Only way I can possibly make sense of it is to put myself in the shoes of a capitalist executive. My job is on the line with AI companies reporting massive losses and an earnings call is coming up. If I don’t care about human beings, I can just lay them off and that will reduce headcount expenditure so that earnings looks better after spending massive capex on AI. Not to mention the market rewards such announcements by increasing stock valuations since we’re running more lean.

However, such a large amount of layoffs could prove unpredictable for workplace morale.

What if we didn’t have to pay most of the benefits we do and allow many of our headcount to choose on their own when to leave? We look better in the public eye, we can have a lead time for a couple months so that this earnings report on Wednesday will look like a massive shift for the year end earnings call when we’re looking for more investment. We’ll be operating so lean it’ll be insane. And anyone who doesn’t leave voluntarily we can simply lay off afterwards and it’ll be a smaller number of layoffs, which the public already treats as normal operating procedure, weeding out the undesirables.

Let’s do it.

That’s what they did with the first VEO, where it was available to anyone who’s age and years of service added up to 70. In order it went 15K layoffs, VEO for 70+ which 30% took, then another 5K layoffs after it closed.

Now it’s just everybody on your team if your team is eligible. Managers also weren’t informed beforehand as they were included as well.

With my friend, they got the offer, so did their entire team they talked to as well as their manager and their skip. And that’s across Azure, the real money maker, and Teams - CoPilot.