How is this a decent gesture ? Any employer with visibility and cash flow wants to hire engineers. Do you think employers are doing workers a favor and being so nice and humane when they go out of their way and give us poor peons a chance at a job ?
I don’t see how it’s anything that’s not at least a positive gesture. You can have problems with the capitalist system as a whole but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what he wrote. It’s better than nothing.
I lost my job when my company closed a few years ago in the middle of the pandemic and I am very appreciative of those who reached out. That limbo of uncertainty even if I could survive for years with what I had didn’t feel nice.
My employer’s (not Microsoft) biggest problem has been getting any competent sysadmins to apply at all. Maybe one in a few hundred applicants is capable enough to interview; the rest are just cookie-cutter cloud-only SREs who’ve never cared for a server before. They’d love to be “DDoS’d with applicants”, because there might be a few capable sysadmins in that pile! And we’re a lot smaller than Microsoft — so, yes, most likely, they’re ready.
(Our job postings are all published on the usual job database sites under the usual sysadmin/opseng titles, and I don’t have any sort of special intake process to offer beyond that.)