Washington man spent 31 years at Microsoft only to be fired on a call with 120 others. Here’s how he’s rebuilding at 60

Thousands of Microsoft workers have been laid off in the past year, and Washington resident Mike Kostersitz is just one of them. After spending 31 years at Microsoft, he’s now looking for a job for the first time in more than three decades.

In May, the 60-year-old principal product manager lead said a new high-priority meeting appeared on his calendar out of nowhere.

“Me and 120 other anonymous faces got told our jobs had been eliminated,” he told Business Insider (1). The layoff came as a complete surprise. “After 31 years, you would expect at least your manager or your VP or somebody to come to you and say, ‘Hey Mike, this is going to happen and here is why.’”

A few years ago Kostersitz presented an ‘architectural deep dive” in a YouTube video and introduced himself as a PM lead on the Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI (AKS-HCI) team (2).

Kostersitz is among thousands of tech workers suddenly forced to navigate an unfamiliar…