Oracle lays off more than 200 California-based workers | Hacker News Reader

Oracle lays off more than 200 California-based workers

datacenterdynamics.com

119 pointskungfudoi68 comments

The article says “201” - yes, technically more than 200. Other articles says “hundreds of jobs”.

Keep in mind Oracle is a 140,000 to 170,000 large company, so this is a 0.14% reduction, compared to other tech companies planning to cut 10s of percents.

Compare that to others:

    Docusign: ~670
    Intel: ~ planning to layoff thousands
    Twilio: 800-900 (~11% cut)

There’s a lot of sensationalism in reporting here.

You got it all wrong man. Oracle only has 205 engineers, so this is devestating to their workforce.

Everyone else at Oracle is either in legal or a proctologist.

> Everyone else at Oracle is either in legal or a proctologist.

Lmao. Man you don't know how much I needed to laugh that hard after the last few weeks I had. Thank you.

I know, right? When Oracle bought Sun they forced all the engineers to choose between legal and proctology; I chose the latter. After ten years I’m starting to regret my decision. At least Sun wasn’t bought by IBM. (That was actually in play before the Oracle deal.) At IBM they force the engineers to go into Sales. That would have been far, far worse.

I’ll buy you a beer at the next JVMLS for each proctology joke you can smuggle into a non draft JEP. :-)

Dying here. Is this a meme I’ve missed?

Well not a meme per se, but I can also tell you've never had Oracle come and perform an audit of your site usage.

I actually worked at a company, acquired by oracle in mid 2010s.

I ended up leaving seeing how it took 5 proctologists, 37 lawyers, and 3 engineers to meet and make decisions when it only needed the 3 engs to begin with.

The stats of the M&A were usually only 1/3 of the acquired company’s staff would stay on w/Oracle. While this layoff probably doesn’t map geographically with the Cerner M&A, not surprised with some minor team restructuring.

I feel this in my bones. Worked at a smallco acquired by market leading bigco. The average meeting size was 15 people and decisions that previously required 5 minutes took weeks.

I didn’t even last 6 months.

> The article says “201” - yes, technically more than 200.

I don't really see the problem with this. You usually want the estimate to be close to the true value. If the headline was "Oracle lays off more than 200 workers", when Oracle had laid off 437 workers, everyone would slam the headline writer for getting it wrong. Because "more than 200" is not an appropriate way to describe 437 unless the category "numbers that are more than 200" is already relevant for some other reason.

You could also literally say 201 which is shorter than “more than 200”

Yeah, but it sounds weird. It make it seems like they wanted to fire 200 due to budget restraints, but seeing as they already need to do the paper work, might as well fire that one guy who just annoying. Can't very well come out and say: We're firing 200 people from various departments, oh and Travis. He's gone as well.

It raise all sorts of weird questions. Was it three departments that was just shutdown, and that happens to be 201 people? Did they have a target salary cut, which just fit nicely with these exact people?

In reality it will always be some odd number of people getting laid off. It's just that when numbers get to specific it sounds like there's a point. Try telling someone that you want to lose 23,5kg. People will ask why 23,5?. Say you want to lose around 20kg, much fewer questions.

Or even "approximately" 200, roughly 200, near 200, anything that tells you it's pretty darn close to 200 exactly.

"More than 200" already fills that purpose.

what if they lay off another person, does the article need to be update then? There's some advantage in using approximate numbers.

I'd have phrased it as "two hundo"

201. So, technically a success?

....and it's just a gesture by Oracle (like the other tech companies) to make the remaining employees feel lucky to have a job (to quell attrition and tamp down salaries). They didn't need to lay anyone off. That notion is ridiculous.

Oracle lays off a lot more than that every March-ish and September-ish, this is not an indicator of recession/etc.

I worked at Oracle for many years. Oracle has a lot of very talented engineers, of all levels of experience, all over the world. Lots of less-talented ones too, but that's not the point. The problem is those talented engineers are often suppressed by upper management who don't recognize that value that those engineers bring, in favor of their own pet projects. Every once in a while, there's a group that doesn't run into this: the Java team is one of them. OCI is better than people give it credit for, but all that is overshadowed by the dumb decisions made by VP-and-above management.

No lawyers were harmed in the execution of this restructuring.

IIRC Oracle is also in the process of opening new offices in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Timing is right before their largest conference in Las Vegas next week on the 17th, Cloud World[1]

[1] https://www.oracle.com/cloudworld/

Every single person hates Oracle to death on HN and elsewhere, so I should probably do the exact opposite and try to see what cool new things they're doing. I dabbled in their cloud offerings (hey, free arm core instances) and everything looks super polished and excellent. Pricing is fair, interface is way better than AWS. I am tempted to tune into Cloud World.

Anyone got any positive things to say about Oracle? What cool things are they doing?

Their RDBMS is an amazing product. There’s reasons you might _prefer_ SQL Server, or reasons you might need something more specialized, and the open source alternatives are really quite good as well. But I’ve always loved their RDBMS technology. None of the reasons that I hate Oracle relate to the quality of their products.

That reminds me of this hilarious comment of 25 million lines of code in Oracle DB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

> The only reason why this product is still surviving and still works is due to literally millions of tests!

So basically the same strategy as Hwaci with SQLite, except with precisely opposite results.

> Their RDBMS is an amazing product.

I hope you're referring to MySQL!

The Oracle DB is a crufty old throwback to the bad old days where you needed highly specialized experts to spend dozens of hours to install, configure, and tune a massively admin unfriendly piece of software.

It comes with a command-line tool (psql) with NO command history, NO tab completion, or other interactive help system. Only uncompressed file import/export formats. The need to manually manage data files when creating a table, and even specifying their file sizes. Oracle's DB is quite stable and reliable, but it is practically a biplane or steam locomotive compared to almost any other DB out there. Even the similarly aged PostgreSQL is an absolute joy to work with in comparison.

> Oracle's DB is quite stable and reliable

Can't speak for the OP but I think that's what he/she meant. Tooling might not be the best due to their proprietary nature, but the software itself kicks ass.

It does it really? I’ve worked in a company who had to file bugs against data access components and they point blank refuse to fix the issues.

Tuning an Oracle database is a dark art of undocumented parameters.

Increasingly, you can swap out Oracle with Postgres.

> Increasingly, you can swap out Oracle with Postgres.

Well, there is also a huge decrease of DB competencies around (myself first, not shifting the blame on anyone). So, now finally all you need is "just a db", DBAs are gone. Most people don't even need non-relational DBs but hey that's cool. Don't get me started :) I wouldn't blame it on the software (oracle) itself but on the fact that with microservices (and managed DBs) the role of a specific DB seems to have decreased significantly.

I'd say the 'increasingly' isn't simply because of the loss of DB competency.

I worked at a shop that for years was an 'always oracle' even though every license renewal visit left management paranoid and dejected, that got won over by the level of similarity between the two.

MSSQL doesn't mesh well with oracle because it isn't MVCC by default, so risk of conversion goes WAY up.

MySQL, well it was(is?) missing a number of other features alongside a touchy datatype model and other warts in people's memory.

PG tends to do well at picking the right features from other DBs, and you just pay a quote tax to enjoy the benefits.

> the fact that with microservices (and managed DBs) the role of a specific DB seems to have decreased significantly.

I do think this is the third point in the trident. In some shops (I've yet to see one!) you can get a database per-microservice. More frequently I see 'database-per-ecosystem' which means your microservices share a DB.

Oracle RAC runs rings around pretty much any other RDBMS in highly available database clustering. It’s very good (and very $$$).

Bubkis. SQL Server's high availability is a dream to use and rock solid. Everything else is a joke in that space.

And how do you fix such a mess? Fork postgreSQL.

You need to have database expertise if you want to operate a database at any significant scale. All of those configuration parameters don’t go away just because you’re not asked by the software to configure them. There are a lot of use cases out there where a more simple product would be most suitable, but I’ve seen plenty of instances of choosing a more simple tool and then one by one encountering every single problem that a more sophisticated RDBMs would be capable of easily solving.

Also, I really like Postgres, but it’s a nightmare to work with at scale. Even simply things like execution plan monitoring and management are tedious in Postgres, but incredibly easy to stay on top of with the _tooling_ provided by Oracle.

Having migrated large codebase/product from SQL Server to Postgres, can definitely relate. I love Postgres as a developer, but from DBA/devops perspective, Postgres requires babysitting where SQL Server just works. Things like having to manually customize work_mem for complex queries feels very cumbersome and is very inefficient, - it should be solved by software.

https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/16/oracle_settles_with_s...

They're incredibly innovative in the intellectual property space. Their lawyers have successfully sued an incredibly diverse range of people using a wide range of unique and esoteric arguments.

Even when they're not successful in court, they're still generally successful in a business sense by forcing smaller companies into bankruptcy, takeover or into accepting licensing on terms favorable to Oracle.

They're doing lots of "cool" things, it's just all evil corporate legal things. They don't do anything "cool" in terms of developing technology.

Graal VM is cool:

https://www.graalvm.org/

Do you need an Oracle license to use it commercially?

No - GPLv2

https://github.com/oracle/graal#license

They basically saved Java when they bought it, tons of great features and quick updates nowadays. There was almost zero innovation for about a decade while it was with Sun.

Their treatment of OpenSolaris is unforgivable in my opinion. We can now run ZFS on mainstream Linux as of a year or two ago, but it's too little, too late.

ZFS is mostly developed by the OpenZFS community, not Oracle. OpenZFS is creating all the new developments, including ZFS on Linux, while Oracle is over in the corner with their little fork, pretending it doesn't exist.

To put it more succinctly: Oracle ZFS is OpenOffice. OpenZFS is LibreOffice.

Yes, what I mean is Oracle could have relicensed it so that the Linux ZFS port could actually be in the kernel source tree.

They also crippled Java on Android by suing Google.

They leverage their hard won reputation to provide business opportunities for smaller rivals, an act of selfless business practice I have not seen from any other organisation outside of, say, Norton.

That's like saying everyone hates going into that part of the forest because there's a grizzly bear roaming around so I should probably do the exact opposite. Look how many berries there are, and I wonder if there's any good salmon in that creek over there.

Good luck getting mauled to death. I'd rather chew on a stick than go into business with Oracle.

Their stewardship of Java is great. I have high confidence that both language and runtime will evolve in direction useful to giant majority of Java devs.

I have a friend who works in Oracle Cloud, he convinced me that it would be good and that there was a "forever free" tier to try it out.

I had a really really bad experience with their cloud relating to billing, they are still chasing me for it, basically they forced me to pick one of two "shapes" and both shapes were paid. I should have had alarm bells ringing when they asked for billing info.

I saw the payment on my card and tried to shut everything down, it was something like $80 which for me was a lot at the time, but even when deleting as much as I could something remained and it was still charging me $80 every month.

I'm not stupid, I use cloud's professionally, so I'm not sure what I did wrong.

Essentially they kept charging me and I cancelled my debit card, which caused them to finally shut down my account and then they put the outstanding amount ($160~) to collections.

I can definitely be in the wrong here, but I really did try to give them a shot and all I got was bitten, which is literally what everyone says about Oracle.

So, no, don't give them a chance, they are trying to rob you.

Not my experience at all, If someone is deterred after reading above experience.

I run a small Http server, and I never had problem with billing, However the control plane UI is not as refined as AWS or GCP.

How many of these were engineers, though?

"Workers" is pretty meaningless.

Hopefully we can get this story to 201 points. One for each worker.

At that point it should be converted into an epic.

Oracle seems to be optimized for profit. Maybe the workers should unionize.

it’s not like they’re hourly shift workers.

plenty of high tech salaries.

All workers should unionize. There is no need to punch down or be classist in any direction.

Know how the 40 hour work week became a thing, paid time off, etc.? Collective action by workers.

Employee-owned co-ops are actually the fairest structures for workers of all sorts.

If you're not an owner, then you're the product, being cheated, and at the mercy of the corporation to fire or replace you at any time.

> Know how the 40 hour work week became a thing, paid time off, etc.? Collective action by workers.

In the US? Armed revolt by unionized workers. Blood baths on both sides (labor and hired scabs/private police/paramilitary). Forced bargaining from state and federal governments. If you know where to look, there are little "union" cemeteries dotted across the Eastern and Midwestern US where union folk are buried due to company town cemeteries banning strikers and their families from being buried "in town".

Workers' rights were bought and paid for in blood.

> In the US? Armed revolt by unionized workers.

And folks wonder why I oppose gun control.

The key is the kind of gun control. I don't want kids having gatling guns, drunks shooting off their pistols on New Year's in city limits, neighbors owning live grenades, or criminals packing SMGs. I do want every sane, stable, decent, responsible adult conceal carrying to be able to defend their life and others against the threat of mass shooters and random crazies. When seconds matter, help is only minutes-hours away and can file a report about it. Weapons-free areas require there to be official continuous security to fill the void, otherwise it presents a security risk to those who follow the rules. (And I'm no MAGA, I'm a pinko commie.) If the US started as "gun-free", gun control would be possible but there are just too many guns out there to where the "nuclear genie" is out the bottle and can't be easily put back in.

Don't conflate or equivocate the two. I recall reading of an incident were Pinkertons sat in the comfort of sniper nests and shot down picketing miners as fast as they could shoot. The sort of thing you hear about in the most oppressive regimes or during periods of colonial rule.

The Bonus Army. Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton attacked veterans, their wives, and children with tanks and live ammunition. Similar violence occurred against Occupy Wall Street.

Most people don't remember, or were never taught, that Oklahoma was a bastion of socialist thought and movements until it was obliterated.

Bernie Sanders is a modern day Henry A. Wallace and suffered a similar fate.

Basically all companies are optimized for profit.

Technically correct.

There is a difference, though, between maximising profit and delivering value for everyone.

A corner store is technically optimising for profit, but they also ensure value so that you don't go elsewhere.

Oracle does more of the former, they maximise profit above what the value is.

You could ask then "Who are there customers, surely someone has value", which is a valid claim but I would put hard money on: a lot of Oracle customers used to have value but are now just being squeezed hard.

Maybe a minority actually get a good value out of them though.

A lot of startups use Netsuite and get squeezed hard for it, and a lot of enterprises use Oracle DB and get squeezed hard for it. Oracle doesn't need to "ensure value" to prevent you from going elsewhere; vendor lock-in works just fine.

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