Microsoft began laying off around 3% of its workforce on Tuesday, cutting more than 6,000 roles. The tech giant reportedly said the new cuts would affect all locations and levels, including LinkedIn and Xbox, but the focus was on reducing managers.
Now, documents seen by Bloomberg suggest that about one-third of the total roles cut were at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Washington, and of the roughly 2,000 layoffs there, the most eliminations (817) were in the software engineering job category. It's more than double the cuts of the next category, product management (373).
Related: AI Is Writing About 30% of Code at Microsoft and Google. Here's What It Means for Software Engineers.
This week's layoffs at Microsoft are the largest for the company since 2023, when it cut 10,000 jobs and froze salaries for full-time employees. (It restarted salary raises based on performance in 2024.)
"We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace," a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC about the initial layoff news.
AI has been writing code at many big tech companies for years, and the technology is improving.
Related: Microsoft Employees Are Banned From Using This Popular AI App
In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said engineers are using AI to write 20% to 30% of the code for company projects. Earlier that month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on an earnings call that the company was using AI to write "well over 30%" of new code, up from 25% in October.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, told Joe Rogan in January that the company is developing AI that can write code at the level of a mid-level engineer, and "a lot" of its code this year will be "built by AI engineers instead of people engineers."
Microsoft is currently the most valuable company in the world, with a market cap of $3.337 trillion at press time.
Related: One of Microsoft's Most Popular Products Is About to Skyrocket in Price
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