A veteran Microsoft employee’s unexpected reaction to her termination email is highlighting the mounting frustration within Big Tech’s changing workplace culture. Deborah Hendersen, 45, says she felt “pure happiness” upon receiving notice of her layoff after 14 years with the software giant.“The moment I got that email, I wasn’t devastated—I was relieved,” Hendersen told Business Insider. The Xbox division user researcher had watched Microsoft’s transformation from its famed “country club” culture into what she described as a pressure-cooker environment where job security had become extinct.

Microsoft cut 15,000 jobs in 2025

Hendersen was among roughly 9,000 employees eliminated in July 2025—the largest single cut in a brutal year for Microsoft workers. The company had already shed approximately 6,000 positions in May and nearly 2,000 more earlier in 2025, Business Insider reported.The Seattle-based researcher said she’d been anticipating the axe for months. “It wasn’t like watching a car wreck. It was more like you were in the car, knowing it was going to wreck,” she explained.Her sentiment reflects a broader disillusionment spreading through Microsoft’s ranks. Several former employees interviewed by Business Insider questioned whether job security exists anywhere if it’s vanished from the world’s third-most valuable company.

Relief over severance

Microsoft has attributed the workforce reductions to “organisational changes” aimed at reducing management layers and streamlining operations—a trend dubbed “The Great Flattening” affecting Amazon, Meta, and Google as well.But for many affected workers, the cuts represent something darker: a fundamental shift where avoiding layoffs appears to be a diminishing priority. Company executives have cited AI as enabling leaner staffing, the precise scenario employees feared would materialise.“It felt like it didn’t matter if you were a great worker or not,” one laid-off technical program manager told Business Insider. “Everybody was at risk.”When seasoned professionals celebrate termination emails, the employer-employee contract has fundamentally fractured. Hendersen’s happiness wasn’t about new opportunities—it was about escaping a workplace that had become intolerable.