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 ?

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.)