Like other companies, Microsoft is reducing its payroll: 10,000 people will be fired in the coming weeks, we learned on January 18, 2023.
He had been expected for several days. Finally, Microsoft’s social plan was announced on January 18, 2023 in a blog post written by Satya Nadella himself. The software giant’s CEO confirms the layoff of 10,000 people in the short term. This payroll reduction, estimated at 5% of all employees, will be carried out until the third quarter.
The announcement made by Microsoft joins other large-scale plans that have affected the high tech sector in recent months. At Facebook (Meta), 11,000 people were fired. snapchat lost 20% of its workforce. Twitter, 50%. Salesforce thanked several hundred employees. Lyft also. And, Amazon closed 10,000 positions.
As for the other groups, Microsoft puts forward the same arguments justifying this reduction in staff. Namely, the disruptions caused by the pandemic (and the increased “digital” needs that have arisen from the covid crisis), the recession already present in certain countries or anticipated, but also the need to reorient the company according to trends emerging.
Microsoft sets course for AI
This downsizing is not, however, associated with a halt in hiring. ” It is important to note that while we eliminate roles in certain areas, we will continue to hire in key strategic areas “warns Satya Nadella. Among them, there is everything related to artificial intelligence, the new frontier of tech.
” The next great wave of computing is being born through advances in AI as we transform the world’s most advanced models into a new computing platform “, he added. For example, Microsoft follows very closely the progress of OpenAI, the company in which it has invested: it is the company that is at the origin of DALL-E, ChatGPT, GPT-3 and GPT-4.
Globally, Microsoft has 221,000 employees including a good majority in the United States (122,000).
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