Imagine you finally got the job at Microsoft. Three months later, on a Monday morning, the email arrives: you can leave voluntarily, for money. And the company sending it isn't struggling. It made $331.8 billion in revenue last fiscal year and $133.7 billion in net income.
Today a deep dive on one single story: what happens when one of the most profitable companies in the world offers roughly 60,000 employees a way out, and what it tells the rest of us.
In this episode:
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The email on Monday (
01:25) โ A young developer in Hyderabad, three months at Microsoft, six months of savings: if I stay, am I next in the next round? If I go, I'm entering a market where tens of thousands of people with Microsoft on their CV may be looking at the same time. Important: about 60,000 people are
eligible for a voluntary programme. Nobody knows yet how many will actually leave.
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The company makes billions (
03:23) โ Revenue up 18 percent, net income up 31 percent, and still an offer to roughly a quarter of the workforce. A mother in Canada, almost ten years at the company, coming back from parental leave: ten months' salary sounds generous, until you have a mortgage, childcare and a saturated job market.
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BMW and the rush for the exit (
08:39) โ The continental European version: BMW opened a voluntary severance programme on 8 October, the internal portal buckled under the demand, and on 20 October it closed early because the target had been reached.
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More revenue, fewer people (
11:18) โ Microsoft's headcount fell two percent year on year while revenue grew eighteen percent. Managers being cut at double the rate, and why this is not only a US and German story. Only the few companies that really roll AI out everywhere get these results, and that doesn't mean handing people ChatGPT or Copilot.
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The first rung of the ladder (
14:50) โ Amazon cut about 14,000 office jobs in October 2025 and another 16,000 in January 2026, while sales and profits went up. And if companies need fewer entry-level people, how are young people supposed to climb a ladder that's missing its first rungs?
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Jensen Huang, Andre and what I really want to say (
19:15) โ At GTC in Berlin a young woman asked NVIDIA's CEO what he would do if he were starting his career today. His answer: become one of the best users of AI. Plus a weekend with our family friend Andre, my eight-year-old asking "why don't you just ask a couple of AI agents?", and why your agents should keep working after your employees go home at five.
๐งต The thread โ It's no longer enough to be good at your job. Good work itself is changing. Learn the tools, and to the bosses: measure before you cut, and make sure this technological revolution doesn't become merely a revolution on corporate balance sheets.
Corrections to the recording:
โข Microsoft has not offered "a third of all its employees" a way out: about 60,000 employees in selected teams in the US, Canada, India and the UK are eligible for a voluntary, time-limited programme, roughly a quarter of the workforce. How many will accept is not known, and Microsoft has not said it is cutting "10% or 15%".
โข Microsoft says explicitly that AI is not the driver of this programme. That AI is the main reason has not been shown.
Sources: Microsoft (Amy Coleman, Amy Hood, annual report), Reddit posts by affected employees, BMW (8 and 20 Oct 2026), Amazon, NVIDIA GTC Berlin (Jensen Huang).
๐ฑ Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904
AI Neanderthal โ AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.
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Every weekday, Malcolm Werchota comes out of the cave and explains what actually happened in AI โ in plain language, with the numbers checked and the hype taken out. Around ten stories a day: three explained slowly, the rest fast.
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