The bulk of the comments in here are focused on comparing Larry Ellison to a lawn mower, so I'll try a new tack and say that I'm genuinely confused at what the value prop of Oracle is.
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.
Short answer: today I think there is genuinely nothing that anyone should use oracle for, but their database used to be seriously far ahead of the competition.
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.
We were building a payments system in the early 2000s and got a diktat to not use Oracle. The amount of things we had to build to satisfy the availability and durability requirements were so huge it consumed the first few years of work. We didn’t get to the business side of things until much later. Funny thing is we ended up giving up on MySQL and went back to oracle after all that work. The whole thing was scraped after a couple of years.
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.
I only ever worked with the Linux/Windows variant. I can’t believe I am saying this about an IBM product, but I found it to be actually rather pleasant to work with.
Kind of, but there are some subtle differences in my opinion. Oracle is top-to-bottom evil, whose business model basically boils down to screwing over their clients and everyone else at every possible opportunity, comparable to the likes of McKinsey or Accenture.
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.
SQL Server was pretty good until they went the Oracle way with their licensing shenanigans, but even with that they were a lot cheaper than Oracle. In fact SQL server was one of the few great products that came out of MS.
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.
Not just constraints, transactions were also a no-op. The MyISAM engine is still available in modern versions if you want to experience this, it's just not default anymore.
Really, you've always had to be careful with MySQL. It really was the PHP of RDBMSs.
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 love Postgres in 2026, but it really was not a viable enterprise option before 2010. MySQL had decent binlog replication starting in 2000 which made up for a lot of the horrible warts it had.
DB2 was crazy good for certain use cases but very weird. For one, the pattern for DB2 efficiency was pretty much the exact opposite of every other database. Every other database would say "Normalize your tables, use BCNF, blah blah, small reference tables, special indices etc".
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.
I have not had much experience with DB2, but given that the relational data model and normalization was invented at IBM (Codd) and IBM's implemenation of those concepts was DB2, DB2 performing poorly with a normalized data model seems strange.
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.
> 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.
SQL Server was Sybase until (I think) version 4.9, just rebranded as Microsoft SQL Server.
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.
SQL Server 2000 was well received in the segments that mattered as a challenger. Oracle was in first place running on Unix. However, it was viewed as expensive and the procurement experience was regarded as unpleasant. People wanted competition even if they didn't think SQL Server, or another alternative, could unseat Oracle for the most important stuff.
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.
I remember talking to one tech leader at the time who described it as "surprisingly good, for a microsoft product" which sort of summed it up. But it had similar characteristics to sybase except more so because you had to run it on an NT server (iirc) and so there was an even harder cap on the scale of hardware you could run it on, whereas you could run oracle on really top-end sparc hardware that was way more powerful than anything that ran windows.
Depends if the director or VP liked Microsoft or not. I’ve worked at places that loved SQL Server and Microsoft server products in general. Others did not use them anywhere in their datacenter and wouldn’t have considered them. Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft were very dependent on if the people in charged liked them. Not so much technical merits.
we still have an informix db for an old early 2000s application we have to support. shit runs on centos5 lmao. it's actually not too bad, around v12 there's cdc capabilities (requires you to build your own agent service to consume the data) that made the exercise of real time replicating the app db in our edw a cakewalk. which ironically has greatly extended the lifespan of the application since no one has to query informix anymore directly.
My experience at the time was that it was perceived as not serious enough and lacking important features. If my memory isn't very bad, I believe as late as 2000 SQL Server still only supported AFTER triggers.
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.
I disagree as I was running clustered sql server 6.5 and 7 in 1998 for hundreds of concurrent users doing millions of reads per hour on NT basically commodity boxes. Replaced it with Oracle for 100x cost and lost performance.
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.
For others like me who might be skeptical to hear throughput in any metric other than seconds (and is used to large numbers in hours/days being used to inflate), I think millions per hour is actually quite high for 1998.
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.
Sort of. The VirtualBox Extension Pack is free for personal or educational use. It is explicitly not free for work use[0]. You can download it for free, but accepting the license to do so obligates you to pay them for it.
> 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 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.
I was around back then and I call Bullshit on everything you claim. There were more database options in 2000 than there were in 1996. Even before that there was FoxPro… c’mon man. Oracle’s only value was they built a NO EXIT clause into their contracts…
Oracle was the ONLY game in town if you were serious. It was like buying IBM in the 80s. Source: programmed PL/SQL and embedded SQL at the Toronto Stock Exchange in the early 90s, on SCO Unix and Oracle.
it was soooooo the only game in town that they were like NVDA now, yea you got alternatives but you really don't and hence you charge insane prices and everyone is paying up with a grin on their faces. oracle was the only game in town 100% if you were serious!
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.
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.
Your phone calls and SMS messages that touch the phone network, likely touch Oracle. Yes, nearly all of them.
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.
The comments on this subthread are a bit out of touch in a very coastal-tech way -- yes, Oracle is a monster, yes, their tech is garbage, yes, their products are awful.
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.
Oracle and Java are deeply embedded in US gov work. How deep? Let's just say a large number of classified developer jobs hire for Java. Ellison has been a huge proponent of a surveillance state, and that likely ingratiates him with certain three letter agencies.
The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
My employer is actively hiring java engineers and we don't "take pictures of things from far away".
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 only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
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.
Yeah, lots of corporate backend code is Java, and Java is a great choice for backend/server code. I've never seen Oracle anywhere, though, not in banks and not in governments. I've mostly seen Postgres and MSSQL and some MongoDB.
I've been working in Wall St. banks for the past 30 years, and I've never used an Oracle database. The investment banks were all Sybase shops in the 90's, and a bunch of them still are. In my experience those that do move are most likely to go to SQL Server, since its Sybase roots make the transition a little easier.
When something has been there for 20+ years switching costs are big.
There was a time (around the beginnings of Mac OS X) when Java was considered a first class citizen in Mac OS X, next to Objective-C.
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.
It wasn't just Apple, in the late 90s/early 2000s there was a not insignificant number of folks in business/academia who thought Java would take over the world. Windows XP also shipped with an embedded JVM for running Java apps out of the box at one stage too, just before Microsoft doubled down on c#/.NET.
Along with MacOS X, Apple's Xcode IDE even had native java project support briefly in this era as well.
Yeah I can see that, even when a recruiter contacted me a few years back for a data engineering position, they were looking strictly for experience in JVM-based languages.
Yeah, I wish they did more Clojure as well. As far as I could tell, it was kind of snuck in about ~12 years ago, and it kind of grew from there.
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.
Adding Smalltalk message passing as an extension to C was very clever and allowed writing very efficient code and dynamic high level UI code in a single language. The semantics were kept clear by the distinctive syntax of message passing. And allowed access to any existing C libraries.
> entire backend for iTunes (Jingle) was written in Java
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.
The financial market infrastructure heavily relies on Java. Transactions at commercial banks across North America are mostly executed on Java codebases.
There are probably millions of corporate projects written in Java. One of the reasons Oracle bought Sun Microsystems (who invented Java) was because Oracle itself had written so much middleware crap in Java.
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.
I worked for a drug discovery company doing Java [1] since we were using Kafka Streams very liberally, but everything was done with the OpenJDK Temurin distribution. It was drilled into our heads on the first day do not install anything from Oracle. I think they were afraid of some weird lawsuit unless they bought an expensive license.
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.
The Ahead of Time compilation is pretty nice for some stuff. Generally startup time is significantly improved, so if you're writing command line tools in particular it can be cool.
Useful for letting us know that GP has a limited network and situational awareness.
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.
> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
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.
That is a silly take. The absolute majority of Java devs in the world does not work in spy agencies (sounds like it’s more about your personal network being close to that world)
Oracle effectively still largely controls the evolution of the language and of OpenJDK, and Java is still a registered Oracle trademark. While it could be forked and renamed if necessary (as happened in the javax –> jakarta transition), that would likely end up being quite disruptive and costly.
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.
I think that overstates, there is a lot of java in the enterprise still, it's lose share to golang and typescript and in certain cases rust, but it's still around and doing just fine (to my annoyance).
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 $$$ to make, but I don't think ZFS would warrant them much.
> the only large target using FreeBSD I can think of is Netflix, but AFAIR they don't use ZFS either.
I can't quite remember, but I think they might have mentioned using ZFS rather than UFS for the OS, but I'm pretty sure they're not using it for the CDN data partitions. I love ZFS, but for CDN nodes, I think it would be more harmful than helpful; especially how ARC is separate from the FreeBSD 'Unified Buffer Cache', and how much work Netflix has done to reduce the number of times data hits RAM on the way from disk to the user.
> Oracle sues when there's $$$ 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.
It’s why I run btrfs on my lab machines. I’ve used ZFS for, looks at calendar oh, wow, literally decades now. It’s fantastic. But the miasma of Oracle’s infection keeps me from recommending it for anything commercial.
ZFS, in a vacuum is fantastic. But it’s not in a vacuum.
There's no zfs grenade. It's CDDL, feel free to use it wherever you want. Oracle can't come after you for violating the gpl even if somehow using zfs on linux violates the gpl.
Everything I have read is that the cddl is not compatible with binary deployments of zfs on linux so actually wouldnt that mean yes they could press that if you bundled it with gpl? Actual lawyers have said yes it could which is what I am refering to, however I think the actual answer is that Oracle has created a latch by inaction on this subject for so long now.
CDDL is more permissive than gpl. It's not a violation of cddl to intermingle with code under a different license. GPL is the issue and it's the individual contributors to linux that _could_ sue.
I'm not a lawyer. I don't k is what Oracle's lawyers can and can't do. Even if I'm legally in the right, Oracle's lawyers could break me if they wanted. I can't know if there is a ZFS grenade, and neither can you. But we can choose to not deal with Oracle.
At that point, if they wanted to, they could sue mort96 for saying something bad about Oracle. It's unlikely they'll do that and perhaps a bit less unlikely they'll sue over ZFS.
Most of their legal shenanigans appear to be restricted to companies that already license some software from them.
> 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 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
I actually sat through an Oracle sales presentation around 1999 (I was the product engineer, along with company executives) and honestly it sounded pretty good. At the time we were using Lotus Notes for a database so even pencil and paper would have been better. Oracle absolutely was the market leader and there was no doubt about its technical chops. Oracle Parallel Server could run active-active across two sites separated by many miles of fibre, which was a remarkable thing to do back then.
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.
Oracle was (and I assume is) able to provide "hardware" level support for their software, if you paid enough and your database was shitting itself at 2 AM, they'd have engineers on the phone and maybe on the plane to get you back up and running.
For smaller companies and businesses? Not needed. For big multinationals where a minute of downtime is millions of dollars in revenue? Oracle is cheap.
There's more to it than just pure databases. They have a pretty large vertical of SaaS apps, specifically ERP. Oracle Saas (their ERP platform) is used by thousands of customers - these are systems implemented with SI's and run super critical functions like payroll, manufacturing, etc really hard to rip out once they're put in place. This has been fueling their growth for some time, and seems like OCI is picking up now from a pure infra POV. But yeah I don't think I'd ever use any Oracle components voluntarily or at the very least find ways to have exit paths
on this point the netsuite ecosystem is huge and there are not that many options for SME's that are too big/complex for inacct or quicken (even campfire/rillet etc) but don't want to get anywhere near SAP, Infor, IFS, oracle (not netsuite).
Yeah, many of these comments are extremely misinformed. Oracle has been an application software vendor for a long time.
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.
I think the big use case for Oracle products are for businesses that are not in the IT space. A lot of reasons for this, a big one is the breadth of Oracle's products is very solid and, similar to Microsoft, you can be sold on Oracle solving all your database needs across your business: HR, asset management, customer relationship stuff, your actual business, all with a single vendor. Non-IT management will be told that it all integrates seamlessly, you don't need to hire IT staff dealing with software from 10 different vendors, just the one.
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.
I just read a tech "policy" document of one of the largest packaged food makers in Mexico. They explicitly say they ONLY use paid services/software to ensure there is liability and support.
There are A Lot of businesses thar are happy to burn cash for a false sense of security. They don't know better.
I didn't save the tweet I saw it in but I saved the joke - "I wish I had enough money to run Oracle instead of Postgres." "Why do you want to do that?" "I don't, I just wish I had enough money to."
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.
> Every company I've worked for has avoided Oracle software of any kind.
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).
A past company I worked for made SaaS and On-prem and we supported Oracle with the on-prem. The simple act of supporting and testing that option was enormous for our company, but the customers we had that needed it were highly lucrative.
I worked for one company that used it. Everybody on the ground hated it but the costs of migrating away were enormous because every system they relied upon was tightly coupled to every other system. It would have been a multiyear project to get off it.
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.
We heard you're planning to migrate away from Oracle. We understand, but unfortunately, that means we have to get rid of the 75% discount we gave you, so we'll make a decade of revenue in the two years it'll take you to get rid of us. Still planning to migrate away?
Oracle is used for mission-critical legacy applications, which is common in the federal government IT space. Replacing with OSS is a nontrivial undertaking, but it is happening. For the most part, replacing Oracle’s Java with OpenJDK is relatively painless, but some agencies preferred the licensed version because it includes support. Replacing a database, however, is a much scarier task, even when you have experienced and competent DBAs.
They sell to cash-rich organisations who are a bit clueless about technology and so can't or wouldn't want to either roll their own, or go with a better but smaller provider?
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.
And, their product have worked correctly for decades.
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...
Precisely this. They prey on outsource-happy big orgs that have 1 million different SaaS all tied together by scotch tape (because their IT dept. is also outsourced)
I have a theory that being cash-rich creates an atmosphere of technological cluelessness, or more specifically weaponized incompetence. A cash-rich company attracts sociopathic executives, who are focused on the prestige of working at a top company. These executives display a unified front outwardly, but internally they are all stabbing each other in the back constantly. And any executive who champions in-house software is just giving other executives ammunition whenever said software has the smallest bug.
Oracle database has unparalleled scalability. Ask someone who works at Microsoft SQL Server division what their bug database looks like. They will tell you that a single SQL Server instance cannot scale to the entire SQL Server division. Oracle on the other hand has a single database for the entire company. No other database is this scalable.
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).
I'm actually impressed by the amount of abuse our Oracle instances are able take from our developers.
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.
The original question does discount the capability of Oracle's database too much, as only something "golf executives" buy. When you have a large problem that is best solved with a relational model, Oracle delivers and can indeed be worth all the money and license hell involved.
Oracle the company has not been about Oracle the DB server for 20+ years.
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).
They do own some vertically integrated products like PeopleSoft that use these lower level foundational pieces. But I agree, I don't know why anyone in their right mind would use Oracle outside of golf and sailing bribes.
They acquired a lot of applications - ERP, CRM, finance - I suspect actual database licensing revenues are only a small part of their revenues these days.
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!
It's exactly as you said. The dependency on old school legacy implementations that can't be turned off. To be fair to Microslop even they had the foresight to open source .net core and even try to bring some things to the open source community. Oracle actively turned into a patent troll.
Support, that's what you'd use them for. Something breaks and your team can't figure it out? You make a phone call and someone will be there in a jiffy to work things out. And if he can't either they'll fly a whole team from a different city or even a different country until they solve it.
They make a lot of money off of the cloud services and their layered "enterprise" applications. Selling "just the database" isn't what Oracle's been about for a very long time.
Also, their inability to make a NewSQL DB rivaling Spanner or Cockroach (they basically just had to clone one of these or acquire Cockroach) puts them out of any serious competition for the future of databases. Their "Oracle Autonomous DB" ain't it.
Totally agreed looking at them from a development and cutting-edge viewpoint. They own what was once very competitive platforms and languages, which they still support. They have largely transitioned into rent seekers.
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.
You are missing the business model - buy has-been platforms and frameworks and charge big bucks for maintenance. Customers eventually manage to migrate off you, but it is fine cause you buy some other has-been stack and then overcharge for that.
They aren't a database company. They are a full spectrum B2B SaaS contract company. They make far more by up selling services than they do from databases total. Half of their stack will run on whatever db you want.
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.
A while ago we were looking at migrating ERP - netsuite was a not a good price proposition and candidly feels a bit dated - but when you mapped features it was pretty impressive and for a lot of business that have some complexity (multi-entity, multi-currency, multi site mfg or inventory), there is not a whole lot of good alternatives because you can't use quicken but you definitely don't want SAP
The irony is that the ERP space is ripe for innovation and disruption, but nobody wants to get into ERP because it's a goddamn nightmare.
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...
I assume you would use Oracle Cloud if, for whatever reason possibly related to legal or competition, you cannot use AWS, or GCP, or Azure. It's hard for me to imagine a startup that needs cloud and would onboard to Oracle Cloud and not to any of the top 3 providers instead.
From small-scale use over the course of several years, I've found their "cloud" (OCI) to be a solid and well-planned product. Additionally, I've experienced not one single outage or hiccup so far (Stockholm region).
If you are not yet in Oracle's clutches you have to be extremely naive or shortsighted to be using Oracle cloud. Obviously the low prices are because they have a shit product and shit reputation, and the moment they think they captured large enough audience they are going to hike them
Yup. They're not offering those prices out of generosity. They're offering them because that's the most they can charge big players who understand what it means to buy from Oracle.
Aren't their databases behemoths that satisfy requirements (especially of regulatory nature) of large banks and such? I don't think they have much in common with the needs of your run-of-the-mill startup.
> From my chair, they make an expensive database they try to sell to golf executives.
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.
oracle is deeply embedded in enterprise and a lot of other enterprise solutions also use it. they have no value proposition for startups. likely just on existing clients and ppl who end up using stuff that requires their products.
I have a cousin who owns a business that decided to contract with Oracle, and as he described this my first thought was “why tf would you ever sign an agreement with Oracle, don’t you know about them?”
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.
Oracle has made a large bet on being a cloud, but nobody wants their terrible cloud, which is reflected in their dollar-store prices. They staffed up and built facilities that they can't sell so I am not surprised they are now swinging the axe.
I posted a response from Gemini where I asked Gemini, "Do you have citations proving or disproving whether Oracle Cloud is still attracting cloud customers away from Azure, AWS and GCP?" and it seems it disagrees with your "nobody wants their terrible cloud" view.
Clearly you are in USA. It’s not how their business works and Startups are not their target. Lobbying governments across the world with questionable practices are
Government contracts. You get good at bidding, there's money to be made there. And those bidding processes are way more than just the tech. That's their main value prop I think. Having the bureaucratic machine to bid and win contracts.
Well, if you're an elected official, and you're in charge of government organizations that could be used to enrich billionaire donors by using a donor's services - Oracle fits that niche very well!
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.
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".
Blame it on whatever you like. oracle has been a rudderless leech for nearly 30 years now.
- 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.
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.
>I have no idea how they could have been so bad while employing so many people
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.
The graph in your Macrotrends link shows the exact same numbers as the AI source, but is harder to read and the page is half ads. It's not an authoritative source -- the data was most likely parsed out of Oracle's earning reports by some janky regexp. I don’t know why you would trust this more than AI.
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.
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.
You did the Python right but the analysis wrong. Looking at it on a graph you can see that interpreting a single growth rate for the entire period (even if you stop pre-covid) doesn’t make sense.
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.
1. They maintain and sell one of the largest relational databases.
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.
>> Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency,
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 also own multiple other huge companies that had tens of thousands of their own employees working in completely different areas (Netsuite, Cerner, Acme, etc)
Unless you have worked with Oracle or other big enterprises, you may not realize the scale of how these companies operate and the breadth of what they actually do. Just by looking at their product page[0] you can see they offer software, hardware, cloud, consulting, support, and even financing solutions. In addition to the technology and product people (of which there are many), you also need HR, sales, marketing, accounting, support, etc for the entire global organization.
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.
It's even more wild when you realize that other similar-sized enterprise companies don't have all that and either leave bugs to sit around for decades, or randomly break shit trying to fix them.
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.
Oracle sells alot of software that is accompanied by hordes of consultants to set it up.
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.
Write code to connect this system with that system. Teach people what setting does what. Integrate with Entra ID. Create custom reports that hordes of Executive on our side want. Scale out the system from undersized nodes we originally gave it. That's all I picked up by just listening to them. I wasn't involved in the project, just sat nearby listening to it.
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"
The training team and what's called 'Change Management' for an F50 company that's spread across the globe implementing a new application like an ERP could be 100 people by itself. It's extremely complex and hard to do those kinds of projects which is why many ERP migrations take a decade to complete if not fail entirely.
"Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?!"
Almost certainly a large amount of support staff, so management/HR/IT etc... Then you've got your customer account managers, sales, lawyers/finance etc.... Given they do an insane amount of B2B and government sales I can see this being easy to reach tbh. Governement contract processes require an insane amount of bureacracy and negotations.
In June 2022 the Oracle acquisition of Cerner (a EMR now billed as Oracle Health) closed, so that would be after the 2022 date and before the 2023 date. Cerner was 28,000 employees.
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.
What's the point of posting statistics if they're not fact-checked and come from no verifiable source? At best they're right but we don't know until someone else fact-checked it for you, and at worst you're just spreading misinformation and we don't know until, again, someone else fact-checked it for you.
If you want to use AI to find information like this, tell it to grab you a source and post that.
The "Something crazy at corona" would likely be, in part, their purchase of Cerner Corporation in 2021-2022. I want to say there were 10k-ish employees? Maybe more?
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.
"Oracle leadership" sounds like nobody wants to take responsibility but they do like the share price to go up so say good bye to [auto generated name in header]'s job.
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.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with EHR systems will know that nobody wants to build their own. I once worked for a large hospital system that abandoned a decades old institutionally built and maintained system for Epic. The choice was celebrated by almost everyone who worked there.
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 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.
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.
> You can't just vibecode your way to replacing an (sic) EMR
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.
One of the ideal things that companies can do is not hire people. A company that never hires someone will never let anyone go and consequently is the only ethical company. The worst thing that a company could do is pay someone to do a job for a while. In fact, one thing we could do is make sure that all jobs should be perpetual. If someone hires you, they can't stop paying you until they die or declare bankruptcy. This is sure to be good for workers.
> In fact, one thing we could do is make sure that all jobs should be perpetual. If someone hires you, they can't stop paying you until they die or declare bankruptcy. This is sure to be good for workers
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.
> One of the ideal things that companies can do is not hire people
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.
It's a failure of hiring, planning, and management. It's an off the books opportunity cost. It's an off the books cost of hiring a replacement. And if over hiring was done willfully, then yes it's straight up unethical.
Actually, it is. You have been blinded by capitalism to consider it ethical.
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.
Yes, that's what people tell themselves to deal with it psychologically. That it's just a job, not a community, and you better not make friends in the workplace (despite spending majority of your life there). And that when you're unemployed, life just goes on, as if it doesn't mean much.
Like when a traumatised kid never loved by the parents concludes that life is harsh and love doesn't exist, so better be tough.
> Yes, that's what people tell themselves to deal with it psychologically. That it's just a job, not a community, and you better not make friends in the workplace (despite spending majority of your life there). And that when you're unemployed, life just goes on, as if it doesn't mean much.
That's a lot of stuff you're saying. Not what I'm saying.
Sure. Also the profitability of a company is just a number, and shareholders dividend is just fiduciary fictions, and company hierarchy is just arbitrary title attaching this or that person to this or that loosely defined role.
Drama is just in the head of people melted in the ambient narrative, sure.
My employer is not my “tribe”. That is crazy. We have a contract saying I do X units of work and they pay me Y in return. Either of us end it at any time.
At least this is in the case in the US. What you are saying might be true in other cultures.
And yet, employers love to use the "we're a family", "we're a team", and other such messaging, especially in the tech industry. They elide the transactional nature of the entire relationship.
Safeway won’t starve and die if I decide to buy from Fred Meyer. You really don’t see that an individual is not on equal footing with multibillion company? It is absolutely immoral. And I’m not even talking about charity, those people were hired and did actual job for the fucking trillion dollar company.
Several grocery stores in Seattle have closed recently. The same with local Starbucks outlets. Locations that don't make money get closed, even if the rest of the company is doing well.
Also, employees can quit anytime, no notice required. Nobody is obliged to work.
> Several grocery stores in Seattle have closed recently. The same with local Starbucks outlets. Locations that don't make money get closed, even if the rest of the company is doing well.
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.
> The grocery stores were run by national chains. Starbucks is global.
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.
It is unethical, if there was nothing wrong with their performance and the company never tried to find a replacement position within the company. Stop licking boots, I heard they don’t even taste that good.
When done for profit maximizing reasons it's not any worse than capitalism itself, but then this degrades into whether capitalism is ethical which is off topic
Ironically, you picked two systems that are heavily interfered with by the government.
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.
My only problem with this is: Some of my best people are those that "I gave them a chance." I'd only hire perfect people from my tribe if I had to have them forever.
Oracle has record revenue and has for many years in a row. Laying people off is a result of mismanagement and not because they can't afford to keep them. In an ideal world I believe we'd have human centered employment instead of profit centered, and while I know that's unlikely to happen, it doesn't mean we can't criticize profit centered
I don't understand this sentiment. I'm absolutely significantly more productive with AI; so much moreso that I now have freetime and we haven't needed to replace an engineer who left. On the flip side my coworkers who think they're above AI are drowning. I think there is an endemic problem of senior engineers who think they're above learning AI and agents who don't want to use them, and these cuts are about forcing them to get with the times or drown in work.
Replacing jobs is a bit of a misnomer, but it's certainly allowing us to build out more features in shorter amounts of time.
he mentions being paid more in terms of time, "I now have freetime". I can relate, in the right use cases it is nice to do some work estimated for 12 hrs in 2.
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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.
I have to be honest that I'm confused by the comment, too. Including the edit about how being out of work would be traumatic, as if losing a job was unique to the United States.
Where I live, your employer basically has to give you notice (weeks to months, depending where you live). It's common for that notice period to turn into "garden leave" though, i.e. get paid but don't show up.
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.
My point was that going from (let's say) 'employed, productive member of the workforce, with social relationships at work' to 'sitting at home collecting unemployment' with no transition, no coaching, in the scope of 5 minutes seems like a traumatic rupture.
(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.
I've been laid off. It's not fun and there a lot of emotions to process at first.
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.
> collect severance and unemployment --- I was not aware this is law in California,
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.
They are done working but will collect severance pay, typically scaled by years of service.
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.
The at-will firing is just how it is in the US, but I do find it odd how accepting we've become with these corporations massively overhiring.
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.
Yeah, the "just how it is" part was the part I wasn't aware of. Sibling comment has pointed out that apparently the US is the only country in the world where this is the case. And totally agree on the latter point.
> apparently the US is the only country in the world where this is the case.
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.
I'm not an economist, but I have heard that there's an argument to be made the easy firing also makes it so that it's easier to hire too, so it creates more jobs.
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.
The other part is that at-will goes both ways: you can just walk out of a bad job with no legal repercussions. Not always the best idea due for social/professional ones, though.
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.
Not employees are hired though, a fair amount are added through acquisitions. Reducing staff could be just streamlining redundancies .
Not the case here [1], but it not always bad planning.
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
Why? They get a severance which is going to be multiple months salary, as well as approximately $2000/mo unemployment from the state (assuming in California).
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
I did not know they got severance. In any case, I'm still not sure I'd prefer that scenario --- coming into your work to suddenly find you've been terminated and subsequently sitting on your ass for a couple months while looking for another job seems pretty emotionally damaging to me, but to each their own.
It's insane to force businesses to take on the government's responsibilities (providing food/shelter/income/energy security).
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.
I completely agree, and apparently in California this is already the case --- I had no idea. In most contexts, though, I'd argue governments fall down on this task completely and people are, unfortunately, still very dependent on their employer. Same-day termination seems very socially risky in those cases.
My Amazon layoff notice came at 5am. Same deal. I thought it was fake because it came to my personal email. Then I logged into my work computer and found that all my email had been erased except for a copy of the layoff notice and an invite to a 10am Zoom with HR. The funny part was the invite had everyone who had been laid off in the To: line.
I was able to send internal only emails until 1pm, and then it logged me off and the computer was a brick.
I'm not sure if companies understand the emotional impact on the laid off and the layoff survivors. It almost seems like a terror campaign, whether intended or not.
One of my past employers tried to give laid off employees a dignified send offs including not immediately revoking their access.
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.
Maybe the solution is to not do mass layoffs. Not sure there's a dignified way to let go of many humans at the same time with almost no reason for why they're being let go except maybe a vague profitability scorecard.
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.
> Maybe the solution is to not do mass layoffs. Not sure there's a dignified way to let go of many humans at the same time
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.
Yeah that makes sense to me and I appreciate you saying it. If the whole team gets laid off, it's we all go down with the ship. But if one person gets laid off on a team, I think it can create intense dynamics. Like why them specifically? It wasn't about the department, it was about them. I can see why they'd take it personally and why the survivor guilt might be stronger on that team as well.
> Companies don't just provide money, they provide people with meaning, routine, social circle, and so much, and layoffs cut all of those immediately.
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.
They understand, but they are more concerned about you exfiltrating data and suing them.
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.
Eh, that's brutal, wondering why someone isn't replying to your email only to find out they get let go. Almost like finding out a friend died, in a professional way.
I think we often just don't understand the full dimensionality of layoffs.
When i was first laid off during the dot com bust I was working on a sales floor. All open no cubes. We didn't know layoffs were coming. Manager walks in and taps this one guy on the shoulder, says grab your personal things and come with me. Manager came back in did the same to a few others. Then it was me. Talk about embarrassing! Also, was 2 weeks before quarter ended. If you were not working for the company at the end of the Q, no bonus. 2 weeks! I'll never forget that. That was my first taste of how nasty a company can be. Not the layoffs, hey things happen. But the timing. Feels diabolical.
I've noticed people are shockingly good at filtering out their empathy through bureaucracies. Instead of feeling bad about their personal decision that they made to lay someone off, they instead can tell themselves it was the only way to do business and then happily absolve themselves of guilt.
Some employees in the company might understand the emotional impact, but companies themselves would only look for certainty in protecting what belongs to them, which will hardly align with fairness or emotions towards employees in a situation like this.
Yeah, our litigation culture to me is just an inability for individuals/companies to resolve conflicts and escalate it to the legal system. And unfortunately there are many elements in the system that discourage us from reconciling and push us towards escalating.
Yes in my (somewhat tinfoil) opinion the point is to have an emotional impact on the workforce overall (or at least, one of the points is). Tech workers had a really good 20 years in the US, and kind of forgot that they were ultimately still wage workers. I think the culture circa 2018 took for granted a basic level of respect and cooperation from upper executives, and were beginning to exercise their power to achieve political goals, which was annoying to the tech ownership class. I think one of the major strategic turns of last 4ish years is the usage of precarity and high turnover to corrode worker solidarity in fields which used to be ironclad and respectable white-collar work. By simultaneously narrowing the hiring window ('junior devs are replaceable with AI') and also expanding the opportunities to be culled ('we are axing this division to cover our moonshot outlays') capital cultivates a desperate and compliant workforce. Bottom-up culture is woke, in the 2020's the folks in power want top-down directives that are followed unquestioningly; similar approach to how the executive branch was brought to heel by DOGE.
> But it goes both ways, if I want to leave I have to work the mandated period
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
I have never, ever understood this whole mandated period thing. Aside from what you mention -- do you really want to keep these people around against their will -- I don't understand how your (ex-)employer can force you to do anything against your will. All you have to do is say "no".
Yet people keep believing mandated work after a layoff is a thing.
I was forced to work out a 3 month notice period at my previous company in the UK. I don’t see the point of keeping an already-checked out employee around so long when you have basically no way of getting anything but the bare minimum out of them.
Contrary to what people may think, the most humane way is a fast clean cut. Drawing it out in anyway doesnt help anyone. This does assume communication is clear about employee next steps for HR related tasks.
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.
It sounds as if you're describing how to humanely kill a living being.
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.
Oh I didn't mean to say that's what you wanted it to mean, just that I've heard clean cut in two main spaces: taking off bandages and slaughtering animals.
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.
And that includes them, the people doing the layoffs, who are employees as well. And what we often don't realize is that causing the pain to others most often causes pain to us as well. Human group output and productivity can rely a lot on trust, and if that trust is damaged, it can hinder all productivity.
As far as actual people? Depends on their personal moral code and is why colleges make people take ethics, even if I don't think that results in anything other than more elaborate ways to justify doing whatever they feel like anyway. Most people would agree that you should minimize suffering in others if you can, but people who make it to upper management and C suites often got there by not being bothered by such scruples.
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.
One of the most surreal meetings I've ever been to was a company All Hands after a 20% layoff round. The upper management people who decided who was laid off took turns talking about how upset it made them to have to do it. They showed a diagram of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief and went back and forth talking about what stage of grief they were in having to lay all these people off. Was like something out of the UK version of The Office. It was so tone deaf that it was bleakly comedic at a certain point.
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.
I've been laid off or fired ~7 times, in slightly different ways, some more humane than others, and it's quite a... traumatizing/colouring experience that stays with you from that point forward, even when I was over the job anyway.
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.
Whenever the lawnmower thing comes up, I try to also mention dtrace. As far as things to be remembered for, they make some strange bedfellows... although it's better than anything I've managed so I guess congrats.
Hey friend, check the user name of the person I'm responding to (and perhaps check out the people responsible for dtrace and larry ellison lawnmower comparisons). I might appear more coherent afterwards.
I’m currently moving my personal VPS to Oracle Cloud (for a couple of reasons). The new machine’s host name is lawnmower. I have never been so decisive and satisfied in naming a computer.
oh my god… we thought anthropomorphizing “the computer”, was the problem, when it was anthropomorphizing the principals all along… (yes, i know that is the joke you made, but it was so incredibly appropos that i felt the need to comment to register my amusement / sadness / ¿)
I think the headline is not the best headline, but what it meant by "cold" is that there was no advance warning. So like cold-calling somebody, but to fire them, and an email instead.
Which I would definitely prefer. A couple of years ago, two weeks before Thanksgiving, management announced there would be layoffs. No timeline on when the cuts would be shared or number impacted. People had to sit around for weeks, wondering if they had a job. Should I buy Xmas presents? Who knows!
At-will employment is hard. Honestly, if you aren't planning to lose your job tomorrow when your at-will, you're not being honest with yourself. I wish it were different, but outside a union contract or some other fairly well-combed over business contract, you should not assume you will get paid tomorrow.
That’s the point. Tell me today if I still have a job. Do not make everyone sweat about it for an undetermined amount of time. That’s unnecessary financial stress on all of the people who were not impacted.
The problem with advance warning is the employee who decides to sabotage in revenge.
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 find it hard to blame the workers in this story... it's a poor indictment of the management if they only checked in 3 months later and got this surprise - no wonder the company collapsed!
The workers who left the company while still collecting a paycheck for 90 days are essentially stealing, and the ones who stripped the premises were also thieves.
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.
I had to let an employee go because he didn't do any work, took forever to respond to chats (in a remote position), and was always late for meetings. I scheduled the 4pm Friday meeting to let him go. He was 15 minutes late.
I've found that there can be a chasm between "what people think I do" and "what I actually do." But also, there can be a chasm between "what I think I do" and "what I actually do."
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.
There is no perfect or right way to do this. Every approach will have criticism (and not every approach is equal), and different people will appreciate different things about the trade-offs.
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.
You're just making excuses for them. The approach they chose was rude and cowardly. Even within this cowardice, further cowardice shows, with the email being sent from no specific individual but simply an amorphous "Oracle Leadership".
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.
I agree. But, IMO it's what you should expect going to work for a giant company. It's a machine, it does not care about you. Some of the people will care about you, but often their influence is quite limited. It's important to understand this at the start.
A great alternative would be operating a company correctly so you don't end up in a situation where you need to cut 30k jobs at once with no notice. That's a bizarre thing that's becoming practically normalized in the USA tech industry.
Does it have to be awful for morale if the reasoning is clear and compassionate? People understand that shit happens.
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.
Why would you give someone 6 months notice? What good is that for the employee? Especially if the severance is generous.
“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.
Maybe they could be kept on the payroll without access to actually work.
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.
Keeping them on the payroll also enables companies to easily manage and extend medical insurance. I’m pretty sure that what you propose is what a lot of companies actually do, too. They keep them on the payroll for the duration of their severance but do not expect them to actually work.
Agree that no one should be getting deported on 30 days because they got laid off.
Giving any kind of notice about layoffs while expecting employees to continue working is just bad for everyone.
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.
> The layoffs are directly tied to Oracle’s aggressive and debt-heavy expansion into artificial intelligence infrastructure. 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.
Interesting that they admit that the layoff off is due to a pivot from software to hardware.
Very often people will defend these kind of layouts as the result of overhiring but then shouldn't the leadership that over hired 30K people also be held accountable?
I think this sucks for the people being laid off but what exactly should they be held accountable for?
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!)
If I am bad at my job, I get fired. For better or worse, this is what happens.
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.
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.
I view the opportunely cost, moral reduction, corporate politics, etc. differently then just money. I wanted to emphasize the long term effects of hiring then firing 30K has on businesses beyond what people typically focus on like payroll.
Tech shareholders want executives to take risks building new products. Of course they’d prefer the products be successful but if the options are “hire 30k people 50% chance we have to lay them all off” or “don’t build new products” most tech shareholders want option 1.
Then why dont executives got punished by investors when they take risks and fail? The answer clearly is that investors want the risks to be taken and understand the downside that comes from taking risks.
I mean bribing trump to get all those sweet government cloud contracts seems like it could end up being either the best bribe ever or a good way to get your company disbanded.
Huh, layoffs in India? That's weird, because most tech companies are freezing headcount and laying off people in the US and increasing headcount in India. I wonder if that says something about the prospects of NetSuite, which is the org they've been cut from...
When I worked for Oracle in 2015 during my co-op there, IDC was generally just another office. NetSuite may be their focus, but I think they generally cover almost all Oracle software.
> A job today isn’t (and shouldn’t be) any guarantee of a job tomorrow.
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.
In germany you have the opposite and it is also nonsense.
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.
You can quit your relationships at any time, too. That's a fundamental tenet of our society - consent to an interaction between free people can be withdrawn at any moment for any reason.
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.
Another consequence of the AI boom. Not in the simplistic sense that “AI is replacing jobs,” but rather in the sense that companies are realizing they have overspent dramatically on a product that still is not strong enough to justify the scale of that investment or deliver a meaningful return.
When laying people off, better companies will often accelerate vesting so that the departing employees get additional stock. For example, Google does this:
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.
This is the unfair part. Quite often salary is reduced with the excuse of having stock options. So this is more like a cut in earned salary along with getting fired.
Just an FYI, if you're ok with not being in Manhattan or the cool parts of Brooklyn, it's really not that bad.
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.
Pretty vicious. As an employee I wouldn't consider working at Oracle or any company that's done this when there are plenty of companies which, despite layoffs sucking for everyone involved, at least compensate their employees decently when it happens.
Ouch. Imagine being let go just a few weeks from vesting. Doesn't seem fair to let someone work for months and months in anticipation of their big prize and then yank it away at the last minute.
Yes, it's the standard in every legal doc I've ever seen too, but most companies have typically done some accelerated vesting as part of severance. Of course they don't have to, but it's a generally lower cost way of showing some good will.
If it's anything like the layoffs I went through at my company, it's always nuanced.
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.
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.
Release the patent and specify a very strict "free usage for anyone not named Larry Ellison, and violators will be punished to the fullest extent of the law" clause.
You'd probably get a few innocent people aren't the Larry Ellison from Oracle, but it's a start.
Warren's inquiry into meta, amazon layoffs would probably be a warning sign that all the large tech companies are up to no good. Anybody who operates tiktok is on my suspicion short list to start out with.
Is it? Based on what I've seen online the company name was derived from a CIA project from the 1970s that the founders worked on, but it doesn't seem to be based on an acronym. There was an earlier unrelated project from the 1950s which used ORACLE as an acronym ("Oak Ridge Automatic Computer and Logical Engine").
this is the internet, not a Sunday service at your local mormon temple where swearing is banned. You can call Larry Ellison an asshole. There are few people more deserving of being called in asshole than he is.
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.
Not an insult at all - the mormons are explicitly against swearing of any and all forms, moreso than any group of people i've ever met. they self-censor in a very unique way, they are super clean in how they speak.
Well, if this helps to explain my actions a little - I have friends in Russia (and elsewhere), and very often our jokes/satires/alike come around censorship and "classified information". It’s a bit difficult to explain, but this way of writing messages - with [CENSORED], [DATA DELETED], [CLEARED] and the like - has become something of a meme (and I don't mean dunk memes, I mean cultural meme, yes) or constant joke among us. So for us, it’s a bit like a way of getting a laugh at censorship’s expense. I’m sorry if that was a bit out of context.
Anytime there are mass layoffs like this, I like to look at the company career page and revel in the HR horseshit they jam down everyone’s throats: https://www.oracle.com/careers/
I find it bizarre than no one here seems to be commenting on the insane amount of capex redirected towards AI infrastructure build out as a reason for such decisions. I only hear bad product or covid over hiring but they seem like cope to my cynical mind.
Every other company sends out cold emails to prospects outside of the company, but Oracle is the only company to send out cold emails to their own employees. Gotta give it to them...
Are there any serious union efforts happening in big tech right now? It’s asinine to me that tech workers haven’t unionized at this point and that folks still fall head over heel just to get a job somewhere that would dispose of you without a second thought.
Am I the only one who, when they see this, feels that it's already tough for Oracle and that many companies betting on "AI" have finally understood the real risks involved, and that they risk simply failing? I mean, if Oracle is doing that, they're clearly having some problems. I don't know how to properly express that (I'm sorry, I'm not very fluent with English), but for me it seems as some kind of signal of potential start of the downfall. It's like they stepped on the path that leads them to fall, and while they still can change it, if they don't, they're doomed.
> feels that it's already tough for Oracle and that many companies betting on AI have finally understood the real risks involved
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.
> The main teams hit - RHS, SVOS, and NetSuite India - are associated with Cerner and NetSuite, both of which can serve to reduce some fat.
> 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.
you can get a gauge on Oracle debt by looking at CDS prices ( basically insurance that pays out if Oracle defaults on debt ). The link is from 4 months ago and it feels weird to link to reddit but CDS prices have risen quite a bit which implies loaning Oracle money is feeling riskier than it use to be. I don't know what the prices are now.
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.
> Yes, but, well... why do they need to do that at all
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.
> to stave off a "build with Accenture/WITCH+OpenAI/Anthropic" disruption.
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.
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.
HN rate limits replies for some or all users. Could be triggered automatically based on the controversiality of a post (I think) or some posters might get marked for it permanently by a moderator.
> Because the ERP and EHR market is almost entirely dominated by SAP and Epic.
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.
> 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.
Okay, understood. I work in entirely different field, so that's not my main speciality, to be honest. Thanks for explanation : )
I tried to do this out of undergrad (graduated last year). Many companies do both good and bad things to me, some more good than bad. The "best of the best" companies to me require many years of experience and are still competitive. I didn't really want an entry level job at an "evil" company, so I'm going to go do a PhD (in something unrelated to my original interest in operating systems, as I don't want to be a 30k/yr automaton part of Meta's R&D machine).
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?
I honestly think is it bad for you to be that morally insistent against "evil" companies.
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.
> My point is: it's very, very, very hard to do this, especially with my set of interests
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.
Yes. I work at boring companies that are not evil instead. Never went to my local magnate (Comcast), left a company when they off/onshored entire teams to HCL slaves, etc.
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.
I used to work on software for non-profits. I found it fulfilling but it was hard to do the work since I found fullstack technically uninteresting (this is my own shortcoming).
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.
The key to not working for evil companies is to have more choice in who you do work for, which involves living way below your means so that you can save inordinate amounts of income and "retire" early - which is just code for "do the work I want to do for those I want to work for".
Many of the startups I work with. We’re helping save the oceans and land. Purpose and profit are dream scenarios for me. It’s difficult in a capitalist economy but it exists.
Why stick with for-profit companies? But on measure I'd say System76, n8n, Nextcloud, GridX, Odoo, Tuxedo, GitLab, Uplight, Aurora Solar, Bandcamp (maybe), Bitwarden, Canonical (maybe), Scribd, Arcadia, Wikihow. Basically any time you find yourself enjoying a product you're using, see who made it and if they're hiring.
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.
I'm not unemployed right now, but in the past have applied to literally every one of those companies and been declined from every one of those companies.
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.
Because for profits have the most employment opportunities? All of the companies named in replies to my initial comment hire a minuscule number of people.
If you're looking to scale, then you're looking for companies that scale, and if you're looking for companies that scale, you're not looking for angels. I used to think Cloudflare was an exception to this belief but today I'm not so sure.
I tried to focus on for-profit, but I'm just saying there's nothing wrong with non-profits either. In fact I don't think I consciously mentioned a non-profit but I might have.
Ok, and when you apply for and get rejected from all those companies, what do you do then? Suppose you give me a list of literally every company you think is ok, and I were declined by all of them, then what?
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?
Valve takes 30% of revenue from developers because they have cornered the distribution market. Their margins on the steam store are probably second only to the apple store's, another heinously immoral product.
Just starting with "Not totally abhorrent and aiding the destruction of democracy in the US" would be fine.
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.
Easier said than done. Most of us end up working for monsters if you go high enough up on the ladder.
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 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.
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.
Honestly, isnt this going to happen in every SAAS based company? My feeling is the bigger and more staff they have the more they will unload. I feel like its almost a necessity otherwise some 3-5 man team agentic first solution will just come with the same offering at 80-90% discount and eat their lunch.
Could this be the start of the AI bubble bursting? There are so many rumors going around about data centers not being built, GPUs waiting to be installed, debt, and much more. Crazy times.
Follow the datacenter companies like Coreweave, when they start to have problems everyone else will start to have problems. Coreweave was bailed out by Nvidia once already and managed to get another $8B loan today. They and others are up to their eyeballs in debt so any trouble will show up first in companies like Coreweave trying to build the datacenters and bring them online.
> RHS (Revenue and Health Sciences) — employees described a reduction in force of at least 30%, with 16 or more engineers from individual business units cut in a single action.
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.
companies overhired when money was cheap during covid to inflate their numbers and push their marketcap. since cheap money is gone, they have no incentive to keep the workforce. this has nothing to do with AI.
These are some of the richest and most profitable companies in history but they act like miserly slaves to their share price. We have created such a perverted incentive system.
There's an argument to be made about bad incentives driving large public companies.
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?
I'm a shareholder. I'd prefer long term growth and sustainability rather than short term unsustainable pumps. When will they look out for the shareholders like me?
If larry hadn't sucked dRump's c*ck that hard, he'd not be in the free downfall that he is in today. He's dismantling America brick by brick. I hope he goes bankrupt soon.
The bulk of the comments in here are focused on comparing Larry Ellison to a lawn mower, so I'll try a new tack and say that I'm genuinely confused at what the value prop of Oracle is.
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.
Short answer: today I think there is genuinely nothing that anyone should use oracle for, but their database used to be seriously far ahead of the competition.
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.
We were building a payments system in the early 2000s and got a diktat to not use Oracle. The amount of things we had to build to satisfy the availability and durability requirements were so huge it consumed the first few years of work. We didn’t get to the business side of things until much later. Funny thing is we ended up giving up on MySQL and went back to oracle after all that work. The whole thing was scraped after a couple of years.
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.
We should really be more thankful for the existence of PostgreSQL
There was also DB2. DB2 was (still is) an excellent database that IBM has completely fumbled.
There are three different Db2 databases.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Db2
I only ever worked with the Linux/Windows variant. I can’t believe I am saying this about an IBM product, but I found it to be actually rather pleasant to work with.
You’d never say that if you’ve been on the inside of a mainframe DB2. shudders
It's very amusing to me that you bring up IBM in a discussion of the value of Oracle.
I came here to say that if you want to understand Oracle's value, think IBM with less history.
Kind of, but there are some subtle differences in my opinion. Oracle is top-to-bottom evil, whose business model basically boils down to screwing over their clients and everyone else at every possible opportunity, comparable to the likes of McKinsey or Accenture.
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 think of IBM and GE as being cut from the same cloth back then- they treated their people well and dominated their markets.
Didn't they famously help both the Nazis and Apartheid South Africa?
SQL Server was pretty good until they went the Oracle way with their licensing shenanigans, but even with that they were a lot cheaper than Oracle. In fact SQL server was one of the few great products that came out of MS.
"At the time, MySQL existed ..."
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.
Not just constraints, transactions were also a no-op. The MyISAM engine is still available in modern versions if you want to experience this, it's just not default anymore.
Really, you've always had to be careful with MySQL. It really was the PHP of RDBMSs.
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 love Postgres in 2026, but it really was not a viable enterprise option before 2010. MySQL had decent binlog replication starting in 2000 which made up for a lot of the horrible warts it had.
mysql was great in 2000 if you knew all the foot guns to avoid and set it up correctly (and not just what sounded correct).
I keep landing into projects with Oracle, SQL Server, DB 2.
Naturally our customers aren't companies that care about HN audience.
What's about DB2? I have no experience with it but I guess IBM specifically designed it for enterprise-scale transaction processing workloads...
DB2 was crazy good for certain use cases but very weird. For one, the pattern for DB2 efficiency was pretty much the exact opposite of every other database. Every other database would say "Normalize your tables, use BCNF, blah blah, small reference tables, special indices etc".
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.
I have not had much experience with DB2, but given that the relational data model and normalization was invented at IBM (Codd) and IBM's implemenation of those concepts was DB2, DB2 performing poorly with a normalized data model seems strange.
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.
That sounds oddly similar to how people recommend using Dynamo. It's super hard to do coming from SQL because everything just feels wrong.
So it was an early version of mongoDB?
> 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
Just curious, how was SQL Server perceived at the time compared to Sybase and Oracle? I know it originated as a port of Sybase.
SQL Server was Sybase until (I think) version 4.9, just rebranded as Microsoft SQL Server.
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.
SQL Server 2000 was well received in the segments that mattered as a challenger. Oracle was in first place running on Unix. However, it was viewed as expensive and the procurement experience was regarded as unpleasant. People wanted competition even if they didn't think SQL Server, or another alternative, could unseat Oracle for the most important stuff.
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.
I remember talking to one tech leader at the time who described it as "surprisingly good, for a microsoft product" which sort of summed it up. But it had similar characteristics to sybase except more so because you had to run it on an NT server (iirc) and so there was an even harder cap on the scale of hardware you could run it on, whereas you could run oracle on really top-end sparc hardware that was way more powerful than anything that ran windows.
Depends if the director or VP liked Microsoft or not. I’ve worked at places that loved SQL Server and Microsoft server products in general. Others did not use them anywhere in their datacenter and wouldn’t have considered them. Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft were very dependent on if the people in charged liked them. Not so much technical merits.
SQL Server's claim to fame was GUI admin tools making life easier for many who bore DBA responsibilities only in anger.
It remains one of the most reliable Microsoft products, but few would claim that is a high bar.
TOAD was fantastic for Oracle, though. I liked it better than SQL’s stuff.
I can't really speak to 3rd party utilities, I think Management Studio was sufficient to keep most competition from ever starting.
MS SQL Server was forked from Sybase in 1993. Not sure how much the code had diverged by 2000. Informix was also a contender back then.
7 was a rewrite, from c to c++, also went from 2k pages to 8k pages
we still have an informix db for an old early 2000s application we have to support. shit runs on centos5 lmao. it's actually not too bad, around v12 there's cdc capabilities (requires you to build your own agent service to consume the data) that made the exercise of real time replicating the app db in our edw a cakewalk. which ironically has greatly extended the lifespan of the application since no one has to query informix anymore directly.
ibms docs and help sites suck butt tho.
My experience at the time was that it was perceived as not serious enough and lacking important features. If my memory isn't very bad, I believe as late as 2000 SQL Server still only supported AFTER triggers.
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.
2000 for sure had instead of triggers.. I used them :-)
This is a very short comment on SQL Server's code improvements (post-Sybase).
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).
I disagree as I was running clustered sql server 6.5 and 7 in 1998 for hundreds of concurrent users doing millions of reads per hour on NT basically commodity boxes. Replaced it with Oracle for 100x cost and lost performance.
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.
For others like me who might be skeptical to hear throughput in any metric other than seconds (and is used to large numbers in hours/days being used to inflate), I think millions per hour is actually quite high for 1998.
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.
Those are big numbers especially for non-enterprise DBs in the 90s.
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.
Java and VirtualBox. But both are free.
Sort of. The VirtualBox Extension Pack is free for personal or educational use. It is explicitly not free for work use[0]. You can download it for free, but accepting the license to do so obligates you to pay them for it.
[0]https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ
> 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 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.
I was around back then and I call Bullshit on everything you claim. There were more database options in 2000 than there were in 1996. Even before that there was FoxPro… c’mon man. Oracle’s only value was they built a NO EXIT clause into their contracts…
Oracle was the ONLY game in town if you were serious. It was like buying IBM in the 80s. Source: programmed PL/SQL and embedded SQL at the Toronto Stock Exchange in the early 90s, on SCO Unix and Oracle.
it was soooooo the only game in town that they were like NVDA now, yea you got alternatives but you really don't and hence you charge insane prices and everyone is paying up with a grin on their faces. oracle was the only game in town 100% if you were serious!
Nobody was building WoW on FoxPro, c'mon.
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.
> Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle
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.
Your phone calls and SMS messages that touch the phone network, likely touch Oracle. Yes, nearly all of them.
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
It sounds like you don't use Oracle, Oracle uses you.
The comments on this subthread are a bit out of touch in a very coastal-tech way -- yes, Oracle is a monster, yes, their tech is garbage, yes, their products are awful.
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.
Oracle and Java are deeply embedded in US gov work. How deep? Let's just say a large number of classified developer jobs hire for Java. Ellison has been a huge proponent of a surveillance state, and that likely ingratiates him with certain three letter agencies.
The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
My employer is actively hiring java engineers and we don't "take pictures of things from far away".
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...
You're right of course, but we only just met! You're the first of probably many counter examples.
> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
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.
Yeah, lots of corporate backend code is Java, and Java is a great choice for backend/server code. I've never seen Oracle anywhere, though, not in banks and not in governments. I've mostly seen Postgres and MSSQL and some MongoDB.
I've been working in Wall St. banks for the past 30 years, and I've never used an Oracle database. The investment banks were all Sybase shops in the 90's, and a bunch of them still are. In my experience those that do move are most likely to go to SQL Server, since its Sybase roots make the transition a little easier.
When something has been there for 20+ years switching costs are big.
We use Java.
We have Oracle blocked at the router (!) to prevent anyone downloading the Oracle JDK and incurring the wrath of Oracle licensing.
Apple used Java in a ton of backend stuff. At least the entire backend for iTunes (Jingle) was written in Java and very very small amount of Clojure.
There was a time (around the beginnings of Mac OS X) when Java was considered a first class citizen in Mac OS X, next to Objective-C.
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...
It wasn't just Apple, in the late 90s/early 2000s there was a not insignificant number of folks in business/academia who thought Java would take over the world. Windows XP also shipped with an embedded JVM for running Java apps out of the box at one stage too, just before Microsoft doubled down on c#/.NET.
Along with MacOS X, Apple's Xcode IDE even had native java project support briefly in this era as well.
Yup, this brings back my academia years in 1998, sitting with KDE 1.0 and Java 1.1. It was mostly Java, then Perl, teeny bit of C and MIPS Assembler.
Java really could have taken over the world, and it can be performant, too.
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.
There was even a Microsoft Visual J++ (and later J#).
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 only need look at the job postings for Apple to see quite how common Java backend is there.
Checks out https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?search=java&sort=relevan...
Yeah I can see that, even when a recruiter contacted me a few years back for a data engineering position, they were looking strictly for experience in JVM-based languages.
> Clojure
Apple should do more of that - they make cool computers, and should use cool languages.
Yeah, I wish they did more Clojure as well. As far as I could tell, it was kind of snuck in about ~12 years ago, and it kind of grew from there.
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.
Adding Smalltalk message passing as an extension to C was very clever and allowed writing very efficient code and dynamic high level UI code in a single language. The semantics were kept clear by the distinctive syntax of message passing. And allowed access to any existing C libraries.
Back in the day, Objective-C was considered a cool hip language, wasn't it?
iCloud is mostly Java (or was, about 10 years ago when I was there)
> entire backend for iTunes (Jingle) was written in Java
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.
The financial market infrastructure heavily relies on Java. Transactions at commercial banks across North America are mostly executed on Java codebases.
There are probably millions of corporate projects written in Java. One of the reasons Oracle bought Sun Microsystems (who invented Java) was because Oracle itself had written so much middleware crap in Java.
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.
Interesting, the _majority_ of developers I know write in JVM languages - mostly Kotlin for new stuff at this point.
Typically I see folks using the Amazon Corretto java distribution.
It could mean you know very few developers.
> 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.
Java is not uncommon. Off the top of my head, a certain rainforest company and a lot of banks and EMR providers use it.
Amazon, among others, write a lot of java, but they want absolutely nothing to do with oracle licenses for java
I worked for a drug discovery company doing Java [1] since we were using Kafka Streams very liberally, but everything was done with the OpenJDK Temurin distribution. It was drilled into our heads on the first day do not install anything from Oracle. I think they were afraid of some weird lawsuit unless they bought an expensive license.
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.
I'm sure GraalVM is nice enough technology but I don't understand why anyone would actively choose to use a JVM from Oracle if they can avoid it.
The Ahead of Time compilation is pretty nice for some stuff. Generally startup time is significantly improved, so if you're writing command line tools in particular it can be cool.
HotSpot also has lots of things to speed up start time. Project Leyden has made a lot of advancements. AOTCache and crac etc.
Right, I just feel like this is a bit over the top
> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
> Right, I just feel like this is a bit over the top
Well, the writer said the only Java devs THEY KN OW, not all Java devs.
They have their own OpenJDK distribution (Amazon Corretto)
Look at who is making OpenJDK distributions besides Oracle: Amazon, Microsoft, Red Hat, IBM, Eclipse, SAP, … It’s being used everywhere.
> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
This can’t be a serious comment. I’d say probably half the world‘s B2B and enterprise runs on Java. Especially in Europe.
> The only developers I know who write Java
It sounds like your personal anecdote is particularly uninformative then.
Useful for letting us know that GP has a limited network and situational awareness.
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.
> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
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.
There are literally millions of us that write Java and don't work for the CIA. It's like still in the top 3 of all languages.
I was surprised at first to learn Minecraft was a CIA plot and then I thought about it and it all fit together :)
And you know that they will be using Java 6 just because...
Amazon is predominantly a java shop as is a lot of big enterprise
it's not purely gov work—lots of legacy software (especially outside of the US) is java-based
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
What? What kind of ridiculous bubble are you in? Isn't Java one of the main languages at Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc?
That is a silly take. The absolute majority of Java devs in the world does not work in spy agencies (sounds like it’s more about your personal network being close to that world)
The question then becomes, does Java warrant the valuation Oracle has when the language itself is mostly FLOSS?
Oracle effectively still largely controls the evolution of the language and of OpenJDK, and Java is still a registered Oracle trademark. While it could be forked and renamed if necessary (as happened in the javax –> jakarta transition), that would likely end up being quite disruptive and costly.
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.
I think that overstates, there is a lot of java in the enterprise still, it's lose share to golang and typescript and in certain cases rust, but it's still around and doing just fine (to my annoyance).
This feels correct. Their business model is squeezing anyone who can't migrate off their properties and suing the rest.
Why would go $58B in debt to support a new feature that no one will want after alienating everyone above?
They have not pulled the pin on the ZFS grenade yet, but I expect at some point it happens.
I'm not sure Larry would be interested in suing Matt Ahrens (one of the original designers), or a handful of LLNL employees (ie the US government).
but what would be the blast radius for ZFS?
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 $$$ to make, but I don't think ZFS would warrant them much.
> the only large target using FreeBSD I can think of is Netflix, but AFAIR they don't use ZFS either.
I can't quite remember, but I think they might have mentioned using ZFS rather than UFS for the OS, but I'm pretty sure they're not using it for the CDN data partitions. I love ZFS, but for CDN nodes, I think it would be more harmful than helpful; especially how ARC is separate from the FreeBSD 'Unified Buffer Cache', and how much work Netflix has done to reduce the number of times data hits RAM on the way from disk to the user.
> Oracle sues when there's $$$ 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.
It’s why I run btrfs on my lab machines. I’ve used ZFS for, looks at calendar oh, wow, literally decades now. It’s fantastic. But the miasma of Oracle’s infection keeps me from recommending it for anything commercial.
ZFS, in a vacuum is fantastic. But it’s not in a vacuum.
There's no zfs grenade. It's CDDL, feel free to use it wherever you want. Oracle can't come after you for violating the gpl even if somehow using zfs on linux violates the gpl.
They can sue for a variety of reasons from trade secret to trademark.
It doesn't mean they'll win anything in court but they'll ruin you long before they notice the spend.
Everything I have read is that the cddl is not compatible with binary deployments of zfs on linux so actually wouldnt that mean yes they could press that if you bundled it with gpl? Actual lawyers have said yes it could which is what I am refering to, however I think the actual answer is that Oracle has created a latch by inaction on this subject for so long now.
CDDL is more permissive than gpl. It's not a violation of cddl to intermingle with code under a different license. GPL is the issue and it's the individual contributors to linux that _could_ sue.
I'm not a lawyer. I don't k is what Oracle's lawyers can and can't do. Even if I'm legally in the right, Oracle's lawyers could break me if they wanted. I can't know if there is a ZFS grenade, and neither can you. But we can choose to not deal with Oracle.
At that point, if they wanted to, they could sue mort96 for saying something bad about Oracle. It's unlikely they'll do that and perhaps a bit less unlikely they'll sue over ZFS.
Most of their legal shenanigans appear to be restricted to companies that already license some software from them.
> 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
I actually sat through an Oracle sales presentation around 1999 (I was the product engineer, along with company executives) and honestly it sounded pretty good. At the time we were using Lotus Notes for a database so even pencil and paper would have been better. Oracle absolutely was the market leader and there was no doubt about its technical chops. Oracle Parallel Server could run active-active across two sites separated by many miles of fibre, which was a remarkable thing to do back then.
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.
Oracle was (and I assume is) able to provide "hardware" level support for their software, if you paid enough and your database was shitting itself at 2 AM, they'd have engineers on the phone and maybe on the plane to get you back up and running.
For smaller companies and businesses? Not needed. For big multinationals where a minute of downtime is millions of dollars in revenue? Oracle is cheap.
There's more to it than just pure databases. They have a pretty large vertical of SaaS apps, specifically ERP. Oracle Saas (their ERP platform) is used by thousands of customers - these are systems implemented with SI's and run super critical functions like payroll, manufacturing, etc really hard to rip out once they're put in place. This has been fueling their growth for some time, and seems like OCI is picking up now from a pure infra POV. But yeah I don't think I'd ever use any Oracle components voluntarily or at the very least find ways to have exit paths
on this point the netsuite ecosystem is huge and there are not that many options for SME's that are too big/complex for inacct or quicken (even campfire/rillet etc) but don't want to get anywhere near SAP, Infor, IFS, oracle (not netsuite).
Yeah, many of these comments are extremely misinformed. Oracle has been an application software vendor for a long time.
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.
Enterprise software as an SDK with a demo is a perfect way of explaining it - I'll have to remember that.
Jira, installed fresh, is nice. Jira after it implements your enterprise disfunction, is a new level of hell Dante couldn't've dreamed of.
I think the big use case for Oracle products are for businesses that are not in the IT space. A lot of reasons for this, a big one is the breadth of Oracle's products is very solid and, similar to Microsoft, you can be sold on Oracle solving all your database needs across your business: HR, asset management, customer relationship stuff, your actual business, all with a single vendor. Non-IT management will be told that it all integrates seamlessly, you don't need to hire IT staff dealing with software from 10 different vendors, just the one.
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.
I just read a tech "policy" document of one of the largest packaged food makers in Mexico. They explicitly say they ONLY use paid services/software to ensure there is liability and support.
There are A Lot of businesses thar are happy to burn cash for a false sense of security. They don't know better.
I didn't save the tweet I saw it in but I saved the joke - "I wish I had enough money to run Oracle instead of Postgres." "Why do you want to do that?" "I don't, I just wish I had enough money to."
>Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle for
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.
Cool stuff like distributed transactions, the database as OS with raw disks, the database as application platform with APEX.
Then again, I guess I am one of those folks that enjoys cool toys, that only big corporations pay for.
Every company I've worked for has avoided Oracle software of any kind.
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.
> Every company I've worked for has avoided Oracle software of any kind.
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).
A past company I worked for made SaaS and On-prem and we supported Oracle with the on-prem. The simple act of supporting and testing that option was enormous for our company, but the customers we had that needed it were highly lucrative.
I worked for one company that used it. Everybody on the ground hated it but the costs of migrating away were enormous because every system they relied upon was tightly coupled to every other system. It would have been a multiyear project to get off it.
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.
We heard you're planning to migrate away from Oracle. We understand, but unfortunately, that means we have to get rid of the 75% discount we gave you, so we'll make a decade of revenue in the two years it'll take you to get rid of us. Still planning to migrate away?
It’s a common ‘large enterprise’ dependency often due to some internal CRN/Accounting/Compliance software, so I suspect you are right.
People also marry the database when a significant amount of logic is in stored procedures.
Oracle is used for mission-critical legacy applications, which is common in the federal government IT space. Replacing with OSS is a nontrivial undertaking, but it is happening. For the most part, replacing Oracle’s Java with OpenJDK is relatively painless, but some agencies preferred the licensed version because it includes support. Replacing a database, however, is a much scarier task, even when you have experienced and competent DBAs.
They sell to cash-rich organisations who are a bit clueless about technology and so can't or wouldn't want to either roll their own, or go with a better but smaller provider?
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.)
And, their product have worked correctly for decades.
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.
Precisely this. They prey on outsource-happy big orgs that have 1 million different SaaS all tied together by scotch tape (because their IT dept. is also outsourced)
Non-tech companies have bigger fish to fry in cost optimization than IT infrastructure.
For example, nobody buying, insuring and operating supertankers will care that much about Oracle licensing or even renewing a mainframe contract.
I have a theory that being cash-rich creates an atmosphere of technological cluelessness, or more specifically weaponized incompetence. A cash-rich company attracts sociopathic executives, who are focused on the prestige of working at a top company. These executives display a unified front outwardly, but internally they are all stabbing each other in the back constantly. And any executive who champions in-house software is just giving other executives ammunition whenever said software has the smallest bug.
Oracle database has unparalleled scalability. Ask someone who works at Microsoft SQL Server division what their bug database looks like. They will tell you that a single SQL Server instance cannot scale to the entire SQL Server division. Oracle on the other hand has a single database for the entire company. No other database is this scalable.
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).
I'm actually impressed by the amount of abuse our Oracle instances are able take from our developers.
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.
The original question does discount the capability of Oracle's database too much, as only something "golf executives" buy. When you have a large problem that is best solved with a relational model, Oracle delivers and can indeed be worth all the money and license hell involved.
Java is used a lot, but not Oracle's version.
One of the best things Sun ever did was open sourcing Java.
Their revenue was $57.4 billion last year. Just in Q4; cloud revenue $6.7 billion, cloud infrastructure $3.0 billion, cloud application $3.7 billion, Fusion Cloud ERP $1.0 billion, NetSuite cloud ERP $1.0 billion.
Oracle the company has not been about Oracle the DB server for 20+ years.
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).
They do own some vertically integrated products like PeopleSoft that use these lower level foundational pieces. But I agree, I don't know why anyone in their right mind would use Oracle outside of golf and sailing bribes.
They acquired a lot of applications - ERP, CRM, finance - I suspect actual database licensing revenues are only a small part of their revenues these days.
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!
It's exactly as you said. The dependency on old school legacy implementations that can't be turned off. To be fair to Microslop even they had the foresight to open source .net core and even try to bring some things to the open source community. Oracle actively turned into a patent troll.
Support, that's what you'd use them for. Something breaks and your team can't figure it out? You make a phone call and someone will be there in a jiffy to work things out. And if he can't either they'll fly a whole team from a different city or even a different country until they solve it.
They make a lot of money off of the cloud services and their layered "enterprise" applications. Selling "just the database" isn't what Oracle's been about for a very long time.
Also, their inability to make a NewSQL DB rivaling Spanner or Cockroach (they basically just had to clone one of these or acquire Cockroach) puts them out of any serious competition for the future of databases. Their "Oracle Autonomous DB" ain't it.
Totally agreed looking at them from a development and cutting-edge viewpoint. They own what was once very competitive platforms and languages, which they still support. They have largely transitioned into rent seekers.
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.
You are missing the business model - buy has-been platforms and frameworks and charge big bucks for maintenance. Customers eventually manage to migrate off you, but it is fine cause you buy some other has-been stack and then overcharge for that.
They aren't a database company. They are a full spectrum B2B SaaS contract company. They make far more by up selling services than they do from databases total. Half of their stack will run on whatever db you want.
It's stickiness.
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.
A while ago we were looking at migrating ERP - netsuite was a not a good price proposition and candidly feels a bit dated - but when you mapped features it was pretty impressive and for a lot of business that have some complexity (multi-entity, multi-currency, multi site mfg or inventory), there is not a whole lot of good alternatives because you can't use quicken but you definitely don't want SAP
The irony is that the ERP space is ripe for innovation and disruption, but nobody wants to get into ERP because it's a goddamn nightmare.
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...
I assume you would use Oracle Cloud if, for whatever reason possibly related to legal or competition, you cannot use AWS, or GCP, or Azure. It's hard for me to imagine a startup that needs cloud and would onboard to Oracle Cloud and not to any of the top 3 providers instead.
From small-scale use over the course of several years, I've found their "cloud" (OCI) to be a solid and well-planned product. Additionally, I've experienced not one single outage or hiccup so far (Stockholm region).
In a world of continuous change, at least we can always rely on oracle being consistently evil.
If you are buying GPUs today, they really are massively cheaper than other clouds.
Until you become addicted, and then plan for the price to spike.
If you are not yet in Oracle's clutches you have to be extremely naive or shortsighted to be using Oracle cloud. Obviously the low prices are because they have a shit product and shit reputation, and the moment they think they captured large enough audience they are going to hike them
Yup. They're not offering those prices out of generosity. They're offering them because that's the most they can charge big players who understand what it means to buy from Oracle.
Aren't their databases behemoths that satisfy requirements (especially of regulatory nature) of large banks and such? I don't think they have much in common with the needs of your run-of-the-mill startup.
maybeeee SPARC based Solaris? Probably not a major usecase nowadays (Oracle bought Sun for Java, not for Sun) but it seems to be limping along
> Oracle bought Sun for Java, not for Sun
My recollection is that they also qanted Sun's storage hardware products, to sell alongside their existing DB software.
> From my chair, they make an expensive database they try to sell to golf executives.
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.
The answer to your question lies in Oracle 10K.
yeah... their "value prop" is keeping monoliths trapped and embedded in their systems with customizations out the wazoo. slow, painful death
oracle is deeply embedded in enterprise and a lot of other enterprise solutions also use it. they have no value proposition for startups. likely just on existing clients and ppl who end up using stuff that requires their products.
I have a cousin who owns a business that decided to contract with Oracle, and as he described this my first thought was “why tf would you ever sign an agreement with Oracle, don’t you know about them?”
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.
It's like IBM for legacy business the German Banking System runs all oracle in the backend.
Indeed. Oracle runs on z/OS as well.
Oracle has made a large bet on being a cloud, but nobody wants their terrible cloud, which is reflected in their dollar-store prices. They staffed up and built facilities that they can't sell so I am not surprised they are now swinging the axe.
I use it only for the free(for now) tier. I always thought AWS console was about the worst UI/UX could get.
Not to be outdone, Oracle came along and said 'hold my beer.'
I posted a response from Gemini where I asked Gemini, "Do you have citations proving or disproving whether Oracle Cloud is still attracting cloud customers away from Azure, AWS and GCP?" and it seems it disagrees with your "nobody wants their terrible cloud" view.
Well, that clinches it.
you could post the citations?
i know they're also one of the AI data center providers of this era. Making partnerships with NVIDIA and helping GPUs get to market.
Clearly you are in USA. It’s not how their business works and Startups are not their target. Lobbying governments across the world with questionable practices are
Government contracts. You get good at bidding, there's money to be made there. And those bidding processes are way more than just the tech. That's their main value prop I think. Having the bureaucratic machine to bid and win contracts.
NetSuite
There are alternatives, but NetSuite is the gold standard unless you want to fork over for SAP.
Truth. I don't know of a better plug and play option than Netsuite for middle to big companies.
moat
Many organizations are extremely low capacity. I am aware of a company that has merely a few hundred gigabytes of data and is stuck on Oracle.
Well, if you're an elected official, and you're in charge of government organizations that could be used to enrich billionaire donors by using a donor's services - Oracle fits that niche very well!
Why use Oracle indeed.... Here's a tale from somewhere around the year 2000.
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.
Java sucks, it will consume lots of ram. Just write your services in Golang.
More victims of AI.
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".
Blame it on whatever you like. oracle has been a rudderless leech for nearly 30 years now.
- 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.
> a rudderless leech for nearly 30 years now.
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.
>I have no idea how they could have been so bad while employing so many people
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.
Amazon empoloys 300k corporate employees. Apple has 170k. How is this a significant correlation.
It seems there's literally no correlation between people and what is accomplished.
> What on earth were those 30k people doing?!
Could be lawyers.
Would we be sad if they were lawyers?
I hadn’t realized their stock price has been cut in half over the past year.
It's been cut in half year-to-date. It's about where it was a full year ago right now.
I don't think its that easy.
Look at their employee numbers over the years:
(ai generated):
Oracle Corporation Employee Count (2010 - 2025)
Legend: Each '' represents approximately 4,000 employees.
Note: Oracle's fiscal reporting for the full year 2025 ended on May 31, 2025.They clearly did something crazy at corona and undoing this as a lot of companies did before already.
> (ai generated)
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.
The graph in your Macrotrends link shows the exact same numbers as the AI source, but is harder to read and the page is half ads. It's not an authoritative source -- the data was most likely parsed out of Oracle's earning reports by some janky regexp. I don’t know why you would trust this more than AI.
> harder to read and the page is half ads
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.
[0]: https://zacksdata.com
[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)
It's okay to use the chatbot. Nothing bad will happen.
---
> 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... ```
I verified it before and generated the graph with gemini for c&p it into hn
If I do my python right, from 2010-2020 they grew by 2.5% annually, from 2020 to 2025, they grew headcount by 3.7% annually.
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.
Or a pickup from 2015 - 2021 which was 0% growth.
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.
You did the Python right but the analysis wrong. Looking at it on a graph you can see that interpreting a single growth rate for the entire period (even if you stop pre-covid) doesn’t make sense.
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.
That's not how stocks are measured on wall street. They picked the dumb metric.
> They clearly did something crazy at corona
They acquired Cerner, which had ~30k employees.
Cool to be part of history I used to go into that office Innovations campus
Saw someone had a license plate say MPAGES ha
Even at 100k employees I’m still dumbfounded by that number. What do all these people do all day?
1. They maintain and sell one of the largest relational databases.
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.
>> Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency,
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.
That sales process is directly tied to the type of customer they're aiming for, which is larger than a "medium-sized family-owned business".
They mis-aligned but for someone like Boeing or United, they'd go gaga over the footy-crowd.
They also own multiple other huge companies that had tens of thousands of their own employees working in completely different areas (Netsuite, Cerner, Acme, etc)
6. Lawyers
"The first thing we do, let's AI all the lawyers" ?
Also their cloud
And all the supporting legal team of course.
No better proof that they're a huge company than that I could forget about an entire public cloud offering. Good point.
Unless you have worked with Oracle or other big enterprises, you may not realize the scale of how these companies operate and the breadth of what they actually do. Just by looking at their product page[0] you can see they offer software, hardware, cloud, consulting, support, and even financing solutions. In addition to the technology and product people (of which there are many), you also need HR, sales, marketing, accounting, support, etc for the entire global organization.
Sure, 100,000 people is a lot, but Oracle also does a lot.
[0] https://www.oracle.com/products/
This! They do _everything_.
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.
Salesforce does one aspect of what Oracle can do (Access as a Service) and they have 83,000 employees. Oracle may actually be pretty lean.
I remember reading this post years ago, and it has stuck in my brain ever since: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
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
It's even more wild when you realize that other similar-sized enterprise companies don't have all that and either leave bugs to sit around for decades, or randomly break shit trying to fix them.
That is really wild
That was a highlights grade comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights )
And the last comment by 'oraguy' - I hope he just picked up another id because "never work for Oracle again" ...
what a horrible horrible read :|
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.
Oracle sells alot of software that is accompanied by hordes of consultants to set it up.
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.
Sure but what did those guys do all day? 400 people is a lot of people
Write code to connect this system with that system. Teach people what setting does what. Integrate with Entra ID. Create custom reports that hordes of Executive on our side want. Scale out the system from undersized nodes we originally gave it. That's all I picked up by just listening to them. I wasn't involved in the project, just sat nearby listening to it.
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"
The need to teach people what setting does what is a sort of consulting moat that AI dismantles when it can access the right context.
They don't make any of the documentation for those settings easy to find or understand because the support contracts make them so much money.
Creating powerpoints. Presenting the powerpoints to others in synchronous meetings.
The training team and what's called 'Change Management' for an F50 company that's spread across the globe implementing a new application like an ERP could be 100 people by itself. It's extremely complex and hard to do those kinds of projects which is why many ERP migrations take a decade to complete if not fail entirely.
Probably had a lot of meetings
"Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?!"
plus yearly support maintenance
Almost certainly a large amount of support staff, so management/HR/IT etc... Then you've got your customer account managers, sales, lawyers/finance etc.... Given they do an insane amount of B2B and government sales I can see this being easy to reach tbh. Governement contract processes require an insane amount of bureacracy and negotations.
I’m guessing development is so slow that they have stacks of teams working in parallel to accomplish what 1 team could normally.
More than 70% of the employees are probably Sales/Support/Service -- on par with any large enterprise firm (Think Cisco/Salesforce/ServiceNow etc)
When you send your database a query, who do you think is gathering those tables?
Well, whatever Oracle is doing, which brings us back to a question very similar to your original one.
Solaris ?
Didn't they fire most of Solaris devs some time ago? Incidentally, Solaris been stuck on 11.4.x for, well, forever and a half..
Me too. Anyone here to enlighten us?
In June 2022 the Oracle acquisition of Cerner (a EMR now billed as Oracle Health) closed, so that would be after the 2022 date and before the 2023 date. Cerner was 28,000 employees.
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...
But the up curve at the end very clearly tracks with AI adoption and not Corona?
You need to pair hc with revenue, otherwise this data tells only one story, hc growth.
What's the point of posting statistics if they're not fact-checked and come from no verifiable source? At best they're right but we don't know until someone else fact-checked it for you, and at worst you're just spreading misinformation and we don't know until, again, someone else fact-checked it for you.
If you want to use AI to find information like this, tell it to grab you a source and post that.
So they are returning to 2015 headcount.
(EDIT: or 2021)
More employees to release less stuff.... Smell like consultancy.
The "Something crazy at corona" would likely be, in part, their purchase of Cerner Corporation in 2021-2022. I want to say there were 10k-ish employees? Maybe more?
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.
Where's the annual revenue for context? Those numbers are almost useless alone.
Feel free to add more info to this discussion.
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.
Their profit doubled from 2010 to 2025 though, no?
"Oracle leadership" sounds like nobody wants to take responsibility but they do like the share price to go up so say good bye to [auto generated name in header]'s job.
Stock barely moved after this news. Would be surprised if it isn't below 100 by H2.
How to tell you we are running out of money because of AI without spooking the investors ?
Is it AI or is it Larry subsidizing his dipshit son’s media exec fantasy/throwing money at Trump’s patronage system?
> More victims of AI
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.
-
That isn't though.
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.
> Based on your response, I doubt you even cared to read my entire post.
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.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with EHR systems will know that nobody wants to build their own. I once worked for a large hospital system that abandoned a decades old institutionally built and maintained system for Epic. The choice was celebrated by almost everyone who worked there.
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 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.
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.
Minor nit - enterprise EMRs brand themselves as EHR because they consider it more encompassing than just medical records.
I agree on other points.
> You can't just vibecode your way to replacing an (sic) EMR
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.
One of the ideal things that companies can do is not hire people. A company that never hires someone will never let anyone go and consequently is the only ethical company. The worst thing that a company could do is pay someone to do a job for a while. In fact, one thing we could do is make sure that all jobs should be perpetual. If someone hires you, they can't stop paying you until they die or declare bankruptcy. This is sure to be good for workers.
> In fact, one thing we could do is make sure that all jobs should be perpetual. If someone hires you, they can't stop paying you until they die or declare bankruptcy. This is sure to be good for workers
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.
> One of the ideal things that companies can do is not hire people
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.
Make money? Seems kind of corpofascistic. That’s profit that should be shared with workers. If no employees it could be distributed to unions.
Ok go for it.
It’s not unethical to lay someone off
It's a failure of hiring, planning, and management. It's an off the books opportunity cost. It's an off the books cost of hiring a replacement. And if over hiring was done willfully, then yes it's straight up unethical.
Irresponsible, careless, negligent. No planning leads to all of this. Ultimately unethical from this point of view
Actually, it is. You have been blinded by capitalism to consider it ethical.
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.
It's a job. Not a tribe.
The role an employer plays in societies varies from culture to culture, but note that in many cultures, it is "just a job".
Yes, that's what people tell themselves to deal with it psychologically. That it's just a job, not a community, and you better not make friends in the workplace (despite spending majority of your life there). And that when you're unemployed, life just goes on, as if it doesn't mean much.
Like when a traumatised kid never loved by the parents concludes that life is harsh and love doesn't exist, so better be tough.
> Yes, that's what people tell themselves to deal with it psychologically. That it's just a job, not a community, and you better not make friends in the workplace (despite spending majority of your life there). And that when you're unemployed, life just goes on, as if it doesn't mean much.
That's a lot of stuff you're saying. Not what I'm saying.
Sure. Also the profitability of a company is just a number, and shareholders dividend is just fiduciary fictions, and company hierarchy is just arbitrary title attaching this or that person to this or that loosely defined role.
Drama is just in the head of people melted in the ambient narrative, sure.
My employer is not my “tribe”. That is crazy. We have a contract saying I do X units of work and they pay me Y in return. Either of us end it at any time.
At least this is in the case in the US. What you are saying might be true in other cultures.
And yet, employers love to use the "we're a family", "we're a team", and other such messaging, especially in the tech industry. They elide the transactional nature of the entire relationship.
> layoffs are deeply immoral
It's no more immoral than you deciding to buy from Safeway, even though you'd been buying from Fred Meyer before.
Safeway won’t starve and die if I decide to buy from Fred Meyer. You really don’t see that an individual is not on equal footing with multibillion company? It is absolutely immoral. And I’m not even talking about charity, those people were hired and did actual job for the fucking trillion dollar company.
Several grocery stores in Seattle have closed recently. The same with local Starbucks outlets. Locations that don't make money get closed, even if the rest of the company is doing well.
Also, employees can quit anytime, no notice required. Nobody is obliged to work.
> Several grocery stores in Seattle have closed recently. The same with local Starbucks outlets. Locations that don't make money get closed, even if the rest of the company is doing well.
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?
> Don’t give me a sob story about mom and pop shop
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.
> The grocery stores were run by national chains. Starbucks is global.
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.
Yeah because marxists systems "take such good care" off people in comparison.
Marxist systems don’t exist in real life.
They do in some peoples heads as an utopian dream.
It's an unpriced negative externality.
It is unethical, if there was nothing wrong with their performance and the company never tried to find a replacement position within the company. Stop licking boots, I heard they don’t even taste that good.
When done for profit maximizing reasons it's not any worse than capitalism itself, but then this degrades into whether capitalism is ethical which is off topic
Profit maximization makes for the high standard of living we enjoy.
The one where one trip to ER can leave you on the street and students have six digit debts?
Ironically, you picked two systems that are heavily interfered with by the government.
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.
> Back in Great Depression
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 only problem with this is: Some of my best people are those that "I gave them a chance." I'd only hire perfect people from my tribe if I had to have them forever.
And what about those who you have a chance to and they didn’t cut it? Their life is ruined by being fired.
Mandated perpetual employment is bad for workers because the company will be extremely reluctant to hire and take on such an open-ended liability.
Oracle has record revenue and has for many years in a row. Laying people off is a result of mismanagement and not because they can't afford to keep them. In an ideal world I believe we'd have human centered employment instead of profit centered, and while I know that's unlikely to happen, it doesn't mean we can't criticize profit centered
> Laying people off is a result of mismanagement and not because they can't afford to keep them.
Markets are a chaotic system and the needs of a business must constantly adapt - or they go out of business.
https://academic.oup.com/ser/article/22/4/1843/7644954?login...
Termination will take on a while different meaning of this turns out to come true on some Black Mirror future.
I don't understand this sentiment. I'm absolutely significantly more productive with AI; so much moreso that I now have freetime and we haven't needed to replace an engineer who left. On the flip side my coworkers who think they're above AI are drowning. I think there is an endemic problem of senior engineers who think they're above learning AI and agents who don't want to use them, and these cuts are about forcing them to get with the times or drown in work.
Replacing jobs is a bit of a misnomer, but it's certainly allowing us to build out more features in shorter amounts of time.
Are you paid significantly more for your newfound productivity?
he mentions being paid more in terms of time, "I now have freetime". I can relate, in the right use cases it is nice to do some work estimated for 12 hrs in 2.
Full text of e-mail:
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/...
> As a result, today is your last working day.
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.
As a European, this seems normal?
When someone is fired, they generally stop working immediately while getting paid through the notice period.
I have to be honest that I'm confused by the comment, too. Including the edit about how being out of work would be traumatic, as if losing a job was unique to the United States.
Where I live, your employer basically has to give you notice (weeks to months, depending where you live). It's common for that notice period to turn into "garden leave" though, i.e. get paid but don't show up.
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.
My point was that going from (let's say) 'employed, productive member of the workforce, with social relationships at work' to 'sitting at home collecting unemployment' with no transition, no coaching, in the scope of 5 minutes seems like a traumatic rupture.
(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.
I've been laid off. It's not fun and there a lot of emotions to process at first.
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.
The way this email is worded this would more likely be classified as a Redundancy as opposed to a Firing. So different laws/rules would apply
No they don't? You keep working for 2-10 months until you can leave whatever your contact says
> collect severance and unemployment --- I was not aware this is law in California,
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.
They are done working but will collect severance pay, typically scaled by years of service.
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.
The at-will firing is just how it is in the US, but I do find it odd how accepting we've become with these corporations massively overhiring.
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.
Yeah, the "just how it is" part was the part I wasn't aware of. Sibling comment has pointed out that apparently the US is the only country in the world where this is the case. And totally agree on the latter point.
> apparently the US is the only country in the world where this is the case.
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.
I'm not an economist, but I have heard that there's an argument to be made the easy firing also makes it so that it's easier to hire too, so it creates more jobs.
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.
The other part is that at-will goes both ways: you can just walk out of a bad job with no legal repercussions. Not always the best idea due for social/professional ones, though.
That argument is definitely BS, though.
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.
Not employees are hired though, a fair amount are added through acquisitions. Reducing staff could be just streamlining redundancies . Not the case here [1], but it not always bad planning.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
Why? They get a severance which is going to be multiple months salary, as well as approximately $2000/mo unemployment from the state (assuming in California).
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
I did not know they got severance. In any case, I'm still not sure I'd prefer that scenario --- coming into your work to suddenly find you've been terminated and subsequently sitting on your ass for a couple months while looking for another job seems pretty emotionally damaging to me, but to each their own.
Dane here. I have had more than one coworker get that treatment.
Sure the company still has to payout salary, as per the contract, but plenty of companies do not want laid of people around.
It's insane to force businesses to take on the government's responsibilities (providing food/shelter/income/energy security).
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.
I completely agree, and apparently in California this is already the case --- I had no idea. In most contexts, though, I'd argue governments fall down on this task completely and people are, unfortunately, still very dependent on their employer. Same-day termination seems very socially risky in those cases.
The US government doesn't exactly go out of its way to support people either.
Crazy society they built over the pond.
They really have some of the best & beautiful land on earth, never been bombed in modern times, plenty population, the best schools in the world.
Yet they made a hellscape of cars and asphalt and same day termination. Just sad.
"eliminate".
Right.
My Amazon layoff notice came at 5am. Same deal. I thought it was fake because it came to my personal email. Then I logged into my work computer and found that all my email had been erased except for a copy of the layoff notice and an invite to a 10am Zoom with HR. The funny part was the invite had everyone who had been laid off in the To: line.
I was able to send internal only emails until 1pm, and then it logged me off and the computer was a brick.
I'm not sure if companies understand the emotional impact on the laid off and the layoff survivors. It almost seems like a terror campaign, whether intended or not.
One of my past employers tried to give laid off employees a dignified send offs including not immediately revoking their access.
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.
Maybe the solution is to not do mass layoffs. Not sure there's a dignified way to let go of many humans at the same time with almost no reason for why they're being let go except maybe a vague profitability scorecard.
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.
> Maybe the solution is to not do mass layoffs. Not sure there's a dignified way to let go of many humans at the same time
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.
Yeah that makes sense to me and I appreciate you saying it. If the whole team gets laid off, it's we all go down with the ship. But if one person gets laid off on a team, I think it can create intense dynamics. Like why them specifically? It wasn't about the department, it was about them. I can see why they'd take it personally and why the survivor guilt might be stronger on that team as well.
> Companies don't just provide money, they provide people with meaning, routine, social circle, and so much, and layoffs cut all of those immediately.
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.
Yeah, but of that list, the only thing I want my employer to provide me is the money. The rest I can do on my own.
Yeah, I'm confident that didn't happen
They understand, but they are more concerned about you exfiltrating data and suing them.
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.
This is why it's important to have a network off of company property.
Eh, that's brutal, wondering why someone isn't replying to your email only to find out they get let go. Almost like finding out a friend died, in a professional way.
I think we often just don't understand the full dimensionality of layoffs.
When i was first laid off during the dot com bust I was working on a sales floor. All open no cubes. We didn't know layoffs were coming. Manager walks in and taps this one guy on the shoulder, says grab your personal things and come with me. Manager came back in did the same to a few others. Then it was me. Talk about embarrassing! Also, was 2 weeks before quarter ended. If you were not working for the company at the end of the Q, no bonus. 2 weeks! I'll never forget that. That was my first taste of how nasty a company can be. Not the layoffs, hey things happen. But the timing. Feels diabolical.
Don't worry, big companies are doing similar things now.
Layoffs after the main activity period is over, laying off HR people after they held layoff meetings for other departments, etc.
Reptiles.
I've noticed people are shockingly good at filtering out their empathy through bureaucracies. Instead of feeling bad about their personal decision that they made to lay someone off, they instead can tell themselves it was the only way to do business and then happily absolve themselves of guilt.
Do not say “companies”. They are managers who do this. It is them who are to blame.
Some employees in the company might understand the emotional impact, but companies themselves would only look for certainty in protecting what belongs to them, which will hardly align with fairness or emotions towards employees in a situation like this.
This is largely the world we've created with litigation practices.
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.
Yeah, our litigation culture to me is just an inability for individuals/companies to resolve conflicts and escalate it to the legal system. And unfortunately there are many elements in the system that discourage us from reconciling and push us towards escalating.
Yes in my (somewhat tinfoil) opinion the point is to have an emotional impact on the workforce overall (or at least, one of the points is). Tech workers had a really good 20 years in the US, and kind of forgot that they were ultimately still wage workers. I think the culture circa 2018 took for granted a basic level of respect and cooperation from upper executives, and were beginning to exercise their power to achieve political goals, which was annoying to the tech ownership class. I think one of the major strategic turns of last 4ish years is the usage of precarity and high turnover to corrode worker solidarity in fields which used to be ironclad and respectable white-collar work. By simultaneously narrowing the hiring window ('junior devs are replaceable with AI') and also expanding the opportunities to be culled ('we are axing this division to cover our moonshot outlays') capital cultivates a desperate and compliant workforce. Bottom-up culture is woke, in the 2020's the folks in power want top-down directives that are followed unquestioningly; similar approach to how the executive branch was brought to heel by DOGE.
* in the USA
Here we get 1-3 month notice.
But it goes both ways, if I want to leave I have to work the mandated period.
https://www.unionen.se/in-english/notice-to-termination
> But it goes both ways, if I want to leave I have to work the mandated period
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
I have never, ever understood this whole mandated period thing. Aside from what you mention -- do you really want to keep these people around against their will -- I don't understand how your (ex-)employer can force you to do anything against your will. All you have to do is say "no".
Yet people keep believing mandated work after a layoff is a thing.
I was forced to work out a 3 month notice period at my previous company in the UK. I don’t see the point of keeping an already-checked out employee around so long when you have basically no way of getting anything but the bare minimum out of them.
Contrary to what people may think, the most humane way is a fast clean cut. Drawing it out in anyway doesnt help anyone. This does assume communication is clear about employee next steps for HR related tasks.
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.
It sounds as if you're describing how to humanely kill a living being.
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.
Killing is an escalation to what i said.
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.
Oh I didn't mean to say that's what you wanted it to mean, just that I've heard clean cut in two main spaces: taking off bandages and slaughtering animals.
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.
Honest question, why would they care?
For the morale of remaining employees?
And that includes them, the people doing the layoffs, who are employees as well. And what we often don't realize is that causing the pain to others most often causes pain to us as well. Human group output and productivity can rely a lot on trust, and if that trust is damaged, it can hinder all productivity.
Honest question, why would they care? The rancher does not care about the morale of the cattle as they're being led to slaughter.
As far as actual people? Depends on their personal moral code and is why colleges make people take ethics, even if I don't think that results in anything other than more elaborate ways to justify doing whatever they feel like anyway. Most people would agree that you should minimize suffering in others if you can, but people who make it to upper management and C suites often got there by not being bothered by such scruples.
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.
This is American way. There are no people, only resources.
Literally, "Human Resources". Such a disgusting phrase.
One of the most surreal meetings I've ever been to was a company All Hands after a 20% layoff round. The upper management people who decided who was laid off took turns talking about how upset it made them to have to do it. They showed a diagram of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief and went back and forth talking about what stage of grief they were in having to lay all these people off. Was like something out of the UK version of The Office. It was so tone deaf that it was bleakly comedic at a certain point.
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.
I've been laid off or fired ~7 times, in slightly different ways, some more humane than others, and it's quite a... traumatizing/colouring experience that stays with you from that point forward, even when I was over the job anyway.
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 was going to type you a sympathetic message and took a peek at your profile, and...well that's quite a resume you got there!
Heh thank you. It was a few years ago that this happened, when they were doing the big RTO.
Do not make the mistake of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison.
I do take a perverse kind of pride that this can now be said without any explicit reference -- and everyone knows you're talking about the lawnmower.
Whenever the lawnmower thing comes up, I try to also mention dtrace. As far as things to be remembered for, they make some strange bedfellows... although it's better than anything I've managed so I guess congrats.
DTrace was absolutely a product of pre-Oracle Sun, not Oracle.
Hey friend, check the user name of the person I'm responding to (and perhaps check out the people responsible for dtrace and larry ellison lawnmower comparisons). I might appear more coherent afterwards.
Yeah, I see what you mean now. Sorry.
It's not like Sun wasn't also lawyer heavy.
Outside of 90s television, this might be the most universal reference I have in my life.
Hey, at least it's better than your other one.
https://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/kissedagirl.html
The lawnmower does not have feedback, it does not stop just because it encounters human flesh.
I’m currently moving my personal VPS to Oracle Cloud (for a couple of reasons). The new machine’s host name is lawnmower. I have never been so decisive and satisfied in naming a computer.
fresh spring grass erupting fast
the distant engine purr comes
ouch goes the lawnmower
Beautiful. How did you come up with that? It's strangely captivating.
lawnmower don’t give a fuuuuuck
oh my god… we thought anthropomorphizing “the computer”, was the problem, when it was anthropomorphizing the principals all along… (yes, i know that is the joke you made, but it was so incredibly appropos that i felt the need to comment to register my amusement / sadness / ¿)
Unless you're being offered a very good package, any firing email is cold. Let's be honest
There's no real way to sugar-coat losing your job. I think an email is as good as anything. Ensures everyone gets the same message at the same time.
I think the headline is not the best headline, but what it meant by "cold" is that there was no advance warning. So like cold-calling somebody, but to fire them, and an email instead.
Which I would definitely prefer. A couple of years ago, two weeks before Thanksgiving, management announced there would be layoffs. No timeline on when the cuts would be shared or number impacted. People had to sit around for weeks, wondering if they had a job. Should I buy Xmas presents? Who knows!
I'd prefer this honestly. Would take 1-2 weeks to start updating my resume and listing out all accomplishments, relevant projects, etc.
At-will employment is hard. Honestly, if you aren't planning to lose your job tomorrow when your at-will, you're not being honest with yourself. I wish it were different, but outside a union contract or some other fairly well-combed over business contract, you should not assume you will get paid tomorrow.
The best strategy is to save up at least 6 months of runway.
> Should I buy Xmas presents? Who knows!
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?
That’s the point. Tell me today if I still have a job. Do not make everyone sweat about it for an undetermined amount of time. That’s unnecessary financial stress on all of the people who were not impacted.
The problem with advance warning is the employee who decides to sabotage in revenge.
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 find it hard to blame the workers in this story... it's a poor indictment of the management if they only checked in 3 months later and got this surprise - no wonder the company collapsed!
The workers who left the company while still collecting a paycheck for 90 days are essentially stealing, and the ones who stripped the premises were also thieves.
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.
The company is free to pay the salary and tell the employee not to show up during that time.
Whatever you do, do not ever book a 1:1 meeting on a Friday afternoon for Monday morning titled, "The Future."
I had to let an employee go because he didn't do any work, took forever to respond to chats (in a remote position), and was always late for meetings. I scheduled the 4pm Friday meeting to let him go. He was 15 minutes late.
Sounds like me on site, ADHD is a bitch, people probably think I don’t anything too.
I've found that there can be a chasm between "what people think I do" and "what I actually do." But also, there can be a chasm between "what I think I do" and "what I actually do."
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.
And traceability.
In a 1:1 meeting you could fire me and say a gazillion things and I'd forget 99.9% of them.
Or, with emotions flaring, could say something that becomes grounds for a wrongful termination or discrimination claim.
I think its very impolite to not do it face-to-face.
What time is a good time for everyone to show up for a face-to-face layoff meeting for a global company?
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.
the practicalities of the issue don't stop it from being impolite.
There is no perfect or right way to do this. Every approach will have criticism (and not every approach is equal), and different people will appreciate different things about the trade-offs.
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.
You're just making excuses for them. The approach they chose was rude and cowardly. Even within this cowardice, further cowardice shows, with the email being sent from no specific individual but simply an amorphous "Oracle Leadership".
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.
> You're just making excuses for them.
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.
I agree. But, IMO it's what you should expect going to work for a giant company. It's a machine, it does not care about you. Some of the people will care about you, but often their influence is quite limited. It's important to understand this at the start.
I'm sorry but you work at Oracle. Terrible people. Very rude people. You should expect it.
I don't, so I can still call how they do things: rude.
What is the alternative? Have 30,000 meetings? How long will that take?
A great alternative would be operating a company correctly so you don't end up in a situation where you need to cut 30k jobs at once with no notice. That's a bizarre thing that's becoming practically normalized in the USA tech industry.
The realistic alternative is to regularly cut a smaller number of people, which is awful for morale.
Does it have to be awful for morale if the reasoning is clear and compassionate? People understand that shit happens.
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.
Can you imagine a company spending a long time on meetings?!
6+ months' notice with a severance package equal to at least an annual salary.
Why would you give someone 6 months notice? What good is that for the employee? Especially if the severance is generous.
“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.
Job hunting takes time. Also, they won't be deported in 30 days, along with their families.
I can do a lot of job hunting with a year of severance.
Valid point about employees on visas though.
Maybe they could be kept on the payroll without access to actually work.
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.
Keeping them on the payroll also enables companies to easily manage and extend medical insurance. I’m pretty sure that what you propose is what a lot of companies actually do, too. They keep them on the payroll for the duration of their severance but do not expect them to actually work.
Agree that no one should be getting deported on 30 days because they got laid off.
Giving any kind of notice about layoffs while expecting employees to continue working is just bad for everyone.
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.
6 months notice + 12 months salary, which is what you are proposing, seems strictly worse to me than just 18 months salary and no notice.
Were those people not already having regular 1-on-1 meetings with a manager?
In many cases the manager is among those laid off. In fact some VPs and their entire org have been laid off.
It's crazy to me that companies are allowed to do this, given that staff are generally expected to be accommodating and give notice when they quit.
Expected, yes, required, not at all.
It is completely legal to just stop showing up one day.
In the US, different countries have processes more favorable to employees.
Even if you're being offered a very good package, being fired, regardless of how, is cold.
Depends on the circumstances. There are people who are ready to go any the time of a layoff if the terms are right.
> The layoffs are directly tied to Oracle’s aggressive and debt-heavy expansion into artificial intelligence infrastructure. 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.
Interesting that they admit that the layoff off is due to a pivot from software to hardware.
Very often people will defend these kind of layouts as the result of overhiring but then shouldn't the leadership that over hired 30K people also be held accountable?
I think this sucks for the people being laid off but what exactly should they be held accountable for?
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!)
If I am bad at my job, I get fired. For better or worse, this is what happens.
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.
> what exactly should they be held accountable for?
Bad leadership. Costing the company a ton of money and goodwill. Need I go on?
The wasted cashed is only part of the story.
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.
> Just think of the wasted man hours...
That's all money.
I view the opportunely cost, moral reduction, corporate politics, etc. differently then just money. I wanted to emphasize the long term effects of hiring then firing 30K has on businesses beyond what people typically focus on like payroll.
> but what exactly should they be held accountable for?
For over hiring 30K people.
making wrong decisions at work has no consequences for you? where do you work?
Politics.
Tech shareholders want executives to take risks building new products. Of course they’d prefer the products be successful but if the options are “hire 30k people 50% chance we have to lay them all off” or “don’t build new products” most tech shareholders want option 1.
where do you pull 50 percent number for oracle?
Even if the number is 10% they want the company to take risks. Big tech shareholders number one goal is not becoming IBM
anyone can get any random shower thought funded by this logic. Thats not how investing works.
Then why dont executives got punished by investors when they take risks and fail? The answer clearly is that investors want the risks to be taken and understand the downside that comes from taking risks.
Those super yatchs of larry have to be paid somewhow.
Is this related to the massive layoffs in the Mexico/GDL offices that happened a couple of days ago?
My LinkedIn was full of people opening for work. Pretty sad.
That CapEx must be really out of control. Soon enough they will be left with 200 data centers and 300 poor bastard running the ship.
Their free cash flows turned negative for the for the first time in forever.
No way this will end badly, when Alphabet (!!!) had to issue bonds for the first time in its history.
In 2 years' time we will look back fondly at the Global Financial Crisis.
"cold" is redundant/implied for Oracle.
not any colder than any other company. spotify did the same to me.
It feels like Oracle has made some massive strategic missteps in the past year. I’m curious if they can turn it around.
Like the OpenAI deal?
I mean bribing trump to get all those sweet government cloud contracts seems like it could end up being either the best bribe ever or a good way to get your company disbanded.
What "massive strategic missteps"? They continue to attract cloud customers coming from Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
They massively over committed to data center deals with debt. Safra leaving is also a big deal. Look at the stock price since she left.
Stock went down 50% in six months. If LE's AI bet is wrong, then they'll have to find some way to pay off the $60B in new debt.
Citations?
I used Google Gemini to confirm before I posted my comment. You're welcome to do the same.
“I used AI to confirm what I said” is not exactly the great comeback you think it is…
It wasn't a comeback, it was a truthful answer to your question.
I will wait for Netcraft to confirm.
Huh, layoffs in India? That's weird, because most tech companies are freezing headcount and laying off people in the US and increasing headcount in India. I wonder if that says something about the prospects of NetSuite, which is the org they've been cut from...
When I worked for Oracle in 2015 during my co-op there, IDC was generally just another office. NetSuite may be their focus, but I think they generally cover almost all Oracle software.
Between employers and employees, loyalty is only expected one way.
Not really. You can quit at any time, too. A job today isn’t (and shouldn’t be) any guarantee of a job tomorrow.
> A job today isn’t (and shouldn’t be) any guarantee of a job tomorrow.
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.
You want the government to force employers to provide a social safety net rather than the government providing it directly?
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.
> A job today isn’t (*and shouldn’t be*) any guarantee of a job tomorrow.
This is nonsense and shouldn’t be normalized.
In germany you have the opposite and it is also nonsense.
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?
You can quit your relationships at any time, too. That's a fundamental tenet of our society - consent to an interaction between free people can be withdrawn at any moment for any reason.
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.
Before I continue with this thread, how old are you? And have you ever been in a long time relationship with someone?
Another consequence of the AI boom. Not in the simplistic sense that “AI is replacing jobs,” but rather in the sense that companies are realizing they have overspent dramatically on a product that still is not strong enough to justify the scale of that investment or deliver a meaningful return.
"Any unvested restricted stock units, however, were forfeited immediately."
wow.
Isn't this normal? I thought that's how it typically works when an employee leaves a company with any method.
When laying people off, better companies will often accelerate vesting so that the departing employees get additional stock. For example, Google does this:
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...
Google did this in 2023, and this blog was a good PR move to make people think they are still doing this today.
OK but for most people a 16-week acceleration is still forfeiting 92% of unvested shares.
That's what the contract would typically say. But it's not uncommon to have accelerated vesting either when parting on good terms or with severance.
This is the unfair part. Quite often salary is reduced with the excuse of having stock options. So this is more like a cut in earned salary along with getting fired.
Since moving to NYC, I'm surprisingly close to cashflow neutral. The cost of living is crazy expensive here.
I'm for sure timing my exit based on the vesting schedule.
Just an FYI, if you're ok with not being in Manhattan or the cool parts of Brooklyn, it's really not that bad.
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.
Pretty vicious. As an employee I wouldn't consider working at Oracle or any company that's done this when there are plenty of companies which, despite layoffs sucking for everyone involved, at least compensate their employees decently when it happens.
That's the definition of "unvested"
Anyone evaluating compensation and stock options should understand vesting periods and what they mean so they're not surprised by something like this.
Ouch. Imagine being let go just a few weeks from vesting. Doesn't seem fair to let someone work for months and months in anticipation of their big prize and then yank it away at the last minute.
This is standard in every tech RSU vest schedule I have seen.
Yes, it's the standard in every legal doc I've ever seen too, but most companies have typically done some accelerated vesting as part of severance. Of course they don't have to, but it's a generally lower cost way of showing some good will.
I've helped a number of people with negotiations and reviews of their employment offers.
I would strongly disagree that accelerated vesting upon layoff is common. It's rare.
That's what the word "vested" means.
This was leaked weeks ago https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/oracle-layoffs-tech-...
How can we teach customers to never ever do business with oracle?
If it's anything like the layoffs I went through at my company, it's always nuanced.
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.
Ethical Dillemas.
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?
Release the patent and specify a very strict "free usage for anyone not named Larry Ellison, and violators will be punished to the fullest extent of the law" clause.
You'd probably get a few innocent people aren't the Larry Ellison from Oracle, but it's a start.
Warren's inquiry into meta, amazon layoffs would probably be a warning sign that all the large tech companies are up to no good. Anybody who operates tiktok is on my suspicion short list to start out with.
Let's not forget that ORACLE is actually an acronym.
Is it? Based on what I've seen online the company name was derived from a CIA project from the 1970s that the founders worked on, but it doesn't seem to be based on an acronym. There was an earlier unrelated project from the 1950s which used ORACLE as an acronym ("Oak Ridge Automatic Computer and Logical Engine").
If this is a joke, I clearly don't get it!
I think the intention was a joke: One Rich A*hole Called Larry Elison.
Ah okay, thanks!
I thought it is reverse of EL CARO (”expensive” in Spanish)
"One Rich A*[CENSORED] Called Larry Ellison"? : )
EDIT: LOL, I haven't expected to be downvoted for simply putting this in a way I like : )
this is the internet, not a Sunday service at your local mormon temple where swearing is banned. You can call Larry Ellison an asshole. There are few people more deserving of being called in asshole than he is.
> at your local mormon temple
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.
Not an insult at all - the mormons are explicitly against swearing of any and all forms, moreso than any group of people i've ever met. they self-censor in a very unique way, they are super clean in how they speak.
Well, if this helps to explain my actions a little - I have friends in Russia (and elsewhere), and very often our jokes/satires/alike come around censorship and "classified information". It’s a bit difficult to explain, but this way of writing messages - with [CENSORED], [DATA DELETED], [CLEARED] and the like - has become something of a meme (and I don't mean dunk memes, I mean cultural meme, yes) or constant joke among us. So for us, it’s a bit like a way of getting a laugh at censorship’s expense. I’m sorry if that was a bit out of context.
Let us not forget the poor Nasser, whose username when combined with the Scunthorpe problem becomes N***er. Text censorship is not always a win.
I'm getting so exhausted by these weird Reddit/social media posts where my brain says "wait, is 'corn' a typo? Why did they write 'k*ll'", and so on.
The algorithm did something explicit censorship never could.
I've heard of people working there that has cozy, low effort jobs, I'm not surprised. More surprised if took them this long.
What makes you sure that those are the ones laid off?
Not confident, but that's a good question. :)
Anytime there are mass layoffs like this, I like to look at the company career page and revel in the HR horseshit they jam down everyone’s throats: https://www.oracle.com/careers/
This one is so over the top, it begins to verge on satire.
At least they had a decency of avoiding the ambiguity of doing this during April 1st.
Does everyone at this point wonder, when is it going to be my time next at the company?
Every time I think: "do I live in a dystopia yet?" I get confirmation with these messages.
this is the cost of getting into the movie business
> The layoffs are directly tied to Oracle’s aggressive and debt-heavy expansion into artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The actual culprit.
Post should be hire. People are missing the point they traded out data center cost for human cost.
"Hire" an unfortunately ironic typo!
With those software engineers gone, they can now return to their core business: suing people.
Do people here believe in karma? I can't empathize with these management practices.
Context of scale....
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.
I find it bizarre than no one here seems to be commenting on the insane amount of capex redirected towards AI infrastructure build out as a reason for such decisions. I only hear bad product or covid over hiring but they seem like cope to my cynical mind.
Free up some $ for Skydance WB acquisition if needed?
Every other company sends out cold emails to prospects outside of the company, but Oracle is the only company to send out cold emails to their own employees. Gotta give it to them...
Are there any serious union efforts happening in big tech right now? It’s asinine to me that tech workers haven’t unionized at this point and that folks still fall head over heel just to get a job somewhere that would dispose of you without a second thought.
Am I the only one who, when they see this, feels that it's already tough for Oracle and that many companies betting on "AI" have finally understood the real risks involved, and that they risk simply failing? I mean, if Oracle is doing that, they're clearly having some problems. I don't know how to properly express that (I'm sorry, I'm not very fluent with English), but for me it seems as some kind of signal of potential start of the downfall. It's like they stepped on the path that leads them to fall, and while they still can change it, if they don't, they're doomed.
> feels that it's already tough for Oracle and that many companies betting on AI have finally understood the real risks involved
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.
> The main teams hit - RHS, SVOS, and NetSuite India - are associated with Cerner and NetSuite, both of which can serve to reduce some fat.
> 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...
you can get a gauge on Oracle debt by looking at CDS prices ( basically insurance that pays out if Oracle defaults on debt ). The link is from 4 months ago and it feels weird to link to reddit but CDS prices have risen quite a bit which implies loaning Oracle money is feeling riskier than it use to be. I don't know what the prices are now.
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.
> Yes, but, well... why do they need to do that at all
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...
> to stave off a "build with Accenture/WITCH+OpenAI/Anthropic" disruption.
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.
> Edit: can't reply
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.
HN rate limits replies for some or all users. Could be triggered automatically based on the controversiality of a post (I think) or some posters might get marked for it permanently by a moderator.
> Because the ERP and EHR market is almost entirely dominated by SAP and Epic.
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.
> 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.
Okay, understood. I work in entirely different field, so that's not my main speciality, to be honest. Thanks for explanation : )
So Ellison's big investors wouldn't back his ridiculous (-Disney) Warner Bros bid without him juicing the performance of Oracle in this way?
(thanks for the reply correcting the company)
Disney is also a target? Or are you confusing Warner Bros Discovery with Disney?
Yup, completely confusing Warner Bros and Disney. Thanks for catching that!
Why doesn't anyone ever mention project stargate when discussing these financial struggles of Oracle and OpenAI? That's your answer.
It's a trash source. No one has confirmed 30k job cuts. They just made it up.
I went looking and have to agree. There's no legit news source with any real numbers.
Perhaps this will be higher than the standard 10% cull, but I suspect not that much higher.
https://thenextweb.com/news/oracle-layoffs-march-2026
Usually the big tech companies leak the layoff numbers to the press themselves
rollingout.com is a clickbait site. Companies aren't leaking info to them.
Yahoo reported the same 30,000 number in February
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-may-slash-30-000-11441...
Billions of dollars, yet not for thee
The game where you, the people, will always be the loser
Don’t work for evil companies.
I tried to do this out of undergrad (graduated last year). Many companies do both good and bad things to me, some more good than bad. The "best of the best" companies to me require many years of experience and are still competitive. I didn't really want an entry level job at an "evil" company, so I'm going to go do a PhD (in something unrelated to my original interest in operating systems, as I don't want to be a 30k/yr automaton part of Meta's R&D machine).
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?
I honestly think is it bad for you to be that morally insistent against "evil" companies.
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.
> My point is: it's very, very, very hard to do this, especially with my set of interests
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.
Yes. I work at boring companies that are not evil instead. Never went to my local magnate (Comcast), left a company when they off/onshored entire teams to HCL slaves, etc.
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.
I used to work on software for non-profits. I found it fulfilling but it was hard to do the work since I found fullstack technically uninteresting (this is my own shortcoming).
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.
The key to not working for evil companies is to have more choice in who you do work for, which involves living way below your means so that you can save inordinate amounts of income and "retire" early - which is just code for "do the work I want to do for those I want to work for".
So exactly what for profit company is on the side of the angels?
Sometimes the lesser evil is truly a lesser evil.
Many of the startups I work with. We’re helping save the oceans and land. Purpose and profit are dream scenarios for me. It’s difficult in a capitalist economy but it exists.
Are those startups self funded or funded by VCs? If they are funded by VCs, it doesn’t matter what your company wants.
Why stick with for-profit companies? But on measure I'd say System76, n8n, Nextcloud, GridX, Odoo, Tuxedo, GitLab, Uplight, Aurora Solar, Bandcamp (maybe), Bitwarden, Canonical (maybe), Scribd, Arcadia, Wikihow. Basically any time you find yourself enjoying a product you're using, see who made it and if they're hiring.
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.
I'm not unemployed right now, but in the past have applied to literally every one of those companies and been declined from every one of those companies.
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!
Because for profits have the most employment opportunities? All of the companies named in replies to my initial comment hire a minuscule number of people.
If you're looking to scale, then you're looking for companies that scale, and if you're looking for companies that scale, you're not looking for angels. I used to think Cloudflare was an exception to this belief but today I'm not so sure.
Wait what's wrong with Cloudflare?
GitLab is for profit, isn't it?
I tried to focus on for-profit, but I'm just saying there's nothing wrong with non-profits either. In fact I don't think I consciously mentioned a non-profit but I might have.
your local food bank only has so many open positions
The more people who believe this, the easier it is for me to find a job at a place I respect, so thank you.
Ideally it would be "don't buy from Oracle", but we don't get to affect those decisions.
Ironically this would just fuel more layoffs.
The right thing to be said here. Oracle is trash. Would you expect rude idiots to be nice smart people all of a sudden?
List successful companies you would not define as evil.
37signals, vanguard, costco, proton, fastmail, mullvad vpn, framework, automattic, valve, patagonia, lego, linear, hetzner, tarsnap, ...
Ok, and when you apply for and get rejected from all those companies, what do you do then? Suppose you give me a list of literally every company you think is ok, and I were declined by all of them, then what?
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?
Valve has been making money hand over fist by getting kids addicted to gambling…
The snowball of government intervention has started rolling on them.
There are those who attribute evil to Lego, and they may have a case (historically or now).
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.
Valve takes 30% of revenue from developers because they have cornered the distribution market. Their margins on the steam store are probably second only to the apple store's, another heinously immoral product.
"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"
It is only a matter of time...
Costco maybe?
Pine64. ("Successful" doesn't have to mean "a megacorp".)
Just starting with "Not totally abhorrent and aiding the destruction of democracy in the US" would be fine.
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.
It's very very hard to do this because any public company will be evil in the name of 'shareholder value' EVERY.SINGLE.TIME.
Easier said than done. Most of us end up working for monsters if you go high enough up on the ladder.
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 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.
> Don’t work for evil 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.
Honestly, isnt this going to happen in every SAAS based company? My feeling is the bigger and more staff they have the more they will unload. I feel like its almost a necessity otherwise some 3-5 man team agentic first solution will just come with the same offering at 80-90% discount and eat their lunch.
I think its clear that a lot of companies over hired during the pandemic, and it seems like we are getting more out of our entire staff with AI tools.
Given that it makes sense to cut if the company doesn't have new product ideas to spend that excess resources.
Java isn't really uncommon
Could this be the start of the AI bubble bursting? There are so many rumors going around about data centers not being built, GPUs waiting to be installed, debt, and much more. Crazy times.
Follow the datacenter companies like Coreweave, when they start to have problems everyone else will start to have problems. Coreweave was bailed out by Nvidia once already and managed to get another $8B loan today. They and others are up to their eyeballs in debt so any trouble will show up first in companies like Coreweave trying to build the datacenters and bring them online.
There is no bubble
Love the confidence. The logic can catch up later.
When everyone says it is a bubble it's very likely not a bubble.
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.
The automobile bubble has lasted longer than expected but the horses are sure to get their jobs back soon.
At least you didn't go with electricity or the internet. Respect.
> RHS (Revenue and Health Sciences) — employees described a reduction in force of at least 30%, with 16 or more engineers from individual business units cut in a single action.
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.
This is AGI.
It's still a company worth $400B that makes $3B of profits and not even $20B of revenue.
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!
Oracle has >$60B in revenue and $16B in net income. It doesn’t seem crazily overvalued to me? Perhaps you were looking at quarterly statements?
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ORCL/financials/
Yeah plenty of suckers are trapped by Ellison’s downward facing grass cutting blades.
It’s a sad state of affairs. I mean Postgres is right over there!
Come work for me instead!
open ai sitll pouring money into oracle btw
an unceremonious email blast is more than I expected from Oracle
It's almost like Larry Ellison is a bad CTO and needs to step down.
companies overhired when money was cheap during covid to inflate their numbers and push their marketcap. since cheap money is gone, they have no incentive to keep the workforce. this has nothing to do with AI.
Disgusting.
Imagine slashing 30,000 jobs for a measly 2% share price bump.
Ellison owns something like 40% of Oracle which has a market cap of $400 billion. That measly 2% share bump earned him $3 billion today.
> Imagine slashing 30,000 jobs for a measly 2% share price bump.
One lost job is a tragedy. 30,000 jobs lost is statistics.
These are some of the richest and most profitable companies in history but they act like miserly slaves to their share price. We have created such a perverted incentive system.
There's an argument to be made about bad incentives driving large public companies.
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?
> 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.
I'm a shareholder. I'd prefer long term growth and sustainability rather than short term unsustainable pumps. When will they look out for the shareholders like me?
30000 jobs equals 10 billion dollars?
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
If larry hadn't sucked dRump's c*ck that hard, he'd not be in the free downfall that he is in today. He's dismantling America brick by brick. I hope he goes bankrupt soon.