Chris Paladino, a Microsoft employee who had been hired in 2006, didn’t worry too much about his job when the economy began to sour last fall. The company employs nearly 90,000 people.
“I thought Microsoft was so stable, it wouldn’t be touched,” he said. Now, as one of the 1,400 employees who received layoff notices in January, Mr. Paladino is worried about making the mortgage payments on his home.
Mr. Paladino gathered user feedback for the Xbox games division of Microsoft. This month, he started his own consulting company, Promethium Marketing, with two colleagues who also had been laid off.
But “I would never have chosen to leave Microsoft,” he said. “I had a great job. I worked with a great team.”
Leaving the company has not always been so traumatic. Microsoft has a long history of making employees part-owners of the company by granting them stock and stock options.
From executive to secretary, many employees received thousands of stock options. Microsoft’s stock price rose from about $2.50 a share in 1992 to almost $60 in 1999, and about 10,000 of those employees became millionaires.
When employees left the company in those days, it was overwhelmingly by their own choice. They were off to new adventures, starting a business or a charity or just planning to have fun, said Rob Horwitz, the chief executive of Directions on Microsoft, an information technology analysis firm that has been tracking the company for 17 years.
Notable alumni rebuilt the Professional Bowlers Association; created the charity Room to Read, which builds schools in poor countries; and founded the Cranium game company (which was sold to Hasbro). Other Microsoft alumni started venture capital firms or followed more personal dreams, creating enterprises like Cameron Catering of Seattle, which focuses on green events, or the Casa Cupula, a bed-and-breakfast for gay travelers in Puerto…