Shawn Mrzena is trading the AI firehose for a welding torch.
In his nearly 25 years at Microsoft, Mrzena has lived through the industry transitions that defined the company’s modern era: the move from on-premises software to hosted services and then the cloud, a succession of CEOs, and now the all-out push into AI.
He also reinvented himself, starting in sales, moving into a business-architect role, then helping to establish and build the company’s data-privacy business. He’s grateful for everything he experienced, likening his Microsoft career to an MBA that no paid education could match.
But AI is moving faster than anything before it, and in his late 50s, he decided he didn’t need to chase the next big thing again. He has accepted Microsoft’s voluntary retirement offer.
In the process, he’s taking matters into his own hands, literally. Mrzena, the kind of person who’ll spot a discarded pallet and haul it home to build a table, plans to go to school for welding and metal fabrication, with an eye toward doing part-time fabrication work. It’s a return to his early career, when he worked in the arts and ran printing presses.
“I love the trades,” he said, “because I can feel it and touch it.”
Mrzena is part of roughly 7% of Microsoft’s U.S. workforce, an estimated 8,750 employees, deemed eligible for its first-ever voluntary retirement program, announced in April.
Over the past few weeks, GeekWire has interviewed and emailed with several longtime Microsoft employees who took the offer — from sales, engineering, marketing and other corners of the company — to find out what drove their decisions and what’s next for them.
Their specific reasons for taking the offer vary, but a few themes run through their stories: gratitude for long careers at the company, a sense that the timing was finally right and, in some cases, ambivalence about where Microsoft and the industry are headed in the AI era.
For some, the decision was also shaped by a steady drumbeat of layoffs at Microsoft and across the tech industry. Rather than wait to find out whether the next round of cuts had their name on it, they chose to take their fate into their own hands and leave on their own terms.
The program is part of Microsoft’s effort to trim costs and reshape its workforce while pouring tens of billions into AI. For a company that laid off more than 15,000 people last year, with additional cuts possible, a voluntary offer is also a gentler way to thin its ranks.
It’s open to U.S. employees at the senior director level and below whose age and years of service add up to at least 70. The package includes a lump-sum payout reaching up to about 39 weeks of pay, or roughly nine months’ salary, depending on level and tenure.
For many, the bigger draw is health coverage. Microsoft pays it in full for the first year, then lets retirees and their families stay on its plans at COBRA rates for up to four more. The tradeoff: because they’re leaving voluntarily, those who take it generally can’t collect unemployment.
The “VRP,” as the voluntary retirement program is known inside Microsoft (yes, there’s even an acronym on the way out the door), has received widespread attention inside and outside the company, driven in part by people dreaming of leaving their own workplaces behind.
Even so, there have been rumblings that the acceptance rate came in lower than the company expected. Microsoft declined to provide any figures in response to our questions.
Judging from LinkedIn, at least, it has seemed like half the company is leaving, given the crush of longtime Microsofties saying goodbye in advance of the July 1 departure date. The public farewells are largely grateful and often nostalgic, and the responses celebratory.
But the program has also surfaced concerns.
Some of those eligible for early retirement were frustrated with the rollout, saying the gap between the announcement and the details fueled weeks of speculation and left people confused.
Others, reflecting on their careers, point to deeper, longer-running issues inside the company: the constant churn of managers and reorgs that made it hard to finish anything, and a sense that the collaborative culture of Microsoft’s recent era is slipping away.
For those staying behind, there’s another worry: the loss of institutional knowledge and experience as so many longtime employees head for the door at once.
The program puts no restrictions on future employment, and some of those GeekWire interviewed say they aren’t really retiring at all. They range in age from their late 40s to their 60s. One is heading to a startup, another is finishing a doctorate, and a third is moving into conservation work. Others will take a breather before deciding on a second act.
Aileen Hannah spent 24 years at Microsoft in a range of marketing and partner roles, joining the company’s U.K. subsidiary in 2002 and moving to Redmond in 2010. Along the way she changed countries, raised a daughter and made lifelong friendships.
Now in her mid-50s and divorced, her daughter grown and back in London, she had long been working toward a move into conservation work somewhere in the world, just on a longer timeline. She has no regrets about the years or the pay: she put her daughter through college, has a home she loves, and gets to leave while she’s “still young enough to enjoy it all.”
When the offer came, she decided a financial and healthcare cushion to make the leap now was worth more than maximizing her final paychecks.
She doesn’t consider it retirement at all. “I consider that Microsoft is releasing me back into the wild,” she said, with no fixed plans beyond “a plate full of possibilities.”
Justin Long spent his entire 28-year career in Microsoft’s Office and M365 engineering organization, with a hand in building, testing and shipping every version of Office since Office 2000. For the last seven years, he was a people manager.
In his early 50s, married 27 years with no children and debt-free, he had been working with a financial adviser and planning to retire at 55. The timing worked out: he was already stepping back into an individual-contributor role and had lined up a strong new manager for his team, so his departure wouldn’t leave them in the lurch.
The payout, he says, means he won’t have to touch his 401(k) for roughly a decade.
The offer flipped his thinking, he said, from “I’ll put in a few more years” to “hey wow, I can actually retire now.” He intends to make it a true retirement, starting with a trip to Kauai, scuba lessons, and more time on photography, 3D printing and gardening.
James Whelan grew up near Manchester, England, and joined Microsoft’s U.K. arm in 2000, transferring to Redmond in 2012. He moved from enterprise messaging support to a field-engineering role that sent him across Europe, then into partner work and identity engineering, in organizations now part of Microsoft’s Entra and Azure groups.
His retirement comes strangely early. He’s 49, and started just before his 24th birthday. “I’ve been at Microsoft for half my life,” he said. He first heard about the program from a neighbor’s text while visiting friends in Arizona.
When he crunched the numbers, the timing made sense. He wanted to choose his own moment, he said, rather than have it chosen for him.
He isn’t leaving the workforce. The payout isn’t enough to retire on, but it lets him “control my own destiny” and pick his next move. First, a short vacation to mark the start of the next chapter.
Denise Hazlick spent 17 years at msnbc.com, the former Microsoft-NBC venture, before joining Microsoft’s partner organization in 2013, where she ran marketing and communications through the company’s pivots to the cloud, to skilling and certification, and lately to AI.
A former journalist, now 61, she counts nearly three decades tied to Microsoft. She was promoted three times and leaves as a director, and after moving to Texas under the hybrid-work policy in 2023, she had been planning to retire this year anyway.
Procrastinating just long enough to qualify made the package “a no-brainer,” with the extended healthcare a significant draw. More than the package, though, she was ready.
“The industry and the company are changing,” she said, “and frankly, I just don’t have the energy or desire to shift yet again.”
She doesn’t think of herself as fully retired, “just retired from Microsoft.” Her immediate plan is no plan: six months to reset before deciding what comes next.
JP Szambelan spent nearly 16 years at Microsoft, starting in its consulting arm and working across the Office, Windows and Surface teams, including work on Windows 10, Surface devices and HoloLens. For his last eight years, he focused on the security business and its relationships with industry analysts.
Szambelan found the work fulfilling and felt fairly rewarded, he said. Two to three years ago, he began planning his exit in earnest, working with a financial adviser toward what he called “vocational freedom.”
He didn’t think he qualified at first, since his age and years of service fell just short of 70, but the company rounded up, pushing him past a financial milestone he’d been aiming for. After nearly 16 years, he also felt a sense of completion.
It isn’t a true retirement. He’ll be starting work at a startup in July, one he chose for its equity upside. “I’ve still got the fire and strong desire to go build something new,” he said.
Scott Thurlow joined Microsoft in 1993 as one of the original program managers behind Outlook, shipping its first versions before leaving for Expedia in 2003. He returned in 2007 and worked on Bing, the messaging backend behind Teams, and, most recently, the Copilot team.
Married, with a daughter in college, he lives in Bellevue. About three years ago, he started chipping away at a doctorate in his spare time, which he jokes turned his decision into “a race condition between finishing my degree or retiring.” The offer answered it.
The healthcare offered under the Microsoft package gives him the runway to finish the degree without wrestling with Washington’s insurance marketplace. Leaving Microsoft also frees him to pursue his research, which focuses on how organizations can keep humans overseeing engineering work as AI takes on more of it. As an outsider, he can finally interview competitors like Google, Amazon and Meta without the baggage of a blue badge.
Beyond the degree, he’s keeping things open: “True retirement plans? No freaking clue.”
Briand Sanderson joined Microsoft in 1998 as a program manager on Internet Explorer, shipping IE5 through 6, after helping build the pioneering Mosaic browser at the University of Illinois. Over 25-plus years he also helped launch the original Microsoft Surface and, more recently, worked on the company’s Cloud and AI organization.
Now almost 59, he says the decision was “less about leaving and more about timing.” Treated fairly and leaving on good terms, he wanted to go out “on a high note, on my own terms, and with gratitude rather than burnout.”
It’s a true retirement from corporate technology, although he says he would “be a terrible retiree if I just stopped.” He’s turning to photography, which he taught before the pandemic, along with gardening and travel.
“After a career spent building windows so other people could see more,” he said, “I’m picking up a camera and framing the view myself.”
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