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Comment by VonGuard | Hacker News Reader

Oracle cannot possibly be expecting to meet its bets here. My own empirical one-person observation is that my friend worked there in the group that went around the world standing up their new cloud datacenters, and he was there from basically 2019 to earlier this year. They laid him and half his team off earlier this year. Absolutely nonsensical if they're really building out cloud data centers. Because that's exactly what his job was for the previous 5 years....

Can anyone make that make sense? The team was like 15 people and is now 7. Not exactly a large enough team to build out billions of dollars worth of data centers... Maybe they're just going to contract that all out, but this guy and his team were a very smooth, very well greased machine for standing this stuff up quickly and reliably.

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From my limited second-hand understanding of orcl, a team that operates in a smooth and well greased manner is quite the anomaly. I could see why the company would have an immune response to it.

LOL - too competent for their own good :(

I have to imagine that their legal team is a smooth, well oiled machine. The technical side on the other hand ...

Minor nit, the lubricant there isn't mineral oil but blood.

Perhaps Larry Ellison is a bad man?

Don't anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.

Not bad, just a lawnmower.

> Because that's exactly what his job was for the previous 5 years...

Or possibly senior leadership isn’t happy with the pace of DC buildout over the last 5-years.

Very unlikely to be the technical build team at fault for that.

Real estate, legal, permitting, utility connections, construction, plant fit out, testing and certification, security, customs and immigration, and shipping all need to happen first - and every one of those has room for huge amounts of uncertainty and delay, more so if you're doing it internationally.

There aren't many shortcuts that you can take when you're dealing with a complex combination of hardware, property, and law.

Technical staff are easiest to pin the blame on in any given situation. All those other fields require enormously more people skills and political inclination.

If you are in an org like that and there is an effort to pin something on technical people inappropriately the reaction when there's solid push back approaches total hysterical breakdown since it's so unexpected. Even if the tech staff "win" they'll be marked for the rest of their time there.

That matches my experience at google. Getting the land and approvals was the most time, then the basic site prep and building shells and utilities, then basic building fit out, and then finally the actual tech installs.

Yeah - and that's if everything goes to plan!

The real way to increase throughput is to first slow down and smooth out the inevitable bumps by adding adequate slack and building up an inventory of shovel-ready projects as a buffer - and then to start running multiple teams in parallel.

The fact that OP's friend experienced Oracle doing the exact opposite of this lends credence to the idea that they're under pressure and are perhaps panicking.

yes but sometimes a VP gets fired, new VP comes in, and says "we'll outsource this" or "we'll use this home grown team doing something else" and unfortunately tons of people are caught in a layoff, even if they were good.

Well I guess we can assume that this means it's not the reason senior leadership laid them off because senior leaders definitely never scapegoat their underlings or have too little competence to correctly assess why things failed!

They said with AI nowadays less people can do more, be more productive than ever!

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