Microsoft is seemingly planning another round of layoffs, as it has allegedly told its employees that it has shifted its focus to the “AI-first” approach. A Redditor, whose friend got laid off after five years with the company, said that the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) “feels way more real now”.
The Redditor, who shared the post on the platform’s “developers India” community, claimed that their friend was a software engineer in the cloud team at Microsoft. He got laid off over a “cold calendar invite” without any prior warning.
Microsoft employee got laid off over cold calendar invite
“My friend at Microsoft just got laid off. AI’s impact feels way more real now. Here’s his story,” read the title of the Reddit post shared a few hours back.
The post, which has over 2,300 upvotes, stated, “My friend just got laid off at Microsoft after five years, totally out of the blue. No warnings, just a cold calendar invite.”
“His whole team was told they’re moving towards ‘AI-first’ work, and most regular devs are out. They’re being replaced with a smaller AI pod and pushing most coding to automated tools,” the Redditor added.
They further shared how their friend feels right now: “He’s honestly shocked and angry because all the talk about ‘AI creating new jobs’ feels like a joke right now.”
“Anyone else running into this or seeing actual new roles open up after these layoffs?” the post ended with the question.
‘Whole laid off due to AI is a scam’
Many who went through this post flocked to the comments section to share their thoughts.
A former Microsoft employee replied to this post and said, “Around 4–5 years ago, there was a bulk hiring drive for the Cloud Development Team based in Noida. However, instead of actual development, the team ended up handling cloud deployment for over 200 Microsoft microservices, if I remember correctly. PS: I was also part of this team but left after about a year.”
“AI is smart, but not smart enough to replace the entire team. If it really was AI replacing humans, the layoff would’ve been more selective,i.e a selected roles or designations being laid off, not the whole team. When the whole team is laid off, it simply means the industry is shedding extra weight and becoming lean,” another chimed in.
A third commented, “Yes, it is getting real. Heard from a friend that a part of the vendor team was let go at Google Android Auto as they wanted to leverage AI more. If possible, can you share which product he was part of and at what level he was?”
“Your friends’ team probably got by last year when they corrected the overhiring that happened during the pandemic… AI is just a scapegoat at this point. Honestly, AI is currently overhyped,” thinks yet another Internet user.
A senior engineer on Reddit added to this and said, “The whole laid off due to AI is very much a scam… They are still shedding the dead weight they added during COVID due to overenthusiastic hiring. Yes, companies are using AI tools and products- the suggestions and ideas that come from tools like GitHub Copilot during debugging a crucial issue are literal nightmare fuel.”
They further said, “If all your company does is maintain someone’s website, some automation wrapper of already highly automated tasks via Jenkins cron, all the easy stuff- it’s good.”