One hundred and ninety people at SUSE are being told this week that the software they spent years keeping dependable has been quietly promoted into their chair. The German Linux company is cutting about 10 percent of a 1,900-person workforce, and the reason it gave its own staff is not a bad quarter or a lost contract. The reason is that automation and AI now carry enough of the work that fewer humans are required to stand behind it. The memo went out Monday, November 2. The individual notifications land by November 4. That is the whole runway: one weekend, then a calendar invitation with a name on it.
The mechanics are ordinary, which is what makes them worth reading slowly. Chief executive Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen sent an all-staff email confirming the reduction, as The Register first reported. Ten percent of roughly 1,900 employees is about 190 jobs. Affected staff are informed by November 4, employee representatives are nominated the day after, one-to-one meetings begin early next week, and whoever is left gets the fiscal year 2027 strategy on November 16.
Van Leeuwen’s note concedes the human cost in the standard register, then moves on to the business case. Automation and AI, it says, are changing how software companies operate at a pace that makes the current organizational design and cost base unfit to carry the company forward. Modern tooling is already reshaping daily workflows, teams are moving faster with less operational overhead and flatter reporting, and the requirement for some existing roles has greatly diminished. Note what the memo does not contain: a number. Not one productivity figure, not one team’s output before and after, not one example of a task that a system now does better than the person who used to do it.
That absence is the story. A company can restructure for any reason it likes, and SUSE is entitled to run its business as it sees fit. But the moment leadership names AI as the cause, it takes on a burden that no other justification carries. It is claiming a measurement. And it is asking 190 people to accept that the thing they built is now capable of replacing them, on the strength of an assertion that nobody outside the executive floor is permitted to check.
Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen — If the Tool Did the Work, Show the Work
Van Leeuwen is not a cost-cutter by reputation. He came from Red Hat, took the top job in March 2023, and has spent his tenure pushing SUSE toward AI infrastructure rather than away from it. The company doubled down on that bet in 2025 and shipped agentic capabilities for its Linux management tooling on October 27 — six days before the memo. Read the sequence in order and it stops looking like an emergency. This is a strategy that has decided what it wants to be, and the people who do not fit the new shape are being removed on schedule.
His note is careful to say the decision reflects changing organizational needs, not anyone’s talent or commitment, and that any organization would be fortunate to have their expertise. That sentence is doing a lot of work. It is true, it is decent, and it is also the sentence a company writes when it wants credit for admiring the people it is letting go. Expertise that every other employer would be lucky to have is, by definition, expertise worth redeploying. SUSE chose to redeploy the work instead.
If a tool genuinely absorbs a tenth of the labor in a business, that is a real and defensible finding. Release the throughput numbers. Show the change in cycle time. Let the productivity claim stand where it can be tested. A company that leads with AI and delivers no measurement has not shared a cause. It has shared a mood.
The 190 — November 4 Is a Deadline, Not a Plan
The people on the receiving end are spread across a company with offices in Germany, the Czech Republic, India and the United States, and SUSE has declined to say which functions or countries will absorb the cut. That silence is not incidental. Staff in every location now spend the week calculating whether the axe is pointed at their team, their visa, their kids’ school term.
What makes this cut worse than a standard reduction is the road that led to it. In September, SUSE offered voluntary separation to long-serving employees, a program that did not draw enough volunteers. So the company converted a choice into an instruction. A door offered twice stops being a door. It becomes a countdown with better branding.
The one structural protection visible in this story belongs to the Czech employees who joined the ICT union, which buys them formal consultation and a representative at the table. Everyone else gets a one-to-one meeting and a box of tissues. The lesson the rest of the industry will take from November is not that AI replaces people. It is that representation is the only thing that changes the shape of the room when the memo arrives.
EQT — Ten Percent Off the Cost Base Is What a Company Looks Like Before It Is Sold
SUSE is not a public company any longer. EQT bought it from Micro Focus in 2018 for $2.5 billion, floated it in Frankfurt in 2021, and took it private again in 2023. Earlier this year Reuters reported that the owner was weighing a sale of the Linux pioneer at a valuation near $6 billion. Keep that in view when you read the reason given to employees.
A business trimming 10 percent of its headcount while an owner explores an exit is doing arithmetic that pays out at the deal table, not on the product roadmap. Buyers pay for margin, and margin improves fastest by removing the largest line item a software company has. AI is the explanation. The spreadsheet is the reason. Those two things can both be true, and only one of them was written down for the staff.
Layoffs.fyi — 137,000 Tech Jobs This Year and Nobody Has Shown Their Working
SUSE is not an outlier; it is a data point in a pattern that has become monotonous. India Today, citing the Layoffs.fyi tracker, puts more than 137,000 tech workers cut in 2026 across roughly 340 companies. Microsoft offered voluntary exits to about 60,000 people. Amazon removed roughly 1,250. Dropbox cut 9 percent and lost its chief technology officer. The nouns change; the sentence structure does not.
Here is the uncomfortable part for anyone who wants to argue the other side, and this column will argue it anyway: some of those cuts genuinely are automation. Coding assistants do collapse certain kinds of work. Support triage does run on models now. But a claim made 340 times without a single company publishing the productivity audit behind it is not a trend in technology. It is a trend in excuses that happen to be fashionable, and fashion is cheaper than severance.
The Customer Promise — SUSE Sells Humans Who Answer at 3 A.M.
Enterprise Linux is not a product you buy once. It is a subscription to the promise that when a kernel update breaks a payroll system at three in the morning, a person who understands the code will pick up. SUSE has spent three decades selling exactly that promise to banks, hospitals, retailers and governments running systems that cannot afford to be down.
So the message to the market is now double-edged in a way the memo does not address. If AI has reduced the need for a tenth of the workforce, then either the support promise is thinner than customers were told, or the cut is not really about AI. There is no third reading that flatters the company. The 1,900 number came from EQT’s own portfolio page, and it is the only figure in this story with a citation attached.
The remaining staff hear the fiscal 2027 strategy on November 16. That briefing is the real test, and it is a simple one. If the tooling genuinely took over a tenth of the work, SUSE can show the measurement, name the functions that disappeared into it, and let the claim be judged. If November 16 arrives with a new org chart and no numbers, then 190 people did not lose their jobs to automation. They lost them to a story about automation, told by people who will never have to prove it.
Axel’s take: the AI-mekna is real, the productivity gains in some of this work are real, and none of that excuses a company asking the public to accept a cause it refuses to document. When a firm names a tool as the reason a person is expendable, the burden of proof runs one direction. Show the work, or admit the work was never the point.
Sources: The Register, HR Katha, India Today.