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Tag: challenger

  • 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

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    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 job market reshaped by automation, AI and an industry-wide slowdown.

    The good news is that he recently shared on LinkedIn that “something exciting is brewing” and he is feeling “grateful, fired up and ready to lace up for what’s ahead.”

    Microsoft’s layoffs are part of a larger trend. In recent months, Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet have all trimmed their workforces. Amazon cut 14,000 jobs in October, citing a shift toward AI automation. Meta eliminated roughly 600 roles in its “superintelligence” division, while Alphabet reduced staff in its cloud unit.

    According to executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, cost-cutting and AI were the top reasons employers cited for job reductions in October (3). The so-called “DOGE impact” is the leading reason cited for layoffs in 2025 overall.

    The tech industry announced 33,281 job cuts in October 2025 — a sharp jump from 5,639 in September, and the highest number recorded across any private sector that month. For all of 2025, tech firms have announced 141,159 job cuts, up 17% from the same period in 2024.

    While overall U.S. unemployment remains relatively low, it has risen since the start of the year. It would appear competition for tech roles has intensified. Reports suggest thousands of skilled professionals are now competing for fewer openings, often requiring updated skill sets in AI, data science and automation.

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  • The Ego Has Crash-Landed

    The Ego Has Crash-Landed

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    Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.

    Donald Trump dominated the news cycle this weekend. Everybody’s talking about the outrageous things he said at his rally in Dayton, Ohio—above all, his menacing warning of a “bloodbath” if he is defeated in November. To follow political news is to again be immersed in all Trump, all the time. And that’s why Trump will lose.

    At the end of the 1980 presidential debate, the then-challenger Ronald Reagan posed a famous series of questions that opened with “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

    Why that series of questions was so powerful is important to understand. Reagan was not just delivering an explicit message about prices and wages. His summation also sent an implicit message about his understanding of how and why a vote was earned.

    As a presidential candidate that year, Reagan arrived as a hugely famous and important person. He was the champion of the rising American conservative movement, a former two-term governor of California, and, before that, a movie and television star. Yet when it came time to make his final appeal to voters, candidate Reagan deflected attention away from himself. Instead, he targeted the spotlight directly at the incumbent president and the president’s record.

    David Frum: The ruin that a Trump presidency would mean

    When Reagan spoke of himself, it was to present himself as a plausible replacement:

    I have not had the experience the president has had in holding that office, but I think in being governor of California, the most populous state in the Union—if it were a nation, it would be the seventh-ranking economic power in the world—I, too, had some lonely moments and decisions to make. I know that the economic program that I have proposed for this nation in the next few years can resolve many of the problems that trouble us today. I know because we did it there.

    Reagan understood that Reagan was not the issue in 1980. Jimmy Carter was the issue. Reagan’s job was to not scare anybody away.

    Reagan was following a playbook that Carter himself had used against Gerald Ford in 1976. Bill Clinton would reuse the playbook against George H. W. Bush in 1992. By this playbook, the challenger subordinates himself to a bigger story, and portrays himself as a safe and acceptable alternative to an unacceptable status quo.

    Joe Biden used the same playbook against Donald Trump in 2020. See Biden’s closing ad of the campaign, which struck generic themes of unity and optimism. The ad works off the premise that the voters’ verdict will be on the incumbent; the challenger’s job is simply to refrain from doing or saying anything that gets in the way.

    But Trump won’t accept the classic approach to running a challenger’s campaign. He should want to make 2024 a simple referendum on the incumbent. But psychically, he needs to make the election a referendum on himself.

    That need is self-sabotaging.

    In two consecutive elections, 2016 and 2020, more Americans voted against Trump than for him. The only hope he has of changing that verdict in 2024 is by directing Americans’ attention away from himself and convincing them to like Biden even less than they like Trump. But that strategy would involve Trump mainly keeping his mouth shut and his face off television—and that, Trump cannot abide.

    Trump cannot control himself. He cannot accept that the more Americans hear from Trump, the more they will prefer Biden.

    Tom Nichols: Donald Trump is a national-security risk

    Almost 30 years ago, I cited in The Atlantic some advice I’d heard dispensed by an old hand to a political novice in a congressional race. “There are only two issues when running against an incumbent,” the stager said. “[The incumbent’s] record, and I’m not a kook.” Beyond that, he went on, “if a subject can’t elect you to Congress, don’t talk about it.”

    The same advice applies even more to presidential campaigns.

    Trump defies such advice. His two issues are his record and Yes, I am a kook. The subjects that won’t get him elected to anything are the subjects that he is most determined to talk about.

    In Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye, the private eye Philip Marlowe breaks off a friendship with a searing farewell: “You talk too damn much and too damn much of it is about you.” When historians write their epitaphs for Trump’s 2024 campaign, that could well be their verdict.

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    David Frum

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  • L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman pulls past 50%, on verge of outright primary win

    L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman pulls past 50%, on verge of outright primary win

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    In her bid for a second term, Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman pulled above 50% for the first time since vote counting began in last week’s primary election, increasing her prospects of avoiding a Nov. 5 runoff.

    The latest batch of returns, released Tuesday, showed Raman with 50.2% of the vote, compared with 39% for her nearest opponent, Deputy City Atty. Ethan Weaver. In third place was software engineer Levon “Lev” Baronian, who had about 11%.

    In a statement, Raman said she’s still waiting for all the votes to be counted. Nevertheless, she called the latest batch of results “very exciting.”

    “It’s been the honor of my life to serve this incredible city as a member of its council, and I very much hope to see what more we can accomplish with four more years of work,” she said.

    Vote counting is expected to resume Wednesday. Raman and her two challengers were competing to represent a district that straddles the Hollywood Hills, stretching from Silver Lake in the east to the San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Reseda in the west.

    Raman was running for a second four-year term in a district that is significantly different from the one that elected her in 2020. A year after she took office, the City Council redrew about 40% of the district, taking out such areas as Hancock Park and Park La Brea and adding all or part of Encino, Studio City and other neighborhoods.

    Under the city’s election rules, any council candidate who receives more than 50% in the primary election wins outright.

    Weaver, in a statement, said his campaign “always knew it was going to be a close race.”

    “I do want to say thank you to all the thousands of people who rallied to our campaign,” he said, “and I’m asking for them to be patient while the remaining votes are counted.”

    Weaver, who spent several years as a neighborhood prosecutor, had sought to make major issues of public safety and homelessness. He received huge financial support from unions that represent police officers and firefighters, as well as landlords, business groups and other donors, which spent a combined $1.35 million on his behalf.

    Raman worked to turn that huge outside spending into a negative for Weaver, saying it showed that special interests were unhappy with her votes in support of new tenant protections and against police raises and digital billboards. Her supporters portrayed the race as one that would determine the future of progressive politics at City Hall.

    Raman’s progress on her reelection bid took place on the same day that Ysabel Jurado, another candidate backed by the city’s political left, pulled into first place in her race against Councilmember Kevin de León.

    Like Raman, Jurado had been increasing her share of the vote in each of the county’s daily updates. Jurado now appears to be headed to a Nov. 5 runoff election in that Eastside district.

    Election officials said they have an estimated 126,000 ballots left to count countywide.

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    David Zahniser

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  • Gascón faces off against 11 challengers in hotly contested L.A. D.A. race

    Gascón faces off against 11 challengers in hotly contested L.A. D.A. race

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    Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón is expected to advance to a November runoff, but it’s too early to tell who his challenger will be.

    While polls show Gascón has grown deeply unpopular with a significant portion of L.A. County residents, polls and local political observers have suggested his strong progressive base will carry him out of a crowded primary field replete with challengers who spent more time attacking him than they did defining their own candidacies.

    Four years after taking office on a popular criminal justice reform platform in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Gascón found himself facing a different political landscape in this primary cycle. Multiple polls showed the incumbent with a disapproval rating over 50%, and a mix of frustrations with his policies and his perceived vulnerability led 11 candidates to challenge him.

    While Gascón has undoubtedly had some successes in his term — including stepped up efforts to exonerate wrongfully convicted persons and an increased focus on prosecutions of police officers accused of misconduct and excessive force — his term has been rocked by public disputes with his own prosecutors and a litany of civil suits that have already cost the county roughly $7 million. Some of his reforms were deemed illegal by a judge in 2021 and critics have also blamed his policies directly for heinous crimes.

    Property and violent crime rose in L.A. County from 2019 to 2022, according to California Department of Justice data. But other counties with more traditional prosecutors saw violent crime surge at much higher rates in the same time frame, a data point Gascón often stresses. LAPD data also show homicides and robberies have declined over the past two years and criminologists argue its disingenuous to solely blame a district attorney’s policies for crime spikes or declines.

    The field chasing Gascón includes four prosecutors from within his own office, three judges and two former federal prosecutors. With resumes and messages that largely mirrored one another — 10 of the 11 challengers promised to roll back nearly all of the policies Gascón announced during his inaugaration speech — it became hard for a challenger to stand out from the pack.

    Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor who unsuccessfully ran for state attorney general in 2022 as a Republican, raised the most money in the primary. Now running as an independent, Hochman promised to “get politics out” of an office he says was made increasingly partisan by Gascón and the broader progressive prosecutor movement nationwide.

    While he favors alternative sentencing outcomes for nonviolent defendants struggling with mental illness or drug addiction, Hochman also promised to seek the death penalty in some cases and make use of sentencing enhancements for gang and gun crimes, measures that can sometimes double the prison time for certain defendants. Critics have argued enhancements are disproportionately used against people of color.

    Running as a moderate who can balance reform with justice, ex-federal prosecutor Jeff Chemerinsky was one of lone candidates to embrace criminal justice reform while challenging Gascón. Chemerinsky disagrees with much of what Gascón has done, but also said he’d largely eschew trying juveniles as adults and had serious reservations about the use of gang enhancements. Such positions have led other challengers to describe him as “mini-Gascón.”

    Other top challengers include Deputy Dist. Attys. Jonathan Hatami and Eric Siddall, and Superior Court Judge Debra Archuleta.

    Hatami was one of the three biggest fundraisers in the field, and the pugnacious prosecutor’s long history of publicly criticizing Gascón and his involvement with attempts to recall the D.A. made him popular with victims’ rights advocates. He was the only candidate to break from the pack in a USC/Dornsife poll earlier this year, snaring 8% of the vote and finishing a clear second to Gascón. Along with Archuleta, he received the endorsement of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the largest law enforcement union in L.A. County.

    Siddall, a veteran prosecutor of cases involving gang crime and attacks on police officers, bagged the endorsement of the union representing rank-and-file prosecutors and has also frequently antagonized the district attorney through the union. Siddall was also running as a moderate, claiming to represent a “new generation of prosecutors” who want to balance reform and aggressive prosecution of violent criminals, but he and Chemerinsky often found themselves fighting for the same airspace.

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    James Queally, Sonja Sharp

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