Microsoft is planning to cut a lot of jobs. This will be their largest cut in five years, coming just months after CEO Satya Nadella took lead of the company, and only days after the very optimistic (and very long) memo he sent about Microsoft's future.
The job cuts come as Microsoft looks to cut corners in Nokia Ojy's handset department. This department will be integrated into Microsoft, as some existing divisions overlap. This restructuring will eat up about over 5,800 jobs, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News.
Usually, Microsoft goes through small job cuts consisting of about several hundred positions at a time. The last layoff of this sort was in 2012, when they cut jobs in advertising sales and marketing. This round of job cuts will also include marketing positions for different businesses, such as the global Xbox group.
Currently, Microsoft employs 127,104 people. Around 30,000 of these were added last September, when Microsoft acquired Nokia's mobile phone business. Thus far, Microsoft has not publicly commented on the job cuts.
In a recent interview, Nadella did mention that engineering teams would be restructured to merge engineering and testing positions. However, he did not note whether this restructuring was related to the job cuts. A source did tell Bloomberg that software testers would be cut, as the engineers will take on their responsibilities, however, that is not definitively confirmed.