REDMOND, WASHINGTON (The Daily Whatever Press)—Microsoft, a company that cleared $133.7 billion in profit in its last fiscal year, has emailed roughly 60,000 of its own people a cordial invitation to get the fuck out before the holidays.
The company calls it the Voluntary Exit Offer, capital letters and all. It’s open to anyone at vice president level or below in the US, Canada, India, and the UK, which works out to about 27% of a workforce of 223,000. Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s chief people officer, announced it on the company blog as a way of “creating greater flexibility and, where possible, more ways for employees to shape their next chapter.”
Shape their next chapter. BARF!
I’m a freelancer now, so I can translate. “Shape your next chapter” means you get to find out what COBRA costs, and just how ungodly bad this current job market is.
The severance, by the numbers
According to Business Insider, which got a look at the terms, employees at internal level 64 and below get one week of pay for every six months they’ve worked there. Levels 65 through 67 get two weeks per six months. Somebody at level 63 with 10 years in walks away with 20 weeks of pay, six to 12 months of stock vesting, health coverage “for a limited time,” and outplacement support.
Outplacement support, from the company that owns LinkedIn. Microsoft will walk you to the door, and the job board on the other side of it is also Microsoft. Also, with my now years of experience on LinkedIn, I can tell you that it is far less valuable than a bag of dicks. Or a bag of Dick’s, for those of you in Seattle. Get used to eating there, btw, as your cash is going to have to last you a long-ass time.
The deadline to accept is early December, and the people who take it are gone later that month, right about when the rest of America is fighting over the last roll of wrapping paper at Target. Then Coleman put this in her memo: “The Voluntary Exit Offer is new for us. We’ll learn from it.”
Hahahaha. How fun! Yes, let’s all learn together on this grand new adventure!
You’ll learn from it? 60,000 human beings are the fucking lesson plan. And there was already a pilot. This spring, Microsoft rolled out its first voluntary retirement program to about 7% of its US workforce, and more than 30% of the people eligible took it. That was the beta. This is general availability. Oh, and in July the company cut 4,800 jobs outright, a lot of them in Xbox, so nobody is “volunteering” with a clear head here. Forgive the 60,000 if “voluntary” sounds like a threat wearing a lanyard.
The people who don’t get the email
Bloomberg, citing a company spokesperson, reports that data center roles are excluded from the offer, along with sales and marketing.
Of course they are. Microsoft expects to spend $175 billion on AI infrastructure this year, according to CFO Amy Hood, and it opened 31 new data centers last quarter alone. The machines need babysitters. The humans who wrote the code that made Microsoft rich in the first place get a goddamn severance calculator.