I worked at Microsoft from June 1997 to June 2025. For most of those years, I was proud to say that I worked at Microsoft. Many of my friends still work at Microsoft, but they are not happy with what they say is a culture of lies and discrimination.

Microsoft has terminated or laid off approximately 18,000 people so far in 2025: 2,000 in January, 6,000 in May, 1,000 in June, 9,000 in July — the exact numbers are impossible to determine. (Update: several sources say 15,000 rather than 18,000 employees gone).

Microsoft is investing billions of dollars in AI infrastructure, and the only place this money can come from is reduced headcount. One credible analysis I read predicted that Microsoft will lay off 10,000 employees per year over the next 4-5 years.

OK, companies need to restructure from time to time, so what’s the problem? Briefly, according to my friends: blatant (but unprovable) lies, discrimination, and lack of integrity.

* The 2,000 terminations in January were supposedly only for low-performing employees. Employees were fired with zero warning, and zero severance. Families and lives destroyed. The six people I know who were part of this purge all had average or above performance — I’ve seen their reviews. Any statement that all of the terminations were for performance reasons is, at least partially incorrect or even a blatant (but unprovable) lie. (Of course this all depends on a definition of “low-performing”).

* According to some business administration friends, a part of senior executives’ compensation is based on how well they meet their hidden diversity percentage “goals” involving basically anyone but white men. So, guess which group is being laid off, resulting in increased percentages of all other categories? In the most recent round of layoffs, in the one group where I have solid information from a friend, 100% of the employees who were laid off were men (8 out of 8). Blatant illegal (but unprovable) discrimination. I have no personal information about diversity goals but I do believe they probably exist. (The annual diversity report is filled with percentages of this group and that group, and the report includes, “While increasing representation is vital to our D&I goals . . ” and “Every employee sets an annual D&I Core Priority goal . . “)

* A high-ranking manager I know told me about the decision process for layoffs in his group. Each proposed list of employees to lay off was met with a verbal (never written), “try again” until the list of those to be laid off had no Indian employees. My acquaintance said they called this the “DEI” mandate — “Don’t Eliminate Indians”. This sounds hard to believe but my friend is not prone to hyperbole. If so, blatant (but unprovable) discrimination.

* In a recent round of layoffs, the public relations release said essentially that layoffs were designed to reduce the number of management layers. The decisions of who to release are made by managers. The result is that managers select engineers rather than their own manager colleagues for termination. In a recent round of layoffs, in Washington state, over 40% of the positions laid off were engineers — by far the largest group. Less than 5% of the positions laid off were managers. Blatant (but unprovable) self-serving corruption and lack of integrity.

No company is perfect, but according to my friends, Microsoft has transformed from a good company into a shameful company with little-to-no internal integrity. I was fortunate to work in an organization (Research) where I didn’t directly experience these toxic patterns, but according to my friends, things are not good. I hope much of the information above is not entirely accurate but I have no data to dispute it.

Microsoft has gone through rough stretches before. I hope the company can rebound and become an admirable company again.