people who keep the lights on. And if a few people are gate keeping information, you already have a problem that needs fixing.

chongli2• 3 months ago

How do you go about fixing the problem if you end up buying out all the people with the domain knowledge you were hoping to preserve? That's like burning all the treasure maps before you set sail.

petcat• 3 months ago

it's more like just giving the employees that are nearing retirement an option to retire early if they want to.

ChrisLTD• 3 months ago

all the people that knew how to keep Github running and make a clean version of Windows are already gone, I suppose

not_doctorq• 3 months ago

Absolutely true for GitHub; there was an exodus a few years after the acquisition presumably once some key vesting dates hit…

kevmo• 3 months ago

Get rid of their highest-paid employees, replace them with off-shoring and AI.

Eventually the fact that the US military and government is getting tech support from overseas will catch up. Microsoft is a walking national security disaster.

But all they care about is "line go up next quarter". Their monopoly has made them lazy.

IncreasePosts4• 3 months ago

There might be these wizards, but probably most of them are dudes who were attached to something successful 15 years ago and have been riding out their time at an inflated level.

nickandbro• 3 months ago

A 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• 3 months ago

I 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-tech2• 3 months ago

It 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.

oblio• 3 months ago

I wonder if Raymond Chen is still there :-(

free652• 3 months ago

I feel like paying your most experienced employees to quit is exactly the opposite of what Microsoft needs right now.

I always felt thats the deal. But not a lot of people left the company when one was given, and we have rolling buys out now so people are trying to time buyout + a new job offer.

nilkn• 3 months ago

I'd think of it this way:

Folks who have institutional knowledge that is really critical to the company are likely treated quite well in prestigious roles and paid handsomely. If they take a modest buyout offer, it's probably because they were close to retirement anyway. Any truly critical role will have a succession plan. And if someone the company really doesn't want to lose signals they intend to take the offer without a credible succession plan, the company could just make them an even better personal offer to stay.

At the same time, I'm sure there are many folks who over-estimate how important their role and knowledge are to the company, especially to its future, which may look increasingly different from its past. Some of these people can become active blockers or political problems that are difficult, visible, and painful to deal with. Getting them to exit on their own is a win for the company, and it avoids the morale problem of visibly performance managing them or firing them.

kh9000• 3 months ago

I assume this voluntary retirement offer will be something like 2 weeks of pay per year of service, plus maybe 16 weeks. And you get to keep your unvested stock. If that's not too far off, you'd expect a principal engineer's gross expected value to be something like 800k from such a move. It seems like the net opportunity cost of accepting the VR would play out like:

1) you lose 1 or 2 million net, in the scenario where you would've otherwise stayed working 4 more years. 2) you lose ~200k net, in the scenario where you get another comparable job, but the job search takes 9 months. 3) you come out ahead if you were about to retire/get laid off anyway.

So, I don't think this plan is going to eliminate a random sampling of senior folks. The folks who accept this offer will tend to be ones that don't super enjoy the work itself, or ones that anticipate bad rewards or impending layoff.

In other words, I doubt it will be a sweet enough deal to entice the already-rich, high performing principal engineers, or the passionate nerds who are just there because they want to be.

Bakermonster• 3 months ago

I'm in Seattle and used to work at MSFT, along with many others at where I work currently.

The details still haven't been given out to anyone, but I had drinks with someone who is thinking of taking the offer based on what they know. While no one has been told explicitly that they are on the list yet, this particular individual has been there more than long enough and is of the age where this actually makes sense to them.

What is known: 1. 2 years salary 2. RSUs are fully paid out, over standard timeline 3. No restrictions if someone chooses to find work elsewhere (do not compete is now illegal in WA) 4. We didn't discuss healthcare, but I'd assume its the same as salary (2 years)

laughing_man• 3 months ago

I've been through a few rounds of voluntary buy-outs at a big tech company. By far and away the people most likely to take the package are the people who aren't bothered by the prospect of finding another job. Some of them are delusional, but in most cases these are the younger, more dynamic employees with marketable skills who will be difficult to replace.

The people you'd want to see go, people who have been there forever and have gotten overly comfortable, people who may even hate their job, tend to stay because of 1) skill atrophy and 2) a (valid) concern about age discrimination.

Based on my own experience I don't think I'd ever do a voluntary buy-out were I running a company. The company comes out ahead when managers do their job and make the hard choices.

jinushaun• 3 months ago

Maybe, but whoever are currently there aren’t making Windows 11 better.

JKCalhoun4• 3 months ago

I'm laughing, having explained to my wife that if you are 69 and have worked there one year you are eligible for buyout/retirement.

The kid that started at 10 years old though, there for the whole 51 years: sorry, in another 9 years you will be eligible.

Hilarious that there is an algorithm.

anon7725• 3 months ago

Age + years of service >= 70.

61 + 51 in your example.

rvz• 3 months ago

This is what really "AGI" is.

johnnyanmac5• 3 months ago

Sounds like an issue for the next CEO when the current one takes their current parachute.

AbbeFaria• 3 months ago

No, once you spend that much time at a Big co, you start treating it like your own little fiefdom. Your allegiance becomes to how do I increase my own scope and not how do I build great products for customers ? Also “coordination tax” is heavy at big companies, it takes monumental effort to ship even incremental improvements. You have to inject new blood and move fast with the times. Your tenure doesn’t give you a birthright to stay at the company forever. This is not to devalue people who have contributed immensely to MSFT before, there are tenured people who aren’t afraid of change and adapt with the times. But someone close to their retirement might not want to rock the boat too much.

There’s a reason why despite investing so much in building AI tools, MSFT has a bad rep and no one uses their tools. People use CC, Codex, Cursor when MSFT already has supposedly competitive tools.

Note: I work at MSFT.

rdtsc4• 3 months 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?

post-it2• 3 months ago

Because "number of expected working years left" is a factor in evaluating common law severance.

rdtsc4• 3 months ago

I can see if it would be exact years working at the place not years left.

IncreasePosts4• 3 months ago

In the US, ageism is allowed as long it doesn't discriminate against older people(45 years old or older I think?). You're allowed to discriminate against youth all you want.

Offering a buyout is in no way discriminatory since it is voluntary. If it was forced buyout, then yes it would be discriminatory

OJFord2• 3 months ago

By that logic a job offer is in no way discriminatory since it is voluntary?

rdtsc4• 3 months ago

In the US, ageism is allowed as long it doesn't discriminate against older people(45 years old or older I think?). You're allowed to discriminate against youth all you want.

I think it's 40 https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination. So for 40 or less years + X years worked to be more than 70 they'd have to work there 30 years starting at 10 years old or younger. Granted, some of the decisions I saw Microsoft make do look like they were made by 10 year olds, so maybe there is some truth there.

Offering a buyout is in no way discriminatory since it is voluntary. If it was forced buyout, then yes it would be discriminatory

Still, what if they offered it based on gender, religious belief, or race? Would that look just as good or bad of an offer.

idebug• 3 months ago

"Hey, John. I see here that you didn't volunteer to retire. I admire your dedication to your job and to the company. However, I just got a troubling message from HR about your recent performance/allegations of misconduct/social media postings/<etc insert other BS excuse that HR makes up etc> and I need you to come with me to the board room so that we can sort this out. Don't bring anything with you. Just leave it on your desk. That'd be grrrrreat..."

renewiltord• 3 months ago

Not all ageism is illegal.

workfromspace2• 3 months ago

I am not a native English speaker so I actually geniunely wonder:

1. Could you please tell more?

2. Could this be said for other -ism s as well? (Sexism, Racism, Ableism, Classism, Nationalism, Nepotism)

ErneX2• 3 months ago

I mean they could instead fire them, at least they can opt to this.

rdtsc4• 3 months ago

Going 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.

barelysapient• 3 months ago

Microsoft isn’t known for great judgement.

avaer• 3 months ago

Can'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• 3 months ago

It'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• 3 months ago

It is overhiring. We are nowhere near close to some collapse: 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-tech2• 3 months ago

It'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.

linkgoron• 3 months ago

Microsoft hired a lot of people post-covid. Googling, they went from 125k employees in 2017, to 163k in 2020, to 221k in 2022, and have been mostly steady in size since then (latest number from 2025 is 228k).

How "temporary" is overhiring? I think that they could probably cut quite a bit from the company, and it might actually improve their output.

johnnyanmac5• 3 months ago

They keep doing cuts but their employee count in 2025 is still higher than whenever we identify "overhiring" to have occured? Meanwhile, we know US hiring is on the downswing the past few years.

Doesn't sound like a company that actually cares about "overhiring". More that where they hire is shifting.

Amhais• 3 months ago

There are a ton of passengers at Microsoft, and many sit in the middle of our unnecessarily bureaucratic processes. They would absolutely do well to trim down.

johnnyanmac5• 3 months ago

We're in a recession. We're not going to admit we're in a recession until it's over (or worse, until it goes on long enough to qualify as a depression), because that's how the powers that can call a recession work.

And no, we cannot handle it. Not without a major overhaul of policy, New Deal style. Will we get that? Who knows.

cromka2• 3 months ago

I 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...

esafak2• 3 months ago

Yes, that good old high quality code Microsoft is famous for.

sirwhinesalot• 3 months ago

There 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.

daemin3• 3 months ago

That 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• 3 months ago

If 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• 3 months 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• 3 months ago

Satya is 58, plus his years at ms totals over 70, maybe he takes the buyout : )

ChrisArchitect• 3 months ago

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/23/microsoft-plans-first-volunt... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877184)

JKCalhoun4• 3 months ago

History 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.)

johnnyanmac5• 3 months ago

I 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.

JKCalhoun4• 3 months ago

Yeah, 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.

fuckinpuppers• 3 months ago

How 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”

Microsoft offers buyouts up to 7% of US employees

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