Java celebrates its 30th birthday and more Microsoft developer layoffs

May has been a busy month for news in the IT world, with cyber attacks hitting retailers across the UK and Microsoft laying off over 800 developers.

In this episode of the ITPro Podcast, Jane is joined by news and analysis editor Ross Kelly to discuss three of the most significant news stories of the past month and wish Java a happy 30th birthday.

Highlights

“A significant portion of [the redundancies] are in Washington state, in the US, the heartland of Microsoft headquarters. It comes at quite an interesting period for Microsoft – they've been performing well, they’re really bullish on their AI investments at the moment. But again, another round of layoffs and it must be really demoralizing for people not only at Microsoft … but across the tech industry to see this still continuing.”

“[For] developers and engineers specifically, I think the writing has been on the wall. We've spoken about this a couple of times over the last year, when you look at big figures in the tech industry like Marc Benioff specifically on agentic AI talking about the fact that they might not have to hire any engineers in the second half of 2025 … you have to wonder where they're all going to go.”

“Last week, on the 21st M&S said hackers were able to essentially access systems by social engineering techniques at a third party contractor, [which] allowed them to circumvent M&S defenses and caused an absolute disaster, and again, it underlines the dangers of an increasingly interconnected software supply chain.”

“[Java’s] a programming language that's had remarkable longevity, still very popular. We covered something on this last year around the fact that … its popularity is still there very much. It's having somewhat of a renaissance, so to speak, in terms of organizations really scrambling to get Java developers.”

Footnotes

Microsoft workers face a fresh round of layoffs – here’s who could be impacted

Microsoft expects 1.3 billion AI agents to be in operation by 2028 – here’s how it plans to get them working together

‘Developers will need to adapt’: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reveals the scale of AI-generated code use

Agentic AI is coming for customer service jobs

CrowdStrike layoffs to hit 500 staff as firm targets strategic AI shift

More than a third of UK tech leaders admit they’ve cut staff in favor of AI – but now they regret making hasty redundancies

Why DragonForce is growing in prominence – with retailer attacks boosting its reputation