(Reuters) - Microsoft Corp is contemplating cutting about 5% of its workforce, or about 11,000 roles, U.K broadcaster Sky News reported on Tuesday, citing sources.

The reported layoffs would be the latest in the U.S. technology sector, where companies like Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc have announced retrenchment exercise in response to slowing demand and deteriorating economy.

Already being done. I have a friend who works in the DFW area that was laid off last week. Fraud unit.

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Microsoft buys ChatGPT, Microsoft slash thousands of jobs. Coincidence? I think not...

Feels like a lot of this is just perception driving reality. Tech stocks are going down due to the Fed which is causing tech companies to cut jobs. It doesn't really make much sense because their actual business isn't affected by the Fed, just their stock.

Nooooo... Not my Windows 95 support.

Some people will say it’s because ChatGPT. Some will say they over-hired in the pandemic. Could be both imo. Microsoft would have inside information on how they can use ChatGPT to automate work but I doubt they’d fire 5% percent of staff before testing it out.

Think they’re having layoffs to reduce staff count and then they’re going to see how they can automate work and then announce more layoffs.

The tech industry is bleeding.

They broke past 150k employees in 2020, now they're at 221k according to the article.

I've spend 20+ years working for giant tech. This is normal even in boom years. I swear every time we would cull the fat we would see a headline like this. It's why we moved cull month to March but then it would be "do layoffs indicate a bad quarter for XXXX?!?!"

No. We just had too many underperformers and we needed to cull and often times that reached 5% which we would fill back up through the year until the next culling.

Its more the media is making it all up to make it seem like its a thing.

All these companies cutting jobs have hundreds of thousands of employees. Its literally like 2-3% attrition rates which is well below national average and typical this time of year because this is when any companies whose fiscal years match the calendar year are giving out performance reviews.

Likewise the "large" numbers of tech jobs cut are not being reflected in monthly unemployment numbers which not only continue to be low, but actually are getting lower as of last month... and these are not the type of employees who run out and get Christmas jobs at the mall here...

The only outliers is Twitter because of Musks fuckery... and Salesforce because their CEO fucked up royally with hiring over COVID. Outside of that I would not bat an eye at even 5-6k job loss in the tech industry... since thats only slightly higher than the normal yearly 2-3k.

Apple is the only remaining FAANG without large scale layoffs

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Google has not had layoffs

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I'd disagree. I've worked for multiple fortune 15 companies. You don't fire percentages of people because they're under performers. Hiring is insanely expensive. That's the excuse executives use to justify downsizing and shift blame. The entire purpose of letting people go is to cut costs and if you look at where costs are cut, it's to underperforming areas of the business or portions of the business that produce no revenue like HR, which this article mentions.

Well that's not quite true. The fed rate going up increases the value of a current dollar over a future dollar. That makes investing in future growth less important and current profits more important. Thus all the layoffs and profit pumping.

That argument gets trotted out a lot, but it doesn't actually make any sense in the current environment. Real rates are currently negative (inflation is higher than interest rates) so actually future profits are worth MORE now.

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Google was laying people off last year. True innovators.

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It's not though. It's most HR people from Amazon. Wouldn't surprise me if that's MS too.

Edit: But meta for sure fucked up lol. I cant stand bitmoji on a 7 inch screen for free, I damn sure don't want to strap it to my face and pay for it.

Also, are they not doing this every year? Scrap up 1 to 5%, Close some departments, deprecate some tech, get new people, open new departments. Aside from the Twitter fuckup of course.

"A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment in an email to Gizmodo, calling the reports a “rumor.” However, Business Insider reported that according to one person familiar with the matter"

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Taken from bloomberg arcticle... this is stupid.

Due to a decline from the huge profits during the pandemic.

They invested in OpenAI to use ChatGPT to enhance their product suite, not to replace workers

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ChatGPT has a 0% chance of taking anyone's jobs, not even those of journalists. It's a LLM, not an intelligence

Do you have a source for that? According to this they haven't had layoffs yet, but it's widely expected they'll announce them in the near future:

>Although several major companies across the tech industry have announced mass layoffs as rising inflation and uncertain macroeconomic conditions fuel recession fears, Alphabet Inc., the parent company of search giant Google, has been obviating this undesirable. The tech behemoth is yet to announce any major layoff, despite several reports of upcoming job cuts inside the company.
However, Alphabet employees will not be immune to this industry-wide layoffs for too long. Employees at Google anticipate an imminent announcement of a huge layoffs, according to reports.
In November, The Information had reported that Alphabet was planning to lay off nearly 10,000 low performing employees starting early 2023 in order to curb costs.
Slumping ad market has weighed heavily on Google's bottom line, which in turn has made investors urge the company to seek avenues to cut expenses. Executives at Alphabet are seemingly more focused to cut down costs of projects and make the company more efficient.

I live in Seattle and work here. They do small layoffs all the time, which gets a lot less attention. Here's a 'source' for one such event:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/21/meta_google_layoffs/

This isn't even the one I was thinking of though. They hit GCP support a while back. That's the one that raised some eyebrows. People briefly questioned what direction GCP was headed when it happened, because everyone else was on a hiring spree. No time to dig for media coverage on it right now.

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