The bulk of the comments in here are focused on comparing Larry Ellison to a lawn mower, so I'll try a new tack and say that I'm genuinely confused at what the value prop of Oracle is.
Given the history of their business model being licensing of important databases that are hard to switch off of, I've actually made a point to avoid using Oracle as much as possible (even so far as to leave MySQL when they acquired it, and I've never started a fresh project in Java, which they used to drive a lawsuit they had with Google).
From my chair, they make an expensive database they try to sell to golf executives. There are innumerable equal (better?), free alternatives, and most startups are founded by broke coders in bedrooms that choose those instead and stick with the devil they know. And they have an un-competitive cloud service? Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle for, I'm genuinely curious.
Short answer: today I think there is genuinely nothing that anyone should use oracle for, but their database used to be seriously far ahead of the competition.
A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2 databases that worked for use cases where you needed high availability and vertical scalability and those were Oracle and Sybase and Oracle was really the only game in town if you actually wanted certain features like online backups and certain replication configurations.
At the time, MySQL existed and was popular for things like websites but had really hard scalability caps[1] and no replication so if you wanted HA you were forced to go to oracle pretty much. Postgres also wasn't competitive above certain sizes of tables that seem pretty modest now but felt big back then, and you used to need to shut postgres access down periodically to do backups and vacuum the tables so you couldn't use it for any sort of always-on type of use case.
Oracle also had a lot of features that now we would use other free or cloud-hosted services for like message queues.
[1] in particular if you had multiple concurrent readers they would permanently starve writers so you could get to a situation where everyone could read your data but you could never update. This was due to a priority inversion bug in how they used to lock tables.
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.
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.
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.
Oracle and Java are deeply embedded in US gov work. How deep? Let's just say a large number of classified developer jobs hire for Java. Ellison has been a huge proponent of a surveillance state, and that likely ingratiates him with certain three letter agencies.
The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
My employer is actively hiring java engineers and we don't "take pictures of things from far away".
There are vibrant java user's groups all around the world. There are many java community conferences. The most recent redmonk language rankings[0] show java at #3.
> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
We all have different circles. I work for a bank and the bulk of the LOB code here is Java (or something that runs under a JVM). There are no Oracle databases as far as I know, but my visibility is limited.
The financial market infrastructure heavily relies on Java. Transactions at commercial banks across North America are mostly executed on Java codebases.
I worked for a drug discovery company doing Java [1] since we were using Kafka Streams very liberally, but everything was done with the OpenJDK Temurin distribution. It was drilled into our heads on the first day do not install anything from Oracle. I think they were afraid of some weird lawsuit unless they bought an expensive license.
I totally get it, but it made me a bit sad because they were even weary of something like GraalVM for some projects where startup time was becoming an issue; I think the Community Edition for GraalVM would have been fine but I think they had this "we don't touch anything with an the Oracle name directly attached with a ten foot pole". Which is totally fair.
[1] It's not hard to find which one but I politely ask that you do not post it here in relation to this thread.
I think that overstates, there is a lot of java in the enterprise still, it's lose share to golang and typescript and in certain cases rust, but it's still around and doing just fine (to my annoyance).
Most enterprises don't seem to be running ZFS with Linux, and the only large target using FreeBSD I can think of is Netflix, but AFAIR they don't use ZFS either.
Oracle sues when there's $$$ to make, but I don't think ZFS would warrant them much.
> Why would go $58B in debt to support a new feature that no one will want after alienating everyone above?
Short term shareholder 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Oracle has made a large bet on being a cloud, but nobody wants their terrible cloud, which is reflected in their dollar-store prices. They staffed up and built facilities that they can't sell so I am not surprised they are now swinging the axe.
I posted a response from Gemini where I asked Gemini, "Do you have citations proving or disproving whether Oracle Cloud is still attracting cloud customers away from Azure, AWS and GCP?" and it seems it disagrees with your "nobody wants their terrible cloud" view.
Clearly you are in USA. It’s not how their business works and Startups are not their target. Lobbying governments across the world with questionable practices are
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.
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!
Not actually of "AI is replacing jobs", more "oh shit we are spending too much and the product isn't good enough for us to ever make a return on our absurd over-investment".
Blame it on whatever you like. oracle has been a rudderless leech for nearly 30 years now.
- overpricing the database led to a predictable exodus and new players with often times better performance.
- acquisition of MySQL led to a predictable exodus and new players like maria with often times better performance.
- Oracle cloud arrived late to spectacular skepticism and low user turnout from customers who had been burned by high cost and users burned from decisions like the death of opensolaris. it exists on federal life support these days by the grace of the prevailing administration.
- more than 80 products, with hundreds of thousands of patches and updates, yet no coherent or meaningful reform of the build for more than forty years. DB 19c still ships broken for redhat 9 as a means of driving users to oracle linux, and patching the installer is a 1970s experience in itself. DB 23's greatest improvement has been to tack the letters "AI" onto it to chum what shallow AI waters Oracle deigns to tread outside of an investment portfolio.
- dumping cash into oracle enterprise linux despite it only having around 2500 active corporate users.
Yeah, from small interactions over the past two decades, I have no idea how they could have been so bad while employing so many people. What on earth were those 30k people doing?! Their solutions were crap for ages.
It's tricky to pick an end-of-decade year also - recessions tend to happen +/- 2 years of the end of each decade in the USA, or at least have done since records began in the 19th century. For example 2010 was recovery over 2008/2009's bust. It's not like comparing March to Ma4ch for a crude seasonal adjustment.
You did the Python right but the analysis wrong. Looking at it on a graph you can see that interpreting a single growth rate for the entire period (even if you stop pre-covid) doesn’t make sense.
You can see linear growth from 2010-2017. Then slow decline or at best a flatline from 2018-2021. Then they went crazy in 2022-2025.
Now if we just do 162k - 30k we are back to 132k, basically same ballpark as pre-COVID.
1. They maintain and sell one of the largest relational databases.
2. They're the primary maintainer of one of the largest programming languages.
3. They do tons of HR/ERP type software.
4. They have a supply chain division (my company is a direct competitor, and we have 2000 employees--it's a drop in the bucket, but a few thousand here, a few thousand there and it starts to add up. Afaik, their supply chain org is bigger than ours).
5. Other things I probably don't know about.
Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency, which swells the number of workers by a lot.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not remotely a fan, I like to quote Bryan Cantrill's rant. However, they do a lot of things.
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)
>> 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.
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.
Oracle sells alot of software that is accompanied by hordes of consultants to set it up.
Last F50 I was at did a PeopleSoft migration. We probably had 400 Oracle employees pass through the doors over 2 years helping to get it off the ground.
Most Enterprises don't just buy software and that's it. They buy software + support to implement it for their business.
Write code to connect this system with that system. Teach people what setting does what. Integrate with Entra ID. Create custom reports that hordes of Executive on our side want. Scale out the system from undersized nodes we originally gave it. That's all I picked up by just listening to them. I wasn't involved in the project, just sat nearby listening to it.
This is extremely customizable software that is designed to pretty much run your entire business and touched by over 40k employees. It requires a ton of care and feeding. There is plenty of people who dedicate themselves to PeopleSoft. Zip Recruiter is showing 5 jobs near me for "PeopleSoft Administrator"
The training team and what's called 'Change Management' for an F50 company that's spread across the globe implementing a new application like an ERP could be 100 people by itself. It's extremely complex and hard to do those kinds of projects which is why many ERP migrations take a decade to complete if not fail entirely.
"Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?!"
Almost certainly a large amount of support staff, so management/HR/IT etc... Then you've got your customer account managers, sales, lawyers/finance etc.... Given they do an insane amount of B2B and government sales I can see this being easy to reach tbh. Governement contract processes require an insane amount of bureacracy and negotations.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
According to the article as well as blind, the main teams hit were associated with Cerner (EHR) and NetSuite (ERP).
Oracle's AI spend is part of Oracle Cloud.
That said, I guess it can be argued that Cerner and NetSuite being on the chopping block can be attributed to AI because now procurement has the choice to either build in-house via an Anthropic or OpenAI SI like Accenture or TCS or they can negotiate better purchasing terms from a best-in-breed product in HRM and ERP like SAP instead.
I also find it interesting how American and European HNers are much more negative about AI compared to their Chinese, Indian, and Israeli peers even though they have a significant amount to lose as well.
> That 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.
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.
should be an interesting parlay: hope this whole fascist, AI, far right nationalist takeover actually replaces workers before everything goes up in smoke.
And this ain't paranoia guys, have a brain cell longer than the LLMs being covetted.
One of the ideal things that companies can do is not hire people. A company that never hires someone will never let anyone go and consequently is the only ethical company. The worst thing that a company could do is pay someone to do a job for a while. In fact, one thing we could do is make sure that all jobs should be perpetual. If someone hires you, they can't stop paying you until they die or declare bankruptcy. This is sure to be good for workers.
> In fact, one thing we could do is make sure that all jobs should be perpetual. If someone hires you, they can't stop paying you until they die or declare bankruptcy. This is sure to be good for workers
You jest, but that's pretty much South Korea if this video (and my interpretation of it) is to be believed: https://youtu.be/pjjhrwVYPE8
For those not interested in watching 30 mins of this, long story short, it doesn't bode well. They do have some other circumstances going on in addition though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
My only problem with this is: Some of my best people are those that "I gave them a chance." I'd only hire perfect people from my tribe if I had to have them forever.
Oracle has record revenue and has for many years in a row. Laying people off is a result of mismanagement and not because they can't afford to keep them. In an ideal world I believe we'd have human centered employment instead of profit centered, and while I know that's unlikely to happen, it doesn't mean we can't criticize profit centered
I’m currently moving my personal VPS to Oracle Cloud (for a couple of reasons). The new machine’s host name is lawnmower. I have never been so decisive and satisfied in naming a computer.
oh my god… we thought anthropomorphizing “the computer”, was the problem, when it was anthropomorphizing the principals all along… (yes, i know that is the joke you made, but it was so incredibly appropos that i felt the need to comment to register my amusement / sadness / ¿)
My Amazon layoff notice came at 5am. Same deal. I thought it was fake because it came to my personal email. Then I logged into my work computer and found that all my email had been erased except for a copy of the layoff notice and an invite to a 10am Zoom with HR. The funny part was the invite had everyone who had been laid off in the To: line.
I was able to send internal only emails until 1pm, and then it logged me off and the computer was a brick.
I 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.
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.
Which I would definitely prefer. A couple of years ago, two weeks before Thanksgiving, management announced there would be layoffs. No timeline on when the cuts would be shared or number impacted. People had to sit around for weeks, wondering if they had a job. Should I buy Xmas presents? Who knows!
At-will employment is hard. Honestly, if you aren't planning to lose your job tomorrow when your at-will, you're not being honest with yourself. I wish it were different, but outside a union contract or some other fairly well-combed over business contract, you should not assume you will get paid tomorrow.
There is no perfect or right way to do this. Every approach will have criticism (and not every approach is equal), and different people will appreciate different things about the trade-offs.
Is it polite to let people stew for hours, or days, as virtual meetings spread across the company to convey the news in person? It is polite to schedule those meetings all at once with the implications clear - how is that any different than just confirming it an email? Is that better or worse than scheduling such calls with short notice, so that every employee must wonder for days (maybe weeks, depending on staffing and leverage model) whether they still have a job, when that information could have been communicated immediately to allow for immediate preparations?
You and I as senior managers might both apply the golden rule in this situation, but that could lead to different decisions.
You're just making excuses for them. The approach they chose was rude and cowardly. Even within this cowardice, further cowardice shows, with the email being sent from no specific individual but simply an amorphous "Oracle Leadership".
Oracle as a company are cowardly and rude and the practicalities are simply an excuse. There's clearly one "better way" which is to put a name at the end of the email, for perhaps Larry himself to take responsibility as he should.
If anything the practicalities show how arbitrary the decision was. Checking the Oracle subreddit we got people with "exceeds expectations" as their average still getting culled. It would appear how they decided upon the cuts reflects on how they have performed them. With all the sophistication of a child in a candy shop trying to buy more candy than their piggy bank can afford and then just dropping the excess on the floor, walking away and trying to forget that it ever happened.
I had to let an employee go because he didn't do any work, took forever to respond to chats (in a remote position), and was always late for meetings. I scheduled the 4pm Friday meeting to let him go. He was 15 minutes late.
I've found that there can be a chasm between "what people think I do" and "what I actually do." But also, there can be a chasm between "what I think I do" and "what I actually do."
If the system in which you operate does not attempt to measure this, I think it's worth it for anyone to measure it themselves. We can so easily be overconfident or underconfident. Collect the data and see the kinds of things you've actually been accomplishing over a year.
I'll feel like I'm getting nothing done, and then I look at the year's changelogs and realize I'm actually doing just fine for where I want to be.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is it? Based on what I've seen online the company name was derived from a CIA project from the 1970s that the founders worked on, but it doesn't seem to be based on an acronym. There was an earlier unrelated project from the 1950s which used ORACLE as an acronym ("Oak Ridge Automatic Computer and Logical Engine").
this is the internet, not a Sunday service at your local mormon temple where swearing is banned. You can call Larry Ellison an asshole. There are few people more deserving of being called in asshole than he is.
Sounds like a kind of insult to me. I'm not related to them in any way.
And, to be honest, I'm just trying to kind of follow the guidelines. There's too much of bad news and negativity around me, I'm fed with it already, thanks. I want to have fun if it's possible.
Not an insult at all - the mormons are explicitly against swearing of any and all forms, moreso than any group of people i've ever met. they self-censor in a very unique way, they are super clean in how they speak.
Well, if this helps to explain my actions a little - I have friends in Russia (and elsewhere), and very often our jokes/satires/alike come around censorship and "classified information". It’s a bit difficult to explain, but this way of writing messages - with [CENSORED], [DATA DELETED], [CLEARED] and the like - has become something of a meme (and I don't mean dunk memes, I mean cultural meme, yes) or constant joke among us. So for us, it’s a bit like a way of getting a laugh at censorship’s expense. I’m sorry if that was a bit out of context.
Anytime there are mass layoffs like this, I like to look at the company career page and revel in the HR horseshit they jam down everyone’s throats: https://www.oracle.com/careers/
> 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.
When laying people off, better companies will often accelerate vesting so that the departing employees get additional stock. For example, Google does this:
We’ll also offer a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, and accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting.
This is the unfair part. Quite often salary is reduced with the excuse of having stock options. So this is more like a cut in earned salary along with getting fired.
Yes, it's the standard in every legal doc I've ever seen too, but most companies have typically done some accelerated vesting as part of severance. Of course they don't have to, but it's a generally lower cost way of showing some good will.
I 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?
> My point is: it's very, very, very hard to do this, especially with my set of interests
It is very, very, very hard because you're making it hard by insisting on finding a strong intersection with your set of interests.
Half the jobs I've had aligned well with my interests. They were also in the lower half of jobs I liked. The best jobs I've had were the boring ones. It turns out, there's a lot more to jobs than just what you work on.
The most important thing is to keep a roof over your head. Next is saving for retirement. And then there are things like work environment, the people you work with, team dynamics, the actual technical work, etc.
I've found that the most intellectually fun/challenging work was usually coupled with the most dysfunctional teams. It's likely just a coincidence, but it was a good lesson that other things matter at least as much.
Yes. I work at boring companies that are not evil instead. Never went to my local magnate (Comcast), left a company when they off/onshored entire teams to HCL slaves, etc.
No i won't make 350K as a dev. Yes i will have a paltry middle class existence while we still have a profession called IT.
I used to work on software for non-profits. I found it fulfilling but it was hard to do the work since I found fullstack technically uninteresting (this is my own shortcoming).
Finding a balance in that is difficult. I have seen that it might be easier to find a societally good job the less technically deep the job gets. Networking research seems to be both technically interesting and connected to societal impact (eg. because of the ties to censorship, security, net neutrality etc)
It seems hard to continue doing this sort of research after your PhD though, as in both your school name matters immensely (i.e. you're screwed if you didn't go to Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, or MIT) and so does your publishing success to land a research job, which seems like an enormous task.
The key to not working for evil companies is to have more choice in who you do work for, which involves living way below your means so that you can save inordinate amounts of income and "retire" early - which is just code for "do the work I want to do for those I want to work for".
Many of the startups I work with. We’re helping save the oceans and land. Purpose and profit are dream scenarios for me. It’s difficult in a capitalist economy but it exists.
Why stick with for-profit companies? But on measure I'd say System76, n8n, Nextcloud, GridX, Odoo, Tuxedo, GitLab, Uplight, Aurora Solar, Bandcamp (maybe), Bitwarden, Canonical (maybe), Scribd, Arcadia, Wikihow. Basically any time you find yourself enjoying a product you're using, see who made it and if they're hiring.
Sure it's an uphill battle. This is late-stage capitalism after all and unless you're comfortable with a role that extracts from people who weren't planning in being extracted from you're not going to make a ton of money. That's what it takes to be on the side of the angels though.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Am I the only one who, when they see this, feels that it's already tough for Oracle and that many companies betting on "AI" have finally understood the real risks involved, and that they risk simply failing? I mean, if Oracle is doing that, they're clearly having some problems. I don't know how to properly express that (I'm sorry, I'm not very fluent with English), but for me it seems as some kind of signal of potential start of the downfall. It's like they stepped on the path that leads them to fall, and while they still can change it, if they don't, they're doomed.
> feels that it's already tough for Oracle and that many companies betting on AI have finally understood the real risks involved
This has nothing to do with AI, whose capex largely falls under Oracle Cloud.
The main teams hit - RHS, SVOS, and NetSuite India - are associated with Cerner and NetSuite, both of which are the kinds of legacy SaaS apps that are most likely to see reduced spend in the world today - it's cheaper to hire Accenture/PWC/Deloitte or WITCH combined with Anthropic or OpenAI to build and manage your own custom in-house or use that threat to purchase an actual market leader in those categories like Veeva or SAP respectively.
> The main teams hit - RHS, SVOS, and NetSuite India - are associated with Cerner and NetSuite, both of which can serve to reduce some fat.
> reduce some fat
Yes, but, well... why do they need to do that at all? I mean, what made them make this decision right now? I think it was mentioned in the article - they're in debt because of their AI data centers projects:
> Oracle has taken on $58 billion in new debt within just two months.
Although...
> All of this is happening even as the company posted a 95% jump in net income — reaching $6.13 billion — last quarter.
Still,
> According to analysis from TD Cowen, the job cuts are expected to free up between $8 billion and $10 billion in cash flow — money the company urgently needs to fund a massive buildout of AI data centers.
And they need a lot of resources to fund that, because:
> Oracle to Invest U.S. $2 Billion in AI and Cloud Infrastructure in Germany (2025) [1]
> Oracle unveils $10B data center expansion plan (plans for 2025) [2]
While they're having some problems now:
> Oracle and OpenAI End Plans to Expand Flagship Data Center (Bloomberg) [3]
It's just a few examples; I'm sure if you will dig deeper you will find more. Some sources suggest that "Oracle plans to invest up to $50 billion in 2026 to expand its AI data center infrastructure", but I'm not sure if it's true and if you can trust them, so I'll leave it there. They're trying to optimize because they're in debt, and still they seem to expand that debt even more.
you can get a gauge on Oracle debt by looking at CDS prices ( basically insurance that pays out if Oracle defaults on debt ). The link is from 4 months ago and it feels weird to link to reddit but CDS prices have risen quite a bit which implies loaning Oracle money is feeling riskier than it use to be. I don't know what the prices are now.
I wish i could remember exactly but there was some financing bet or debt structuring thing that Oracle did that didn't go according to plan and put them in a bad spot.
> Yes, but, well... why do they need to do that at all
Because the ERP and EHR market is almost entirely dominated by SAP and Epic. Frankly, the Cerner bet was already a bad bet when they took it in the early 2020s as was NetSuite to a certain extent.
No business has an obligation to hire you in perpetuity. Similarly, you have no obligation to remain at a company you don't like.
> Although...
>> All of this is happening even as the company posted a 95% jump in net income — reaching $6.13 billion — last quarter.
Which is largely attributed to the growth in spend on Oracle Cloud.
---
I work in this industry and once you remove the AI washing, much of Oracle's current strategy is around building a hyperscaler business that is comparable to GCP and Azure in size. Already over the past 2 years I've seen 2 fortune 500s completely shift off AWS or Azure to Oracle Cloud because of better terms and strategic hires by Oracle Cloud.
Edit: can't reply
> Thanks for explanation
No worries! Infra, Enterprise, Cloud, and Cybersecurity has a very different dynamic from other businesses
> And still they were trying to compete, weren't they
Sure, 5 years ago. But not anymore.
> Why have their cloud services are suddenly started to make more money, roughly speaking
Becuase around 2-3 years ago Oracle Cloud began strategically hiring enterprise sales leadership from Azure, AWS, and GCP with preexisting relationships with F1000 accounts who were getting hit by contract renegotiations from the other 3.
> what exactly pushed them to do it right now
The "SaaSpocalypse" [0].
Basically, non-market leading Enterprise SaaS products cannot justify their current prices and valuation because the choice is to now either buy best-in-breed at a significant discount or build in-house working with a systems integrator for Anthropic, OpenAI, or Gemini.
If you weren't already a market leader in your specific segment of Enterprise SaaS you are most likely going to see your dealbook reduce significantly over the next 2-4 years as customers shift to dominant market players who are offering significant discounts to stave off a "build with Accenture/WITCH+OpenAI/Anthropic" disruption.
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.
> Because the ERP and EHR market is almost entirely dominated by SAP and Epic.
And still they were trying to compete, weren't they?
> Which is largely attributed to the growth in spend on Oracle Cloud.
That's exactly what I'm trying to say. Why have their cloud services are suddenly started to make more money, roughly speaking? And at the same time, what is (seemingly) the main reason for their recent debt increase? They do cut out the fat, yes, I agree, but what exactly pushed them to do it right now? What made them to act so quickly and urgently? That's what I'm trying to say.
> I work in this industry and once you remove the AI washing, much of Oracle's current strategy is around building a hyperscaler business that is comparable to GCP and Azure in size. Already over the past 2 years I've seen 2 fortune 500s completely shift off AWS or Azure to Oracle Cloud because of better terms and strategic hires by Oracle Cloud.
Okay, understood. I work in entirely different field, so that's not my main speciality, to be honest. Thanks for explanation : )
companies overhired when money was cheap during covid to inflate their numbers and push their marketcap. since cheap money is gone, they have no incentive to keep the workforce. this has nothing to do with AI.
These are some of the richest and most profitable companies in history but they act like miserly slaves to their share price. We have created such a perverted incentive system.
There's an argument to be made about bad incentives driving large public companies.
But it's way less satisfying that emotional appeals.
The base of your statement is just wrong.
A company is a legal fiction. It doesn't have thoughts, wants, desires. It's not rich or poor. It's a piece of paper. It's an entry in government database.
What is not a fiction is Oracle's owners i.e. shareholders.
They are not rich. Majority of them, either direct owner of stock or in-direct owners via pension plans etc. are like you and me. They are not rich and the price of Oracle shares can be a difference between them being able to pay rent today or being able to retire tomorrow.
Those people rightfully care about the share price.
The executive are correctly responding to wishes of owners of the company by managing it to make a profit and therefore keep the stock price high.
What in the above chain do you find objectionable?
That millions of Americans investing in public companies depend on and therefore care about stock price?
That management of public companies is correctly responding to demands of owners of those companies by managing companies for profit?
Or maybe you just want to skip to the end of the line and seize means of production from private citizens to bask in the warm glow of collectivism?
I'm a shareholder. I'd prefer long term growth and sustainability rather than short term unsustainable pumps. When will they look out for the shareholders like me?
He already owns an island, "donates" billions to the Israeli Ethnic-cleansing Force, owns a massive media company, and yet somehow can't keep orange makeup off his mouth.
The bulk of the comments in here are focused on comparing Larry Ellison to a lawn mower, so I'll try a new tack and say that I'm genuinely confused at what the value prop of Oracle is.
Given the history of their business model being licensing of important databases that are hard to switch off of, I've actually made a point to avoid using Oracle as much as possible (even so far as to leave MySQL when they acquired it, and I've never started a fresh project in Java, which they used to drive a lawsuit they had with Google).
From my chair, they make an expensive database they try to sell to golf executives. There are innumerable equal (better?), free alternatives, and most startups are founded by broke coders in bedrooms that choose those instead and stick with the devil they know. And they have an un-competitive cloud service? Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle for, I'm genuinely curious.
Short answer: today I think there is genuinely nothing that anyone should use oracle for, but their database used to be seriously far ahead of the competition.
A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2 databases that worked for use cases where you needed high availability and vertical scalability and those were Oracle and Sybase and Oracle was really the only game in town if you actually wanted certain features like online backups and certain replication configurations.
At the time, MySQL existed and was popular for things like websites but had really hard scalability caps[1] and no replication so if you wanted HA you were forced to go to oracle pretty much. Postgres also wasn't competitive above certain sizes of tables that seem pretty modest now but felt big back then, and you used to need to shut postgres access down periodically to do backups and vacuum the tables so you couldn't use it for any sort of always-on type of use case.
Oracle also had a lot of features that now we would use other free or cloud-hosted services for like message queues.
[1] in particular if you had multiple concurrent readers they would permanently starve writers so you could get to a situation where everyone could read your data but you could never update. This was due to a priority inversion bug in how they used to lock tables.
What's about DB2? I have no experience with it but I guess IBM specifically designed it for enterprise-scale transaction processing workloads...
DB2 was crazy good for certain use cases but very weird. For one, the pattern for DB2 efficiency was pretty much the exact opposite of every other database. Every other database would say "Normalize your tables, use BCNF, blah blah, small reference tables, special indices etc".
DB2, the pattern was "denormalize everything into one gigantic wide table". If you did that it was insanely fast for the time and could handle very large datasets.
There was also DB2. DB2 was (still is) an excellent database that IBM has completely fumbled.
Just curious, how was SQL Server perceived at the time compared to Sybase and Oracle? I know it originated as a port of Sybase.
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.
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.
Oracle and Java are deeply embedded in US gov work. How deep? Let's just say a large number of classified developer jobs hire for Java. Ellison has been a huge proponent of a surveillance state, and that likely ingratiates him with certain three letter agencies.
The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
My employer is actively hiring java engineers and we don't "take pictures of things from far away".
There are vibrant java user's groups all around the world. There are many java community conferences. The most recent redmonk language rankings[0] show java at #3.
The world is big :) .
0: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2...
> 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.
We use Java.
We have Oracle blocked at the router (!) to prevent anyone downloading the Oracle JDK and incurring the wrath of Oracle licensing.
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.
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.
> Clojure
Apple should do more of that - they make cool computers, and should use cool languages.
One only need look at the job postings for Apple to see quite how common Java backend is there.
Checks out https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?search=java&sort=relevan...
The financial market infrastructure heavily relies on Java. Transactions at commercial banks across North America are mostly executed on Java codebases.
Java is not uncommon. Off the top of my head, a certain rainforest company and a lot of banks and EMR providers use it.
Amazon, among others, write a lot of java, but they want absolutely nothing to do with oracle licenses for java
I worked for a drug discovery company doing Java [1] since we were using Kafka Streams very liberally, but everything was done with the OpenJDK Temurin distribution. It was drilled into our heads on the first day do not install anything from Oracle. I think they were afraid of some weird lawsuit unless they bought an expensive license.
I totally get it, but it made me a bit sad because they were even weary of something like GraalVM for some projects where startup time was becoming an issue; I think the Community Edition for GraalVM would have been fine but I think they had this "we don't touch anything with an the Oracle name directly attached with a ten foot pole". Which is totally fair.
[1] It's not hard to find which one but I politely ask that you do not post it here in relation to this thread.
Right, I just feel like this is a bit over the top
> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
> Right, I just feel like this is a bit over the top
Well, the writer said the only Java devs THEY KN OW, not all Java devs.
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
The question then becomes, does Java warrant the valuation Oracle has when the language itself is mostly FLOSS?
I think that overstates, there is a lot of java in the enterprise still, it's lose share to golang and typescript and in certain cases rust, but it's still around and doing just fine (to my annoyance).
This feels correct. Their business model is squeezing anyone who can't migrate off their properties and suing the rest.
Why would go $58B in debt to support a new feature that no one will want after alienating everyone above?
They have not pulled the pin on the ZFS grenade yet, but I expect at some point it happens.
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.
> Why would go $58B in debt to support a new feature that no one will want after alienating everyone above?
Short term shareholder 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
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.)
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.
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.
It’s a common ‘large enterprise’ dependency often due to some internal CRN/Accounting/Compliance software, so I suspect you are right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Java is used a lot, but not Oracle's version.
One of the best things Sun ever did was open sourcing Java.
>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.
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!
Java sucks, it will consume lots of ram. Just write your services in Golang.
NetSuite
There are alternatives, but NetSuite is the gold standard unless you want to fork over for SAP.
Truth. I don't know of a better plug and play option than Netsuite for middle to big companies.
It's like IBM for legacy business the German Banking System runs all oracle in the backend.
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.
Oracle has made a large bet on being a cloud, but nobody wants their terrible cloud, which is reflected in their dollar-store prices. They staffed up and built facilities that they can't sell so I am not surprised they are now swinging the axe.
I posted a response from Gemini where I asked Gemini, "Do you have citations proving or disproving whether Oracle Cloud is still attracting cloud customers away from Azure, AWS and GCP?" and it seems it disagrees with your "nobody wants their terrible cloud" view.
Clearly you are in USA. It’s not how their business works and Startups are not their target. Lobbying governments across the world with questionable practices are
Why use Oracle indeed.... Here's a tale from somewhere around the year 2000.
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A-Software-Problem%2C-A-Mar...
For Jason R., it was an exciting time. His company was trying to break into the telecom market with a new product that they'd get to build almost entirely from scratch. The only part that he wasn't excited about was that the major customers had very specific requirements that his team would have to meticulously follow. In this case, some bigtime POTS operators demanded that all servers must come from Sun, and any databases must be built on Oracle 8i.
One of the applications they were building had to interface with the clients' call data records (or CDRs). The most important use of CDRs is for phone bill calculation, so naturally they were stored in properly designed and indexed tables. The CDRs were stored alongside all billing records, and were frequently accessed by mission-critical internal applications, and they weren't prepared to expose all of that to a third party. So instead, Jason's company would have to construct CDRs on their own from the signaling message flow. Because the CDRs would be processed right away, they wouldn't even need to store them. The tentative architecture called for an Oracle database for CDR pipelining from the front end to the application backend.
When the analysis was being conducted, the team grew concerned with the costs — both in terms of budget and disk I/O. Oracle licenses are incredibly expensive, and there would be a huge volume of CDR data written to and read from the database. Finally, it dawned on someone that the database was completely superfluous since records were processed as they came in. In fact, a single, low-end Sun server with a few hundred megs of RAM could easily handle the CDR generation and application backend.
Excited about their good news, they called up a meeting with the product managers. "We've discovered that we can deliver the product at a fraction of what our original estimates were." The managers left the room, some looking happy, others just looking incredulous.
Later that day, Jason got a call from the VP of Engineering. "Jason, while I understand what you're proposing is technically valid, you have upset the marketing team."
"I'm sorry... did I say something?"
"It's just that they've promised the customer that our product would use Oracle 8i, and now they're going to be made liars. Can you just humor me and add Oracle 8i to the design somewhere?"
"Uh..."
"I have enough trouble politically as it is. I really appreciate this favor!" click
After delivering the news to his team, they argued a bit on what to use Oracle for. Ultimately they delivered the final product with an Oracle database that had a single table which was used to store a handful of configuration parameters.
It was the most expensive individual table Jason had ever created in his entire career.
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!
More victims of AI.
Not actually of "AI is replacing jobs", more "oh shit we are spending too much and the product isn't good enough for us to ever make a return on our absurd over-investment".
Blame it on whatever you like. oracle has been a rudderless leech for nearly 30 years now.
- overpricing the database led to a predictable exodus and new players with often times better performance.
- acquisition of MySQL led to a predictable exodus and new players like maria with often times better performance.
- Oracle cloud arrived late to spectacular skepticism and low user turnout from customers who had been burned by high cost and users burned from decisions like the death of opensolaris. it exists on federal life support these days by the grace of the prevailing administration.
- more than 80 products, with hundreds of thousands of patches and updates, yet no coherent or meaningful reform of the build for more than forty years. DB 19c still ships broken for redhat 9 as a means of driving users to oracle linux, and patching the installer is a 1970s experience in itself. DB 23's greatest improvement has been to tack the letters "AI" onto it to chum what shallow AI waters Oracle deigns to tread outside of an investment portfolio.
- dumping cash into oracle enterprise linux despite it only having around 2500 active corporate users.
this is nearly 20% of the company being laid off.
> a rudderless leech for nearly 30 years now.
Yeah, from small interactions over the past two decades, I have no idea how they could have been so bad while employing so many people. What on earth were those 30k people doing?! Their solutions were crap for ages.
I don't think its that easy.
Look at their employee numbers over the years:
(ai generated):
Oracle Corporation Employee Count (2010 - 2025)
Legend: Each '' represents approximately 4,000 employees.
Note: Oracle's fiscal reporting for the full year 2025 ended on May 31, 2025.They clearly did something crazy at corona and undoing this as a lot of companies did before already.
> (ai generated)
here's a link to an actual source for people who also don't trust ai generated stuff
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/number...
edit: this source also includes data/graphs on stock price and bunch of other metrics, rather than just one number over time.
If I do my python right, from 2010-2020 they grew by 2.5% annually, from 2020 to 2025, they grew headcount by 3.7% annually.
After the layoffs, they'll apparently now have grown by 1.0% annually since 2020.
So yes, from 2021 to 2023, they had a huge spike, but overall, it's a net slowdown in growth relative to the 2010-2020 period.
If this was about reversion to the old pattern they'd have done a smaller set of layoffs or simply wait for a few years of zero growth.
Or a pickup from 2015 - 2021 which was 0% growth.
It's tricky to pick an end-of-decade year also - recessions tend to happen +/- 2 years of the end of each decade in the USA, or at least have done since records began in the 19th century. For example 2010 was recovery over 2008/2009's bust. It's not like comparing March to Ma4ch for a crude seasonal adjustment.
You did the Python right but the analysis wrong. Looking at it on a graph you can see that interpreting a single growth rate for the entire period (even if you stop pre-covid) doesn’t make sense.
You can see linear growth from 2010-2017. Then slow decline or at best a flatline from 2018-2021. Then they went crazy in 2022-2025.
Now if we just do 162k - 30k we are back to 132k, basically same ballpark as pre-COVID.
That's not how stocks are measured on wall street. They picked the dumb metric.
> They clearly did something crazy at corona
They acquired Cerner, which had ~30k employees.
Cool to be part of history I used to go into that office Innovations campus
Saw someone had a license plate say MPAGES ha
Even at 100k employees I’m still dumbfounded by that number. What do all these people do all day?
1. They maintain and sell one of the largest relational databases.
2. They're the primary maintainer of one of the largest programming languages.
3. They do tons of HR/ERP type software.
4. They have a supply chain division (my company is a direct competitor, and we have 2000 employees--it's a drop in the bucket, but a few thousand here, a few thousand there and it starts to add up. Afaik, their supply chain org is bigger than ours).
5. Other things I probably don't know about.
Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency, which swells the number of workers by a lot.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not remotely a fan, I like to quote Bryan Cantrill's rant. However, they do a lot of things.
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)
>> 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.
6. Lawyers
"The first thing we do, let's AI all the lawyers" ?
Also their cloud
And all the supporting legal team of course.
Unless you have worked with Oracle or other big enterprises, you may not realize the scale of how these companies operate and the breadth of what they actually do. Just by looking at their product page[0] you can see they offer software, hardware, cloud, consulting, support, and even financing solutions. In addition to the technology and product people (of which there are many), you also need HR, sales, marketing, accounting, support, etc for the entire global organization.
Sure, 100,000 people is a lot, but Oracle also does a lot.
[0] https://www.oracle.com/products/
Oracle sells alot of software that is accompanied by hordes of consultants to set it up.
Last F50 I was at did a PeopleSoft migration. We probably had 400 Oracle employees pass through the doors over 2 years helping to get it off the ground.
Most Enterprises don't just buy software and that's it. They buy software + support to implement it for their business.
Sure but what did those guys do all day? 400 people is a lot of people
Write code to connect this system with that system. Teach people what setting does what. Integrate with Entra ID. Create custom reports that hordes of Executive on our side want. Scale out the system from undersized nodes we originally gave it. That's all I picked up by just listening to them. I wasn't involved in the project, just sat nearby listening to it.
This is extremely customizable software that is designed to pretty much run your entire business and touched by over 40k employees. It requires a ton of care and feeding. There is plenty of people who dedicate themselves to PeopleSoft. Zip Recruiter is showing 5 jobs near me for "PeopleSoft Administrator"
The need to teach people what setting does what is a sort of consulting moat that AI dismantles when it can access the right context.
They don't make any of the documentation for those settings easy to find or understand because the support contracts make them so much money.
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.
Creating powerpoints. Presenting the powerpoints to others in synchronous meetings.
Probably had a lot of meetings
"Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?!"
plus yearly support maintenance
I remember reading this post years ago, and it has stuck in my brain ever since: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
So I suspect the answer is: they need _at least_ 10x as many engineers to get things done as you would expect. Maybe more like 50x
That is really wild
That was a highlights grade comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights )
And the last comment by 'oraguy' - I hope he just picked up another id because "never work for Oracle again" ...
When you send your database a query, who do you think is gathering those tables?
Almost certainly a large amount of support staff, so management/HR/IT etc... Then you've got your customer account managers, sales, lawyers/finance etc.... Given they do an insane amount of B2B and government sales I can see this being easy to reach tbh. Governement contract processes require an insane amount of bureacracy and negotations.
I’m guessing development is so slow that they have stacks of teams working in parallel to accomplish what 1 team could normally.
Well, whatever Oracle is doing, which brings us back to a question very similar to your original one.
Solaris ?
Didn't they fire most of Solaris devs some time ago? Incidentally, Solaris been stuck on 11.4.x for, well, forever and a half..
Me too. Anyone here to enlighten us?
But the up curve at the end very clearly tracks with AI adoption and not Corona?
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.
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.
You need to pair hc with revenue, otherwise this data tells only one story, hc growth.
More employees to release less stuff.... Smell like consultancy.
Where's the annual revenue for context? Those numbers are almost useless alone.
Their profit doubled from 2010 to 2025 though, no?
"Oracle leadership" sounds like nobody wants to take responsibility but they do like the share price to go up so say good bye to [auto generated name in header]'s job.
I don't understand this sentiment. I'm absolutely significantly more productive with AI; so much moreso that I now have freetime and we haven't needed to replace an engineer who left. On the flip side my coworkers who think they're above AI are drowning. I think there is an endemic problem of senior engineers who think they're above learning AI and agents who don't want to use them, and these cuts are about forcing them to get with the times or drown in work.
Replacing jobs is a bit of a misnomer, but it's certainly allowing us to build out more features in shorter amounts of time.
Are you paid significantly more for your newfound productivity?
> More victims of AI
According to the article as well as blind, the main teams hit were associated with Cerner (EHR) and NetSuite (ERP).
Oracle's AI spend is part of Oracle Cloud.
That said, I guess it can be argued that Cerner and NetSuite being on the chopping block can be attributed to AI because now procurement has the choice to either build in-house via an Anthropic or OpenAI SI like Accenture or TCS or they can negotiate better purchasing terms from a best-in-breed product in HRM and ERP like SAP instead.
I also find it interesting how American and European HNers are much more negative about AI compared to their Chinese, Indian, and Israeli peers even though they have a significant amount to lose as well.
> That 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.
-
That isn't though.
Both Cerner (EHR) and NetSuite (ERP) were laggards in their market segments for years.
If I'm the Director of Enterprise Applications and have a budget allocated to procurement, I have no reason to purchase a laggard product like Cerner or NetSuite even with the Oracle bundle when SAP is giving significant discounts because OpenAI, Anthropic, and GCP are offering partnerships with systems integrations like Accenture or Deloitte to fully build out and manage your own hyperspecific ERP or EHR.
There's no reason to keep investing in products in a market that was already past it's growth stage pre-AI with a clear market winner, especially now that there is downstream pressure that makes build much more attractive than buying an inferior product.
Based on your response, I doubt you even cared to read my entire post.
Edit: can't reply
> I didn't read it because it didn't exist yet, you added it in an edit
It did when I posted. The only edit I made after you posted was fixing HRM to EHR.
> You're not even disagreeing with my response, merely elaborating the mechanism behind it. This is bad faith posting.
I strongly disagree. My entire thesis is that Cerner and NetSuite were bad businesses. If a business is bad you kill the business.
No need to gaslight me and delete your response.
> Based on your response, I doubt you even cared to read my entire post.
I didn't read it because it didn't exist yet, you added it in an edit.
You're not even disagreeing with my response, merely elaborating the mechanism behind it. This is bad faith posting.
should be an interesting parlay: hope this whole fascist, AI, far right nationalist takeover actually replaces workers before everything goes up in smoke.
And this ain't paranoia guys, have a brain cell longer than the LLMs being covetted.
> 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.
One of the ideal things that companies can do is not hire people. A company that never hires someone will never let anyone go and consequently is the only ethical company. The worst thing that a company could do is pay someone to do a job for a while. In fact, one thing we could do is make sure that all jobs should be perpetual. If someone hires you, they can't stop paying you until they die or declare bankruptcy. This is sure to be good for workers.
> In fact, one thing we could do is make sure that all jobs should be perpetual. If someone hires you, they can't stop paying you until they die or declare bankruptcy. This is sure to be good for workers
You jest, but that's pretty much South Korea if this video (and my interpretation of it) is to be believed: https://youtu.be/pjjhrwVYPE8
For those not interested in watching 30 mins of this, long story short, it doesn't bode well. They do have some other circumstances going on in addition though.
Mandated perpetual employment is bad for workers because the company will be extremely reluctant to hire and take on such an open-ended liability.
It’s not unethical to lay someone off
It's a failure of hiring, planning, and management. It's an off the books opportunity cost. It's an off the books cost of hiring a replacement. And if over hiring was done willfully, then yes it's straight up unethical.
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.
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.
> layoffs are deeply immoral
It's no more immoral than you deciding to buy from Safeway, even though you'd been buying from Fred Meyer before.
Safeway won’t starve and die if I decide to buy from Fred Meyer. You really don’t see that an individual is not on equal footing with multibillion company? It is absolutely immoral. And I’m not even talking about charity, those people were hired and did actual job for the fucking trillion dollar company.
It's a job. Not a tribe.
The role an employer plays in societies varies from culture to culture, but note that in many cultures, it is "just a job".
Yes, that's what people tell themselves to deal with it psychologically. That it's just a job, not a community, and you better not make friends in the workplace (despite spending majority of your life there). And that when you're unemployed, life just goes on, as if it doesn't mean much.
Like when a traumatised kid never loved by the parents concludes that life is harsh and love doesn't exist, so better be tough.
Yeah because marxists systems "take such good care" off people in comparison.
It's an unpriced negative externality.
When done for profit maximizing reasons it's not any worse than capitalism itself, but then this degrades into whether capitalism is ethical which is off topic
Profit maximization makes for the high standard of living we enjoy.
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.
Termination will take on a while different meaning of this turns out to come true on some Black Mirror future.
Oracle has record revenue and has for many years in a row. Laying people off is a result of mismanagement and not because they can't afford to keep them. In an ideal world I believe we'd have human centered employment instead of profit centered, and while I know that's unlikely to happen, it doesn't mean we can't criticize profit centered
> Laying people off is a result of mismanagement and not because they can't afford to keep them.
Markets are a chaotic system and the needs of a business must constantly adapt - or they go out of business.
Do not make the mistake of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison.
I do take a perverse kind of pride that this can now be said without any explicit reference -- and everyone knows you're talking about the lawnmower.
Outside of 90s television, this might be the most universal reference I have in my life.
The lawnmower does not have feedback, it does not stop just because it encounters human flesh.
I’m currently moving my personal VPS to Oracle Cloud (for a couple of reasons). The new machine’s host name is lawnmower. I have never been so decisive and satisfied in naming a computer.
lawnmower don’t give a fuuuuuck
Furries are a distaste but Larry Elison as such. It wouldn't surprise me.
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 / ¿)
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.
Unless you're being offered a very good package, any firing email is cold. Let's be honest
There's no real way to sugar-coat losing your job. I think an email is as good as anything. Ensures everyone gets the same message at the same time.
I think the headline is not the best headline, but what it meant by "cold" is that there was no advance warning. So like cold-calling somebody, but to fire them, and an email instead.
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.
Which I would definitely prefer. A couple of years ago, two weeks before Thanksgiving, management announced there would be layoffs. No timeline on when the cuts would be shared or number impacted. People had to sit around for weeks, wondering if they had a job. Should I buy Xmas presents? Who knows!
At-will employment is hard. Honestly, if you aren't planning to lose your job tomorrow when your at-will, you're not being honest with yourself. I wish it were different, but outside a union contract or some other fairly well-combed over business contract, you should not assume you will get paid tomorrow.
The best strategy is to save up at least 6 months of runway.
And traceability.
In a 1:1 meeting you could fire me and say a gazillion things and I'd forget 99.9% of them.
Or, with emotions flaring, could say something that becomes grounds for a wrongful termination or discrimination claim.
I think its very impolite to not do it face-to-face.
What time is a good time for everyone to show up for a face-to-face layoff meeting for a global company?
If you don't do it simultaneously, you're going to hear by rumor rather than by official email, which is IMHO worse.
If you do it simultaneously, everyone will know something is up, because there's never simultaneous global meetings.
the practicalities of the issue don't stop it from being impolite.
There is no perfect or right way to do this. Every approach will have criticism (and not every approach is equal), and different people will appreciate different things about the trade-offs.
Is it polite to let people stew for hours, or days, as virtual meetings spread across the company to convey the news in person? It is polite to schedule those meetings all at once with the implications clear - how is that any different than just confirming it an email? Is that better or worse than scheduling such calls with short notice, so that every employee must wonder for days (maybe weeks, depending on staffing and leverage model) whether they still have a job, when that information could have been communicated immediately to allow for immediate preparations?
You and I as senior managers might both apply the golden rule in this situation, but that could lead to different decisions.
You're just making excuses for them. The approach they chose was rude and cowardly. Even within this cowardice, further cowardice shows, with the email being sent from no specific individual but simply an amorphous "Oracle Leadership".
Oracle as a company are cowardly and rude and the practicalities are simply an excuse. There's clearly one "better way" which is to put a name at the end of the email, for perhaps Larry himself to take responsibility as he should.
If anything the practicalities show how arbitrary the decision was. Checking the Oracle subreddit we got people with "exceeds expectations" as their average still getting culled. It would appear how they decided upon the cuts reflects on how they have performed them. With all the sophistication of a child in a candy shop trying to buy more candy than their piggy bank can afford and then just dropping the excess on the floor, walking away and trying to forget that it ever happened.
I'm sorry but you work at Oracle. Terrible people. Very rude people. You should expect it.
Whatever you do, do not ever book a 1:1 meeting on a Friday afternoon for Monday morning titled, "The Future."
I had to let an employee go because he didn't do any work, took forever to respond to chats (in a remote position), and was always late for meetings. I scheduled the 4pm Friday meeting to let him go. He was 15 minutes late.
Sounds like me on site, ADHD is a bitch, people probably think I don’t anything too.
I've found that there can be a chasm between "what people think I do" and "what I actually do." But also, there can be a chasm between "what I think I do" and "what I actually do."
If the system in which you operate does not attempt to measure this, I think it's worth it for anyone to measure it themselves. We can so easily be overconfident or underconfident. Collect the data and see the kinds of things you've actually been accomplishing over a year.
I'll feel like I'm getting nothing done, and then I look at the year's changelogs and realize I'm actually doing just fine for where I want to be.
What is the alternative? Have 30,000 meetings? How long will that take?
A great alternative would be operating a company correctly so you don't end up in a situation where you need to cut 30k jobs at once with no notice. That's a bizarre thing that's becoming practically normalized in the USA tech industry.
Can you imagine a company spending a long time on meetings?!
6+ months' notice with a severance package equal to at least an annual salary.
Why would you give someone 6 months notice? What good is that for the employee? Especially if the severance is generous.
“Hey, we’re going to fire you in 6 months. Just a heads up.”
Nah. Give me the year of salary and send me home today. Better for the employee and for the company than pointlessly dragging it out. Again, this is assuming generous severance.
Even if you're being offered a very good package, being fired, regardless of how, is cold.
Depends on the circumstances. There are people who are ready to go any the time of a layoff if the terms are right.
It's a trash source. No one has confirmed 30k jobs. They just made it up.
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.
Those super yatchs of larry have to be paid somewhow.
That CapEx must be really out of control. Soon enough they will be left with 200 data centers and 300 poor bastard running the ship.
Their free cash flows turned negative for the for the first time in forever.
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.
"cold" is redundant/implied for Oracle.
Full text of e-mail:
We are sharing some difficult news regarding your position.
After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change. As a result, today is your last working day.
We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made during your time with us.
After signing your termination paperwork, you will be eligible to receive a severance package subject to the terms and conditions of the severance plan. You will receive an email from DocuSign to your Oracle email address with details on your severance and termination date.
Immediate Action Required
To receive important follow-up information, including FAQs and separation documents to help you through this transition, you must provide a personal email address.
Please click here to submit a personal email address immediately. If you make a submission error, please re-submit a new form. Please Note: The personal email address will only be used for correspondence regarding separation-related information and severance agreements.
Access to your computer, email, voicemail, and files will be deactivated soon, and you will be unable to log into your computer. As a reminder, you are prohibited from downloading, copying or retaining (including emailing yourself) any Oracle confidential information.
Thank you for your contributions to our organization. If you have additional questions, please reach out to the HR team via the Ask HR page or at (888) 404-2494.
Oracle Leadership
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/employeesOfOracle/comments/1s8jadx/...
Java isn't really uncommon
Between employers and employees, loyalty is only expected one way.
Let's not forget that ORACLE is actually an acronym.
Is it? Based on what I've seen online the company name was derived from a CIA project from the 1970s that the founders worked on, but it doesn't seem to be based on an acronym. There was an earlier unrelated project from the 1950s which used ORACLE as an acronym ("Oak Ridge Automatic Computer and Logical Engine").
If this is a joke, I clearly don't get it!
"One Rich A*[CENSORED] Called Larry Ellison"? : )
EDIT: LOL, I haven't expected to be downvoted for simply putting this in a way I like : )
this is the internet, not a Sunday service at your local mormon temple where swearing is banned. You can call Larry Ellison an asshole. There are few people more deserving of being called in asshole than he is.
> at your local mormon temple
Sounds like a kind of insult to me. I'm not related to them in any way.
And, to be honest, I'm just trying to kind of follow the guidelines. There's too much of bad news and negativity around me, I'm fed with it already, thanks. I want to have fun if it's possible.
Not an insult at all - the mormons are explicitly against swearing of any and all forms, moreso than any group of people i've ever met. they self-censor in a very unique way, they are super clean in how they speak.
Well, if this helps to explain my actions a little - I have friends in Russia (and elsewhere), and very often our jokes/satires/alike come around censorship and "classified information". It’s a bit difficult to explain, but this way of writing messages - with [CENSORED], [DATA DELETED], [CLEARED] and the like - has become something of a meme (and I don't mean dunk memes, I mean cultural meme, yes) or constant joke among us. So for us, it’s a bit like a way of getting a laugh at censorship’s expense. I’m sorry if that was a bit out of context.
Let us not forget the poor Nasser, whose username when combined with the Scunthorpe problem becomes N***er. Text censorship is not always a win.
How can we teach customers to never ever do business with oracle?
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.
It feels like Oracle has made some massive strategic missteps in the past year. I’m curious if they can turn it around.
Like the OpenAI deal?
What "massive strategic missteps"? They continue to attract cloud customers coming from Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
They massively over committed to data center deals with debt. Safra leaving is also a big deal. Look at the stock price since she left.
Stock went down 50% in six months. If LE's AI bet is wrong, then they'll have to find some way to pay off the $60B in new debt.
Citations?
I used Google Gemini to confirm before I posted my comment. You're welcome to do the same.
“I used AI to confirm what I said” is not exactly the great comeback you think it is…
It wasn't a comeback, it was a truthful answer to your question.
And your response tells me that you still don’t get why you shouldn’t use “AI told me” as a citation..
I will wait for Netcraft to confirm.
Anytime there are mass layoffs like this, I like to look at the company career page and revel in the HR horseshit they jam down everyone’s throats: https://www.oracle.com/careers/
This one is so over the top, it begins to verge on satire.
Every time I think: "do I live in a dystopia yet?" I get confirmation with these messages.
> 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.
"Any unvested restricted stock units, however, were forfeited immediately."
wow.
Isn't this normal? I thought that's how it typically works when an employee leaves a company with any method.
When laying people off, better companies will often accelerate vesting so that the departing employees get additional stock. For example, Google does this:
We’ll also offer a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, and accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting.
https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/j...
That's what the contract would typically say. But it's not uncommon to have accelerated vesting either when parting on good terms or with severance.
This is the unfair part. Quite often salary is reduced with the excuse of having stock options. So this is more like a cut in earned salary along with getting fired.
Since moving to NYC, I'm surprisingly close to cashflow neutral. The cost of living is crazy expensive here.
I'm for sure timing my exit based on the vesting schedule.
This is standard in every tech RSU vest schedule I have seen.
Yes, it's the standard in every legal doc I've ever seen too, but most companies have typically done some accelerated vesting as part of severance. Of course they don't have to, but it's a generally lower cost way of showing some good will.
That's what the word "vested" means.
Don’t work for evil companies.
I tried to do this out of undergrad (graduated last year). Many companies do both good and bad things to me, some more good than bad. The "best of the best" companies to me require many years of experience and are still competitive. I didn't really want an entry level job at an "evil" company, so I'm going to go do a PhD (in something unrelated to my original interest in operating systems, as I don't want to be a 30k/yr automaton part of Meta's R&D machine).
My point is: it's very, very, very hard to do this, especially with my set of interests (lots of OS work is in the datacenter, which leads to jobs with hyperscalers; I consider many of those companies evil). I'm trying. It will probably make my QoL worse for some time, and I'll probably give up eventually.
Also, evil is undefined in some sense. Is it wrong to do something "good" at a company that has an "evil" aspect?
> My point is: it's very, very, very hard to do this, especially with my set of interests
It is very, very, very hard because you're making it hard by insisting on finding a strong intersection with your set of interests.
Half the jobs I've had aligned well with my interests. They were also in the lower half of jobs I liked. The best jobs I've had were the boring ones. It turns out, there's a lot more to jobs than just what you work on.
The most important thing is to keep a roof over your head. Next is saving for retirement. And then there are things like work environment, the people you work with, team dynamics, the actual technical work, etc.
I've found that the most intellectually fun/challenging work was usually coupled with the most dysfunctional teams. It's likely just a coincidence, but it was a good lesson that other things matter at least as much.
Yes. I work at boring companies that are not evil instead. Never went to my local magnate (Comcast), left a company when they off/onshored entire teams to HCL slaves, etc.
No i won't make 350K as a dev. Yes i will have a paltry middle class existence while we still have a profession called IT.
I used to work on software for non-profits. I found it fulfilling but it was hard to do the work since I found fullstack technically uninteresting (this is my own shortcoming).
Finding a balance in that is difficult. I have seen that it might be easier to find a societally good job the less technically deep the job gets. Networking research seems to be both technically interesting and connected to societal impact (eg. because of the ties to censorship, security, net neutrality etc)
It seems hard to continue doing this sort of research after your PhD though, as in both your school name matters immensely (i.e. you're screwed if you didn't go to Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, or MIT) and so does your publishing success to land a research job, which seems like an enormous task.
The key to not working for evil companies is to have more choice in who you do work for, which involves living way below your means so that you can save inordinate amounts of income and "retire" early - which is just code for "do the work I want to do for those I want to work for".
So exactly what for profit company is on the side of the angels?
Many of the startups I work with. We’re helping save the oceans and land. Purpose and profit are dream scenarios for me. It’s difficult in a capitalist economy but it exists.
Why stick with for-profit companies? But on measure I'd say System76, n8n, Nextcloud, GridX, Odoo, Tuxedo, GitLab, Uplight, Aurora Solar, Bandcamp (maybe), Bitwarden, Canonical (maybe), Scribd, Arcadia, Wikihow. Basically any time you find yourself enjoying a product you're using, see who made it and if they're hiring.
Sure it's an uphill battle. This is late-stage capitalism after all and unless you're comfortable with a role that extracts from people who weren't planning in being extracted from you're not going to make a ton of money. That's what it takes to be on the side of the angels though.
GitLab is for profit, isn't it?
The right thing to be said here. Oracle is trash. Would you expect rude idiots to be nice smart people all of a sudden?
your local food bank only has so many open positions
The more people who believe this, the easier it is for me to find a job at a place I respect, so thank you.
Ideally it would be "don't buy from Oracle", but we don't get to affect those decisions.
Ironically this would just fuel more layoffs.
List successful companies you would not define as evil.
37signals, vanguard, costco, proton, fastmail, mullvad vpn, framework, automattic, valve, patagonia, lego, linear, hetzner, tarsnap, ...
There are those who attribute evil to Lego, and they may have a case (historically or now).
Automattic has apparently gone insane, but that's not the same as evil.
Valve might be the closest to a HN-agree on "good company" - and even that has a comment below mine attributing gambling to them.
Valve has been making money hand over fist by getting kids addicted to gambling…
The snowball of government intervention has started rolling on them.
"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"
It is only a matter of time...
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.
Costco maybe?
Pine64. ("Successful" doesn't have to mean "a megacorp".)
> Don’t work for evil companies.
I'm certainly not a fan of Oracle (or the wider scale damage the Ellisons have been doing), but I also can't bring myself to be so flippant when an action this large is going to cause untold amounts of personal tragedies.
See, for example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/employeesOfOracle/comments/1s8m58p/...
Today this unfortunate guy, tomorrow perhaps me.
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...
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.
There is no bubble
Love the confidence. The logic can catch up later.
With those software engineers gone, they can now return to their core business: suing people.
> The layoffs are directly tied to Oracle’s aggressive and debt-heavy expansion into artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The actual culprit.
Am I the only one who, when they see this, feels that it's already tough for Oracle and that many companies betting on "AI" have finally understood the real risks involved, and that they risk simply failing? I mean, if Oracle is doing that, they're clearly having some problems. I don't know how to properly express that (I'm sorry, I'm not very fluent with English), but for me it seems as some kind of signal of potential start of the downfall. It's like they stepped on the path that leads them to fall, and while they still can change it, if they don't, they're doomed.
> feels that it's already tough for Oracle and that many companies betting on AI have finally understood the real risks involved
This has nothing to do with AI, whose capex largely falls under Oracle Cloud.
The main teams hit - RHS, SVOS, and NetSuite India - are associated with Cerner and NetSuite, both of which are the kinds of legacy SaaS apps that are most likely to see reduced spend in the world today - it's cheaper to hire Accenture/PWC/Deloitte or WITCH combined with Anthropic or OpenAI to build and manage your own custom in-house or use that threat to purchase an actual market leader in those categories like Veeva or SAP respectively.
> The main teams hit - RHS, SVOS, and NetSuite India - are associated with Cerner and NetSuite, both of which can serve to reduce some fat.
> reduce some fat
Yes, but, well... why do they need to do that at all? I mean, what made them make this decision right now? I think it was mentioned in the article - they're in debt because of their AI data centers projects:
> Oracle has taken on $58 billion in new debt within just two months.
Although...
> All of this is happening even as the company posted a 95% jump in net income — reaching $6.13 billion — last quarter.
Still,
> According to analysis from TD Cowen, the job cuts are expected to free up between $8 billion and $10 billion in cash flow — money the company urgently needs to fund a massive buildout of AI data centers.
And they need a lot of resources to fund that, because:
> Oracle to Invest U.S. $2 Billion in AI and Cloud Infrastructure in Germany (2025) [1]
> Oracle unveils $10B data center expansion plan (plans for 2025) [2]
While they're having some problems now:
> Oracle and OpenAI End Plans to Expand Flagship Data Center (Bloomberg) [3]
It's just a few examples; I'm sure if you will dig deeper you will find more. Some sources suggest that "Oracle plans to invest up to $50 billion in 2026 to expand its AI data center infrastructure", but I'm not sure if it's true and if you can trust them, so I'll leave it there. They're trying to optimize because they're in debt, and still they seem to expand that debt even more.
[1] https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-invests-two-...
[2] https://www.channeldive.com/news/oracle-capex-spike-cloud-ai...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-06/oracle-an...
you can get a gauge on Oracle debt by looking at CDS prices ( basically insurance that pays out if Oracle defaults on debt ). The link is from 4 months ago and it feels weird to link to reddit but CDS prices have risen quite a bit which implies loaning Oracle money is feeling riskier than it use to be. I don't know what the prices are now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/1p6f5ra/what_is_ha...
I wish i could remember exactly but there was some financing bet or debt structuring thing that Oracle did that didn't go according to plan and put them in a bad spot.
> Yes, but, well... why do they need to do that at all
Because the ERP and EHR market is almost entirely dominated by SAP and Epic. Frankly, the Cerner bet was already a bad bet when they took it in the early 2020s as was NetSuite to a certain extent.
No business has an obligation to hire you in perpetuity. Similarly, you have no obligation to remain at a company you don't like.
> Although... >> All of this is happening even as the company posted a 95% jump in net income — reaching $6.13 billion — last quarter.
Which is largely attributed to the growth in spend on Oracle Cloud.
---
I work in this industry and once you remove the AI washing, much of Oracle's current strategy is around building a hyperscaler business that is comparable to GCP and Azure in size. Already over the past 2 years I've seen 2 fortune 500s completely shift off AWS or Azure to Oracle Cloud because of better terms and strategic hires by Oracle Cloud.
Edit: can't reply
> Thanks for explanation
No worries! Infra, Enterprise, Cloud, and Cybersecurity has a very different dynamic from other businesses
> And still they were trying to compete, weren't they
Sure, 5 years ago. But not anymore.
> Why have their cloud services are suddenly started to make more money, roughly speaking
Becuase around 2-3 years ago Oracle Cloud began strategically hiring enterprise sales leadership from Azure, AWS, and GCP with preexisting relationships with F1000 accounts who were getting hit by contract renegotiations from the other 3.
> what exactly pushed them to do it right now
The "SaaSpocalypse" [0].
Basically, non-market leading Enterprise SaaS products cannot justify their current prices and valuation because the choice is to now either buy best-in-breed at a significant discount or build in-house working with a systems integrator for Anthropic, OpenAI, or Gemini.
If you weren't already a market leader in your specific segment of Enterprise SaaS you are most likely going to see your dealbook reduce significantly over the next 2-4 years as customers shift to dominant market players who are offering significant discounts to stave off a "build with Accenture/WITCH+OpenAI/Anthropic" disruption.
[0] - https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/01/saas-in-saas-out-heres-wha...
> 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.
> Because the ERP and EHR market is almost entirely dominated by SAP and Epic.
And still they were trying to compete, weren't they?
> Which is largely attributed to the growth in spend on Oracle Cloud.
That's exactly what I'm trying to say. Why have their cloud services are suddenly started to make more money, roughly speaking? And at the same time, what is (seemingly) the main reason for their recent debt increase? They do cut out the fat, yes, I agree, but what exactly pushed them to do it right now? What made them to act so quickly and urgently? That's what I'm trying to say.
> I work in this industry and once you remove the AI washing, much of Oracle's current strategy is around building a hyperscaler business that is comparable to GCP and Azure in size. Already over the past 2 years I've seen 2 fortune 500s completely shift off AWS or Azure to Oracle Cloud because of better terms and strategic hires by Oracle Cloud.
Okay, understood. I work in entirely different field, so that's not my main speciality, to be honest. Thanks for explanation : )
Come work for me instead!
Why doesn't anyone ever mention project stargate when discussing these financial struggles of Oracle and OpenAI? That's your answer.
So Ellison's big investors wouldn't back his ridiculous (-Disney) Warner Bros bid without him juicing the performance of Oracle in this way?
(thanks for the reply correcting the company)
Disney is also a target? Or are you confusing Warner Bros Discovery with Disney?
Yup, completely confusing Warner Bros and Disney. Thanks for catching that!
an unceremonious email blast is more than I expected from Oracle
Billions of dollars, yet not for thee
The game where you, the people, will always be the loser
This is AGI.
It's still a company worth $400B that makes $3B of profits and not even $20B of revenue.
And full of debt from AI datacenters full of hardware with a 6 year depreciation cycle, possibly even lower depending on what NVidia releases next.
So overvalued!
Oracle has >$60B in revenue and $16B in net income. It doesn’t seem crazily overvalued to me? Perhaps you were looking at quarterly statements?
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ORCL/financials/
Yeah plenty of suckers are trapped by Ellison’s downward facing grass cutting blades.
It’s a sad state of affairs. I mean Postgres is right over there!
Disgusting.
It's almost like Larry Ellison is a bad CTO and needs to step down.
companies overhired when money was cheap during covid to inflate their numbers and push their marketcap. since cheap money is gone, they have no incentive to keep the workforce. this has nothing to do with AI.
Imagine slashing 30,000 jobs for a measly 2% share price bump.
Ellison owns something like 40% of Oracle which has a market cap of $400 billion. That measly 2% share bump earned him $3 billion today.
> Imagine slashing 30,000 jobs for a measly 2% share price bump.
One lost job is a tragedy. 30,000 jobs lost is statistics.
These are some of the richest and most profitable companies in history but they act like miserly slaves to their share price. We have created such a perverted incentive system.
There's an argument to be made about bad incentives driving large public companies.
But it's way less satisfying that emotional appeals.
The base of your statement is just wrong.
A company is a legal fiction. It doesn't have thoughts, wants, desires. It's not rich or poor. It's a piece of paper. It's an entry in government database.
What is not a fiction is Oracle's owners i.e. shareholders.
They are not rich. Majority of them, either direct owner of stock or in-direct owners via pension plans etc. are like you and me. They are not rich and the price of Oracle shares can be a difference between them being able to pay rent today or being able to retire tomorrow.
Those people rightfully care about the share price.
The executive are correctly responding to wishes of owners of the company by managing it to make a profit and therefore keep the stock price high.
What in the above chain do you find objectionable?
That millions of Americans investing in public companies depend on and therefore care about stock price?
That management of public companies is correctly responding to demands of owners of those companies by managing companies for profit?
Or maybe you just want to skip to the end of the line and seize means of production from private citizens to bask in the warm glow of collectivism?
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?
Right on brand for one rich asshole.
He already owns an island, "donates" billions to the Israeli Ethnic-cleansing Force, owns a massive media company, and yet somehow can't keep orange makeup off his mouth.
He should be taxed heavily.