What Microsoft’s Memo Didn’t Say... and Why October Still Isn’t Safe

The AI agents. JD Vance & the H-1B math. The Nadella memo. The October purge?

What’s happening inside Microsoft isn’t a layoff story. It’s a workforce sleight of hand. A real magic trick - David Blaine style….

I’ve spent two decades analyzing how companies build, restructure, and dismantle their workforces while helping leaders in their career path. The patterns are predictable, but what Microsoft is executing right now is next-level. The tech giant we all grew up using is orchestrating a controlled workforce purge, buried beneath the buzzwords of ‘AI transformation’ and leadership humility.

So far in 2025, Microsoft has laid off roughly 18,000 -22,000 people. Thousands more are being flagged for removal this fall through performance cuts, but y’all won’t find a press release about those ones… well that’s what they are saying anyways. Internally, quotas are imploding, AI agents are replacing entire teams, and delayed performance reviews are now being used as a backdoor to terminate employees. The memo said one thing. The job cuts say another. It’s been an interesting few weeks, and I am still wondering where their PR team is.

And right in the middle of all this, Microsoft filed over 6,000 new H-1B visa applications this year.

Vice President, JD Vance, called it a "bullshit story." He’s not wrong.

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This is the post that had to be written. Behind the AI hype, corporate memos, and visa filings is a real story of internal workforce reorgs, starting with licensing, sales, and some other sectors. I'm going to show you what's actually happening. Who's being replaced. Who's being silenced. And why the next round of layoffs is already in motion.

What’s coming next isn’t speculation …. it’s already coded into Microsoft’s org structure.

Paid subs get the internal signals, functional risk zones, and the role-level blueprint behind the next workforce purge.

This isn’t “maybe.” It’s just not public yet. I have it here.