Microsoft plan reportedly targets managers and non-coders for layoffs

Microsoft to lay off managers and non-coders

A tweet attributed to an account named @NIK claims that Microsoft plans to lay off managers and non-coding staff, rather than just low performers, with the cuts expected next month. The news, linked to Business Insider, has sparked a wider debate: what happens when artificial intelligence enters a company's organizational structure rather than just its product line.

The paradox is clear. For years, the narrative was that AI would come for programmers. This leaked plan suggests the opposite: those who stay are the ones writing code, while those being let go are the ones managing, coordinating, and supervising the coders. The immediate reaction in the sector is not relief, but a sense of reckoning.

Less politics, more product: the new power shift

The most common takeaway is that AI does not eliminate jobs; it eliminates intermediation. One analyst puts it this way: the trend is less politics and more product, less management and more code. Those who do not contribute to the product must reinvent themselves. And experts warn this won't be limited to Microsoft; it is a growing trend.

The argument has a concrete basis. In any construction company, there are workers and a foreman, nothing more. In tech, layers of project managers, project directors, project assistants, product managers, and a long list of other roles have piled up. Every change must pass through that entire chain before reaching the person pressing the keys. In any other sector, this would be seen as madness.

The conclusion drawn by many is that middle management is the most dispensable layer. They lack specific technical information, earn more, and their roles often overlap with the board that makes decisions. Laying them off is, in accounting terms, a win-win.

AI is already replacing programmers and non-coders alike

One testimony is worth reading carefully. A developer who started with Z80 assembly claims that today, by giving instructions to a language model, they can complete in two days what used to take two months. It is not about being a good or bad programmer: the tool is otherworldly if you know how to communicate with it. In another case, an entire JavaScript project—with API calls for data integration, about 5,000 lines, and 300 functions—was developed from scratch by an AI and made functional with just a few tweaks. However, one must work step-by-step and request functions in a structured way; asking for a full online store in one go will only result in a mess.

The logical consequence is uncomfortable for the profession itself. If AI writes the code, the traditional programmer is also at risk. The difference is that a manager does not have an equivalent tool to replace them with the same efficiency, because their job was not to produce, but to intermediate.

The day AI replaces the CEO

The question circulating in the conversation is why it doesn't start at the top. One participant points out that for an AI, it is easier to replace a CEO than a programmer, and it is not a matter of capability but of energy expenditure. An executive makes decisions based on aggregated information; a programmer deals with exceptions, rare cases, and the system that breaks at three in the morning.

The counterargument is that executives are still necessary, but in smaller numbers: one per section to maintain order and execute board decisions. The debate is not whether the boss is redundant, but how many bosses are redundant. And the answer provided by the leaked plan is: almost all of them.

Those left out and those already excluded

The social undertone is what causes the most discomfort. If Microsoft outsources maintenance, cleaning, accounting, legal, and security, the layoffs do not affect those services: they hit the company's own middle layer. If this phenomenon becomes widespread, one participant describes the resulting social division as trinc: billionaires and politicians at the top, rentiers living off real estate and stock investments, civil servants who at least have to go to the office, benefit recipients, and the rest of private-sector workers split among the last three groups. The only real change is that private-sector workers fall to lower rungs.

This is not a hopeful prediction, but it is not new. The discussion drifts toward inflation as a silent mechanism: if money is the metric of the relationship between time and value, eliminating the capacity to save is equivalent to eliminating the capacity to control one's own time. Hence the recurring formula: inflation is slavery.

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The uncomfortable question remains. If AI writes the code, manages the project, and handles the client, what exactly is left of the structure the company built to supervise all that? The answer, for now, lies in a leaked plan that no one has denied.