Oracle shed about 20k roles globally in the last year
bbc.com
bbc.com
They told him everything is oriented towards AI, to the point that otherwise profitable software is not being updated and development has stopped on anything new.
Oracle has a lot of niche solutions and the one my friend’s corporation uses is profitable but not on the AI path, so it is being put into maintenance mode.
I’m not saying AI is the next internal combustion engine. If Oracle is certain it is, though, then that sounds like a more rational move.
If each dollar you throw at dead-end product lines returns $1.20, that gives you more to spend on R&D for the new hotness. Shutting down the old business doesn't maximize spending on new R&D.
Now it's different when there's a conflict over resources. . However, in retrospect it would seem like bad business to throw resources after dead-end product lines, even if they’re valuable, because each dollar not advancing their automobile R&D was a dollar wasted on legacy stuff. If we need kstrauser to keep the old business running and we also need kstrauser to have effective R&D for the new business, hard choices are ahead. For carriage makers, manufacturing facilities would be the big resource issue; maybe you need to stop production of carriages to start working on horseless carriages because they're built in the same facility and can't share and a second location would be too costly.
I don't think the facility argument applies to Oracle. And probably not the key person argument either; line of business apps and AI are pretty different and I wouldn't expect a top person in one to be a top person in the other (although they might be).
However, if your dead-end investment has a 20% ROR, and you think your AI investment will have a 1000% ROR, you'd kinda be foolish not to throw every possible resource at the new venture. I'd bet that a lot of the people maintaining Product A could be switched to the AI project. It's going to need lots of people supporting the networking, CRUD APIs for various things, sales, tech support, legal, etc. The product itself will be different, but much of the underlying support might look the same between the two. Why "waste" someone maintaining Product A's CI/CD pipeline when they could be helping the AI project move faster?
And again, I'm not arguing that they're right. It's more that if they're completely convinced that this is the future of their company, then that could be a rational, defensible decision. There's a lot of "ifs" in all this, to be sure. And in any case, don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.
Honestly, at Oracle scale, doing the "let's destroy and rebuild the company mid-flight" seems like a losing proposition compared to newly formed companies or more natural extension of existing companies.
And meanwhile, customer reliant on Oracle products are left alone, with all the negative output it entails.
Even if AI is a game changer, it doesn't mean that your business model will have a role in it.
Oracle was all in on spinning up a less corporate bubble that felt like the startup zeitgeist; we had Slack while Oracle legacy units had in house XMPP
Management was dumping everything into data center and cloud growth and trying to catch up
I stayed for a couple years to help my team migrate and prepare for release the product Oracle bought the startup for. Not long but long enough to get a sense of the internal story and driving themes
No doubt in my mind this is Oracle trying to get ahead in this hype cycle. By 2017 upper management did nothing but lament how far behind Oracle was.
Cut n run from everything early this time to go all in on new meme is exactly the kind of choice Larry would make given constant anxiety on display about missing the cloud bubble.
Either that, or to declare bankruptcy earlier to get better terms.
[1] https://www.hrgrapevine.com/us/content/article/2026-02-11-ai...
Though I do agree there are a vocal group of people that are loudly outspoken about AI. I would guess that those people are a minority of the total population though, and tend to skew either techy or geographically local to areas hardest hit by data center build-out.
Regardless, whether or not the majority of people are hostile to AI was not my main point. My point was that regardless of the public sentiment about AI, it seems that the general public is more accepting (or perhaps forgiving) of a CEO saying "We are laying off people because of AI" than, for example, "We are laying off people to save money and preserve shareholder value." (I am paraphrasing in both of these cases; obviously a real statement would be more obfuscated in corporate-speak in either case).
That seems odd to me, _especially_ if the majority of the public is hostile to AI.
Can you explain what you mean?
>I made it up. It was invented by a writer.
> Oracle shed about 21,000 roles globally in the last year as the US technology giant reshapes its business around artificial intelligence (AI), the firm's latest annual report shows.
Seems possible to flatten out a company, in a way the domain knowledge is kept.
That being said, I haven't seen many layoffs that actually seem directly AI related, because the main effects are not hiring junior Devs, and not outsourcing to low cost/skill areas.
This definitely seems possible, but I've rarely seen it work. That being said, the follow on from any layoffs (reduced morale, more switchers) make it hard to be certain here.
And that is not even considering how much it costs to run AI right now at scale AND retraining people to use the new tools AND possible disruption in existing workflows.
If I was running a large org I would actively try to slow down AI adoption in most areas until there are clear established solutions.
However, if you are oracle sending out consultants with zero domain knowledge around to help.... I would rather just use claude.
Let’s say someone is entering the IT job market today. How should they prepare for the responsibilities of adulthood, starting a family, buying (perhaps on a mortgage?) their first flat, and planning for a family? I’m not writing solely in the context of AI layoffs but broader. Over the last 10 years that I’ve been in the IT industry from EU/US perspective, I’ve perceived the market as economic cycles, the sine wave of which has narrowed significantly (more often markets demands changes and instability) and accelerated in the past years.
I can go for a decade without another dime coming in the door. If I started using DoorDash and Amazon Prime every day, I'd last maybe 18-24 months. Just barely treading water is actually a great position to be in. It keeps you honest and any amount of work you do find on top of that feels like a windfall. An extra $500/m is a lot if you can make it happen consistently.
(Source: I'm one of the 21,000, let go via a 6am email after 15 years with the company in engineering and management roles.)
You save a good deal of cash for emergencies, live below your means, keep your skill set up to date and face the world.
It's a very convenient excuse, especially given the apparent lack of public backlash to it, compared to, say, "the business isn't profitable and we need to save money."
I am not sure we are there yet.
In my experience even the SoTA models are faaaaar away from replacing humans, maybe making them a bit faster.
If you have a team of 10 and make them all a little faster, you can do the same amount of work with 9. Run this out over the entire industry and it's hundreds of thousands of roles that are redundant.
While that research was published in 2026, it analyzed the 2023 period. Very much NOT sota models!
When talking about bullshit jobs like, say, taking a bill received by paper and manually extracting data from it (company name, invoice number, bank account details) to enter into an accounting program, AI is already good enough according to the pareto principle.
But we are talking about a corporation that is one of the most sociopathic in modern business history.
They're going to flip us all like burger patties eventually - we're done on this side.
1. I was in the top 0.01% in my state. (Actually true; who gives a crap; it was a quarter century ago and literally no one other than Canonical cares.)
2. You can’t prove me wrong. I can’t prove me right, because I’m not the kind of loser who has a wall of their high school accomplishments they never moved past.
3. The fact that you’re even asking shows that this is an amateur hour leadership team who cares about utterly irrelevant things.
Anyone who has that stupid of a hiring process deserves to have unfilled roles. I’m hiring for several roles right now, and while I ask a great many things, I promise you that none of it relates to their high school math performance.
Why bother asking? Is a recruiter going to fly out to my high school and see if they can get records? Interview a teacher that still works there?
You also are likely selecting not for high school calculus geniuses, but for people willing to lie. Presumably they ask because there is a more desired answer, so if you want to get a job you should provide the more desirable answer.
I wouldn't personally lie about it, because 1) I'm not going to lie, and 2) I do not want any job where my coworkers are rewarded for lying. But for anyone who just wants to get in and extract some salary while it's there for the taking, morals be damned, that would be the obvious course of action.
I'm inclined to believe that its no longer the case of employees being replaced by AI but simply those businesses being replaced by AI and the current businesses who were able to benefit from AI are reaping the momentum they have but eventually this will end.
Open source databases have already been doing this for decades. You can’t just clone its products and expect to eliminate it. Oracle is driven by a strong sales culture and ruthless business strategy.
Like, mate, if you want to be a superhero in real life, stop laying off thousands of people and working the remaining people ragged. That's all you gotta do.
Which will probably depress wages of service workers - unless somehow there is a dramatic expansion in service demand, which apart from particular industries (i.e elder care), seems unlikely.
Narrator: This was not, in fact, obvious.
These companies seem to be led by mind bogglingly short sighted people. Maybe they should be replaced by AI. It can't possibly get any worse than now, right?
There's a whole bunch of open roles at Oracle right now. https://careers.oracle.com/en/sites/jobsearch/jobs?keyword=E... 700 of them within engineering.
- “iaas” (OCI) is growing 50% yoy and the bulk of the revenue. - “cloud license and on prem license” (new software licensing) is $5B or ~10% of the segment - ERP, peoplesoft etc arent broken out but are also very large in their market categories.
All in the all-mighty fiduciary duty to your investors of course.
Ah yes, fire to rehire via the model training gig economy
And he'd take a good chunk of that money for himself, and a good amount of that to also "donate" to a foreign, nuclear-armed, hostile country's "defense" force. But don't you dare question him.
DBA would go around screaming if you were logging too much stuff. I assumed they had some sort of periodic cleanup because I couldn't see that stuff being practical long term.
Technically it was 2 databases, one was a read replica for longer running data analysis of course.
That telecom has at least 100 million paying customers (maybe much more). I don't see they ever moving away from Oracle, they are more likely to go bankrupt than ever leaving.
[1]: Oracle RAC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_RAC
They are justifying that on commitments (500+B USD), but 300B of those are tied to OpenAI. So, if OpenAI goes belly up or at least doesn't follow their crazy growth projections, they would have to find the same amount of consumption quickly to repay the interest on said debt and eventually the principal.
It is a lot of money for a company the size of Oracle (~500B market cap).
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/oracle-500...
But Oracle could relatively easily be broken up and sold off. Essentially all of the global consulting business units could sell to competitors in the various niches, the hardware business and the cloud hosting business could be separated, etc.
Plenty of companies worldwide would be up for buying pieces of Oracle at a bargain price.
"Too big to fail" only really applies in extreme circumstances (which might happen, admittedly) and with essentially monolithic businesses (or banking).
I don't think even Microsoft is too big to fail.
And I don't think people should casually entertain the idea that really any tech industry company is too big to fail, because tech corporations that cannot die point the way to a Rollerball future.
So the predictive autocomplete will survive those too.
And the dot com bubble collapse of Nortel and Worldcom shows that even well-established companies with significant non-bubble investments are vulnerable if the companies make poor economic decisions (in both of those cases, the collapse was driven by excessively aggressive acquisitions).
Likewise, LLM's won't disappear completely with a stock market crash. But the weaker players might.