Tuesday, Microsoft cut fewer than 600 jobs globally. About 300 were in Washington state, 268 of them in Xbox Game Studios as part of a restructuring Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty framed as "operating fewer business units, aligning groups that already work closely together." That part's a game studio story.
The part worth your attention is what else got cut alongside it. Cloud, AI, marketing, and research teams also lost people this week. Microsoft called it "part of the normal course of business," no single cause.
This is the company plowing tens of billions into AI and cloud infrastructure, and the AI and cloud teams weren't spared. It's not the first trim either. Microsoft cut 4,800 jobs in July, about 2% of its workforce. September's round is smaller, but it landed in the exact groups the company keeps telling investors are the future.
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The bigger picture didn't look much better
Two days later, Indeed's Hiring Lab published its September snapshot and there's a genuinely good headline in it. Job postings just posted their first positive year-over-year growth in almost four years, up 0.7%, and now sit about 3% above pre-pandemic levels.
Tech didn't get to enjoy it. The report calls out tech specifically as one of the tougher spots for job seekers right now, postings still depressed even though they're off last year's lows. Engineers in physical, non-software roles and home health workers are seeing the strong demand. Tech is playing catch-up.
There's one bright spot buried in the wage data. Posted wages for higher-paying occupations, the bucket most cloud and engineering roles sit in, grew from 2.0% in January to 2.6% by August. Pay for the roles that are open is climbing faster than everything else, even while the number of postings lags.
What this means if you're job hunting or just nervous about your own team
Don't assume "I'm on the cloud team" or "I'm on the AI team" buys you safety. Microsoft just proved it doesn't, even at the company setting the pace on AI spending. Titles that sound strategic get cut in the same memo as the ones that don't.
What actually protects you is being able to point to something specific you shipped and what it moved. Cost saved, latency cut. Vague ownership of "cloud strategy" is exactly the kind of role that gets absorbed when a company decides to "operate fewer business units."
If you're searching right now, the wage data is the useful half of this. Postings are down. Pay for the roles that exist climbed faster than it did in January. Don't lowball yourself in a negotiation because the headlines say tech hiring is soft. Volume is down. Pay for open roles isn't.
And if your own team just went through a round like Microsoft's, ask your manager directly what the actual selection criteria were. "Normal course of business" is corporate speak for "we're not telling you," and you're allowed to push for a real answer before you decide whether to stay.
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