>To think you suddenly can get by with up to 25% fewer people.

Not necessarily the reasoning. It might also be that they think their slice of the pie is about to become much smaller, for example.

Would love to have some insider knowledge on this decision.

they know for sure many fewer will accept. there's probably a clause in there that only so many people will be allowed to accept

I recently took a contract with big tech after working with startups for about a year ( I was at this big corp a year ago)

Maybe it’s the small sample size, but from what I’ve seen, the thing hurting velocity more than anything is the fact that teams have too many “cooks”.

The way work is delegated is a bit broken when in reality the engineer who knows the code base or problem best should scope the work and just delegate it to their agents.

I can’t image how things look on the BI side.

Conversion rate will almost certainly be far from 100%

Imagine it's more like a net 10% will leave, which is in line with many layoffs (acknowledging Microsoft's size makes this a large number)

Oracle has cut 13% of its people in about two years.