Microsoft’s recent round of layoffs appears to have fallen largely on software developers, including several prominent Python developers and a veteran TypeScript developer.
As The Register reported earlier this week, Microsoft plans to cut 3 percent of its staff worldwide, or almost 7,000 employees. According to Bloomberg, more than 40 percent of roughly 2,000 jobs cut in Microsoft’s home state of Washington are in software engineering.
This is after Redmond in April warned of swinging the ax on middle managers, with CFO Amy Hood saying the Windows giant would be “reducing layers with fewer managers.” Be as that may, coders definitely felt the squeeze this month.
Mike Droettboom, principal software engineering manager at Microsoft and a CPython core developer, mentioned the cuts in a LinkedIn post on Thursday.
“It’s been a tough couple of days,” Droettboom wrote. “Microsoft’s support for the Faster CPython project was canceled yesterday, and my heart goes out to the majority of the team that was laid off. A hard day for me, but even harder for others.”
He added, “We were all (minus one) set to attend the Python Language Summit at PyCon today, and in fact the notifications went out while we were en route to Pittsburgh.”
Beyond the at least three core Python devs let go, Microsoft also laid off Ron Buckton, a long-time TypeScript developer.
“After 18 years at Microsoft, with roughly a decade of that time working on TypeScript, I have unfortunately been let go in the latest round of layoffs,” Buckton wrote in a Mastodon post. “I need to take a few days to process before I start looking for work. Thanks to everyone who’s been part of my journey so far.”
Matt Podwysock, a 19-year-veteran of Microsoft who worked on the Azure SDK, also said he’d been given notice.
When we asked Microsoft about the layoffs, we got the following boilerplate response: “We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace.” Thank goodness they’re not positioning the company for failure!
The prominence of software developers among those let go is noteworthy in light of CEO Satya Nadella’s claim last month that 30 percent of its code is now written by AI.
The idea of using AI to code seems to be a growing meme among tech CEOs. During the LlamaCon 2025 discussion in which Nadella made that remark, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded that at Meta, “our bet is sort of that in the next year … maybe half the development is going to be done by AI as opposed to people.”
Social media wags were certainly full of speculation that AI is to blame for Microsoft’s developer winnowing, but the company said it would be misleading to assume so, and the real answer is probably much more complicated. IBM, for example, has talked up the transformative power of AI, while shifting jobs overseas. And last month, the CEO of e-commerce firm Nate was charged with fraud for allegedly powering the company’s purported AI automation with people.
Other factors may be at work too. For example, Microsoft’s plan “to invest approximately $80 billion to build out AI-enabled datacenters” may be constraining what the mega-corp wants to spend on salaries.
Meanwhile, in a fitting bit of irony, Gabriela de Queiroz, director of AI, Microsoft for Startups, was among those laid off.
We reached out to the laid-off employees mentioned in this article, as well as some others, and will update the story if we hear back. ®
