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.
seanhunter 1 hours ago [-]
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.
DrJokepu 51 minutes ago [-]
There was also DB2. DB2 was (still is) an excellent database that IBM has completely fumbled.
chasil 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.
killerstorm 53 minutes ago [-]
What's about DB2? I have no experience with it but I guess IBM specifically designed it for enterprise-scale transaction processing workloads...
seanhunter 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
smoyer 31 minutes ago [-]
"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.
wilsonnb3 55 minutes ago [-]
Just curious, how was SQL Server perceived at the time compared to Sybase and Oracle? I know it originated as a port of Sybase.
seanhunter 52 minutes ago [-]
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.
wil421 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
chasil 8 minutes ago [-]
This is a very short comment on SQL Server's code improvements (post-Sybase).
The top comment in the post is a long complaint about the code quality of the Oracle database (worth a read).
zerkten 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
fauigerzigerk 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
trueno 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
fipar 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
reactordev 41 minutes ago [-]
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…
amiga386 10 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
jvanderbot 1 hours ago [-]
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.
mooreds 1 hours ago [-]
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.
You're right of course, but we only just met! You're the first of probably many counter examples.
rbanffy 51 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
InsideOutSanta 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
JackFr 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
iamjake648 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
geodel 40 seconds ago [-]
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.
amiga386 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
tombert 1 hours ago [-]
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.
steve1977 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
> 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.
rbanffy 50 minutes ago [-]
> Clojure
Apple should do more of that - they make cool computers, and should use cool languages.
tombert 48 minutes ago [-]
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.
jimbokun 31 minutes ago [-]
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.
Wowfunhappy 35 minutes ago [-]
Back in the day, Objective-C was considered a cool hip language, wasn't it?
jen20 1 hours ago [-]
One only need look at the job postings for Apple to see quite how common Java backend is there.
shrikant 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
The financial market infrastructure heavily relies on Java. Transactions at commercial banks across North America are mostly executed on Java codebases.
pjc50 50 minutes ago [-]
We use Java.
We have Oracle blocked at the router (!) to prevent anyone downloading the Oracle JDK and incurring the wrath of Oracle licensing.
bobthepanda 1 hours ago [-]
Java is not uncommon. Off the top of my head, a certain rainforest company and a lot of banks and EMR providers use it.
wredcoll 1 hours ago [-]
Amazon, among others, write a lot of java, but they want absolutely nothing to do with oracle licenses for java
tombert 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
vips7L 19 minutes ago [-]
HotSpot also has lots of things to speed up start time. Project Leyden has made a lot of advancements. AOTCache and crac etc.
mort96 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
bobthepanda 1 hours ago [-]
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.
burnte 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
coredog64 33 minutes ago [-]
They have their own OpenJDK distribution (Amazon Corretto)
layer8 31 minutes ago [-]
Look at who is making OpenJDK distributions besides Oracle: Amazon, Microsoft, Red Hat, IBM, Eclipse, SAP, … It’s being used everywhere.
ghurtado 28 minutes ago [-]
> The only developers I know who write Java
It sounds like your personal anecdote is particularly uninformative then.
nsxwolf 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
bjord 58 minutes ago [-]
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
losvedir 21 minutes ago [-]
What? What kind of ridiculous bubble are you in? Isn't Java one of the main languages at Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc?
lenerdenator 1 hours ago [-]
The question then becomes, does Java warrant the valuation Oracle has when the language itself is mostly FLOSS?
layer8 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
sleepybrett 1 hours ago [-]
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).
imglorp 1 hours ago [-]
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?
jollymonATX 1 hours ago [-]
They have not pulled the pin on the ZFS grenade yet, but I expect at some point it happens.
riffraff 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
jollymonATX 4 minutes ago [-]
Truenas has a pretty top tier clients logo pg. If they did go after them and win would not the clients also have an issue? IANAL of course but that could be a money land for them possiby.
kstrauser 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
uberduper 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
mort96 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
toomuchtodo 1 hours ago [-]
> 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
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
balderdash 18 minutes ago [-]
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).
ralphc 8 minutes ago [-]
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."
drillsteps5 25 minutes ago [-]
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).
trelane 60 minutes ago [-]
Java is used a lot, but not Oracle's version.
One of the best things Sun ever did was open sourcing Java.
post-it 1 hours ago [-]
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.
rbanffy 47 minutes ago [-]
> 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).
pydry 55 minutes ago [-]
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.
InsideOutSanta 32 minutes ago [-]
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?
lazide 1 hours ago [-]
It’s a common ‘large enterprise’ dependency often due to some internal CRN/Accounting/Compliance software, so I suspect you are right.
rbanffy 46 minutes ago [-]
People also marry the database when a significant amount of logic is in stored procedures.
mft_ 1 hours ago [-]
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.)
whynotmaybe 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
vachina 48 minutes ago [-]
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)
phendrenad2 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
kace91 1 hours ago [-]
>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.
Hizonner 1 hours ago [-]
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.
bilekas 1 hours ago [-]
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.
arethuza 1 hours ago [-]
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!
rockinghigh 1 hours ago [-]
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.
daneel_w 19 minutes ago [-]
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).
ventana 29 minutes ago [-]
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.
stego-tech 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
balderdash 13 minutes ago [-]
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
benced 40 minutes ago [-]
If you are buying GPUs today, they really are massively cheaper than other clouds.
kstrauser 32 minutes ago [-]
Until you become addicted, and then plan for the price to spike.
mr_mitm 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
saidnooneever 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
diogomqbm 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
paulddraper 1 hours ago [-]
NetSuite
There are alternatives, but NetSuite is the gold standard unless you want to fork over for SAP.
glenstein 1 hours ago [-]
Truth. I don't know of a better plug and play option than Netsuite for middle to big companies.
BoredPositron 1 hours ago [-]
It's like IBM for legacy business the German Banking System runs all oracle in the backend.
rbanffy 44 minutes ago [-]
Indeed. Oracle runs on z/OS as well.
gytisgreitai 1 hours ago [-]
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
vasco 1 hours ago [-]
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.
jeffbee 1 hours ago [-]
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.
newsoftheday 1 hours ago [-]
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.
kstrauser 30 minutes ago [-]
Well, that clinches it.
nemomarx 49 minutes ago [-]
you could post the citations?
DetroitThrow 1 hours ago [-]
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!
EliRivers 1 hours ago [-]
Why use Oracle indeed.... Here's a tale from somewhere around the year 2000.
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.
newsoftheday 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
thorncorona 1 hours ago [-]
Did you validate anything you have posted?
api 54 minutes ago [-]
Google Cloud's bandwidth pricing is much more reasonable. That's one thing I see. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon still charge the standard big cloud absolutely ludicrous bandwidth markup, stuff like $0.08/gig.
If you know what bandwidth actually costs, that's like $500/gallon gasoline.
Oracle is still expensive relative to wholesale bandwidth but it's at least not absolutely insane.
sleepybrett 1 hours ago [-]
'percentage based growth'
Sure if you have 5 customers and got 5 more, that would be 100% growth...
afavour 1 hours ago [-]
...so what citations did it provide?
faangguyindia 56 minutes ago [-]
Java sucks, it will consume lots of ram. Just write your services in Golang.
dafelst 2 hours ago [-]
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".
nimbius 2 hours ago [-]
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.
NitpickLawyer 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
colechristensen 47 minutes ago [-]
>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.
rbanffy 43 minutes ago [-]
> What on earth were those 30k people doing?!
Could be lawyers.
Would we be sad if they were lawyers?
jimbokun 16 minutes ago [-]
I hadn’t realized their stock price has been cut in half over the past year.
muskstinks 2 hours ago [-]
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.
edit: this source also includes data/graphs on stock price and bunch of other metrics, rather than just one number over time.
jonas21 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
dijksterhuis 6 minutes ago [-]
> harder to read and the page is half ads
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.
> 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...
> I don’t know why you would trust this more than AI.
because (1)
> 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.
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.
ai gives you the answer you want -- not the answer you actually need.
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.
throwaway5465 2 hours ago [-]
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.
_aavaa_ 2 hours ago [-]
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.
franktankbank 2 hours ago [-]
That's not how stocks are measured on wall street. They picked the dumb metric.
sethev 2 hours ago [-]
> They clearly did something crazy at corona
They acquired Cerner, which had ~30k employees.
ge96 2 hours ago [-]
Cool to be part of history I used to go into that office Innovations campus
Saw someone had a license plate say MPAGES ha
CoolGuySteve 2 hours ago [-]
Even at 100k employees I’m still dumbfounded by that number. What do all these people do all day?
hyperpape 2 hours ago [-]
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.
burningChrome 1 hours ago [-]
>> 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.
mikeyouse 2 hours ago [-]
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)
PyWoody 2 hours ago [-]
6. Lawyers
B1FF_PSUVM 1 hours ago [-]
"The first thing we do, let's AI all the lawyers" ?
raverbashing 1 hours ago [-]
Also their cloud
And all the supporting legal team of course.
hyperpape 39 minutes ago [-]
No better proof that they're a huge company than that I could forget about an entire public cloud offering. Good point.
rocmcd 2 hours ago [-]
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.
stackskipton 2 hours ago [-]
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.
CoolGuySteve 2 hours ago [-]
Sure but what did those guys do all day? 400 people is a lot of people
stackskipton 2 hours ago [-]
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"
odyssey7 2 hours ago [-]
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.
zdragnar 1 hours ago [-]
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.
chasd00 1 hours ago [-]
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.
irl_zebra 2 hours ago [-]
Creating powerpoints. Presenting the powerpoints to others in synchronous meetings.
kadushka 2 hours ago [-]
Probably had a lot of meetings
davidw 2 hours ago [-]
"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?!"
And the last comment by 'oraguy' - I hope he just picked up another id because "never work for Oracle again" ...
zipy124 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ra_men 2 hours ago [-]
I’m guessing development is so slow that they have stacks of teams working in parallel to accomplish what 1 team could normally.
shusaku 59 minutes ago [-]
When you send your database a query, who do you think is gathering those tables?
drowntoge 2 hours ago [-]
Well, whatever Oracle is doing, which brings us back to a question very similar to your original one.
hulitu 1 hours ago [-]
Solaris ?
jabl 51 minutes ago [-]
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..
Simboo 2 hours ago [-]
Me too. Anyone here to enlighten us?
mandevil 47 minutes ago [-]
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.
But the up curve at the end very clearly tracks with AI adoption and not Corona?
jimbokun 14 minutes ago [-]
So they are returning to 2015 headcount.
(EDIT: or 2021)
RobRivera 2 hours ago [-]
You need to pair hc with revenue, otherwise this data tells only one story, hc growth.
hbn 60 minutes ago [-]
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.
lenerdenator 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
Foobar8568 2 hours ago [-]
More employees to release less stuff....
Smell like consultancy.
gedy 2 hours ago [-]
Their profit doubled from 2010 to 2025 though, no?
2 hours ago [-]
gib444 1 hours ago [-]
Where's the annual revenue for context? Those numbers are almost useless alone.
consp 2 hours ago [-]
"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.
2 hours ago [-]
guywithahat 1 hours ago [-]
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.
lljk_kennedy 52 minutes ago [-]
Are you paid significantly more for your newfound productivity?
chasd00 19 minutes ago [-]
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.
belter 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
cyanydeez 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
gustavus 2 hours ago [-]
> this whole fascist, AI, far right nationalist takeover
Well that's a new take I haven't heard before. That the AI is actually a far right nationalist takeover....
That's an interesting perspective.
alephnerd 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
lenerdenator 51 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
SlinkyOnStairs 2 hours ago [-]
-
alephnerd 2 hours ago [-]
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.
rus20376 46 minutes ago [-]
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!
SlinkyOnStairs 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
renewiltord 2 hours ago [-]
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.
perching_aix 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
shepherdjerred 2 hours ago [-]
It’s not unethical to lay someone off
Zigurd 1 hours ago [-]
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.
arkaic 37 minutes ago [-]
Irresponsible, careless, negligent. No planning leads to all of this. Ultimately unethical from this point of view
js8 2 hours ago [-]
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.
shepherdjerred 8 minutes ago [-]
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.
BeetleB 1 hours ago [-]
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".
js8 1 hours ago [-]
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.
BeetleB 33 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
psychoslave 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
WalterBright 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
wiseowise 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
WalterBright 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
wiseowise 35 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
WalterBright 8 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
1 hours ago [-]
christkv 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah because marxists systems "take such good care" off people in comparison.
wiseowise 48 minutes ago [-]
Marxist systems don’t exist in real life.
christkv 9 minutes ago [-]
They do in some peoples heads as an utopian dream.
wiseowise 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
throwaway85825 2 hours ago [-]
It's an unpriced negative externality.
whamlastxmas 2 hours ago [-]
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
WalterBright 60 minutes ago [-]
Profit maximization makes for the high standard of living we enjoy.
wiseowise 47 minutes ago [-]
The one where one trip to ER can leave you on the street and students have six digit debts?
WalterBright 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
WalterBright 1 hours ago [-]
Mandated perpetual employment is bad for workers because the company will be extremely reluctant to hire and take on such an open-ended liability.
zulux 1 hours ago [-]
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.
whamlastxmas 2 hours ago [-]
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
WalterBright 58 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
Termination will take on a while different meaning of this turns out to come true on some Black Mirror future.
jedberg 58 minutes ago [-]
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.
jimkleiber 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
jedberg 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
julenx 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
tech_ken 30 minutes ago [-]
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.
ponector 23 minutes ago [-]
This is American way. There are no people, only resources.
guerrilla 20 minutes ago [-]
Literally, "Human Resources". Such a disgusting phrase.
potsandpans 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
jimkleiber 13 minutes ago [-]
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.
heraldgeezer 18 minutes ago [-]
* 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.
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.
danmaz74 30 minutes ago [-]
For the morale of remaining employees?
kibwen 22 minutes ago [-]
Honest question, why would they care? The rancher does not care about the morale of the cattle as they're being led to slaughter.
rustystump 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
viccis 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
chekibreki 2 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
IncreasePosts 11 minutes ago [-]
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
heraldgeezer 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
rossant 36 minutes ago [-]
"eliminate".
Right.
quelsolaar 2 hours ago [-]
Do not make the mistake of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison.
bcantrill 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Verdex 30 minutes ago [-]
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.
mwcampbell 21 minutes ago [-]
DTrace was absolutely a product of pre-Oracle Sun, not Oracle.
Verdex 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
secstate 1 hours ago [-]
Outside of 90s television, this might be the most universal reference I have in my life.
bombcar 2 hours ago [-]
The lawnmower does not have feedback, it does not stop just because it encounters human flesh.
chrismorgan 1 hours ago [-]
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.
1 hours ago [-]
razingeden 2 hours ago [-]
lawnmower don’t give a fuuuuuck
doublerabbit 2 hours ago [-]
Furries are a distaste but Larry Elison as such. It wouldn't surprise me.
1 hours ago [-]
keeganpoppen 2 hours ago [-]
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 / ¿)
dolphinscorpion 2 hours ago [-]
Unless you're being offered a very good package, any firing email is cold. Let's be honest
SoftTalker 2 hours ago [-]
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.
troyvit 2 hours ago [-]
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.
0cf8612b2e1e 2 hours ago [-]
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!
s3p 32 minutes ago [-]
I'd prefer this honestly. Would take 1-2 weeks to start updating my resume and listing out all accomplishments, relevant projects, etc.
secstate 1 hours ago [-]
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.
WalterBright 51 minutes ago [-]
The best strategy is to save up at least 6 months of runway.
WalterBright 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
lljk_kennedy 44 minutes ago [-]
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!
WalterBright 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
Gualdrapo 1 hours ago [-]
And traceability.
In a 1:1 meeting you could fire me and say a gazillion things and I'd forget 99.9% of them.
SoftTalker 55 minutes ago [-]
Or, with emotions flaring, could say something that becomes grounds for a wrongful termination or discrimination claim.
Waterluvian 2 hours ago [-]
Whatever you do, do not ever book a 1:1 meeting on a Friday afternoon for Monday morning titled, "The Future."
thinkingtoilet 2 hours ago [-]
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.
iwontberude 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like me on site, ADHD is a bitch, people probably think I don’t anything too.
Waterluvian 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Quarrelsome 2 hours ago [-]
I think its very impolite to not do it face-to-face.
toast0 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Quarrelsome 2 hours ago [-]
the practicalities of the issue don't stop it from being impolite.
HelloMcFly 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Quarrelsome 1 hours ago [-]
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.
HelloMcFly 12 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
lokar 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
01284a7e 1 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry but you work at Oracle. Terrible people. Very rude people. You should expect it.
Quarrelsome 40 minutes ago [-]
I don't, so I can still call how they do things: rude.
yodsanklai 31 minutes ago [-]
In the US, different countries have processes more favorable to employees.
lateforwork 2 hours ago [-]
What is the alternative? Have 30,000 meetings? How long will that take?
steve_adams_86 1 hours ago [-]
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.
IshKebab 34 minutes ago [-]
The realistic alternative is to regularly cut a smaller number of people, which is awful for morale.
Barbing 1 hours ago [-]
Can you imagine a company spending a long time on meetings?!
zerr 1 hours ago [-]
6+ months' notice with a severance package equal to at least an annual salary.
emmp 3 minutes ago [-]
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.
dpark 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
zerr 48 minutes ago [-]
Job hunting takes time. Also, they won't be deported in 30 days, along with their families.
dpark 39 minutes ago [-]
I can do a lot of job hunting with a year of severance.
Valid point about employees on visas though.
mitthrowaway2 40 minutes ago [-]
Were those people not already having regular 1-on-1 meetings with a manager?
epolanski 2 hours ago [-]
Even if you're being offered a very good package, being fired, regardless of how, is cold.
ghaff 1 hours ago [-]
Depends on the circumstances. There are people who are ready to go any the time of a layoff if the terms are right.
wnevets 46 minutes ago [-]
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?
jaccola 36 minutes ago [-]
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!)
wnevets 18 minutes ago [-]
> but what exactly should they be held accountable for?
For over hiring 30K people.
dominotw 20 minutes ago [-]
making wrong decisions at work has no consequences for you? where do you work?
silveira 5 minutes ago [-]
At least they had a decency of avoiding the ambiguity of doing this during April 1st.
kwanbix 2 hours ago [-]
Those super yatchs of larry have to be paid somewhow.
newsoftheday 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
modo_mario 2 hours ago [-]
What brought you to make that comment?
geon 2 hours ago [-]
Where did he say he's not worried about other billionaires?
newsoftheday 2 hours ago [-]
Where did he say that he is, that's the point. Otherwise their comment is disingenuous at best or engineered to be divisive against Oracle at worst.
wiseowise 55 minutes ago [-]
> at best or engineered to be divisive against Oracle at worst.
Oracle can go suck donkey balls for all I care, is this divisive enough for you?
2 hours ago [-]
scrollop 2 hours ago [-]
You want every discussion about one billionaire to be about all of them?
And you want to generalise this to every topic?
1 hours ago [-]
vincentastral 1 hours ago [-]
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.
asah 2 hours ago [-]
"cold" is redundant/implied for Oracle.
dominotw 18 minutes ago [-]
not any colder than any other company. spotify did the same to me.
renegade-otter 2 hours ago [-]
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.
strongpigeon 2 hours ago [-]
Their free cash flows turned negative for the for the first time in forever.
butterlesstoast 58 minutes ago [-]
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.
giancarlostoro 24 minutes ago [-]
I've heard of people working there that has cozy, low effort jobs, I'm not surprised. More surprised if took them this long.
bux93 2 hours ago [-]
"Any unvested restricted stock units, however, were forfeited immediately."
wow.
dtdynasty 1 hours ago [-]
Isn't this normal? I thought that's how it typically works when an employee leaves a company with any method.
tmoertel 1 hours ago [-]
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.
OK but for most people a 16-week acceleration is still forfeiting 92% of unvested shares.
16 minutes ago [-]
jvuygbbkuurx 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ivell 1 hours ago [-]
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.
garbawarb 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
bsimpson 1 hours ago [-]
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.
samuelknight 2 hours ago [-]
This is standard in every tech RSU vest schedule I have seen.
iamjake648 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
jeffbee 1 hours ago [-]
That's what the word "vested" means.
bipinrimal1 37 minutes ago [-]
Does everyone at this point wonder, when is it going to be my time next at the company?
throwaway85825 2 hours ago [-]
How can we teach customers to never ever do business with oracle?
kleiba 1 hours ago [-]
Between employers and employees, loyalty is only expected one way.
sneak 48 minutes ago [-]
Not really. You can quit at any time, too. A job today isn’t (and shouldn’t be) any guarantee of a job tomorrow.
wiseowise 44 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
paxys 51 minutes ago [-]
It's a trash source. No one has confirmed 30k job cuts. They just made it up.
Let's not forget that ORACLE is actually an acronym.
ZenoArrow 1 hours ago [-]
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!
dryarzeg 2 hours ago [-]
"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 : )
NickC25 2 hours ago [-]
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.
dryarzeg 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
NickC25 1 hours ago [-]
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.
dryarzeg 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Quarrelsome 2 hours ago [-]
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.
1 hours ago [-]
thomasgeelens 2 hours ago [-]
Every time I think: "do I live in a dystopia yet?" I get confirmation with these messages.
bix6 2 hours ago [-]
It feels like Oracle has made some massive strategic missteps in the past year. I’m curious if they can turn it around.
Steve16384 2 hours ago [-]
Like the OpenAI deal?
newsoftheday 2 hours ago [-]
What "massive strategic missteps"? They continue to attract cloud customers coming from Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
bix6 2 hours ago [-]
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.
AptSeagull 2 hours ago [-]
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.
raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago [-]
Citations?
newsoftheday 2 hours ago [-]
I used Google Gemini to confirm before I posted my comment. You're welcome to do the same.
raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago [-]
“I used AI to confirm what I said” is not exactly the great comeback you think it is…
newsoftheday 1 hours ago [-]
It wasn't a comeback, it was a truthful answer to your question.
1 hours ago [-]
bombcar 2 hours ago [-]
I will wait for Netcraft to confirm.
xvxvx 2 hours ago [-]
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/
steve_adams_86 1 hours ago [-]
This one is so over the top, it begins to verge on satire.
amelius 1 hours ago [-]
With those software engineers gone, they can now return to their core business: suing people.
rishabhaiover 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
shmerl 2 hours ago [-]
> The layoffs are directly tied to Oracle’s aggressive and debt-heavy expansion into artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The actual culprit.
axpy906 47 minutes ago [-]
Post should be hire. People are missing the point they traded out data center cost for human cost.
jaccola 33 minutes ago [-]
"Hire" an unfortunately ironic typo!
fredgrott 55 minutes ago [-]
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.
codemog 2 hours ago [-]
Don’t work for evil companies.
kaladin-jasnah 2 hours ago [-]
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?
BeetleB 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
calvinmorrison 2 hours ago [-]
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.
kaladin-jasnah 2 hours ago [-]
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.
bombcar 2 hours ago [-]
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".
raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago [-]
So exactly what for profit company is on the side of the angels?
bix6 2 hours ago [-]
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.
troyvit 1 hours ago [-]
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.
raw_anon_1111 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
troyvit 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
BeetleB 1 hours ago [-]
GitLab is for profit, isn't it?
troyvit 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
liveoneggs 2 hours ago [-]
your local food bank only has so many open positions
troyvit 1 hours ago [-]
The more people who believe this, the easier it is for me to find a job at a place I respect, so thank you.
Steve16384 2 hours ago [-]
Ideally it would be "don't buy from Oracle", but we don't get to affect those decisions.
WarmWash 2 hours ago [-]
Ironically this would just fuel more layoffs.
01284a7e 1 hours ago [-]
The right thing to be said here. Oracle is trash. Would you expect rude idiots to be nice smart people all of a sudden?
newsoftheday 2 hours ago [-]
List successful companies you would not define as evil.
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.
antonymoose 2 hours ago [-]
Valve has been making money hand over fist by getting kids addicted to gambling…
throwaway85825 1 hours ago [-]
The snowball of government intervention has started rolling on them.
ivell 1 hours ago [-]
"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"
It is only a matter of time...
jjice 2 hours ago [-]
Costco maybe?
mrguyorama 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
fsflover 2 hours ago [-]
Pine64. ("Successful" doesn't have to mean "a megacorp".)
georgemcbay 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
chasd00 31 minutes ago [-]
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.
MattDamonSpace 1 hours ago [-]
There is no bubble
diehunde 1 hours ago [-]
Love the confidence. The logic can catch up later.
zarzavat 29 minutes ago [-]
The automobile bubble has lasted longer than expected but the horses are sure to get their jobs back soon.
diehunde 9 minutes ago [-]
At least you didn't go with electricity or the internet. Respect.
neya 2 hours ago [-]
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...
sublinear 1 hours ago [-]
Why doesn't anyone ever mention project stargate when discussing these financial struggles of Oracle and OpenAI? That's your answer.
ozzafar 52 minutes ago [-]
Java isn't really uncommon
dryarzeg 2 hours ago [-]
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.
alephnerd 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
dryarzeg 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
alephnerd 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
dryarzeg 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
lotsofpulp 50 seconds ago [-]
HN rate limits replies for some or all users.
dryarzeg 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
dryarzeg 1 hours ago [-]
> 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 : )
WhereIsTheTruth 2 hours ago [-]
Billions of dollars, yet not for thee
The game where you, the people, will always be the loser
lenerdenator 60 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
micromacrofoot 35 minutes ago [-]
open ai sitll pouring money into oracle btw
passive 1 hours ago [-]
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)
bhouston 1 hours ago [-]
Disney is also a target? Or are you confusing Warner Bros Discovery with Disney?
passive 1 hours ago [-]
Yup, completely confusing Warner Bros and Disney. Thanks for catching that!
10ca1d1me 1 hours ago [-]
Come work for me instead!
rvz 2 hours ago [-]
This is AGI.
thiago_fm 2 hours ago [-]
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!
strongpigeon 2 hours ago [-]
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?
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!
yieldcrv 1 hours ago [-]
an unceremonious email blast is more than I expected from Oracle
josefritzishere 1 hours ago [-]
It's almost like Larry Ellison is a bad CTO and needs to step down.
nunez 1 hours ago [-]
Disgusting.
gethly 2 hours ago [-]
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.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2 hours ago [-]
Imagine slashing 30,000 jobs for a measly 2% share price bump.
criddell 2 hours ago [-]
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.
TwoNineA 2 hours ago [-]
> Imagine slashing 30,000 jobs for a measly 2% share price bump.
One lost job is a tragedy. 30,000 jobs lost is statistics.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway613746 2 hours ago [-]
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kjksf 2 hours ago [-]
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?
wiseowise 39 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
47 minutes ago [-]
2OEH8eoCRo0 2 hours ago [-]
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?
2 hours ago [-]
kjksf 2 hours ago [-]
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bcrosby95 2 hours ago [-]
Imagine thinking people losing their primary income source (usually 100% of it) is remotely comparable to the share price of a single company not going up 2%.
simianwords 1 hours ago [-]
If you can’t lay off people then the economy won’t run and it affects everyone.
Sure you can show easy empathy for the employees but this is how economy runs. A static economy where layoffs are hard or punished will lose to a more dynamic one.
wiseowise 38 minutes ago [-]
> Sure you can show easy empathy for the employees but this is how economy runs. A static economy where layoffs are hard or punished will lose to a more dynamic one.
Is that why workers are generally happier in Europe even though on paper their economy loses?
kjs3 2 hours ago [-]
I think we have a new high water mark for "false equivalence".
lucasay 43 minutes ago [-]
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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.
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.
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 came here to say that if you want to understand Oracle's value, think IBM with less history.
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.
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.
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).
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.
ibms docs and help sites suck butt tho.
In my experience in the late 90s and early 00s, besides Oracle and Sybase, DB/2 and Informix were also regarded as good. Oracle was considered the best though.
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.
The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that 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...
We all have different circles. I work for a bank and the bulk of the LOB code here is Java (or something that runs under a JVM). There are no Oracle databases as far as I know, but my visibility is limited.
Also, Oracle Applications for things like HR.
When something has been there for 20+ years switching costs are big.
Typically I see folks using the Amazon Corretto java distribution.
> Typically I see folks using the Amazon Corretto java distribution.
It means nothing. ~90% of core development of JDK and JVM is done by Oracle employees and it is shared by all distributions by various vendors.
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.
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...
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.
Apple should do more of that - they make cool computers, and should use cool languages.
To be fair, I know people hate on it, but I honestly do kind of think Objective C is kind of a cool language. I think it's ugly but I think the message-passing style semantics are kind of neat.
We have Oracle blocked at the router (!) to prevent anyone downloading the Oracle JDK and incurring the wrath of Oracle licensing.
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 only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
Well, the writer said the only Java devs THEY KN OW, not all Java devs.
It sounds like your personal anecdote is particularly uninformative then.
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
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.
Why would go $58B in debt to support a new feature that no one will want after alienating everyone above?
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.
ZFS, in a vacuum is fantastic. But it’s not in a vacuum.
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
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).
One of the best things Sun ever did was open sourcing Java.
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.
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).
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.
e.g. I was unsurprised when I spotted that Novartis (no connection, btw) was deep in with Oracle. Big pharma, lots of money, typically-clueless-big-org-IT-leadership, etc.
(LOL, Novartis also uses SAP.)
So if you have a lot of money and don't want to take any risk you go the oracle route. It's not the best product today, but you won't have any surprise, except cost, that you can justify because it's oracle.
Which is the same as using a tank to go grocery shopping because you're afraid of an accident on the way. You need everything in house to support a thank, special garage, specifically trained crew, specific fuel...
And it's way harder to drive than a civic.
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.
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!
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.
There are alternatives, but NetSuite is the gold standard unless you want to fork over for SAP.
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.
If you know what bandwidth actually costs, that's like $500/gallon gasoline.
Oracle is still expensive relative to wholesale bandwidth but it's at least not absolutely insane.
Sure if you have 5 customers and got 5 more, that would be 100% growth...
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".
- overpricing the database led to a predictable exodus and new players with often times better performance.
- acquisition of MySQL led to a predictable exodus and new players like maria with often times better performance.
- Oracle cloud arrived late to spectacular skepticism and low user turnout from customers who had been burned by high cost and users burned from decisions like the death of opensolaris. it exists on federal life support these days by the grace of the prevailing administration.
- more than 80 products, with hundreds of thousands of patches and updates, yet no coherent or meaningful reform of the build for more than forty years. DB 19c still ships broken for redhat 9 as a means of driving users to oracle linux, and patching the installer is a 1970s experience in itself. DB 23's greatest improvement has been to tack the letters "AI" onto it to chum what shallow AI waters Oracle deigns to tread outside of an investment portfolio.
- dumping cash into oracle enterprise linux despite it only having around 2500 active corporate users.
this is nearly 20% of the company being laid off.
Yeah, from small interactions over the past two decades, I have no idea how they could have been so bad while employing so many people. What on earth were those 30k people doing?! Their solutions were crap for ages.
There is a significant correlation between how many people you employ and how much nothing you accomplish. It means you've gotten big enough to survive long bouts of doing something and achieving nothing with large amounts of people.
Could be lawyers.
Would we be sad if they were lawyers?
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
> I don’t know why you would trust this more than AI.
because (1)
> 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.
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.
ai gives you the answer you want -- not the answer you actually need.
[0]: https://zacksdata.com
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.
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 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.
They acquired Cerner, which had ~30k employees.
Saw someone had a license plate say MPAGES ha
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.
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.
And all the supporting legal team of course.
Sure, 100,000 people is a lot, but Oracle also does a lot.
[0] https://www.oracle.com/products/
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.
Last F50 I was at did a PeopleSoft migration. We probably had 400 Oracle employees pass through the doors over 2 years helping to get it off the ground.
Most Enterprises don't just buy software and that's it. They buy software + support to implement it for their business.
This is extremely customizable software that is designed to pretty much run your entire business and touched by over 40k employees. It requires a ton of care and feeding. There is plenty of people who dedicate themselves to PeopleSoft. Zip Recruiter is showing 5 jobs near me for "PeopleSoft Administrator"
So I suspect the answer is: they need _at least_ 10x as many engineers to get things done as you would expect. Maybe more like 50x
And the last comment by 'oraguy' - I hope he just picked up another id because "never work for Oracle again" ...
If they do cut back to their size before the acquisition, while continuing to try and support the EMR, they will be doing a lot more with fewer employees.
The acquisition has already had a lot of bad consequences: https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-cerner-health-larry-e...
(EDIT: or 2021)
If you want to use AI to find information like this, tell it to grab you a source and post that.
I have friends there who have described how bare-bones things were. This is only going to make it worse.
I would not patronize a hospital system that intended on staying on Cerner Millennium EMRs for the foreseeable future. If things were bad before, they'll only be worse now.
Replacing jobs is a bit of a misnomer, but it's certainly allowing us to build out more features in shorter amounts of time.
Well that's a new take I haven't heard before. That the AI is actually a far right nationalist takeover.... That's an interesting perspective.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
At least this is in the case in the US. What you are saying might be true in other cultures.
The role an employer plays in societies varies from culture to culture, but note that in many cultures, it is "just a job".
Like when a traumatised kid never loved by the parents concludes that life is harsh and love doesn't exist, so better be tough.
That's a lot of stuff you're saying. Not what I'm saying.
Drama is just in the head of people melted in the ambient narrative, sure.
It's no more immoral than you deciding to buy from Safeway, even though you'd been buying from Fred Meyer before.
Also, employees can quit anytime, no notice required. Nobody is obliged to work.
Irrelevant to the topic at hand. Don’t give me a sob story about mom and pop shop, we’re talking about a trillion dollar company.
> Also, employees can quit anytime, no notice required. Nobody is obliged to work.
Okay? What’s your point?
The grocery stores were run by national chains. Starbucks is global.
> What’s your point?
It's symmetric. Companies employ at will, and workers work at will.
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.
Markets are a chaotic system and the needs of a business must constantly adapt - or they go out of business.
I was able to send internal only emails until 1pm, and then it logged me off and the computer was a brick.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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 European, I never realized that this is allowed under US labor law. That is absolutely insane.
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.
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
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.
Right.
For example, a company I knew in the 80s had a wholly owned subsidiary. It was losing money, so it was decided to close the subsidiary. Management decided that they'd be nice guys, and notified the subsidiary that it would be closed in 90 days and then everyone would be laid off.
90 days later, management arrived to close the facility. It was empty, stripped clean of everything. Not a lick of work was done in the 90 days, and nobody was there. There were reports that trucks had come to the loading dock, and took everything they could carry.
The cost of that led to the collapse of the company.
I agree it was poor management to not oversee what was happening.
This is why management does not give advance notice of layoffs. Usually, when a person gets laid off, their first notion of it is a security guard is there to help them fill a box with their personal items and escort them out.
Nobody likes this, but it's the inevitable result of a bad apple now and then. For example, most people aren't thieves, but banks still need security guards because there are thieves.
In a 1:1 meeting you could fire me and say a gazillion things and I'd forget 99.9% of them.
If the system in which you operate does not attempt to measure this, I think it's worth it for anyone to measure it themselves. We can so easily be overconfident or underconfident. Collect the data and see the kinds of things you've actually been accomplishing over a year.
I'll feel like I'm getting nothing done, and then I look at the year's changelogs and realize I'm actually doing just fine for where I want to be.
If you don't do it simultaneously, you're going to hear by rumor rather than by official email, which is IMHO worse.
If you do it simultaneously, everyone will know something is up, because there's never simultaneous global meetings.
Is it polite to let people stew for hours, or days, as virtual meetings spread across the company to convey the news in person? It is polite to schedule those meetings all at once with the implications clear - how is that any different than just confirming it an email? Is that better or worse than scheduling such calls with short notice, so that every employee must wonder for days (maybe weeks, depending on staffing and leverage model) whether they still have a job, when that information could have been communicated immediately to allow for immediate preparations?
You and I as senior managers might both apply the golden rule in this situation, but that could lead to different decisions.
Oracle as a company are cowardly and rude and the practicalities are simply an excuse. There's clearly one "better way" which is to put a name at the end of the email, for perhaps Larry himself to take responsibility as he should.
If anything the practicalities show how arbitrary the decision was. Checking the Oracle subreddit we got people with "exceeds expectations" as their average still getting culled. It would appear how they decided upon the cuts reflects on how they have performed them. With all the sophistication of a child in a candy shop trying to buy more candy than their piggy bank can afford and then just dropping the excess on the floor, walking away and trying to forget that it ever happened.
I am communicating my own sincerely held belief on general practices with large-scale layoffs, and my sincere disagreement with the black-and-white declarative than a mass email is definitely worse than individual conversations. Reasonable people can disagree.
I am not evaluating the full list of circumstances in this specific situation as I wouldn't be able to even if I were interested in doing so. If we were taking wagers, I'd wager my opinion of the Ellisons is at least as negative as yours independent of anything to do with this story.
> There's clearly one "better way" which is to put a name at the end of the email, for perhaps Larry himself to take responsibility as he should.
Completely agree with that, though ultimately it should be many names, not just one.
“Hey, we’re going to fire you in 6 months. Just a heads up.”
Nah. Give me the year of salary and send me home today. Better for the employee and for the company than pointlessly dragging it out. Again, this is assuming generous severance.
Valid point about employees on visas though.
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!)
For over hiring 30K people.
Oracle can go suck donkey balls for all I care, is this divisive enough for you?
And you want to generalise this to every topic?
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.
wow.
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...
I'm for sure timing my exit based on the vesting schedule.
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.
Perhaps this will be higher than the standard 10% cull, but I suspect not that much higher.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-may-slash-30-000-11441...
If this is a joke, I clearly don't get it!
EDIT: LOL, I haven't expected to be downvoted for simply putting this in a way I like : )
Sounds like a kind of insult to me. I'm not related to them in any way.
And, to be honest, I'm just trying to kind of follow the guidelines. There's too much of bad news and negativity around me, I'm fed with it already, thanks. I want to have fun if it's possible.
The actual culprit.
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.
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?
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.
No i won't make 350K as a dev. Yes i will have a paltry middle class existence while we still have a profession called IT.
Finding a balance in that is difficult. I have seen that it might be easier to find a societally good job the less technically deep the job gets. Networking research seems to be both technically interesting and connected to societal impact (eg. because of the ties to censorship, security, net neutrality etc)
It seems hard to continue doing this sort of research after your PhD though, as in both your school name matters immensely (i.e. you're screwed if you didn't go to Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, or MIT) and so does your publishing success to land a research job, which seems like an enormous task.
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.
Automattic has apparently gone insane, but that's not the same as evil.
Valve might be the closest to a HN-agree on "good company" - and even that has a comment below mine attributing gambling to them.
It is only a matter of time...
Instead of working for Zuck or Google or Larry, you can work for Garmin, Shopify, Visa and Mastercard, most banks (they are soulless but some aren't always evil), grocery chains, pretty much any local business, car companies, non-weapon or surveillance based government work, IDEXX, hell even Apple imo and I dislike Apple, nearly every business that isn't "Tech"
Basically just stop pretending that the industry is only Google, Facebook, AWS, Microsoft, and Oracle. There's something like millions of jobs that aren't in those companies.
I'm certainly not a fan of Oracle (or the wider scale damage the Ellisons have been doing), but I also can't bring myself to be so flippant when an action this large is going to cause untold amounts of personal tragedies.
See, for example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/employeesOfOracle/comments/1s8m58p/...
Today this unfortunate guy, tomorrow perhaps me.
This has nothing to do with AI, whose capex largely falls under Oracle Cloud.
The main teams hit - RHS, SVOS, and NetSuite India - are associated with Cerner and NetSuite, both of which are the kinds of legacy SaaS apps that are most likely to see reduced spend in the world today - it's cheaper to hire Accenture/PWC/Deloitte or WITCH combined with Anthropic or OpenAI to build and manage your own custom in-house or use that threat to purchase an actual market leader in those categories like Veeva or SAP respectively.
> reduce some fat
Yes, but, well... why do they need to do that at all? I mean, what made them make this decision right now? I think it was mentioned in the article - they're in debt because of their AI data centers projects:
> Oracle has taken on $58 billion in new debt within just two months.
Although...
> All of this is happening even as the company posted a 95% jump in net income — reaching $6.13 billion — last quarter.
Still,
> According to analysis from TD Cowen, the job cuts are expected to free up between $8 billion and $10 billion in cash flow — money the company urgently needs to fund a massive buildout of AI data centers.
And they need a lot of resources to fund that, because:
> Oracle to Invest U.S. $2 Billion in AI and Cloud Infrastructure in Germany (2025) [1]
> Oracle unveils $10B data center expansion plan (plans for 2025) [2]
While they're having some problems now:
> Oracle and OpenAI End Plans to Expand Flagship Data Center (Bloomberg) [3]
It's just a few examples; I'm sure if you will dig deeper you will find more. Some sources suggest that "Oracle plans to invest up to $50 billion in 2026 to expand its AI data center infrastructure", but I'm not sure if it's true and if you can trust them, so I'll leave it there. They're trying to optimize because they're in debt, and still they seem to expand that debt even more.
[1] https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-invests-two-...
[2] https://www.channeldive.com/news/oracle-capex-spike-cloud-ai...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-06/oracle-an...
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.
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.
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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...
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.
And still they were trying to compete, weren't they?
> Which is largely attributed to the growth in spend on Oracle Cloud.
That's exactly what I'm trying to say. Why have their cloud services are suddenly started to make more money, roughly speaking? And at the same time, what is (seemingly) the main reason for their recent debt increase? They do cut out the fat, yes, I agree, but what exactly pushed them to do it right now? What made them to act so quickly and urgently? That's what I'm trying to say.
Okay, understood. I work in entirely different field, so that's not my main speciality, to be honest. Thanks for explanation : )
The game where you, the people, will always be the loser
Hm. So, likely old Cerner operations.
Y'know, the ones that keep EMR systems running.
Ol' Larry just doesn't see the value proposition in making sure that your health information is accurate.
As a side, the fact that you can just slash someone's job without any warning needs to be addressed by law.
(thanks for the reply correcting the company)
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!
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ORCL/financials/
It’s a sad state of affairs. I mean Postgres is right over there!
One lost job is a tragedy. 30,000 jobs lost is statistics.
But it's way less satisfying that emotional appeals.
The base of your statement is just wrong.
A company is a legal fiction. It doesn't have thoughts, wants, desires. It's not rich or poor. It's a piece of paper. It's an entry in government database.
What is not a fiction is Oracle's owners i.e. shareholders.
They are not rich. Majority of them, either direct owner of stock or in-direct owners via pension plans etc. are like you and me. They are not rich and the price of Oracle shares can be a difference between them being able to pay rent today or being able to retire tomorrow.
Those people rightfully care about the share price.
The executive are correctly responding to wishes of owners of the company by managing it to make a profit and therefore keep the stock price high.
What in the above chain do you find objectionable?
That millions of Americans investing in public companies depend on and therefore care about stock price?
That management of public companies is correctly responding to demands of owners of those companies by managing companies for profit?
Or maybe you just want to skip to the end of the line and seize means of production from private citizens to bask in the warm glow of collectivism?
Interesting how “American dream” was forgotten and now it’s either under corporatist boot or collectivism.
Sure you can show easy empathy for the employees but this is how economy runs. A static economy where layoffs are hard or punished will lose to a more dynamic one.
Is that why workers are generally happier in Europe even though on paper their economy loses?