That offer was substantially different, for example it included 5 years of COBRA including 1 year of paid COBRA, and it was intended for those near retirement. This current offer is only slightly better terms than an involuntary layoff, and includes only standard 18 months of COBRA, only 6 months paid.
What is the reason to even put a time limit on the unsubsidized part of COBRA? It seems like it would cost the company nothing (besides maybe needing to help you submit a change of address or something periodically) when you’re paying the full premium, and it makes your group slightly bigger anyway (though I assume not enough that it matters).
some corporations do provide "unlimited cobra" to retirees (not cobra, but effectively the same thing, allowing retirees to remain part of the group plan), as its considered a form of deferred compensation the employee is vested into.
> What is the reason to even put a time limit on the unsubsidized part of COBRA?
Good question, and why limit this question to Microsoft? Why does COBRA have an 18-month limit? There should be no time limit to COBRA at all, especially if you have been with the same employer for many years. The law needs to be updated. Contact your elected representative.
First of all, it is not cheaper. It may be cheaper for young people because ACA marketplace rates are age dependent while COBRA rates are not. It is not cheaper if you are over a certain age, it is significantly more expensive.
Secondly, many ACA marketplace plans have narrower networks. (Which doctors are in-network doesn't only dependent on the insurance company, it also depends on the network, and insurance companies have multiple networks.) In WA, check out Regence's network for ACA plans--most hospitals are excluded, while their regular plans include them.
Unlike COBRA which almost always includes out-of-state doctors and hospitals, ACA networks don't. If you get a rare disease for which the expert doctor is in another state over you're out of luck.
And lastly, ACA rates just went up 20% in many states. If you are a couple in your 60's, you will pay nearly $45,000 for health insurance and then pay $7,000 each in deductible before insurance kicks in. At these rates, most healthy people will decide to forgo insurance. Which will reduce insurance company profits, who will then raise rates even more. This is a death spiral, and ACA will collapse (which is a desirable outcome as far as the current admin is concerned).
Having been briefly on an ACA plan, it's not ideal because those plans tend to be worse by any metric. Acceptance rate (size of network), copays, covered services, deductibles, etc.
ACA is sometimes cheaper though! Depending on your age, and your income, and whatever politicians in your state are doing to throw sticks in the spokes (not that the ACA really needs any help to collapse, given what an intentionally-compromised, politicized mess it's been from the beginning).
I just wish that we could do a full redo of health-insurance portability with these simple changes: COBRA with zero time limits, and you can choose to apply whatever number of dollars the government(s) would use to subsidize an ACA plan for you, towards COBRA premiums instead. Next, allow employers to offer you pretax premium subsidies to use to pay for COBRA insurance from your former job so that if you take a new job you don't have to change insurance unless you want to.
I'm assuming health insurers would deeply hate all of that, since the upshot from all that is they'd have to compete with each other in the consumer market! They do compete today of course -- to get contracts from employers, but employers have far different interests than humans do.
I seriously doubt that, no company in their right mind would want to publicize a quarter of their entire workforce or 60,000 people getting “laid off” as a headline
I always thought leadership was about undersstanding consequences and having a backup plan. It seems these one sided thoughts have no backup, they are the greatest poker bet in history, especially without first proving the tech first.
First of all the current staff have a significant advantage over others in the general public.
They have experience and knowledge of the current systems. This would be lost. It takes many years to learn the in depth details of todays complicated systems.
Those years are worth millions for each person. It would take years for any replacement to become equivalent in the lost knowledge. Without this they will be making costly mistakes.
Why would anyone take the offer if it's so vanilla? You'd be at a disadvantage to leave in a large wave like this; better to wait and be laid off in a smaller group and get the same package.
- bullshit jobs is a thing and many of these positions were make work anyways
- yes philosophically and economically, who will buy X product if all employees are laid off is a thing
- some of these will be rehired, some will be layed off if the voluntary buyout percentage is not large enough
- opinion: Microsoft as a company is a has been dinosaur, soon to be IBM, its (engineer) salaries were on the lower end and were very PM (Program Manager) heavy
- there is a lot of entrenched bureaucracy and top down mandates at this company.
- i personally use Macbooks/MacOS over Surface/XP, Google Docs over Word, GMail over Outlook, Slack over Teams, Firefox over Edge, etc. their user facing products are severely lacking in user experience.
- from my time in the tech industry/friends I understand their bureaucracy existing for the needs of the bureaucracy. their c-suite/leadership is a bunch of world salad morons
That bureaucracy is there for a reason, you often need bureaucracy to serve bureaucracy. About 85% of Microsoft's revenue comes from B2B/Enterprise/Governments. From their latest fiscal year report [1], the top 4 revenue groups were:
Server products & cloud services (39% of revenue)
M365 Commercial products & cloud services, excludes Consumer (30.7%)
Xbox / Gaming (6.6%)
LinkedIn (6%)
> You should be more concerned about what comes next.
I always wonder about that with buy-outs. Seems to me that the people who take buyouts are either:
- those who are close to retirement
- those who have other options
I'd assume the first vary in quality the same as your overall workforce, but I'd assume the second would, all other things equal, be better than the average.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like by offering an optional buyout, you'd degrade the overall quality of your workforce. Wonder if there are any case studies about that?
At a former employer, a voluntary buyout resulted in many of the best people leaving. Better people are more likely to find new work elsewhere and also they are better at recognizing the disfunction which produced the situation in the first place.
In this case it sounds like they are offering it to lower ranked employees (its own dystopian situation), but within that range of people, I still expect that Microsoft will lose more of the better ones.
Tech corporations have always been enormous stores of (1) capital and (2) people. MSFT's flavor of this has always been "tech Berkshire Hathaway": a holding company for a diversified portfolio of a couple-dozen billion-dollar businesses. MSFT in particular is willing to park ~300 people on a seemingly-dead-end product, just waiting for the incumbent to mess up. Sometimes it eventually succeeds commercially (Teams, PowerBI) and sometimes it doesn't (or hasn't, yet, see Bing).
What is happening here is a sign they are changing their view on how this capital allocation works.
To what? We don't know, and I think they might not know yet, either. If you are spending > $4M for a top-end engineer and $8M on their tokens (this refers to a person know personally, it is not hearsay), this will necessarily change the how this allocation works. Maybe it doesn't make sense to park 300 people on tomorrow's PowerBI any more.
What is clear is that we are not in anything approaching an equilibrium state. MSFT (and others like them) clearly do not have enough conviction to fire all the line engineers and only keep the so-called "elite" ones. It's not even clear that they think we're on that trajectory. I think what we are seeing, though, is that they have enough conviction to try to clear the way for more of this kind of spending on these so-called "elite" developers.
44 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 5.2 ms ] thread> Large employers are usually self-insured.
They can choose to not be self-insured as well. This needs to be based on what is best for employees, not corporations.
Good question, and why limit this question to Microsoft? Why does COBRA have an 18-month limit? There should be no time limit to COBRA at all, especially if you have been with the same employer for many years. The law needs to be updated. Contact your elected representative.
For example https://www.wahealthplanfinder.org/HBEWeb/Annon_ShowIndividu...
First of all, it is not cheaper. It may be cheaper for young people because ACA marketplace rates are age dependent while COBRA rates are not. It is not cheaper if you are over a certain age, it is significantly more expensive.
Secondly, many ACA marketplace plans have narrower networks. (Which doctors are in-network doesn't only dependent on the insurance company, it also depends on the network, and insurance companies have multiple networks.) In WA, check out Regence's network for ACA plans--most hospitals are excluded, while their regular plans include them.
Unlike COBRA which almost always includes out-of-state doctors and hospitals, ACA networks don't. If you get a rare disease for which the expert doctor is in another state over you're out of luck.
And lastly, ACA rates just went up 20% in many states. If you are a couple in your 60's, you will pay nearly $45,000 for health insurance and then pay $7,000 each in deductible before insurance kicks in. At these rates, most healthy people will decide to forgo insurance. Which will reduce insurance company profits, who will then raise rates even more. This is a death spiral, and ACA will collapse (which is a desirable outcome as far as the current admin is concerned).
ACA is sometimes cheaper though! Depending on your age, and your income, and whatever politicians in your state are doing to throw sticks in the spokes (not that the ACA really needs any help to collapse, given what an intentionally-compromised, politicized mess it's been from the beginning).
I just wish that we could do a full redo of health-insurance portability with these simple changes: COBRA with zero time limits, and you can choose to apply whatever number of dollars the government(s) would use to subsidize an ACA plan for you, towards COBRA premiums instead. Next, allow employers to offer you pretax premium subsidies to use to pay for COBRA insurance from your former job so that if you take a new job you don't have to change insurance unless you want to.
I'm assuming health insurers would deeply hate all of that, since the upshot from all that is they'd have to compete with each other in the consumer market! They do compete today of course -- to get contracts from employers, but employers have far different interests than humans do.
• Fiscal Year 2026: $133.75 billion (up 31.34% YoY)
• Fiscal Year 2025: $101.83 billion (up 15.54% YoY)
• Fiscal Year 2024: $88.14 billion (up 21.80% YoY)
• Fiscal Year 2023: $72.36 billion
Seems like they can decrease workforce, make up the gap with AI, and increase revenue while doing it
They have experience and knowledge of the current systems. This would be lost. It takes many years to learn the in depth details of todays complicated systems.
Those years are worth millions for each person. It would take years for any replacement to become equivalent in the lost knowledge. Without this they will be making costly mistakes.
Their reports also tell us AI is very much in the negative.
Very enticing Microsoft.
- bullshit jobs is a thing and many of these positions were make work anyways
- yes philosophically and economically, who will buy X product if all employees are laid off is a thing
- some of these will be rehired, some will be layed off if the voluntary buyout percentage is not large enough
- opinion: Microsoft as a company is a has been dinosaur, soon to be IBM, its (engineer) salaries were on the lower end and were very PM (Program Manager) heavy
- there is a lot of entrenched bureaucracy and top down mandates at this company.
- i personally use Macbooks/MacOS over Surface/XP, Google Docs over Word, GMail over Outlook, Slack over Teams, Firefox over Edge, etc. their user facing products are severely lacking in user experience.
- from my time in the tech industry/friends I understand their bureaucracy existing for the needs of the bureaucracy. their c-suite/leadership is a bunch of world salad morons
Server products & cloud services (39% of revenue) M365 Commercial products & cloud services, excludes Consumer (30.7%) Xbox / Gaming (6.6%) LinkedIn (6%)
[1] https://app.edgar.tools/companies/MSFT/disclosures/segments
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...
Either senior talent leaves, people who are close to retiring, or just can find a job easily outside.
Low hanging fruits take the bait and head out.
Mid level people live in fear of either scared to find another job, or worried about layoffs.
Either way the company morale is down the drain for a long time, and a culture is lost.
Are these offers extended to the highest performers with institutional knowledge?
I always wonder about that with buy-outs. Seems to me that the people who take buyouts are either:
- those who are close to retirement
- those who have other options
I'd assume the first vary in quality the same as your overall workforce, but I'd assume the second would, all other things equal, be better than the average.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like by offering an optional buyout, you'd degrade the overall quality of your workforce. Wonder if there are any case studies about that?
1. MS over-hired, has too many employees, and not enough work?
2. MS is reaping the benefits of AI and can do the same work with fewer employees?
3. MS has over-invested in data-centres and needs to conserve cash to stay in the game during it's unprofitable phase (assuming it's not a bubble)?
In this case it sounds like they are offering it to lower ranked employees (its own dystopian situation), but within that range of people, I still expect that Microsoft will lose more of the better ones.
What is happening here is a sign they are changing their view on how this capital allocation works.
To what? We don't know, and I think they might not know yet, either. If you are spending > $4M for a top-end engineer and $8M on their tokens (this refers to a person know personally, it is not hearsay), this will necessarily change the how this allocation works. Maybe it doesn't make sense to park 300 people on tomorrow's PowerBI any more.
What is clear is that we are not in anything approaching an equilibrium state. MSFT (and others like them) clearly do not have enough conviction to fire all the line engineers and only keep the so-called "elite" ones. It's not even clear that they think we're on that trajectory. I think what we are seeing, though, is that they have enough conviction to try to clear the way for more of this kind of spending on these so-called "elite" developers.