As expected, Satya Nadella announced the redundancy of 18,000 employees from Microsoft. 13,000 of those will go in the next 6 months. 12,500 will go from the Nokia businesses. And after that, it appears that Redmond (MSFT HQ) will be hit heavily. It appears that non-core businesses will be targeted, such as Xbox Entertainment Studios.
Nadella has talked about making Microsoft more agile by removing layers of decision making, i.e. management. That’s important to be able to operate at the speeds that cloud sprint development requires. It also sounds like another reorganisation is taking place; Nadella doesn’t appear to like what Ballmer did before he left. Much of this is to undo the silos between teams in the same groups that should be working closer together.
I have also read that a lot of v- contractors will be let go. This is unfortunate – these are people on very short contracts who are often filling in very important positions that a manager has not had budget for hiring a full time employee.
Hopefully, Microsoft will not be letting go the necessary people that keep the core businesses going. I know how shitty it is to be made redundant, even from a very profitable company. Best of luck to all involved.