I mean, do those headcount numbers count contractors?

V dashes? A dashes? Etc?

The majority of MSFT's workforce has been temp contractors for a very long time, and they do everything they can to have as few actual employees as possible.

If your source is saying the average tenure is 5.3 years, no, no it is not counting contractors.

Beyond that, unless you have an actual source for the culture shift beyond 'you think so', I'm going with no, everything I've described has gotten worse.

That's why I've, for years, been able to predict moves that MSFT would likely make, that people at the time think are ludicrous or incredibly pessimistic, worst case scenarios... and then they happen.

As an example, I was saying MSFT probably just set Xbox with impossibly unrealistic profit targets for the Xbox/Gaming division, to more or less intentionally downsize it and then basically kill it off, over time, while acting like that's not what they were doing... I said that a good deal of time before the news broke, that is exactly what happened.

They are a gormless faceless machine that is unimaginably high on their own supply.

Given the amount of outright caste based racism I saw amongst Indian actual employees vs Indian contractors when I was there, where HR told.me that actually 'that's just their culture' and that I was being racist for pointing out abusive managers literally screaming at their lower caste underlings, whom they had by their H1-B balls...

....yeah, I'm willing to bet it is now even worse.

I've also worked at other large corps, a place or two in fairly high responsibilty positions.

I've met a fair deal of the Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond upper management of various texh and other firms, and the thing they all have in common is an unimaginably inflated ego, elitist attitude, that propogates downward via basically an essentially religious level of respect for people in higher positions... its just expected to be shown by anyone under them.

They really are like the corpos from Cyberpunk 77, they just don't have the nakedly open bloodlust most of those corpos do.

Force of habit, shorter to type, everyone knows what I mean.

EDIT:

It took me an embarassingly long amount of time to realize that does not work with 3RR.

That was the internal code in a fair number of processes, for referring to 'The Red Ring of Death', the 3 red lit segments of a 360 that means basically 95% chance its gotta be RMA'd, likely just wholly replaced.