• Phil Coachman resigned from Microsoft in January due to layoffs and culture shifts.
• He said the layoffs and management changes, part of the Great Flattening, had affected morale.
• He shared the strategy that helped him land a new tech role after nine months.

Phil Coachman loved working at Microsoft for most of his nearly decadelong tenure. But as the culture began to shift and layoffs piled up, he decided it was time to move on.

He started looking for a new role in July 2024 when he was still at Microsoft, but struggled to get much traction. In January, he resigned from his role as a senior cloud solution architect to focus on his job search.

"I just didn't feel happy there anymore," said the 44-year-old, who lives in Pennsylvania. "I wanted to just continue making cool stuff and not have this constant fear of losing my job every week."

Coachman said company layoffs — including the elimination of about 10,000 roles in 2023 — took a toll on his morale and that of his co-workers. He said he knew several people who were let go, including one teammate he regarded as a "top performer."

"Every team that I worked with was just down," he said. "So now you go to work and everybody's depressed every day."

Coachman is among the current and former Microsoft employees who have been affected by workforce reductions — either by losing a job or being left to adjust to coworker departures. After cutting about 6,000 jobs in May, the company laid off roughly 9,000 more in July. A Microsoft spokesperson previously told Business Insider that the company was focused on reducing management layers and streamlining processes. The cuts have also included many individual contributor roles.

Microsoft isn't alone. Google, Intel, Amazon, and Walmart are among the companies that have also announced plans to reduce the number of managers in a trend dubbed the "Great Flattening." Layoffs remain low by historical standards, but tech workers have been hit hard — just as white-collar hiring has slowed. That's made it more difficult for workers like Coachman to switch jobs — or find new ones after they resign or are laid off.

"It just got to a point where morale was no longer up to par," Coachman said, "and ultimately it got to a place where it was time to make a change."

The 'Great Flattening' and other strategic shifts affected company culture

After working as a Microsoft contractor for several years, Coachman joined the company full-time in 2015. He said he's extremely grateful for his time at the company, and that before joining, he was earning far less and just trying to get by. He'd be open to returning in the future, he said, if he saw signs of a positive culture shift.

During his final years at Microsoft, Coachman said there appeared to be a push to reduce the number of managers in an effort to increase what the company calls "span of control" — or the number of employees who report to each manager.

While his own manager's number of direct reports didn't change during his time on the team, he said they are now working in an individual contributor role. He also said he saw the number of reports per manager increase on other teams.

"I saw managers leave and other managers absorb that head count, so you go from managing 10 people to now maybe 18 people, which when you talk to those managers, becomes really hard," he said. "The great flattening was definitely happening."

Beyond layoffs and shifts in management structure, Coachman said he also began being asked to focus more on performance metrics, which he felt came at the cost of flexibility and meaningful customer work. In recent years, Big Tech firms, including Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon, have revamped their performance review and compensation structures to better reward top performers and weed out underperformers in pursuit of smaller, higher-performing teams.

Another key factor in his decision to resign was the uptick in business travel. He said he was on the road about three times a month — a return to pre-pandemic norms.

"It just got to a point where I was missing too much of my kids' lives," he said, adding that his work frustrations made travel less tolerable. "It was different when I was traveling and the job was awesome."

Taking the risk of resigning without a new job

When Coachman started his job search in July 2024, he thought it was going to be fairly easy.

There seemed to be plenty of job postings on platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed, so after pinpointing a few roles he felt qualified for, he figured he'd be able to get interviews and eventually land an offer. But he quickly realized it wouldn't be that simple. After all, US businesses were hiring at nearly the slowest pace in more than a decade.

"It was six months of basically just being ghosted," he said. "It was a completely different world than when I had applied to a job decades ago."

Coachman said he went through several rounds of résumé tweaks — thinking the format might be the issue — but still got little response.

As his job search dragged on, Coachman said he was hesitant to resign from his Microsoft job before having another role lined up because it would mean giving up a steady paycheck and unvested company stock. However, he said the "rainy day fund" he'd built over the years helped him feel more comfortable.

"I had enough savings that even if it would take me a year to find a job, I would be fine," he said. "So it was just getting the courage to take that jump."

In early 2024, Coachman said he hired a life coach — in part to help him navigate the changes he was experiencing at work. He said the life coach helped him get confident in his decision to resign, adding that hiring them was maybe the "best investment" he'd ever made.

His network made the difference

After resigning, Coachman said he adjusted his job search strategy. Rather than simply applying for jobs, he spent more time tapping into the network he'd built over the years. He targeted roles at companies where he knew someone, then reached out to ask whether they thought he'd be a good fit — and if they'd be willing to refer him.

In one instance, he saw a few open roles at the data analytics and AI startup Databricks, where a former Microsoft colleague of his worked. After reaching out, Coachman said they recommended he focus on one specific role that they'd be willing to refer him for. The next day, Coachman received a call from a company recruiter. After the interview process, he received an offer and started working for the company in April.

"Finding my next gig was 100% through my network," he said.

Coachman said his pay is comparable to what he earned at Microsoft, and that the signing bonus helped make up for what he left behind in unvested stock. He said his travel is also now limited to no more than once a month, which was a big factor in his decision to accept the offer.

Over the course of his roughly nine-month job search, Coachman said he applied to hundreds of jobs and received two offers — one for his current role and another from a startup he turned down due to concerns about job security.

His top advice for job seekers: build your network and lean on it. Rather than just connecting on LinkedIn, he said, it's better to have real conversations that help foster relationships. He said this could boost your chances of landing a referral down the road — giving your application the "personal touch" it might need to get past applicant tracking system scanners.

"It's real connections with people that I think make all the difference," he said.

• The New York Fed analyzed the mid-career wages of college graduates with a bachelor's degree.
• Graduates aged 35 to 45 in 19 areas of study had a median wage of at least $100,000 a year. 
• Ten of those 19 college majors were related to engineering.

When undergraduate college students choose their majors, there can be several factors that go into their decisions.

But if maximizing one's future earnings is high on their priority list, some areas of study have a better track record than others.

A New York Fed analysis of 2023 American Community Survey data found that college graduates who majored in one of 19 areas of study had a median mid-career wage of at least $100,000 a year. The New York Fed defined mid-career as people between the ages of 35 and 45. The analysis of 73 majors and groups of study only included people with a bachelor's degree — no additional graduate school education — and used what's noted as people's first major.

One general area of study accounted for 10 of the 19 spots: engineering.

Aerospace engineering majors had the top median mid-career wage of $125,000, per the analysis. Three other engineering fields followed behind — computer, chemical, and electrical.

Jaison Abel, the head of microeconomics at the New York Fed, told Business Insider that engineering is a great example of the type of college major that has the quantitative skills businesses tend to want.

"There is a bit of a premium on the demand side, and also these are relatively challenging majors to get through," Abel said. "When you've got quite a bit of demand for the skills and not as much supply of the types of people who are coming in, that's going to make wages overall go up and be high."

Computer science, economics, and finance were the three non-engineering majors with the highest mid-career median wages. Across all the majors analyzed, the median mid-career wage was $83,000 a year.

While the prospect of high mid-career earnings is likely attractive to many students, this appeal hinges on actually landing a job in their field of study — a feat that has become increasingly difficult for some college graduates.

A New York Fed analysis of unemployment data showed 5.8% of recent college graduates in the labor force between the ages of 22 and 27 were unemployed in March, up from 3.9% in October 2022. Absent the pandemic-related spike and its recovery over the next year, that's the highest rate since 2013.

Student loans and the cost of college may affect how a degree is valued

As college tuition rates have risen in recent decades, many Americans have taken on a considerable amount of student debt. In 2024 dollars, the average price for tuition and fees at private nonprofit, four-year schools has increased 30% from the 2004-05 academic year to $43,350 for the 2024-25 academic year. Public, four-year in-state schools are much cheaper, but their average cost has also climbed during that timeframe. Housing and food expenses make the cost of school even higher.

The average American consumer with student loans had a debt balance of about $35,000 as of the third quarter of last year, per Experian data. That's a decline from the average in the third quarter of 2023.

This changing landscape has caused some people to question whether college is a worthwhile investment. In response to these concerns, some high school graduates have gone straight to the workforce, while others have opted for alternative paths, like community college or trade schools.

Not all job openings require someone to have a particular level of education. However, sometimes a college degree is preferred for a job seeker. Automaker Stellantis said in a previous statement that "most non-bargaining unit positions (salaried) require an associate's or bachelor's degree," but also noted that "for some positions, a degree might be a preferred qualification which would open those up to people who can demonstrate proficiency in other ways."

College graduates who majored in early childhood education had the lowest median mid-career wage, at $49,000 a year. Other types of education majors had relatively low mid-career median wages, such as secondary education.