Microsoft winnows: Layoffs hit software engineers hard

Microsoft's recent round of layoffs appears to have fallen largely on software developers, including several prominent Python developers and a veteran TypeScript developer.

As The Register reported earlier this week, Microsoft plans to cut 3 percent of its staff worldwide, or almost 7,000 employees. According to Bloomberg, more than 40 percent of roughly 2,000 jobs cut in Microsoft's home state of Washington are in software engineering.

This is after Redmond in April warned of swinging the ax on middle managers, with CFO Amy Hood saying the Windows giant would be "reducing layers with fewer managers." Be as that may, coders definitely felt the squeeze this month.

Mike Droettboom, principal software engineering manager at Microsoft and a CPython core developer, mentioned the cuts in a LinkedIn post on Thursday.

"It's been a tough couple of days," Droettboom wrote. "Microsoft's support for the Faster CPython project ...