Oracle slashes 30k jobs
rollingout.com
rollingout.com
Given the history of their business model being licensing of important databases that are hard to switch off of, I've actually made a point to avoid using Oracle as much as possible (even so far as to leave MySQL when they acquired it, and I've never started a fresh project in Java, which they used to drive a lawsuit they had with Google).
From my chair, they make an expensive database they try to sell to golf executives. There are innumerable equal (better?), free alternatives, and most startups are founded by broke coders in bedrooms that choose those instead and stick with the devil they know. And they have an un-competitive cloud service? Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle for, I'm genuinely curious.
Not to be outdone, Oracle came along and said 'hold my beer.'
My hunch is that big consulting firms like CGI might use it, and therefore the customers of those firms use it? But I haven't worked at any of those.
Their software wasn't just more expensive than using open source equivalents it was worse, too. It's just very, very sticky.
At the same time the sales team wine and dine key decision makers and try to strike the fear of god in to them so they don't rock the boat.
Lucky you. Sadly, not all companies are new enough to be able to do that. Some embarked on Java when it was Sun, and Oracle when the only alternative would have been SQL Server (or DB2 on AIX, AS/400, or MVS).
Years ago I had some fun integrating with Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) - which is actually a pretty impressive beast if you need consolidated financial reporting!
There are alternatives, but NetSuite is the gold standard unless you want to fork over for SAP.
Why would go $58B in debt to support a new feature that no one will want after alienating everyone above?
Short term shareholder equity gains during an over exuberant hype cycle you do not know when might repeat.
"As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." -- Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince (symbolizing Wall Street's reckless persistence in risky lending despite signs of a market downturn)
The Overvaluation Trap - https://hbr.org/2015/12/the-overvaluation-trap - December 2015
> The trap is an almost inevitable consequence of what many managers might regard as a blessing, because it occurs when the capital markets overvalue a company’s equity—and especially when stock overvaluation is common in a particular sector. In the following pages, we’ll describe the trap, show how it has played out in various industries, and suggest where it may be playing out once again.
"If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Paul Newman
Edit: tsunamifury wrote a prescient comment a decade ago, referencing the same hrb piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10851527
Most enterprises don't seem to be running ZFS with Linux, and the only large target using FreeBSD I can think of is Netflix, but AFAIR they don't use ZFS either.
Oracle sues when there's $$$ to make, but I don't think ZFS would warrant them much.
I can't quite remember, but I think they might have mentioned using ZFS rather than UFS for the OS, but I'm pretty sure they're not using it for the CDN data partitions. I love ZFS, but for CDN nodes, I think it would be more harmful than helpful; especially how ARC is separate from the FreeBSD 'Unified Buffer Cache', and how much work Netflix has done to reduce the number of times data hits RAM on the way from disk to the user.
> Oracle sues when there's $$$ to make, but I don't think ZFS would warrant them much.
(Agreeing with you), if they are using ZFS for the OS and Oracle makes ZFS toxic, it shouldn't take long to ditch it.
Most of their legal shenanigans appear to be restricted to companies that already license some software from them.
We have less good laws and systems protecting our right to use software in ways which Oracle considers breach of license.
It doesn't mean they'll win anything in court but they'll ruin you long before they notice the spend.
ZFS, in a vacuum is fantastic. But it’s not in a vacuum.
The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
Well, the writer said the only Java devs THEY KN OW, not all Java devs.
I totally get it, but it made me a bit sad because they were even weary of something like GraalVM for some projects where startup time was becoming an issue; I think the Community Edition for GraalVM would have been fine but I think they had this "we don't touch anything with an the Oracle name directly attached with a ten foot pole". Which is totally fair.
[1] It's not hard to find which one but I politely ask that you do not post it here in relation to this thread.
Apple should do more of that - they make cool computers, and should use cool languages.
To be fair, I know people hate on it, but I honestly do kind of think Objective C is kind of a cool language. I think it's ugly but I think the message-passing style semantics are kind of neat.
Some NeXT products like WebObjects got ported to Java (and ran not only the iTunes backend but also things like the original Dell online store) and there was something called the Java bridge which allowed you to program Cocoa applications with Java.
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...
Oh, and with Yellow Box for Windows, this was also possible on Windows.
If you look at the screenshots here, it's mostly Windows 2000: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Le...
Along with MacOS X, Apple's Xcode IDE even had native java project support briefly in this era as well.
It was definitely the thing for a while. Although I remember my very first steps with Java and Swing and my primary impression was "this is so slow".
One of the versions of the most popular game in the world is written in Java, and it's quite capable of being very fast.
Minecraft does do some horrible things to the JVM, but it's strong and can take it.
Because it is graphically simple. That's not even a CPU issue.
millions of blocks in memory at any time and has to cull which to not render, etc).
128x128x128 is already 2 million voxels. Minecraft and any other game like that can use an octree or some variation to not individually deal with blocks. When things are in the distance or occluded or empty space you cull a courser level of the octree.
Java can be fast compared to scripting languages but I don't know why minecraft would be an example. It is a simple game that was poorly written and had to be re-written in C++ for other platforms. It got by on being simple and but running on full PCs at the same time.
I just remember that GUI programming with Swing felt like molasses compared to native GUIs at that time (i.e. Win32/MFC, Cocoa, Motif).
But of course the cross-platform aspect was cool and since I did quite a bit with Solaris back then, Java got of course pushed a lot by Sun.
We didn't touch a fairly esoteric language called Python much. Because we saw the future. Java and IPv6 was about to change everything.
Wasn't that because iTunes started out as a NextStep WebObjects application? WebObjects started on Objective C, transitioned to a framework for Java in early 2000's, came to Apple with the Next acquisition.
There are vibrant java user's groups all around the world. There are many java community conferences. The most recent redmonk language rankings[0] show java at #3.
The world is big :) .
0: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2...
That being said, Oracle’s valuation is based on their huge integrated ecosystem. That they also control Java, while not insignificant, probably only plays a minor role there.
Typically I see folks using the Amazon Corretto java distribution.
> Typically I see folks using the Amazon Corretto java distribution.
It means nothing. ~90% of core development of JDK and JVM is done by Oracle employees and it is shared by all distributions by various vendors.
and if you hire an offshore outsourcing company, odds are that they will insist on something java (spring) based, as that's where their experience is
We all have different circles. I work for a bank and the bulk of the LOB code here is Java (or something that runs under a JVM). There are no Oracle databases as far as I know, but my visibility is limited.
Also, Oracle Applications for things like HR.
When something has been there for 20+ years switching costs are big.
Regulatory thing for us, some workloads need production support for the data tier for various boring legal and compliance reasons, so our choices are kida limited to oracle and, these days, mongo, who have made massive inroads to enterprise in the last couple years.
Personally, I prefer Mongo.
We have Oracle blocked at the router (!) to prevent anyone downloading the Oracle JDK and incurring the wrath of Oracle licensing.
It sounds like your personal anecdote is particularly uninformative then.
I always find these “relative to me” claims not very informative on the internet. But it fun when every once in a while you notice the claimer is Bill Joy or Linus Torvalds or someone where the relativeness holds weight.
Both Java and C#/.NET are super-popular in Enterprise land, with the choice between them mainly being if the enterprise is a Microsoft shop or not.
Everything SAP touches is written in Java too, and it's boring old payroll stuff. There's the entire Android user interface with millions of Java-only app developers.
Oracle may well be in bed with the spooks, but it's not a Java-specific thing.
Huh??? Google, the search engine part, is written in Java as far as I know. Yandex uses Java extensively. Odnoklassniki, once second most popular Russian social network, is written in Java. Banks like Java. Android apps are written in Java (and Kotlin, which I consider an abstraction over Java).
And that's only what I can remember right away. A sizable chunk of the world runs on Java.
This can’t be a serious comment. I’d say probably half the world‘s B2B and enterprise runs on Java. Especially in Europe.
You would use it to keep your job when your company goes with it against all technical recommendation due to the push of a higher up that wouldn't let the idea go for stupid or suspicious reasons.
e.g. I was unsurprised when I spotted that Novartis (no connection, btw) was deep in with Oracle. Big pharma, lots of money, typically-clueless-big-org-IT-leadership, etc.
(LOL, Novartis also uses SAP.)
So if you have a lot of money and don't want to take any risk you go the oracle route. It's not the best product today, but you won't have any surprise, except cost, that you can justify because it's oracle.
Which is the same as using a tank to go grocery shopping because you're afraid of an accident on the way. You need everything in house to support a thank, special garage, specifically trained crew, specific fuel...
And it's way harder to drive than a civic.
For example, nobody buying, insuring and operating supertankers will care that much about Oracle licensing or even renewing a mainframe contract.
A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2 databases that worked for use cases where you needed high availability and vertical scalability and those were Oracle and Sybase and Oracle was really the only game in town if you actually wanted certain features like online backups and certain replication configurations.
At the time, MySQL existed and was popular for things like websites but had really hard scalability caps[1] and no replication so if you wanted HA you were forced to go to oracle pretty much. Postgres also wasn't competitive above certain sizes of tables that seem pretty modest now but felt big back then, and you used to need to shut postgres access down periodically to do backups and vacuum the tables so you couldn't use it for any sort of always-on type of use case.
Oracle also had a lot of features that now we would use other free or cloud-hosted services for like message queues.
[1] in particular if you had multiple concurrent readers they would permanently starve writers so you could get to a situation where everyone could read your data but you could never update. This was due to a priority inversion bug in how they used to lock tables.
ibms docs and help sites suck butt tho.
In my experience in the late 90s and early 00s, besides Oracle and Sybase, DB/2 and Informix were also regarded as good. Oracle was considered the best though.
Do you remember if that was a recent addition?
Full disclosure: I was quite the newbie back then and most of what I "new" about SQL Server was what the more experienced coworkers told me. This was a very IBM-biased place so I'm not surprised they would have stuck to some old shortcoming, like people who still talk about bad MySQL defaults that have been changed for at least 10 years.
Up until that job (which was my second Actual Formal Job), all my DB experience had been with either dBase (I think III plus or IV) and access, so this was a whole new world with me.
It was through MS SQL Server that a colleague taught me about backups and recovery, after I ran an update in prod but forgot to include the where clause ... :)
Windows was really picking up steam and there was a move to web development in the Windows-based developer space. Visual Basic and Delphi were popular but desktop development had peaked. ASP was for building your apps and SQL Server was the natural backend. SQL Server fed off this wave. It wasn't dislodging Oracle, but rather than every app being built on Oracle, more apps started to use SQL Server as the backend.
Then ASP.NET appeared on the scene and demand grew even more. It was a well-integrated combo that appealed to a lot of shops. I started my career in a global pharma and there was a split between tech budget. IT was a Windows shop for many reasons and ran as much on SQL Server as possible. R&D was Unix/Linux with Oracle. There was a real battle going on in the .NET vs Java (how about some EJB 1) and the databases followed the growth curves of both rather than competing against each other.
The SQL Slammer worm brought a lot of attention to the product. There were instances running everywhere and IT didn't expect so much adoption. Back then you had a lot more servers running inside offices than you do today. My office was much like my homelab today. This validated the need so the patches got applies, IT got involved in the upkeep, and adoption continued to grow.
Oracle's sales folk and lawyers were horrible to deal with. I had some experience of this directly as they tried pushing Java-related products and my boss dragged me into the evals. One of my in-laws was outside counsel in the IT space doing work with enterprise-sized companies. He claims they are the worst company he's ever had to deal with and wouldn't delegate any decision-making locally which endlessly dragged out deals. They had a good product but felt they could get away with anything. Over time he saw customers run lots of taskforces to chip away Oracle usage. This accelerated with SaaS because you could eliminate the app AND Oracle in one swoop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18464429
The top comment in the post is a long complaint about the code quality of the Oracle database (worth a read).
It remains one of the most reliable Microsoft products, but few would claim that is a high bar.
Then the two versions split and I don't think that any of the Sybase source code remains in what is SQL Server today.
That said, a lot of the concepts (like a significant number of system stored procedures) and also TSQL remain almost the same, with small differences (except for system functions, which SQL Server has a lot more functionality).
When you come from the Sybase world getting a start on SQL Server is quite straight forward when it comes to handling the database.
Internals and other low level nuts and bolts differ nowadays, of course.
I don't remember exactly what and why, just that for some specific DML commands another kind of connection was required.
It's notable that 10 was the worst Sybase version, ever.
Source: I worked for Sybase Professional Services from 95 - 99.
Oracle was definitely seen as the more mature and resilient (and expensive!) RDBMS in all the years I worked in that space. It also ran on Unix/Linux whereas SQL Server was windows only. Many enterprises didn't like running Microsoft servers, for lots of (usually good) reasons.
Starting with version 7.5 it was quite alright, however being Microsoft, it has been mostly used in Microsoft shops, alongside VB, MFC two tier applications, ASP, .NET, Sharepoint, Dynamics,...
I built apps in an active-active bidirectional replication telecom Sybase environment and was deeply involved in migrating it to MS SQL server in the early 2000s. I remember a fair amount of paranoia and effort around the transition as our entire business and customers' phone calls depended on it (for "reasons") but in hindsight it went quite smoothly and there were no regrets afterwards.
The Microsoft went and added a nice BI stack to the whole thing which added a new dimension of value creation at a new low price point.
DB2, the pattern was "denormalize everything into one gigantic wide table". If you did that it was insanely fast for the time and could handle very large datasets.
Nobody got fired for buying IBM^W NoSQL
My recollection was that DB2 did not support multi version concurrency control like Oracle and Postgres did. The result was a lot of lock contention with DB2 if you were not careful. MVCC was eventually added to DB2, but by then it was too late.
For raw performance needs, many financial services schema were going to be denormalized anyway. Compression was a great way to claw some of the resulting inefficient storage back.
I came here to say that if you want to understand Oracle's value, think IBM with less history.
IBM is a bit more nuanced. My wife grew up in an IBM town and a lot of her family and her friends’ families used to work there in the 70s and 80s. People, especially the engineers, used to take pride in their work there.
I believe the mainframe version was first.
There is a version baked into the os/400 operating system (i series).
Then unix/windows Db2 came last, if memory serves.
Imagine the antithesis of Emacs. That's an IBM environment with 3270 terminals and obtuse commands to learn.
You'd have to assume businesses were insane/stupid to go with Oracle to the tune of billions and billions of dollars if you believe that they had zero value to sell.
You had to be careful with MySQL back then as constraints were syntactic sugar but not enforced. PostgreSQL was indeed much tougher to manage but more full-featured.
The silent "SHOW WARNINGS" system, nonsense dates like Feb 31, implicit type conversions like converting strings to 0s, non-deterministic group by enabled by default, index corruption, etc.
I think even back then you were usually better off with distributed databases running mysql or postgres over Oracle. Although people liked to think a giant Oracle db was better.
Assume that means 5_000_000/hour. 5M/hr => 83k/min => 1400/s. That is impressive for late 90s. I was generous on what "millions per hour" meant, but even if its 2.5M/hr that would be 700/s, which is still quite good.
MySQL's big breakthrough(not specifically talking about perf) was innodb in 2010.
Just 15+ years ago Postgres had major issues with concurrency as we think about it today.
And just 10+ years ago a LOT of DB drivers weren't thread safe and had their own issues dealing with concurrency.
So nearly 30 years ago? Fuhgeddaboudit.
To get to the level of scale that oracle can handle we had to build sharding and cluster replication from scratch. It still didn’t get to even 1/10th of a single oracle node. Obviously we made a lot of poor architecture decisions as well - in hindsight, of course.
As I understand it, you would have to script a separate watchdog process for the basic PostgreSQL, to get high availability.
https://www.theregister.com/2016/05/16/salesforce_replace_or...
... and both of them were Postgres.
I used it in the late 90s for the backend for websites written in PHP3, but everyone said this was ridiculous and silly and don't you know that everyone's using the MySQL thing.
So I used this MySQL thing, but by about 2005 I'd gone back to powering my lawnmower with a 500bhp Scania V8 because I just preferred having that level of ridiculous overkill in an engine.
Nowadays? Key/Value store in RAM is probably fine for testing -> Sqlite is often Good Enough -> Ah sod it, fire Postgres into a docker container and warn the neighbours, we're going down the Scanny V8 route yet again.
Can't say the same about Oracle.
MS SQL is today stil a very good product, using it now for more than 20 years in different applications.
And: The free version with max up to 50 GB (?) of DB size is a very good option for smaller environments/apps
Visual Studio is also great and widely adopted.
But what else do they have? I had some good experiences with Exchange years ago, but this is just my personal experience, since most people seem to hate it.
What else do they have that is considered a good/solid product that you would recommend to someone?
Naturally our customers aren't companies that care about HN audience.
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A-Software-Problem%2C-A-Mar...
For Jason R., it was an exciting time. His company was trying to break into the telecom market with a new product that they'd get to build almost entirely from scratch. The only part that he wasn't excited about was that the major customers had very specific requirements that his team would have to meticulously follow. In this case, some bigtime POTS operators demanded that all servers must come from Sun, and any databases must be built on Oracle 8i.
One of the applications they were building had to interface with the clients' call data records (or CDRs). The most important use of CDRs is for phone bill calculation, so naturally they were stored in properly designed and indexed tables. The CDRs were stored alongside all billing records, and were frequently accessed by mission-critical internal applications, and they weren't prepared to expose all of that to a third party. So instead, Jason's company would have to construct CDRs on their own from the signaling message flow. Because the CDRs would be processed right away, they wouldn't even need to store them. The tentative architecture called for an Oracle database for CDR pipelining from the front end to the application backend.
When the analysis was being conducted, the team grew concerned with the costs — both in terms of budget and disk I/O. Oracle licenses are incredibly expensive, and there would be a huge volume of CDR data written to and read from the database. Finally, it dawned on someone that the database was completely superfluous since records were processed as they came in. In fact, a single, low-end Sun server with a few hundred megs of RAM could easily handle the CDR generation and application backend.
Excited about their good news, they called up a meeting with the product managers. "We've discovered that we can deliver the product at a fraction of what our original estimates were." The managers left the room, some looking happy, others just looking incredulous.
Later that day, Jason got a call from the VP of Engineering. "Jason, while I understand what you're proposing is technically valid, you have upset the marketing team."
"I'm sorry... did I say something?"
"It's just that they've promised the customer that our product would use Oracle 8i, and now they're going to be made liars. Can you just humor me and add Oracle 8i to the design somewhere?"
"Uh..."
"I have enough trouble politically as it is. I really appreciate this favor!" click
After delivering the news to his team, they argued a bit on what to use Oracle for. Ultimately they delivered the final product with an Oracle database that had a single table which was used to store a handful of configuration parameters.
It was the most expensive individual table Jason had ever created in his entire career.
One of the best things Sun ever did was open sourcing Java.
Embedded folks with real time offerings like PTC, Aicas, microEJ,.... have their own implementations, with real time support, bare metal deployments.
Folks like IBM and Azul nowadays take parts of OpenJDK, mostly standard library, and add their own runtimes instead.
that's right, Oracle's databases are for things like Visa and Mastercard transactions and maybe the US IRS and Social Security systems of record.
Their biggest asset is ERP. That's how they get orgs locked in, because migrating ERP systems after deployment can take decades of work and cost multitudes more than just eating Oracle's renewal increases. Could orgs jettison them into the sun? Totally. Is it fiscally sensible? Yeah, absolutely. Can you sell that to the board? Nope.
The best way to kill Oracle - because such a toxic organization absolutely deserves to fail - is to avoid building anything atop their infrastructure ever again going forward. Don't use their Java tooling, don't use their software suites, don't use their cloud services.
Just don't use Oracle for anything new, and work to get the fuck off of it for anything that remains.
The only reason Oracle survives is because rich dumb fucks keep giving them money.
Every business runs slightly differently than everyone else, and ERP tries to be this all-encompassing monolith. I wonder if the solution to ERP isn't just targeted microservices exposing data via APIs...
For example, Oracle sell Opera. Opera manages hotels, both individual and chains. And integrates with their amusement park management software.
People complain about them, but software like that is much closer to an sdk than a finished product. It is generally customized for each buyer for their needs. And the quality of the customization is more on the buyer than on Oracle.
Oracle have a giant suite of these products for POS, guest experiences, amusement parks, hospitality, marketing (b2b and b2c), etc. And companies buy from Oracle because they're not good at making software and because you do leverage some economies of scale.
Jira, installed fresh, is nice. Jira after it implements your enterprise disfunction, is a new level of hell Dante couldn't've dreamed of.
Oracle the company specializes in acquiring software, integrating it in their ecosystem, selling the installations, and living off the recurring licensing fees (NetSuite is one example).
Oracle buys smaller enterprise companies with rich customers that were already using Oracle DB, or makes them rely on it, then cashes in on licensing.
So for example, they bought Micros (most EFTPOS terminals in the world are powered by them, I think), they bought Cerner (big supplier of IT to healthcare companies), they bought PeopleSoft. If your big company isn't using SAP, it's probably using that. Mundane but essential things for large businesses: CRM, ERP, payroll/HR.
So that's what you'd use Oracle for. Or perhaps you wouldn't use Oracle, then Oracle would buy your IT supplier and either you have to change your IT supplier (costing you millions) or congrats you're an Oracle customer now.
For a tech-adjacent example of an acquisition of an entrenched supplier, look at Tekelec, a telecom hardware and software vendor which Oracle purchased in 2013[1].
Tekelec had a number of products but Oracle really cared about one: the EAGLE family, which is a suite of hardware and software for handling network signaling and routing over SS7. For any customer, EAGLE sits at the core of their networks and it is why your calls actually get connected and billed correctly.
EAGLE had a customer base that included nearly all of the important global telecom carriers. From the press release:
> Tekelec’s technology enables service providers to deliver, control and monetize innovative and personalized communications services and is utilized by more than 300 service providers in over 100 countries.
Verizon[2][3] runs EAGLE STP in their core, as does AT&T[4] (f/k/a SBC). Old business win press releases from Tekelec mean Bell Canada and Rogers still likely do. Based on job postings, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile use EAGLE STP for exchanging SS7 messages to/from roaming partners. And from public RFPs, the US Department of Defense[5] runs their own private phone networks, with EAGLE STP at the core.
Given how prevalent EAGLE deployments were in the early 2000s, how SS7 is needed to make the phone network functional, and how STPs are fixtures that do NOT get swapped out often, I feel very confident in saying that Oracle has had a supporting hand in most, if not all, of the phone calls and text messages you've placed since 2013.
1: https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oracle-buys-te...
2: https://www.verizon.com/about/sites/default/files/2025-03-07...
3: https://www.verizon.com/business/content/dam/business-market...
4: https://www.lightreading.com/business-management/tekelec-win...
5: https://sam.gov/opp/2227eac9a05f7c33f25b19a6ed5ab634/view
"When you read an unusually high-expertise HN comment and realise you know the author..."
It's not used in 4G/5G; Diameter is used instead. Most cellular telcos are ending or planning to end their 2G/3G networks (3G moreso than 2G). In the US, the FCC continues to push for IP-only networks, and AT&T is turning off their landline services (though they keep pushing out the date, it's currently at 2029). Obviously, the US is not the only country, but this seems to be the global direction.
Nonetheless, I can imagine that Oracle will still worm its way into telco recordkeeping and billing systems even if the protocol changes...
They acquired the leaders in HCM (PeopleSoft) and CRM (Siebel) domains and combined them all (SCM, HCM, CRM) into a single (new) product called Fusion.
Their pitch also was - PeopleSoft and Siebel required people with different skill sets (PeopleCode for PeopleSoft, Siebel eScript for Siebel); but with Fusion, customization would not require any programming language knowledge and in the rare cases that it did, you just needed Java. This meant it was cheaper for enterprises. This was a big selling point for a lot of enterprises and helped them reduce their IT cost.
But I suppose that does help a company get staff in the door if the job advert just says "Java programmer", they won't be immediately scared off.
Oracle came back with a quote that was so far outside what our company could afford that we went with Informix (not a cheap database). Pretty lucky escape.
A year or two later I ported the whole stack to PostgreSQL and it worked absolutely fine since we didn't have that much scale. Unfortunately when I left the guy who took over was a huge Informix fan so he deleted all the PG code and went back.
For smaller companies and businesses? Not needed. For big multinationals where a minute of downtime is millions of dollars in revenue? Oracle is cheap.
For instance, I work in the utility industry. They offer specialized utility-specific software for managing data from our meters, our customer and billing system, asset management, HR, accounting, reporting from all these systems. Even more specialized stuff exists that we don'tbuy. No doubt if you had a different use case, Oracle would sell us on their ability to handle it. I think this is the model they follow. They are not trying to sell to startups, tech platforms, software companies, etc. They are trying to sell to your bank.
From the investment standpoint they still have a lot of value to siphon from, but its all rent seeking behavior, its not producing new ecosystems like them or Sun did in the past. Long-term blue chip play.
Though all the Paramount stuff is loosely coupled to them now, so tough to say if its a good long-term play anymore.
This is basically it. You wouldn’t want to use oracle for anything, and they know that. What they also know, very very well, is that they can get their fingers into high-dollar orgs and shmooze people that have little knowledge on the matter to lock themselves into basically never ending contracts for garbage products.
Oracle is a perfect distillation of capitalism in that way.
My recollection is that they also qanted Sun's storage hardware products, to sell alongside their existing DB software.
But Oracle is not just a database company. Oracle started as a database company, but today they are more an applications company than a database company. They have ERP back-office applications (finance, operations, HR), and CRM front-office applications (sales, marketing, service). Oracle bought a large number of applications software companies such as Seibel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, NetSuite and Cerner to become this big.
Of course Oracle is also a major cloud services provider and provide AI superclusters, and GPU instances from NVIDIA and AMD (context for today's layoffs).
Massive amounts of parallel single reads and writes with millisecond responses mixed with mega-joins of incorrectly indexed tables that works flawlessly "on their machine" that limp on well enough to sneak past performance testing with just the planner silently writhing in agony.
There are A Lot of businesses thar are happy to burn cash for a false sense of security. They don't know better.
Hahahahaha. Yes, by all means, call IBM or Oracle and ask them to compensate you for downtime. Support, sure, of a sort. If you throw enough money at them, you'll get an answer from them in an arbitrarily short time frame.
Then again, I guess I am one of those folks that enjoys cool toys, that only big corporations pay for.
But as he described the whole dealings (for some SEO product, I’m not sure of the specifics) it became clear to me they bamboozled him, gave him a bait and switch, and left him on the hook for a huge bill he never thought he’d have to pay.
So to answer your question I don’t think there is a value prop, I think it’s actually a giant grift.
But Oracle owns Cerner Health (now Oracle Health, but to most users it is still Cerner), i.e. 25% market share of the EHR space, and PeopleSoft, which you are painfully familiar with if you work for a bigcorp or anywhere in the public sector in North America. Their database product is very far from their only LOB.
I'm talking about huge, billion dollar institutions like banks, financial services, governments, logistics, manufacturing, software, etc. These are the companies run by the "golf executives" who want guaranteed database dependability and are willing to pay for it.
In this case, you'll use Oracle or IBM DB2.
For example, if you're TikTok dealing with billions of interactions, or Boeing, maintaining critical databases of millions of parts, you'll be totally willing to spend huge amounts of money to make sure your data is rock solid, even if it's overpriced (Apparently, Microsoft is one of Oracle's biggest customers of all companies!)
I’ve had this argument with several DBAs. They always claim “Oracle is the most performant,” while quite possibly true technically, they also tend to run a single massive instance that inevitably leads to a complete failure of the site under heavy load. Oracle is often designed to be the single point of failure. I believe that is by design. The same problems can be solved with modern event driven architectures, better caching, horizontal dynamic scaling, etc.
Oracle switched from Waterfall development model to sprint years ago. They also switched from yearly to quarterly releases (for their Apps) which means they deliver a lot of features in a year.
Without commenting on whether this is true of Oracle, that conclusion doesn't inherently follow from the given. If I'm driving 60 miles per hour, then recalculate it in miles per minute, that doesn't actually mean I'm going faster. Oracle could easily be delivering 1/8 a year's worth of features in 1/4 a year due to release process overhead for all I'd know.
This is also the same incentives that resulted in many classic architectures from 80s and 90s relying heavily on stored procedures. It was the only place where certain data could be crunched in a performant way. Middleware servers lacked the CPU and memory to crunch large datasets, and the network was more of a performance bottleneck.
Legal blame transfer.
Oracle has every single compliance checkbox you need for any certification you can name.
So, if your end customer (generally BigCorp or BigGovt) wants "NitWit Certification v4007", you call up the Oracle sales rep, get a quote, and pass the cost along with a significant markup.
If you are a publicly traded company who needs to report audited financial results every quarter to shareholders, there are less than 10 ERP software in world for that and Oracle owns 5 of those - Fusion, PeopleSoft, Netsuite, JDE and EBS.
Also, in the last decade a big chunk of their revenue comes from cloud services where these enterprises move away from their physical hardware and onto the cloud. Here also, Oracle provides one of the most generous free limits compared to GCP, AWS and Azure. Also they provide some unique options that I have not seen in any other clouds like Bring Your Own License where you can keep running your old enterprise databases in the cloud with just paying for the compute .
Few years back they also bought out Cerner which was the largest EHR company at that time and it pushed their head count by 28000.
They grew their headcount massively during covid like any other software company and simultaneously took on too much debt to build datacenters.
But with rising cost of these capex builds, they are in consolidation mode and reducing headcounts just like other companies.
We are sharing some difficult news regarding your position.
After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change. As a result, today is your last working day.
We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made during your time with us.
After signing your termination paperwork, you will be eligible to receive a severance package subject to the terms and conditions of the severance plan. You will receive an email from DocuSign to your Oracle email address with details on your severance and termination date.
Immediate Action Required
To receive important follow-up information, including FAQs and separation documents to help you through this transition, you must provide a personal email address.
Please click here to submit a personal email address immediately. If you make a submission error, please re-submit a new form. Please Note: The personal email address will only be used for correspondence regarding separation-related information and severance agreements.
Access to your computer, email, voicemail, and files will be deactivated soon, and you will be unable to log into your computer. As a reminder, you are prohibited from downloading, copying or retaining (including emailing yourself) any Oracle confidential information.
Thank you for your contributions to our organization. If you have additional questions, please reach out to the HR team via the Ask HR page or at (888) 404-2494.
Oracle Leadership
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/employeesOfOracle/comments/1s8jadx/...
Right.
As a European, I never realized that this is allowed under US labor law. That is absolutely insane.
EDIT: some commentors have pointed out that the workers collect severance and unemployment --- I was not aware this is law in California, and that changes matters. I would, though, still find being suddenly out of a job fairly traumatic.
Personally, I'd rather just get the money and not have to work, rather than be forced to come into the office knowing I was getting canned in 3 months or whatever
A buyer and seller should be free to start and stop buying and selling whenever they want, absent contracts stating otherwise.
The government should be there to directly support all of the people, not to police and cajole businesses to support some of the people that happened to be hired by a business.
If they have to fire twenty percent of the company, shouldn't that be a signal to investors that the people in charge are morons for overhiring thirty thousand people in the first place? Software engineers aren't cheap; assuming an average compensation of $250,000/year (which I think is pretty conservative if you count total comp like insurance and stock) then that's 7.5 billion dollars of investor money they're wasting per year.
That's one of those things that sounds like bullshit, so I don't know that I believe it, but that's what I've heard anyway.
What do you think happens in the most restrictive labor market in Europe? We're not slaves. There is a short notice period, usually 1 month or even shorter (notice periods for companies are longer, usually double or longer).
And if it's a bad job people just phone it in, take medical leave, etc during their notice period.
Hardly the end of the world to last 1 month.
The US law isn't translated directly to other countries, but every country allows companies to do layoffs. They just have different requirements for including someone in a layoff.
In some countries the requirements are as minimal as saying that there's not enough work for the person to do. It's basically the same thing with extra steps.
The real difference is requirements for notice periods or severance. Note that in tech companies like Oracle they're giving severance as well.
The other side of this debate is that companies in the United States are much less resistant to hiring people when they know it's easy to scale back later. In our European offices we had to be much more cautious about hiring because the managers in our various European offices were afraid of getting stuck with a bad hire for a long or costly notice period. They also had a lot of games with "trial period" work that I don't fully remember, but I can think of several trial period employees who were dismissed because they were borderline and their managers didn't want to take the risk of having them past the period where letting them go was easy.
Even without acquisitions, business conditions can change rapidly things like tariffs, interest rates , war or competition due to newer tools etc , as an investor you can would want leadership to move fast and course correct, rather than be held by the sunk cost fallacy.
All else being equal, the way investors would see a change like this - is now the company is no longer wasting 7.5B/yr in the future and their current cost was already priced in.
However all else is rarely the same, there could be other factors, like slowing sales growth projections which can bring down the multiples .
Oracle is still trading at 28x P/E historically they typically traded at 15x, given the growth and risk profile a more realistic number .
Since 2022 (ignoring 2020 spikes) the number has been going up are basis the expectation that their cloud business will really benefit from AI significantly.
If the market no longer has the confidence —- it has already cooled a bit since October then stock will keep dropping, layoffs will only slow it down a bit .
The timing is critical, because leverage/sale of Oracle stock is how the Warner Bros Discover acquisition is being funded .
The increasing doubts about that financial viability is why that stock risk premium is increasing on Warner .- Currently trading at 27 although acquisition price is 31 and it was trading at 29 a month back . Also senior executives like Zaslav are selling now at 27 which they less likely to if they believed deal will close at 31 soon.
TLDR; this 30k layoff is an attempt to strengthen/save the other acquisition Oracle is indirectly financing.
[1] although the Cerner acquisition added 30k employees to Oracle 3 years back. This doesn’t seem related to that. Oracle did not have a strong overlapping BU, there were/are some redundancies as in any acquisition but certainly not 30k
Oracle is not a high payer of salaries.
I disagree that its a "signal that they overhired". Laying off people means:
1. They didn't plan well enough
2. Their business wasn't attractive enough to customers
3. Their business people aren't good enough to support the people who are developing their product.
If anything, it should be a red flag to investors that they're working with someone they can't trust to give money.
All three of those points, to me, would still indicate that the CEO and executives are very bad at their jobs.
Sure the company still has to payout salary, as per the contract, but plenty of companies do not want laid of people around.
Oracle software engineering compensation for mid-level software engineers is in the $200-300K range. The top of their scale extends into the $400K to $1 million range.
From what I've seen, laid off employees will receive a minimum of 1 month of their compensation with 1 week of pay for every year worked, plus any remaining unused vacation time. So a mid-level employee who has worked their a few years and hasn't drawn their vacation balance to 0.0 could receive $30-50K or more beyond this date.
When someone is fired, they generally stop working immediately while getting paid through the notice period.
(I'm not saying I _know_ better, just how I think I would _experience_ such a thing.)
Losing a job happens everywhere, but there are different ways to handle it, I guess.
Let me tell you, though. All of the gestures that come from the company doing the layoff like coaching services or transition resources felt pretty useless. They were actually trying, but everything in it seemed more like it was to soothe their conscience than to help me out.
When other people get laid off I recommend they try not to put a lot of expectations into any transition services provided by their ex-employer because your time is better invested in your own job search.
Anything an employer can do at scale can be reduced to cash, and cash is king.
Mass layoffs, or RIFs, operate under slightly different rules, but I still saw a stark difference between US and EU employees when I went through one at a different corp.
US accounts were deactivated same day. EU employees were given until end of week to look over the proposed terms etc.
In the US, one day you can have a job, the next none and you'd better hope you've got enough money saved up to cover rent/mortgage, food etc.
That was by far the biggest culture shock when I moved to the states, and really acted as the big "Oh shit, it really is a government by the businesses, for the businesses".
Many states copied the statute.
There are some exceptions, like a company going out of business or natural disasters, but those don't apply here.
That is being laid off, not being fired - big difference. Being fired means being let go for poor performance / bad behaviour. No severance or grace period is necessary there (will be written in the contract). Being made redundant, particularly a redundancy of this size is quite well protected in EU. Typically negotiations between HR and representatives of the laid off group are required, you will continue to work (officially at least) until negotiations are over, as you are not officially out yet. This usually takes a few weeks.
I can tell you this from personal experience...
Unemployment benefits in California are capped at $450/week, and you only get 26 weeks of it. It's helpful, but doesn't even cover housing costs for many individuals, let alone for families.
I don't think there's a state law requiring severance. It's often offered by the employer if the terminated employee agrees to sign an NDA.
In California, it is illegal to require a terminated employee to sign an NDA to receive severance paid to waive the required WARN notice. A company attempting to enforce such an NDA would key face judicial sanction in court (including paying the former employee's legal fees) and likely pay fines to the CA Labor Dept as well.
on the head-roll day HR sends a friendly message asking you to pay a visit in their office. While you do that, security folks clear your desk, and a few minutes later you are outside the building with the signed paperwork in your hands. And suddenly another guy gets a friendly message from HR...
Of course the severance is paid according to the law - but such sudden (mass)termination does happen here too.
I once was given about 6 weeks notice in the US, with a promise that if I completed a project I would be given severance. Given the situation I was in, where the product would be "done", it was a good situation to be in.
Unemployment is not enough for people to live on. In some cases, it barely covers health insurance which can be 800$/month for a single person. (You can get cheaper plans but they start you back on your deducible)
We never have.
But we do know that someone must pay for our incompetence and lack of vision. That someone is YOU. So you are fired.
Thank you for any contributions that you made that still bring us profits.
Oracle Leadership"
Not actually of "AI is replacing jobs", more "oh shit we are spending too much and the product isn't good enough for us to ever make a return on our absurd over-investment".
Look at their employee numbers over the years:
(ai generated):
Oracle Corporation Employee Count (2010 - 2025)
Legend: Each '' represents approximately 4,000 employees.
Year | Employees
------------------------------------------------------------------
2010 | (105,000)
2011 | (108,000)
2012 | (115,000)
2013 | (120,000)
2014 | (122,000)
2015 | (132,000)
2016 | (136,000)
2017 | (138,000)
2018 | (137,000)
2019 | (136,000)
2020 | (135,000)
2021 | (132,000)
2022 | (143,000)
2023 | (164,000)
2024 | (159,000)
2025 | (162,000)
They clearly did something crazy at corona and undoing this as a lot of companies did before already.
Last F50 I was at did a PeopleSoft migration. We probably had 400 Oracle employees pass through the doors over 2 years helping to get it off the ground.
Most Enterprises don't just buy software and that's it. They buy software + support to implement it for their business.
This is extremely customizable software that is designed to pretty much run your entire business and touched by over 40k employees. It requires a ton of care and feeding. There is plenty of people who dedicate themselves to PeopleSoft. Zip Recruiter is showing 5 jobs near me for "PeopleSoft Administrator"
Soon, it will be table stakes to put scattered internal communications, notes, documents into an AI’s knowledge base, where the information can no longer hide.
When that fails, the AI can read the code itself, so that the settings and how to change them are easily explained in simple terms. Actually, this is possibly even better than letting the scattered internal information serve as an intermediate layer.
Being big is the actual moat.
So I suspect the answer is: they need _at least_ 10x as many engineers to get things done as you would expect. Maybe more like 50x
And the last comment by 'oraguy' - I hope he just picked up another id because "never work for Oracle again" ...
Clearly shows that either no one understands the whole picture anymore or that it became so diverse custom, that this is the only way of handling this now.
I think though that these companies are more business companies than tech companies and move themselves into this nightmare.
2. They're the primary maintainer of one of the largest programming languages.
3. They do tons of HR/ERP type software.
4. They have a supply chain division (my company is a direct competitor, and we have 2000 employees--it's a drop in the bucket, but a few thousand here, a few thousand there and it starts to add up. Afaik, their supply chain org is bigger than ours).
5. Other things I probably don't know about.
Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency, which swells the number of workers by a lot.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not remotely a fan, I like to quote Bryan Cantrill's rant. However, they do a lot of things.
And all the supporting legal team of course.
I have some anecdotal evidence for this. I worked at a medium sized family owned business. They were going through a massive ERP upgrade/replacement. One of the bids was from Oracle. The company was able to essentially test drive each company they were reviewing to see if the software was going to be a good fit.
Oracle's sales team was like a having a football on site. They sent over no less than about 20 people to swarm our pretty small office, barge into the dev spaces and generally annoy the fuck out of everybody for several months. The other vendors? They sent one, maybe two people to work alongside us as we test drove their software.
It was funny being in those meetings listening to people talk about the Oracle people. Nobody even remembered how good or bad their software was. Every single comment was about how overbearing and pushy their sales people were.
Needless to say, we went with a different company.
They mis-aligned but for someone like Boeing or United, they'd go gaga over the footy-crowd.
Sure, 100,000 people is a lot, but Oracle also does a lot.
In the real world, there are a lot of things you need to run a business: HR, ERP, Financing, Cloud, Compliance, CRM, etc. There is really only one company who can sell them all to you on one piece of paper, and that's Oracle.
After the layoffs, they'll apparently now have grown by 1.0% annually since 2020.
So yes, from 2021 to 2023, they had a huge spike, but overall, it's a net slowdown in growth relative to the 2010-2020 period.
If this was about reversion to the old pattern they'd have done a smaller set of layoffs or simply wait for a few years of zero growth.
You can see linear growth from 2010-2017. Then slow decline or at best a flatline from 2018-2021. Then they went crazy in 2022-2025.
Now if we just do 162k - 30k we are back to 132k, basically same ballpark as pre-COVID.
It's tricky to pick an end-of-decade year also - recessions tend to happen +/- 2 years of the end of each decade in the USA, or at least have done since records began in the 19th century. For example 2010 was recovery over 2008/2009's bust. It's not like comparing March to Ma4ch for a crude seasonal adjustment.
They acquired Cerner, which had ~30k employees.
Saw someone had a license plate say MPAGES ha
here's a link to an actual source for people who also don't trust ai generated stuff
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/number...
edit: this source also includes data/graphs on stock price and bunch of other metrics, rather than just one number over time.
with an adblocker ... there is one ad on the page just above the graph about "Unlock Macrotrends Premium" which takes up 1.5/2cm of the page, while the graph underneath it takes up like 15cm. Then there's a bunch of other information on the page, none of which are ads. yes, there's a "you only get 5 page visits free" whole page pop-up thing, but there's an easy and well-known way round that for individuals who understand basic internet browser usage.
maybe start using an ad-blocker? pretty much everyone else does these days.
> the data was most likely parsed out of Oracle's earning reports by some janky regexp.
which is probably what the ai would do... or more likely it's just stealing it from the source i linked, since the numbers are exactly the same...
also, probably not because see (1b) below.
> I don’t know why you would trust this more than AI.
because (1a)
> Fundamental data from Zacks Investment Research, Inc.
> Built on Zacks Investment Research — trusted by institutional investors, academics, and financial professionals for over 45 years. [0]
I'd take people who have been doing this stuff for 45 years over some new-fangled toy that's well known to hallucinate and get things wrong in ways that appear authoritative.
also, on that (1b)
> Zacks employs a rigorous quality control process to make sure all data points are recorded accurately. For each company, a trained analyst enters the data from SEC filings, which is then double checked by a senior analyst. Once the data is entered, a senior analyst signs off on final completion after reviewing all the data. In addition, the data is subjected to a battery of automated checks to verify balancing relationships and correct errors. All data items are reviewed by multiple sets of trained eyes as well as automated computer checks. [1]
and (2) because that site provides other contextual information that is helpful, like the fact that Oracle's stock price has been trending downwards, which is possibly a reason why they felt the need to make cuts now. [2]
ai gives you the answer you want -- not the answers you might actually need.
[1]: https://zacksdata.com/static/docs/Zacks_Fundamental_Data_Ove...
[2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/stock-...
edit1: apparently you're not using an adblocker, wtf dude, it's 2026. use an adblocker.
edit2: added (1b)
---
> Yes — the universal fallback is `full-time employees`. That phrase appears in the employee-count disclosure across Oracle's filings in this run. ([Securities and Exchange Commission][1]) > > If you want the exact string to paste into `Cmd-F`, use these: > > * FY2010: `As of May 31, 2010, we employed approximately 105,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][1]) > * FY2011: `As of May 31, 2011, we employed approximately 108,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][2]) > * FY2012: `As of May 31, 2012, we employed approximately 115,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][3]) > * FY2013: `As of May 31, 2013, we employed approximately 120,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][4]) > * FY2014: `As of May 31, 2014, we employed approximately 122,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][5]) > * FY2015: `As of May 31, 2015, we employed approximately 132,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][6]) > * FY2016: `As of May 31, 2016, we employed approximately 136,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][7]) > * FY2017: `As of May 31, 2017, we employed approximately 138,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][8]) > * FY2018: `As of May 31, 2018, we employed approximately 137,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][9]) > * FY2019: `As of May 31, 2019, we employed approximately 136,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][10]) > * FY2020: `As of May 31, 2020, we employed approximately 135,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][11]) > * FY2021: `As of May 31, 2021, we employed approximately 132,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][12]) > * FY2022: `As of May 31, 2022, we employed approximately 143,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][13]) > * FY2023: `As of May 31, 2023, we employed approximately 164,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][14]) > * FY2024: `As of May 31, 2024, we employed approximately 159,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][15]) > * FY2025: `As of May 31, 2025, we employed approximately 162,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][16]) > > If the browser/PDF viewer is annoying, use this order: `full-time employees` → `As of May 31, 20XX` → `Employees`. The first one is usually the fastest. > > [1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312510... > [2]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312511... > [3]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312512... > [4]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312513... > [5]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312514... > [6]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312515... > [7]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312516... > [8]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312517... > [9]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312518... > [10]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000156459019... > [11]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000156459020... > [12]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000156459021... > [13]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000156459022... > [14]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000095017023... > [15]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000095017024... > [16]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000095017025... ```
Funny to say that in a story like this.
I simply don't trust a chart with a botched legend to begin with.
>Legend: Each '' represents approximately 4,000 employees.
That's what put me off and once again reinforces that blindly copying AI does in fact bring harm.
I only wanted to point out that number of jobs in context of the company growth. I found 160k already a huge/gigantic number though.
If you want to use AI to find information like this, tell it to grab you a source and post that.
I have friends there who have described how bare-bones things were. This is only going to make it worse.
I would not patronize a hospital system that intended on staying on Cerner Millennium EMRs for the foreseeable future. If things were bad before, they'll only be worse now.
If they do cut back to their size before the acquisition, while continuing to try and support the EMR, they will be doing a lot more with fewer employees.
The acquisition has already had a lot of bad consequences: https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-cerner-health-larry-e...
(EDIT: or 2021)
Back in the Great Depression, my great grandmother got sick and was hospitalized, and they took care of her until she passed. My grandfather did not have enough to pay the bill. The hospital told him not to worry, just pay what he could. It took him a while, but he paid the bill in full.
Why not civil war?
> It took him a while, but he paid the bill in full.
How long was “a while” specifically? And how much did it affect your grandfathers life?
My great grandmother's brother, Frank Taylor, fought in the Union Army. He later became a bodyguard for Buffalo Bill. And that's all I know about him, and the personal side of the Civil War.
Keep in mind that doctoring was pretty primitive in those days. A doctor could set your broken bones and sew up wounds, and that's about it. You got better or you died. Doctors were called "sawbones" in those days.
> How long was “a while” specifically?
If I recall correctly, it took him 3 years. I don't know much about his finances.
I do know that his first job was shoveling coal in a steamship, which is a filthy, rotten job.
> and they're better off for it
In the US, the cost of medical care rose in step with inflation until 1968. After that, it rose at a much steeper rate, and has not slowed down. 1968 was when the government got involved with health care.
Countries with a heavily-interfered health care system are poorer as a result.
Consider that getting the government out of healthcare would mean all the rural hospitals close.
Consider who that would most-hurt, while saving you money, before you jump to the humanitarian position. Consider it in light of the 2024 election.
i spent $57 on a regular size pack of paper towels and toilet paper in the bay area yesterday
truly, the invisible hand is giving us the finger
The government puts its foot on the scale there.
In contrast, look at the software industry. No regulations, yet highly sophisticated software where the price went to zero. I just reinstalled Ubuntu on my (now fixed!) computer, and every bit of the software was 100% free. And I give away the software I write for it!
$zero!! Can you believe it?
Also software can be reproduced without cost. I cannot get back surgery without a lot of physical time and labor and resources.
I think you're rage baiting at this point so I'm done.
Basically, yet more management by fad.
The tribes usually treat the members as a family. While kicking someone from a tribe can happen, it's considered to be a harsh punishment.
In a tribe, when hard times come, people usually redistribute. That's a normal, human way of dealing with that situation. Not a layoff.
The other aspect is the economic crises. When a central bank decides to increase interest rates, it decreases lending to new investments in favor of lower inflation. This can lead to layoffs, instead of having inflation inflicted on everyone (especially the rich with huge savings). So that decision is essentially some random guys get kicked out of economic (and societal) participation in order to prevent more redistribution of existing wealth.
If you think about it, yes layoffs are deeply immoral. But we can understand, why they happen in capitalism, as a sort of big tragedy of the commons.
The role an employer plays in societies varies from culture to culture, but note that in many cultures, it is "just a job".
Like when a traumatised kid never loved by the parents concludes that life is harsh and love doesn't exist, so better be tough.
That's a lot of stuff you're saying. Not what I'm saying.
Drama is just in the head of people melted in the ambient narrative, sure.
It's no more immoral than you deciding to buy from Safeway, even though you'd been buying from Fred Meyer before.
Also, employees can quit anytime, no notice required. Nobody is obliged to work.
Irrelevant to the topic at hand. Don’t give me a sob story about mom and pop shop, we’re talking about a trillion dollar company.
> Also, employees can quit anytime, no notice required. Nobody is obliged to work.
Okay? What’s your point?
The grocery stores were run by national chains. Starbucks is global.
> What’s your point?
It's symmetric. Companies employ at will, and workers work at will.
So you’re confirming my point that billion dollar companies (like Starbucks killing mom and pop shop) have disproportionately more power over individuals or what are you saying?
> It's symmetric. Companies employ at will, and workers work at will.
Workers don’t work at will. Last time I checked UBI is not there, so workers work to pay the bills and put food on the table.
They have zero power over individuals. They cannot make you work. They cannot prevent you from working for someone else. They cannot arrest you. They cannot confiscate things from you. They cannot tell you were to live. They cannot shoot your dog. They cannot evict you. They cannot fine you. They cannot tell you what to do after hours. You can quit at any time for any reason. Your rights are completely intact.
> Workers don’t work at will.
"at will" has a legal meaning, meaning they can work or quit or change jobs at any time. No law or company rule can prevent that.
It was chains of their own making, the company was not even aware of it.
They weren't poor people, either. They had a McMansion, nice furniture, snazzy clothes and his&hers new cars.
A friend of mine, much lower on the pay scale, came to me once for some financial advice. He was married, and lived in a modest apartment. He could not pay the bills. The problem was he had his+hers new cars with stiff payments. I advised him to sell the cars, and buy ones he could afford. I was surprised that he followed my advice, and got his finances back on their feet.
A reasonable goal is to save/invest 20% of your income.
P.S. You can cut spending dramatically by getting a roommate. I had roommates for years.
What’s your net worth? How much do you own at moment? How much have you inherited?
> They cannot tell you were to live.
Yes, they can. If you don’t have money to pay for mortgage, you have to leave.
> They cannot shoot your dog.
No, but landlord can say “no dogs”, which will reduce your pool of rental options.
> They cannot evict you.
The banks and government will, right.
> They cannot fine you
So you going from $100k+ salary to, potentially, welfare isn’t a problem at all?
> They cannot tell you what to do after hours.
Of course not, they can just gaslight you under threat of pip to be on-call for extra hours.
> Your rights are completely intact.
Companies have responsibility to society beyond making money to shareholders and upholding legal laws.
> "at will" has a legal meaning, meaning they can work or quit or change jobs at any time. No law or company rule can prevent that.
No wonder “the American Dream” is dead.
Ironically, you (along with a significant number of others) deciding to buy from a competitor will eventually lead to financial trouble for Safeway and thus to layoffs and losses for their investors (pension funds among them).
So, do you find your decision to buy from Fred Meyer "absolutely immoral"?!
At least this is in the case in the US. What you are saying might be true in other cultures.
Most people's reactions to large-scale movements like this seem to imply that we feel there should be something more than a simple "money duty" between employer and employee, and we seem to also have respect for companies that act that way (e.g, some Japanese companies perhaps, or baseball teams keeping a sick player on the payroll so they get healthcare even though they never play another game).
Attempting to realize that duty and at the same time abscond it to the state or the family may be an aspect of the failing.
It glosses over the fact that employers exercise control over the social relations required for production (of anything larger that can be built by a self-employed person). This happens by virtue of owning all the crucial means of production involved. And that point, where you need to coordinate work of several people, it ceases to be a system of contractors who freely determine their working conditions, and becomes a collective that has a common goal.
So no, it's not case in the U.S., in no economy of the world is majority of production organized into everyone being a little independent contractor who brings (or rents) their own equipment. That would be horribly inefficient (not to mention that people don't want it either, by and large).
There is a clear rebut to this, how can employer own the social relations (required for production), like managerial relationships, when they ostensibly only own the factory equipment? Well, it's like when you own an appartment, you technically only own the four walls, but practically you also enjoy the privacy that comes with it. In a similar way, capitalists owning a factory don't just rent equipment to a bunch workers, but can dictate the whole social superstructure of production, including the redistribution of earnings.
Markets are a chaotic system and the needs of a business must constantly adapt - or they go out of business.
You jest, but that's pretty much South Korea if this video (and my interpretation of it) is to be believed: https://youtu.be/pjjhrwVYPE8
For those not interested in watching 30 mins of this, long story short, it doesn't bode well. They do have some other circumstances going on in addition though.
This, but unironically. Companies that make money without hiring anyone provide the most "value".
Simultaneously we should stop calling business owners "job creators". They're actually "job minimizers". They only hire people when there's no other choice.
According to the article as well as blind, the main teams hit were associated with Cerner (EHR) and NetSuite (ERP).
Oracle's AI spend is part of Oracle Cloud.
That said, I guess it can be argued that Cerner and NetSuite being on the chopping block can be attributed to AI because now procurement has the choice to either build in-house via an Anthropic or OpenAI SI like Accenture or TCS or they can negotiate better purchasing terms from a best-in-breed product in HRM and ERP like SAP instead.
I also find it interesting how American and European HNers are much more negative about AI compared to their Chinese, Indian, and Israeli peers even though they have a significant amount to lose as well.
Both Cerner (EHR) and NetSuite (ERP) were laggards in their market segments for years.
If I'm the Director of Enterprise Applications and have a budget allocated to procurement, I have no reason to purchase a laggard product like Cerner or NetSuite even with the Oracle bundle when SAP is giving significant discounts because OpenAI, Anthropic, and GCP are offering partnerships with systems integrations like Accenture or Deloitte to fully build out and manage your own hyperspecific ERP or EHR.
There's no reason to keep investing in products in a market that was already past it's growth stage pre-AI with a clear market winner, especially now that there is downstream pressure that makes build much more attractive than buying an inferior product.
Based on your response, I doubt you even cared to read my entire post.
Edit: can't reply
> I didn't read it because it didn't exist yet, you added it in an edit
It did when I posted. The only edit I made after you posted was fixing HRM to EHR.
> You're not even disagreeing with my response, merely elaborating the mechanism behind it. This is bad faith posting.
I strongly disagree. My entire thesis is that Cerner and NetSuite were bad businesses. If a business is bad you kill the business.
No need to gaslight me and delete your response.
I didn't read it because it didn't exist yet, you added it in an edit.
You're not even disagreeing with my response, merely elaborating the mechanism behind it. This is bad faith posting.
The value is in the “system” itself. The tooling, plugins, knowledge that your staff has the familiarity and skills so as to not require retraining, the interoperability of data with other systems and vendors.
The idea that AI is going to enable a variety of bespoke competitors is truly laughable!
That seems to be a bit of contradiction to your thesis no? OCI is their golden goose now for example.
Cerner isn't an EHR, it's an EMR. EHR == Electronic Health Record. Your FitBit data is an Electronic Health Record. EMR == Electronic Medical Record. Your doctor's records, how much blood thinner that nurse is supposed to give grandpa, and whether or not he's a fall risk are things you'd put in an EMR.
You can't just vibecode your way to replacing an EMR. Cerner Millennium has a shrinking, but substantial, footprint at healthcare systems across the country and around the globe. There are 25+ years of bugfixes, caveats, architecture, and other pieces of knowledge to be tracked and accounted for, and you must do so, because if you don't, people under the care of doctors could die.
It's also worth noting that the DoD uses Millennium for active service members, and I think they also use it for TriCare. American taxpayers are on the hook for dealing with the problems that Oracle's cost cuts will produce.
I agree on other points.
Absolutely, but you can now demand a market leader like Epic to give you a significantly better discount (eg. 20-30% over the 10% you may have previously been offered).
And that is the crux of the "SaaSpocalypse" and why you are seeing targeted layoffs in Oracle specifically for their ERP and EHR products.
> It's also worth noting that the DoD uses Millennium for active service members, and I think they also use it for TriCare. American taxpayers are on the hook for dealing with the problems that Oracle's cost cuts will produce
Absolutely, but they were already on the hook for that before Cerner became a part of Oracle.
Is this on the grounds that you can do it yourself?
Even at the lower ends of the funnel, companies are now extracting significant discounts from market leaders as well as their incumbent vendors becuase they are quote shopping.
Oracle isn't in a position to push back because it isn't a market leader in the segments that NetSuite and Cerner compete in, which makes discount even more critical, which means margins management also becomes significantly more critical.
Sorry, but that sounds as mythical as Bigfoot.
It doesn't matter if the customer is serious because the general sentiment across the board amongst procurement teams is that existing quotes are too high, and that they want to maximize discounting where possible.
If you are a non-dominant player in a market segment as Oracle is in ERP and EHR, you lack leeway to better manage margins pressures and win in a price war.
It is in this vein that mass layoffs like the one Oracle announced occur.
Why pay a premium for a tier 2 product when I can buy the tier 1 product on a discount?
I wouldn't want to be the hospital executive sitting for a deposition on a medical malpractice suit, explaining how instead of using Epic or Cerner or whomever, they decided to let AI and a bunch of recent college grads from the lowest bidder consulting firm replace a known system. Sounds like a good way to wipe out whatever you saved in costs with court judgments.
Also, switching EMRs is a huge pain in the ass. When I was a fresh-faced employee at an EMR company they sent me and other employees out to help deploy a new system in a client's hospitals in another city. This took a small army of employees, contractors, travel nurses, and consultants to do. Your ass was up at 3 AM, back at your hotel room at 8 PM. Nurses didn't care about what your program did, they wanted it a certain way and they wanted it fixed now. You're hopefully not going to have the hospital leadership saying, "Yeah, you can try this and if you fail, we'll switch again in three years". I can't imagine many healthcare systems doing that, particularly if the physicians are a major component of management.
If it is a board priority to extract favorable terms from vendors (and it absolutely is right now), we will get it done consequences be damned. If you can't do it, we'll fire you and replace you with someone else. You saw this with enterprises making 12-18 month roadmaps to completely tear out VMware ESXi and migrate to Nutanix.
Unlike Broadcom which has a much more diversified business and purchased actual market leaders which allows them to be so vicious, Oracle's SaaS products have a much weaker hand as the headline of churn is much more destabilizing for a market laggard like Cerner or NetSuite than choosing to drop from 90% gross margins to 40% gross for strategic customers - and purchasers know that.
As such, as a business who is not in a position to protect against strongarming purchaser you need to preemptively build additional margins slack where possible, and it is in this vein that the NetSuite and Cerner layoffs happened today.
Here is an article in English: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Scrapping-the-millennium-introd...
- overpricing the database led to a predictable exodus and new players with often times better performance.
- acquisition of MySQL led to a predictable exodus and new players like maria with often times better performance.
- Oracle cloud arrived late to spectacular skepticism and low user turnout from customers who had been burned by high cost and users burned from decisions like the death of opensolaris. it exists on federal life support these days by the grace of the prevailing administration.
- more than 80 products, with hundreds of thousands of patches and updates, yet no coherent or meaningful reform of the build for more than forty years. DB 19c still ships broken for redhat 9 as a means of driving users to oracle linux, and patching the installer is a 1970s experience in itself. DB 23's greatest improvement has been to tack the letters "AI" onto it to chum what shallow AI waters Oracle deigns to tread outside of an investment portfolio.
- dumping cash into oracle enterprise linux despite it only having around 2500 active corporate users.
this is nearly 20% of the company being laid off.
Yeah, from small interactions over the past two decades, I have no idea how they could have been so bad while employing so many people. What on earth were those 30k people doing?! Their solutions were crap for ages.
There is a significant correlation between how many people you employ and how much nothing you accomplish. It means you've gotten big enough to survive long bouts of doing something and achieving nothing with large amounts of people.
It seems there's literally no correlation between people and what is accomplished.
Could be lawyers.
Would we be sad if they were lawyers?
Developers & QA are cost centres and liabilties.
Replacing jobs is a bit of a misnomer, but it's certainly allowing us to build out more features in shorter amounts of time.
This round of layoffs was telegraphed at a month or so ago. It's all related to banks getting spooked and pulling funding for their massive data center project and the OpenAI deal being on the rocks.
So, I don't think it's really about their product being good enough, it's more that they've bet the company on data centers and it's starting to look like they just don't have the skills to execute on it.
I was able to send internal only emails until 1pm, and then it logged me off and the computer was a brick.
As far as the company is concerned, obviously there's no reason not to care aside from not wanting to lose any critical employees who value stability. That's why many of the labor protections we take for granted now were fought for many years in the past.
Corpo is very careful to show empathy that can be perceived in some way as accepting blame in a way that would open them to litigation.
But you're right, the survivors don't even get a list. They have to find out when something they're waiting for never shows up because that person doesn't work there anymore.
I think we often just don't understand the full dimensionality of layoffs.
This is also why in the other direction a fast clean cut works too. I mean if they want two weeks of “work”, i always consider that severance.
The fast clean cut is true in all industries. Drawing it out only makes it more painful. It is similar to breaking up in a relationship.
There are alternatives to killing things and I don't think fast clean cut is true in all industries. I think people want it to be true because then it hides away the complexity of the emotions we feel. Just cut it off and pretend that the cutting off won't bother us or them after the event.
I think that strategy may appear helpful but just buries most of the feelings, which don't go away, most likely just to fester underneath and erode trust.
The reality is the layoff decision has been made. There is no undo. It is better to cut cleanly as it allows people to move on faster than drawing it out.
The best thing for the most people is to help them move on to the next gig quickly.
The people u work with bosses included, are what make or break this. In my experience, people help one another. I have seen ceo’s push resumes of people let go to other execs in their network. This is outside company policy or communication for legal reasons but not everyone is dirt bag.
If you mean clean cut as in only cleanly cut the contract, but then maintain the relationship in other ways, I think that could make sense, as it doesn't pretend the decision hasn't already been made. I think I was reacting to clean cut the relationship completely, which I don't even think works well. But yeah, I'd appreciate if the individuals or even the company helped the people out.
It'd be like ending a relationship with someone who was financially dependent on you and just letting them fall of the cliff, compared to saying that you know it doesn't work for you two together, but you'll financially help them transition. I dunno, some people should say clean cut the relationship, drop friendships, never talk, cold turkey, I just don't know how well that works for human well being in the long term.
Do companies actually force people to continue working during that period? I would expect that in tech they'd allow them to leave early because employees who have chosen to leave the company are some times not the most helpful to keep around for months
Yet people keep believing mandated work after a layoff is a thing.
In some countries the notice period can go for months. Usually it gets longer with the tenure. It allows both parties to transition and prepare in advance.
>I would expect that in tech they'd allow them to leave early because employees who have chosen to leave the company are some times not the most helpful to keep around for months
It's called work ethics. Have some pride. Also if you bail without garden leave, you have to pay.
The extra kicker was that there were a bunch of UK people in this meeting who knew they'd be laid off, but it takes longer to do the redundancy process over there, so they had to listen to these people complaining about how sad firing them feels.
The number of people who snap and make rash decisions to try to exfiltrate data, plant backdoor logins for themselves, or sabotage company work in those hours was a much larger number than I would have guessed prior to seeing it.
And also to expect and manage people snapping and giving them an off-ramp, financially but emotionally as well and maybe professionally, too. Why not try to help them find other jobs?
Companies don't just provide money, they provide people with meaning, routine, social circle, and so much, and layoffs cut all of those immediately.
The number of people included in a single layoff wasn't a factor.
The people who snapped treated it as a personal affront and wanted revenge on the company. If anything, being laid off in a large group made it feel less personal to people. The people who felt unfairly singled out were the angriest. If an entire satellite office was closed or a department was laid off together they didn't take it as personally.
I think that in a way, to really learn why you shouldn't depend on your company for your social circle, it sort of requires being laid off (not really, but kind of; some sudden permanent intervention in your work-life). I consider it a blessing in disguise that I realized this early, even if it meant a job loss. People who get comfy in marriages or long-term jobs or buy a house early on tend to spend their resources in the obvious optimal efficient ways, which is to make their friends at work or through their partner or literally right next door to their house. But those are not generally or reliably resilient to significant change. Proximity will always be important, but if your friends need to be literally where you work every day or over the fence, you are isolated and socially vulnerable. If you leave the job or move, it's now dramatically more expensive for both parties to encounter each other, and it's best to incur that expense intentionally before you end up needing to.
Layoffs after the main activity period is over, laying off HR people after they held layoff meetings for other departments, etc.
Reptiles.
I once had my access cut off while I was working late, albeit from a much smaller company. Got to go to sleep knowing I didn't have an income in the morning. Incidentally, in retrospect I'm glad they made the decision for me, since I eventually was forced to leave my awful hometown in search of greener pastures, so it's not always a bad thing long-term, and I ratted them out to the tax man which I'm sure they had fun with.
I'm doing pretty well for now actually. The things that stay with me though are the little signals that something might be going sour, and a much more tangible anticipation for the next time I'll need to prepare for another full year or more looking for work. I never really feel like I can make big commitments that depend on future income, even if the income is stable now.
Thank you for being a good role model and setting the example that saying "that was bad, here is the context, but I don't like that I said that."
the distant engine purr comes
ouch goes the lawnmower
Could be 'wrong' since erupting is "technically" 3 syllables - but I think it sounds better said fast. Becomes a 7-7-5 that way. Same issue with 'lawnmower.'
If the system in which you operate does not attempt to measure this, I think it's worth it for anyone to measure it themselves. We can so easily be overconfident or underconfident. Collect the data and see the kinds of things you've actually been accomplishing over a year.
I'll feel like I'm getting nothing done, and then I look at the year's changelogs and realize I'm actually doing just fine for where I want to be.
If you don't do it simultaneously, you're going to hear by rumor rather than by official email, which is IMHO worse.
If you do it simultaneously, everyone will know something is up, because there's never simultaneous global meetings.
Is it polite to let people stew for hours, or days, as virtual meetings spread across the company to convey the news in person? It is polite to schedule those meetings all at once with the implications clear - how is that any different than just confirming it an email? Is that better or worse than scheduling such calls with short notice, so that every employee must wonder for days (maybe weeks, depending on staffing and leverage model) whether they still have a job, when that information could have been communicated immediately to allow for immediate preparations?
You and I as senior managers might both apply the golden rule in this situation, but that could lead to different decisions.
Oracle as a company are cowardly and rude and the practicalities are simply an excuse. There's clearly one "better way" which is to put a name at the end of the email, for perhaps Larry himself to take responsibility as he should.
If anything the practicalities show how arbitrary the decision was. Checking the Oracle subreddit we got people with "exceeds expectations" as their average still getting culled. It would appear how they decided upon the cuts reflects on how they have performed them. With all the sophistication of a child in a candy shop trying to buy more candy than their piggy bank can afford and then just dropping the excess on the floor, walking away and trying to forget that it ever happened.
I am communicating my own sincerely held belief on general practices with large-scale layoffs, and my sincere disagreement with the black-and-white declarative than a mass email is definitely worse than individual conversations. Reasonable people can disagree.
I am not evaluating the full list of circumstances in this specific situation as I wouldn't be able to even if I were interested in doing so. If we were taking wagers, I'd wager my opinion of the Ellisons is at least as negative as yours independent of anything to do with this story.
> There's clearly one "better way" which is to put a name at the end of the email, for perhaps Larry himself to take responsibility as he should.
Completely agree with that, though ultimately it should be many names, not just one.
If losing your job means you can't afford buying presents, isn't it good to know your job is at risk?
Better than buying presents and then getting fired right?
Maybe we need the corporate version of "Good night, Wesley, I'll no doubt fire you in the morning."
For example, a company I knew in the 80s had a wholly owned subsidiary. It was losing money, so it was decided to close the subsidiary. Management decided that they'd be nice guys, and notified the subsidiary that it would be closed in 90 days and then everyone would be laid off.
90 days later, management arrived to close the facility. It was empty, stripped clean of everything. Not a lick of work was done in the 90 days, and nobody was there. There were reports that trucks had come to the loading dock, and took everything they could carry.
The cost of that led to the collapse of the company.
I agree it was poor management to not oversee what was happening.
This is why management does not give advance notice of layoffs. Usually, when a person gets laid off, their first notion of it is a security guard is there to help them fill a box with their personal items and escort them out.
Nobody likes this, but it's the inevitable result of a bad apple now and then. For example, most people aren't thieves, but banks still need security guards because there are thieves.
In a 1:1 meeting you could fire me and say a gazillion things and I'd forget 99.9% of them.
“Hey, we’re going to fire you in 6 months. Just a heads up.”
Nah. Give me the year of salary and send me home today. Better for the employee and for the company than pointlessly dragging it out. Again, this is assuming generous severance.
Valid point about employees on visas though.
But the real problem is any law that would deport someone 30 days after they were laid off, even if they had been working for years. That should be 6 months minimum.
Agree that no one should be getting deported on 30 days because they got laid off.
It's common in some companies.
The employees stress out about whether they're going to be impacted. Nobody gets much work done as they update their resumes and prepare for the worst. The best people start looking for other opportunities and find them. If specific employees are told they're going to be laid off, some seek revenge.
Much better to immediately notify those impacted, revoke their access, give them generous severance instead of expecting them to work, and let everyone else know they're safe.
And I don't mean this in a mean or evil way, but (of course there's a but) I wonder if this would motivate people to work more effectively as well. My organization has had cuts lately, but it hasn't in a decade. It has been transformative. People are reminded that their jobs depend on them showing up and being valuable.
I don't want people to be scared for their jobs. Perhaps this cycle creates false security, though. There must be a balance in here somewhere.
It is completely legal to just stop showing up one day.
Interesting that they admit that the layoff off is due to a pivot from software to hardware.
It's not like over-hiring or laying people off is a crime. The employees presumably knew the deal going in (that they could be laid off). They got compensated for the time they worked.
No one owed them a job at Oracle in the first place. (Again, not to diminish how bad it feels / shocking it can be to be laid off!)
they do?
For over hiring 30K people.
Bad leadership. Costing the company a ton of money and goodwill. Need I go on?
Just think of the wasted man hours spent on integrating 30K new employees that supposedly the company didn't need. The time spent in meetings about restructuring departments, new points of contacts, reassignment of duties, figuring out who to promote, training the new hires, etc.
Now the company gets to it all again in reverse with much lower moral and excitement. The amount of hours & employee focus wasted on the bureaucracy of the hiring and firing over 30K employees instead of spending that time on improving the business should get you fired from leadership.
That's all money.
If a CEO is bad at his or her job (e.g. wasting billions of dollars on employees that they don't need), apparently he or she can fire 20% of the company and give himself a bonus for making such a tough decision.
They literally failed at their job. Came up with a 30k headcount budget shortfall. If I did something like that I'd certainly be fired.
I personally don’t agree with this, but it’s easy to say “overhiring was bad”, when at that point, it might’ve been a great business decision. Things just have changed now.
For the long term health of the company it's near a certainty that would have been better. The effects of adding ~20K then laying off 30K in such a relatively small period of time are gonna be felt for years
They took on 58billion in debt which halved their stock price...
Expected savings is only 8Billion
What you are seeing is Oracle in death pains.....
If you or the org you are working for uses Oracle products fast find a way to migrate away from Oracle as it will cease to exist in 2027 at this rate.
In 2 years' time we will look back fondly at the Global Financial Crisis.
Edit: sorry- thought this was about the stock price, not about picking up stragglers in cloud computing. I’m gonna contradict Gemini and say that’s bullshit marketing
Also relationships, kids and stability. Spend all your life in perpetual anxiety, rent all your life, you will own nothing and be happy! Also, here’s a bowl of insect protein while we’re at it.
That's not perpetual anxiety - that's the way things work today, and the way things have worked for generations. Anyone pretending otherwise is fooling themselves with lies.
The problem isn't that people can be fired, it's that their food, housing, and medical care are all dependent on or provided through their employer.
This is nonsense and shouldn’t be normalized.
You have to work with people that do literally nothing (usefull to the goal of the company) and they can't be fired.
Companies are afraid to hire. Young people only get short therm contracts. If a company needs to cut jobs it has to keep employees with children over the others.
What society will be more productive?
Germany acts like money grows on trees. Reality will come and hit hard.
Like it hit Block and Oracle workers already?
Less than 20 million people in germany pay more taxes than they get money from the government (if you consider state employees as getting money from the government). With a population of over 80 million.
Think about what happens if that is not financially viable anymore.
It is ridiculous to think that either party to an employment relationship should be forced to participate longer than they wish to.
The actual culprit.
wow.
I would strongly disagree that accelerated vesting upon layoff is common. It's rare.
We’ll also offer a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, and accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting.
https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/j...
For something paid at regular intervals like RSUs, you really should never be looking at the total value of the grant, and instead think of it in terms of how many shares per paycheck/month/quarter/year you vest.
If you've got a cliff coming up, that's different. I'd be pissed if a company laid me off 11.5 months into a 12 month cliff or a few weeks before an annual bonus and didn't accelerate the vesting / bonus.
The point is, you're getting shares for 16 weeks + ${years_employment * 2} additional weeks, and you don't have to work those weeks. It's comp that, according to the terms you agreed to when you accepted the job, you are not entitled to. You're getting it as an unearned parting gift.
Yes, it sucks to be laid off. But it sucks a little less if you get a parting gift that for many of the more senior folks will run into six figures.
Would you rather have that parting gift or not? Because some companies don't give you one when when they lay you off.
I'm for sure timing my exit based on the vesting schedule.
I live pretty far east in Brooklyn. I'm still only a few blocks away from a train; apartments in this area, even with a bedroom, can go for less than $2,000/month. Not "cheap" but not unlivable either.
Anyone evaluating compensation and stock options should understand vesting periods and what they mean so they're not surprised by something like this.
Lots of talented hard working engineers are laid off at the same time that they lay off people just checking Slack on their phone on the plane to avoid taking PTO.
Reading the r/employeesOfOracle is a bit gutting. Hoping for the best for the people. Don't really care much for Oracle; especially their business model.
MySQL is no longer the only choice for database, MariaDB is fully open-source.
VMWare, there are far better options like Proxmox, build a Proxmox server using second hand Dell PC you find in bulk on eBay, increase the memory, add GPU passthrough and you are golden.
Most companies which uses HCM are eventually forced to use SCM, because if any company wants to use a SCM product, they need employee management system as well, so if anyone is already using HCM they eventually also starts using SCM. and if someone who does not uses Oracle HCM but wants to use SCM product they will eventually have to shift HCM here as well.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-may-slash-30-000-11441...
Perhaps this will be higher than the standard 10% cull, but I suspect not that much higher.
And full of debt from AI datacenters full of hardware with a 6 year depreciation cycle, possibly even lower depending on what NVidia releases next.
So overvalued!
It’s a sad state of affairs. I mean Postgres is right over there!
But if you compare to other companies with similar rev/profit numbers, you'll be amazed with how cheap they are.
I don't believe Oracle has a wide moat other than its DB -- the Datacenters are mostly commodity.
You found the cure of cancer. If you release it now, you'd giving back humanity millions of LifeYears, but if you release it in a few years, Larry Elison won't be able to take advantage of it.
How do you proceed?
You'd probably get a few innocent people aren't the Larry Ellison from Oracle, but it's a start.
The game where you, the people, will always be the loser
Hm. So, likely old Cerner operations.
Y'know, the ones that keep EMR systems running.
Ol' Larry just doesn't see the value proposition in making sure that your health information is accurate.
As a side, the fact that you can just slash someone's job without any warning needs to be addressed by law.
That's just mean. People need to show some respect to lawn mowers.
EDIT: LOL, I haven't expected to be downvoted for simply putting this in a way I like : )
Sounds like a kind of insult to me. I'm not related to them in any way.
And, to be honest, I'm just trying to kind of follow the guidelines. There's too much of bad news and negativity around me, I'm fed with it already, thanks. I want to have fun if it's possible.
The algorithm did something explicit censorship never could.
If this is a joke, I clearly don't get it!
But on the other side, I'm afraid that the fired employees will go to work for other companies contaminating them with the harmful spirit against customers.
Given that it makes sense to cut if the company doesn't have new product ideas to spend that excess resources.
My LinkedIn was full of people opening for work. Pretty sad.
Problem part B. Not working for a sustainable, worked-owned co-op that prioritizes authenticity, fairness, stability, worker happiness, and customer satisfaction. Such environments have extremely low turnover. The main gotcha is they generally aren't scalable beyond medium-sized organizations, but the workaround is a loose federation of a multitude of similar and complementary organizations whom band together for purchasing power, common infrastructure, standards, and process templates.
The co-op model in general is so very promising and those that still exist are really successful and from video documentations I watched, the employees seem to be content, if not getting rich. The problem is that this model runs counter to the very core of capitalism and as such faces a lot of criticism.
This has nothing to do with AI, whose capex largely falls under Oracle Cloud.
The main teams hit - RHS, SVOS, and NetSuite India - are associated with Cerner and NetSuite, both of which are the kinds of legacy SaaS apps that are most likely to see reduced spend in the world today - it's cheaper to hire Accenture/PWC/Deloitte or WITCH combined with Anthropic or OpenAI to build and manage your own custom in-house or use that threat to purchase an actual market leader in those categories like Veeva or SAP respectively.
> reduce some fat
Yes, but, well... why do they need to do that at all? I mean, what made them make this decision right now? I think it was mentioned in the article - they're in debt because of their AI data centers projects:
> Oracle has taken on $58 billion in new debt within just two months.
Although...
> All of this is happening even as the company posted a 95% jump in net income — reaching $6.13 billion — last quarter.
Still,
> According to analysis from TD Cowen, the job cuts are expected to free up between $8 billion and $10 billion in cash flow — money the company urgently needs to fund a massive buildout of AI data centers.
And they need a lot of resources to fund that, because:
> Oracle to Invest U.S. $2 Billion in AI and Cloud Infrastructure in Germany (2025) [1]
> Oracle unveils $10B data center expansion plan (plans for 2025) [2]
While they're having some problems now:
> Oracle and OpenAI End Plans to Expand Flagship Data Center (Bloomberg) [3]
It's just a few examples; I'm sure if you will dig deeper you will find more. Some sources suggest that "Oracle plans to invest up to $50 billion in 2026 to expand its AI data center infrastructure", but I'm not sure if it's true and if you can trust them, so I'll leave it there. They're trying to optimize because they're in debt, and still they seem to expand that debt even more.
[1] https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-invests-two-...
[2] https://www.channeldive.com/news/oracle-capex-spike-cloud-ai...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-06/oracle-an...
Because the ERP and EHR market is almost entirely dominated by SAP and Epic. Frankly, the Cerner bet was already a bad bet when they took it in the early 2020s as was NetSuite to a certain extent.
No business has an obligation to hire you in perpetuity. Similarly, you have no obligation to remain at a company you don't like.
> Although... >> All of this is happening even as the company posted a 95% jump in net income — reaching $6.13 billion — last quarter.
Which is largely attributed to the growth in spend on Oracle Cloud.
---
I work in this industry and once you remove the AI washing, much of Oracle's current strategy is around building a hyperscaler business that is comparable to GCP and Azure in size. Already over the past 2 years I've seen 2 fortune 500s completely shift off AWS or Azure to Oracle Cloud because of better terms and strategic hires by Oracle Cloud.
Edit: can't reply
> Thanks for explanation
No worries! Infra, Enterprise, Cloud, and Cybersecurity has a very different dynamic from other businesses
> And still they were trying to compete, weren't they
Sure, 5 years ago. But not anymore.
> Why have their cloud services are suddenly started to make more money, roughly speaking
Becuase around 2-3 years ago Oracle Cloud began strategically hiring enterprise sales leadership from Azure, AWS, and GCP with preexisting relationships with F1000 accounts who were getting hit by contract renegotiations from the other 3.
> what exactly pushed them to do it right now
The "SaaSpocalypse" [0].
Basically, non-market leading Enterprise SaaS products cannot justify their current prices and valuation because the choice is to now either buy best-in-breed at a significant discount or build in-house working with a systems integrator for Anthropic, OpenAI, or Gemini.
If you weren't already a market leader in your specific segment of Enterprise SaaS you are most likely going to see your dealbook reduce significantly over the next 2-4 years as customers shift to dominant market players who are offering significant discounts to stave off a "build with Accenture/WITCH+OpenAI/Anthropic" disruption.
[0] - https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/01/saas-in-saas-out-heres-wha...
And still they were trying to compete, weren't they?
> Which is largely attributed to the growth in spend on Oracle Cloud.
That's exactly what I'm trying to say. Why have their cloud services are suddenly started to make more money, roughly speaking? And at the same time, what is (seemingly) the main reason for their recent debt increase? They do cut out the fat, yes, I agree, but what exactly pushed them to do it right now? What made them to act so quickly and urgently? That's what I'm trying to say.
Okay, understood. I work in entirely different field, so that's not my main speciality, to be honest. Thanks for explanation : )
That's strange. You mean you can't see the "reply" button or there's something else? I just have seen this only once (no "reply" button"), and reloading after a couple of minutes helped. Not sure if it's your case though.
> The "SaaSpocalypse" [0].
I'm very grateful that you have decided to spend your time explaining this. Seriously, I am. Thank you very much. I now understand that way better than before.
idk, i mean you could try to build in house, wait for it to be done, and hope it's correct with respect to your business which i would give about a 5% chance of success or buy saas and concentrate on implementation/migration.
AI or not, unless your business already has the teams and governance in place to manage custom software you're going to be tied to Accenture or some other firm indefinitely which will be expensive. Besides, something of the magnitude of a global ERP is going to be almost impossible even with GenAI. Writing the code and the technical architecture, where GenAI will help the most, is the easiest most straightforward part of a project like that. The real difficulty will be business process definition, alignment, and requirements gathering/refinement same as always. Finally, business doesn't stop while you're implementing something in-house, once it's done (which it will never be truly done) you still have to migrate to it which is another multi-year process. I think where most of these projects will end up is still paying for saas but then for certain processes you use the in-house system. ...So it's the worst of both worlds basically.
https://www.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/1p6f5ra/what_is_ha...
I wish i could remember exactly but there was some financing bet or debt structuring thing that Oracle did that didn't go according to plan and put them in a bad spot.
(thanks for the reply correcting the company)
Also LLMs have a lot of value because it is a way to steal intellectual property without anyone beeing able to do s.th. about it.
10,000,000,000 / 30,000 = 333k per employee?
I guess that tracks for a company that is 50% lawyers for suing their own customers /s
One lost job is a tragedy. 30,000 jobs lost is statistics.
But it's way less satisfying that emotional appeals.
The base of your statement is just wrong.
A company is a legal fiction. It doesn't have thoughts, wants, desires. It's not rich or poor. It's a piece of paper. It's an entry in government database.
What is not a fiction is Oracle's owners i.e. shareholders.
They are not rich. Majority of them, either direct owner of stock or in-direct owners via pension plans etc. are like you and me. They are not rich and the price of Oracle shares can be a difference between them being able to pay rent today or being able to retire tomorrow.
Those people rightfully care about the share price.
The executive are correctly responding to wishes of owners of the company by managing it to make a profit and therefore keep the stock price high.
What in the above chain do you find objectionable?
That millions of Americans investing in public companies depend on and therefore care about stock price?
That management of public companies is correctly responding to demands of owners of those companies by managing companies for profit?
Or maybe you just want to skip to the end of the line and seize means of production from private citizens to bask in the warm glow of collectivism?
Interesting how “American dream” was forgotten and now it’s either under corporatist boot or collectivism.
Automattic has apparently gone insane, but that's not the same as evil.
Valve might be the closest to a HN-agree on "good company" - and even that has a comment below mine attributing gambling to them.
It is only a matter of time...
This isn't a theoretical question for me. I've applied to and been declined from all the companies you listed (except tarsnap because I didn't see a careers page). What exactly do I do then? Do I then just decide that food is overrated and be content with not having paycheck?
Let's not also forget that most companies go broke, and realistically most of us don't have any ideas that are likely to make a sustainable business.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't try and find an ethical place to work for or start a business, I'm just saying that it's not as easy as "just apply to places that don't suck".
Instead of working for Zuck or Google or Larry, you can work for Garmin, Shopify, Visa and Mastercard, most banks (they are soulless but some aren't always evil), grocery chains, pretty much any local business, car companies, non-weapon or surveillance based government work, IDEXX, hell even Apple imo and I dislike Apple, nearly every business that isn't "Tech"
Basically just stop pretending that the industry is only Google, Facebook, AWS, Microsoft, and Oracle. There's something like millions of jobs that aren't in those companies.
I'm certainly not a fan of Oracle (or the wider scale damage the Ellisons have been doing), but I also can't bring myself to be so flippant when an action this large is going to cause untold amounts of personal tragedies.
See, for example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/employeesOfOracle/comments/1s8m58p/...
Today this unfortunate guy, tomorrow perhaps me.
Sure it's an uphill battle. This is late-stage capitalism after all and unless you're comfortable with a role that extracts from people who weren't planning in being extracted from you're not going to make a ton of money. That's what it takes to be on the side of the angels though.
Definitely my bias here so take it with a grain of salt. I still use cloudflare and I'd probably still work for them.
It's hard to find jobs at companies that aren't run by monsters; even if you can identify a company that isn't terrible, there's still a relatively low likelihood of getting a job there.
I'm not blaming the companies for not hiring me, I'm sure they have their reasons for their terrible decision of passing up on someone as handsome and smart as me [1], and I am certainly not entitled to a job, but when I run out of companies that seem ethical, what do you do then?
It's easy to say "well start your own company!", and sure if you have the ability to do that then that's great, but I don't even really know where to begin with finding investors for stuff I'm working on, and I'm not sure that anything I'm working on would be interesting to investors anyway.
[1] It's true, my mom told me!
My point is: it's very, very, very hard to do this, especially with my set of interests (lots of OS work is in the datacenter, which leads to jobs with hyperscalers; I consider many of those companies evil). I'm trying. It will probably make my QoL worse for some time, and I'll probably give up eventually.
Also, evil is undefined in some sense. Is it wrong to do something "good" at a company that has an "evil" aspect?
No i won't make 350K as a dev. Yes i will have a paltry middle class existence while we still have a profession called IT.
Finding a balance in that is difficult. I have seen that it might be easier to find a societally good job the less technically deep the job gets. Networking research seems to be both technically interesting and connected to societal impact (eg. because of the ties to censorship, security, net neutrality etc)
It seems hard to continue doing this sort of research after your PhD though, as in both your school name matters immensely (i.e. you're screwed if you didn't go to Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, or MIT) and so does your publishing success to land a research job, which seems like an enormous task.
It is very, very, very hard because you're making it hard by insisting on finding a strong intersection with your set of interests.
Half the jobs I've had aligned well with my interests. They were also in the lower half of jobs I liked. The best jobs I've had were the boring ones. It turns out, there's a lot more to jobs than just what you work on.
The most important thing is to keep a roof over your head. Next is saving for retirement. And then there are things like work environment, the people you work with, team dynamics, the actual technical work, etc.
I've found that the most intellectually fun/challenging work was usually coupled with the most dysfunctional teams. It's likely just a coincidence, but it was a good lesson that other things matter at least as much.
I also think it's not as easy as most people make it. It's not the poor and innocent people that are oppressed by all this evil companies. These companies are just a reflection of the people and the society we live in.
Why is that? I broadly agree with the idea that even "evil" companies have parts that do good things or neutral things, but I am curious about your rationale.
I'm certainly not saying that you shouldn't have boundaries; there are certain companies that I will absolutely not work for no matter what they pay me (e.g. Palantir). I'm just saying that if you draw the line at "don't work for bad company", it's going to be hard to pay your bills since due to the lovely world of capitalism the people on top are usually sociopaths.
To be clear, I do agree broadly; if you can find a company that has decent people running it and doesn't appear to be evil to you, you should probably work for that company. The problem is that the job market is very competitive and you often have to take what you can get.
I'm in a privileged position to where I can be a little choosy with my work (for now!), but I can't really judge someone who has a family to take care of for doing what they need to to pay the bills.
They'll kill people regardless, so might as well get paid for it!