A former Microsoft employee, who was affected by the company’s latest round of layoffs, has claimed that the culture “shifted heavily” after “AI became monetised”. The techie, who goes by “BlackExcellence19” on Reddit, joined the company three years ago in 2022. He worked within the M365 Core team on the Copilot Data Platform. Microsoft has laid off approximately 15,000 employees in 2025 and is now requiring its remaining staff to adopt AI tools and workflows as part of their daily operations.
‘I was part of Microsoft layoffs’
“I was part of the most recent Microsoft layoffs. The company culture shifted heavily when AI became monetised,” read the title of the post shared on Reddit’s “layoffs” community.
He shared, “I was in M365 Core working on the Copilot Data Platform team, which basically is the infrastructure that Copilot runs and gets its data trained from.” The techie alleged that the company he started at vs the one he ended with feels like “two completely different entities”.
“BlackExcellence19” said that before 2024, career progression for software engineers at Microsoft was “holistic” and focused more on “people skills and technical understanding”. He noted that with the support of his manager, he was promoted to Level 60, just below Software Engineer II, before a major cultural shift took place.
“The company shifted into this AI-driven mindset where the growth chart changed to start emphasising performance metrics and throughput. The problem for me was that it was hard for me to find ways to improve these metrics because our team was heavily DevOps-focused, with only a few people on my team working on features that could actually generate meaningful performance metrics,” he explained.
‘Microsoft’s culture shifted heavily due to AI’
He stated that once AI became central to Microsoft’s direction, growth trajectories began focusing heavily on performance metrics and output. His manager began closely monitoring his use of AI tools, asking how frequently he was leveraging them, how many pull requests he was completing each week, and even encouraging him to give talks about his experience using AI as a developer. “My manager even acknowledged that a recurring complaint from our team was the amount that we don’t get to code stuff compared to DevOps-related work, which cannot be factored into PR metrics.”
He also claimed that once Copilot started generating profit, the company shifted to a performance-driven mindset. While he personally found Copilot to be an underwhelming product at the time, he admitted that its future potential is promising.
In addition to being laid off, the ex-employee expressed disappointment over losing $30,000 in stock compensation that had been part of his original sign-on package.
“I genuinely did enjoy my time there, but I’m not gonna act like Copilot/AI hasn’t shifted the company into a less holistic version of itself. The main thing I’m sad about is that I lost like $30k of stock that was part of my signing agreement and with how these financial reports are coming out that would have been so much damn money to sit on for the next 3-5 years since Microsoft is doing incredibly well from a business standpoint with no signs of slowing down,” he ended his Reddit post with these words.
How did Reddit users react?
One person in the comments section asked, “I have friends telling me Microsoft was forcing employers to use Copilot for everything. Was that true? Surely you would want people to either use or not use it naturally, and then interview the people who didn’t use it, and then find out why.”
To this, the OP replied, “Absolutely. We had SWE agents that could make a PR from just a title and task description, and give it access to a repo, and it would generate that PR autonomously. My team didn’t even know about it at the time, and this was like 2 weeks ago that this capability was released for us to use.”
Another asked him: “How did it feel to be working on a product that you knew would be your replacement?”
The techie responded, “Quite weird really, but I think I was ignoring clear signs that I needed to pivot away from my current team and go to another one, and that was a crucial oversight that I did not see until it was too late. I began stagnating once I got promoted, when I should have just chosen another team after that, because the work slowed down immediately after being promoted.”
“They need to prove that AI works so they can sell it. You were the demo, so this will continue as a product demo. Once they are done, their customers will start,” said one person on Reddit.
Another, who works at Google, joined, “We have to find business problems that are solved or aided by AI, build solutions that target those problems, and then use things that actually improve our workflow. We’re not judged on usage metrics. And one of the main criteria that we’re judged on as product teams is the time to ROI for customers adopting our services.”
“Funny that every other advice is to learn AI, be part of AI teams and still here we are with somebody being laid off for age-old metrics involving PRs and LOCs,” chimed in one Internet user.
“When the Copilot took off, every team (from what I understand, I was laid off pretty soon after) had to demonstrate how they were integrating Copilot into their product,” commented yet another.
“Your experience sounds very familiar to what JPMC software engineering is currently going through. Management is becoming obsessed with performance metrics like the number of commits, PRs, etc., and is also pushing people to use AI to increase productivity while layoffs happen. They are also pushing people to become AWS certified, while AWS cloud migrations are basically on hold due to the exploding costs in the public cloud. crazy times!” read one comment under his post.
When one Redditor asked him if AI-driven tools are good enough to replace workers, even junior developers with over 6 months of experience, he said, “The SWE agent is definitely as good as what an intern could do. Analysing my intern projects over the years, if the current SWE agent were given as much detailed information as possible, it could easily have done all of my intern projects.”
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