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Comment by wiremine | Hacker News Reader

> ..employees who had given their careers to the company were told of their termination via a pre-recorded call — “robo-RIF’d”

Every single first person or second hand account I've heard about Oracle makes like a terrible place to work... is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible?

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> is this just people being hyperbolic, or is is truly that terrible?

I'm on the outside looking in and don't have any special internal insight, but they didn't just pull this robo-RIF idea out of their ass spur-of-the-moment. Oracle is the kind of place that maintains a robo-layoff system, which pretty much says all you need to know.

"What you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle."

https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m

Oh man, so many good quotes in that talk. "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison"

"There is no need to have an open mind about Oracle. That wastes the openness of your mind."

“We make money” - no truer words have been spoken. Hell, I work for a medical billing company and even our company mission has something about helping patients in it (and literally, our company sends bills and insurance claims to collect revenue).

There's a fascinating book by Joel Bakan called The Corporation, which applies the DSM criteria for diagnosis of mental illness to the modern corporation. It concludes that the modern corporation is functionally equivalent to a psychopath (even created that way by law) - an entity whose destructive behavior, if unchecked, leads to scandal and ruin.

Based on the stories I've heard about Oracle and Elison, I've often thought that Bakan might have had an inside informant at the company.

https://www.amazon.com/Corporation-Pathological-Pursuit-Prof...

And you know somebody had to program the robo-RIF script. Wanna bet they had to run it on themselves when they were done?

This is a burner account, so take it with a grain of salt etc. but I used to work at Oracle in a senior management role and honestly the culture was horrible and very incompatible with me (I stayed there for a few years trying to 'work it out' though because I thoughts I was maybe just me and that I was soft etc.).. I worked in middleware and we were over selling average software, people were cut throat horrible to eachother, we spent more time internally competing against other departments and arguing about who'd get which slice of the customer's money rather than working with the customer, providing value and beating the competition. Nobody knows the company mission and its quite a cold and hostile place to work. That was my opinion but most of my colleagues and friends who left felt all the same things. I would NEVER recommend working at Oracle to anyone I cared about even if it paid twice what they earn now.

I left a little more than 5 years ago ... I cannot fully explain how much ... lighter I felt after. I went to work with a cloud (ha!) over my head everyday for the previous oh 8 years of an almost 10-stint. I was contacted by an Oracle employee to recruit me back about 3 years after I left - I fired off a two page email explaining the poor ethics, the horrendous ways people were/are treated ... sadly to no avail, I couldn't get him to leave and get his life back.

Probably depends on where you work. The new cloud team (Bare Metal Cloud) is a great place to work. It has been some of the most fun I've had working for a while now. A lot of the department is ex-AWS and are determined not to bring the toxic work culture across, while bringing across the good parts. So: lots of bright, smart, highly technical people, a careful focus on avoiding hiring "assholes" (for want of a better term). Management who pay attention to deadlines being realistic, pushing back on unrealistic ones and discouraging the "working all hours" behaviour.

RIF == Reduction In Force

(Saved you a Google)

> Every single first person or second hand account I've heard

You answered yourself

robo-RIFs are the new normal.

Support.com is another big offender.

it very much is a terrible place to work

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