Microsoft will not be giving its employees any increment this year

Microsoft has decided not to give a salary increase to any of its full time employees according to a CNBC report.

It’s Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella made the announcement on May 10. In January the company announced it would cut 10,000 jobs as well.

“We will maintain our bonus and stock award budget again this year, however, we will not overfund to the extent we did last year, bringing it closer to our historical averages,” said Nadella.

Microsoft

He also announced that performance bonuses for its top executives will be reduced significantly.

“Last year, we made a significant investment in compensation driven by market conditions and company performance, nearly doubling our global merit budget. This year the economic conditions are very different across many dimensions.”

Nadella said that going forward the company would focus on growing the artificial intelligence segment.

“We are clear that we are helping drive a major platform shift in this new era of AI, and doing so in a dynamic, competitive environment while also facing macroeconomic uncertainties,” wrote Nadella.

Earlier this year, Microsoft said that it had made a multibillion-dollar investment in startup OpenAI which relies on Microsoft’s Azure cloud to run its viral ChatGPT chatbot and provide large language models such as GPT-4 to power apps from Microsoft and other companies.

Together with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the tech giant has been infusing AI tech into its Office products and search engine Bing.

Linkedin Report

According to a LinkedIn report, tech pay rises are plateauing across the board. Tech workers who are looking to change companies are no longer asking for big pay bumps to make the switch and many are concerned about being laid off.

Brisbane sports tech startup VALD, CEO Laurie Malone said that she noticed that software engineers are quite open to taking less money to swap companies.

“Before, people would say they need $10,000 or $15,000 [pay rises] to make the move… This week we have seen a reduction in salary expectations – I don’t know if that’s on the back of job cuts – but recruiters are saying that is what people are on, but they are open to offers,” said Malone to The Australian Financial Review.

Photo above is a logo of Microsoft