To say that it's because Microsoft overhired is a gross mis-remembering of the last 20 years.
For starters, I remember way back in the late 2000s meeting an engineer from the office team. Their entire job was focused on making buttons. Microsoft also used to employee engineers focused soley on testing software, though I've heard that has changed.
Anyway, this is a company with decades long cultural roots for enormously large teams where each person is hyper focused on tiny little pieces of a much larger product.
Also, let's not forget that they bought up 1/3 of the gaming industry.
I don't mind that Microsoft is hurting, because it makes mid products, that always seem to fail-up. However, I do mind that the people are okay that the answer is to lay people off instead of, maybe, breaking the company back up into smaller companies that preserve the stability of the workforce.
Is this weird in any way? I live in EU land, but this does not seem too uncommon. As a developer Ive had assignments where I only wrote unit test, another where I was reponsible for daily CI running well (though both moved towards development eventually). I heard just the other day about a competitor where you did not write your own test code.
But yes, before that it would be not at all unusual to have “test engineers” or other technical staff whose entire responsibility laid with setting up test environments and running QA of products. These people did not do product dev, though they may have been involved in writing supporting test platform libraries or even maintaining test infrastructure (like IBM Jazz).
Even today in the U.S. companies that haven’t fully jumped onto newer development practices probably still have QA and/or test departments.
I just checked LinkedIn and they have quite a few job listings in this vein. Which makes sense: in the "AI and YOLO" development lifecycle, automated testing is more important than ever.
That's small potatoes vs their new excess capex spend of 100sB/y.
This isn't the end.
Blasphemy! Bring the torches!
You mean 3.96T dollars, right?