As tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon rolled out voluntary exits and sudden layoffs in late October 2026, tech professionals in India’s IT hubs are experiencing severe anxiety.
Early on Wednesday morning last week, a couple of hundred people in Amazon’s devices unit picked up their phones and learnt that they no longer had jobs. Amazon likes to do this before breakfast, so that by the time you would have logged in, there is nothing to log in to. At the same hour, a far larger number of people across the industry also picked up their phones. They had not been laid off. They were checking whether they had been.
This column is about them: not the sacked but the spared, and in particular the 40-year-old manager at a big tech or IT firm in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, or Gurugram, who has been spared every year since 2022 and is finding it exhausting. On Monday, Microsoft offered a “voluntary exit” to staff at level 70 and below in four countries, India among them: about 60,000 people, roughly a quarter of its workforce.
Level 70, I learn, goes up to general managers. In other words, the middle. Its chief people officer, Amy Coleman, wrote: “The Voluntary Exit Offer is new for us. We’ll learn from it.” Those receiving it are learning too, chiefly how to read an email four times looking for what it isn’t saying. On Wednesday it was Amazon’s turn again. It had already cut about 1,000 retail jobs this month, 16,000 in January, and 14,000 the October before.
Each round is described as modest, and it is, unless you happen to be in it. The 40-year-old manager is in a peculiar spot: too senior to be cheap, too junior to be safe. She was promoted for being good at managing people at precisely the moment companies decided they wanted fewer people and fewer managers. Every slide about “flattening layers” is, if you squint, a slide about her. She has an EMI on a flat, school fees that rise faster than her increment, parents who need more looking after each year, and a LinkedIn profile she updated last month “just to keep it current”, the professional equivalent of sleeping with your shoes on.
She is also, by her industry’s standards, old. A software engineer with nine years’ experience posted this week that Microsoft’s announcement had kept him up all night. If it happened to him, he wrote, he had no plan, because software was all he knew. He is probably barely 30. If he feels stranded, imagine being 40 and told to upskill in AI by employers whose AI bills are part of the reason for the cuts.
Fear does odd things to behaviour. Managers who used to argue in meetings now nod. People sign up for the AI pilot not from curiosity but as insurance. Everyone is conspicuously online, the green dot glowing like a lamp at a vigil. The one-to-one with the boss, once a chore, is read like tea leaves. Was he warmer than usual? Too warm? The cruellest part is not the layoff, which at least ends the suspense.
It is the waiting, the low hum of being permanently next. A voluntary exit sharpens it, because it hands the decision to you. By early December you must choose whether to jump before you are pushed, with no idea whether the push is coming. If you go, you may have left too soon. If you stay, the next offer may not be voluntary. My advice, worth roughly what she is paying for it: stop refreshing. Work out your number, the months you could last without a salary.
Have one conversation a week with someone outside the company. Learn the AI tools because they are useful, not because they are a talisman. And remember that the email, if it comes, says more about a spreadsheet than about her. The spreadsheet, after all, will be fine.
