[HN Gopher] Oracle slashes 30k jobs
___________________________________________________________________
Oracle slashes 30k jobs
Author : pje
Score : 807 points
Date : 2026-03-31 14:30 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rollingout.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rollingout.com)
| dafelst wrote:
| 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".
| consp wrote:
| "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.
| progbits wrote:
| Stock barely moved after this news. Would be surprised if it
| isn't below 100 by H2.
| muskstinks wrote:
| 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.
| Year | Employees ----------------------------------------
| -------------------------- 2010 | (105,000) 2011 |
| (108,000) 2012 | (115,000) 2013 | (120,000)
| 2014 | (122,000) 2015 | (132,000) 2016 |
| (136,000) 2017 | (138,000) 2018 | (137,000)
| 2019 | (136,000) 2020 | (135,000) 2021 |
| (132,000) 2022 | (143,000) 2023 | (164,000)
| 2024 | (159,000) 2025 | (162,000)
|
| _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.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| More employees to release less stuff.... Smell like
| consultancy.
| perching_aix wrote:
| But the up curve at the end very clearly tracks with AI
| adoption and not Corona?
| gedy wrote:
| Their profit doubled from 2010 to 2025 though, no?
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| Even at 100k employees I'm still dumbfounded by that number.
| What do all these people _do_ all day?
| ra_men wrote:
| I'm guessing development is so slow that they have stacks
| of teams working in parallel to accomplish what 1 team
| could normally.
| Simboo wrote:
| Me too. Anyone here to enlighten us?
| drowntoge wrote:
| Well, whatever Oracle is doing, which brings us back to a
| question very similar to your original one.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Oracle sells alot of software that is accompanied by hordes
| of consultants to set it up.
|
| Last F50 I was at did a PeopleSoft migration. We probably
| had 400 Oracle employees pass through the doors over 2
| years helping to get it off the ground.
|
| Most Enterprises don't just buy software and that's it.
| They buy software + support to implement it for their
| business.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| Sure but what did _those_ guys do all day? 400 people is
| a lot of people
| davidw wrote:
| "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?!"
| irl_zebra wrote:
| Creating powerpoints. Presenting the powerpoints to
| others in synchronous meetings.
| kadushka wrote:
| Probably had a lot of meetings
| stackskipton wrote:
| Write code to connect this system with that system. Teach
| people what setting does what. Integrate with Entra ID.
| Create custom reports that hordes of Executive on our
| side want. Scale out the system from undersized nodes we
| originally gave it. That's all I picked up by just
| listening to them. I wasn't involved in the project, just
| sat nearby listening to it.
|
| This is extremely customizable software that is designed
| to pretty much run your entire business and touched by
| over 40k employees. It requires a ton of care and
| feeding. There is plenty of people who dedicate
| themselves to PeopleSoft. Zip Recruiter is showing 5 jobs
| near me for "PeopleSoft Administrator"
| odyssey7 wrote:
| The need to teach people what setting does what is a sort
| of consulting moat that AI dismantles when it can access
| the right context.
| zdragnar wrote:
| 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.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Before, that could create a moat.
|
| Soon, it will be table stakes to put scattered internal
| communications, notes, documents into an AI's knowledge
| base, where the information can no longer hide.
|
| When that fails, the AI can read the code itself, so that
| the settings and how to change them are easily explained
| in simple terms. Actually, this is possibly even better
| than letting the scattered internal information serve as
| an intermediate layer.
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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.
| pearlsontheroad wrote:
| plus yearly support maintenance
| baumy wrote:
| 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
| seniorThrowaway wrote:
| That is really wild
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| 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" ...
| muskstinks wrote:
| what a horrible horrible read :|
|
| Clearly shows that either no one understands the whole
| picture anymore or that it became so diverse custom, that
| this is the only way of handling this now.
|
| I think though that these companies are more business
| companies than tech companies and move themselves into
| this nightmare.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's even more wild when you realize that other similar-
| sized enterprise companies _don 't have all that_ and
| either leave bugs to sit around for decades, or randomly
| break shit trying to fix them.
| zipy124 wrote:
| 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.
| hyperpape wrote:
| 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.
| PyWoody wrote:
| 6. Lawyers
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| "The first thing we do, let's AI all the lawyers" ?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| 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)
| raverbashing wrote:
| Also their cloud
|
| And all the supporting legal team of course.
| hyperpape wrote:
| No better proof that they're a huge company than that I
| could forget about an entire public cloud offering. Good
| point.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| That sales process is directly tied to the type of
| customer they're aiming for, which is larger than a
| "medium-sized family-owned business".
|
| They mis-aligned but for someone like Boeing or United,
| they'd go gaga over the footy-crowd.
| rocmcd wrote:
| 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/
| blackaspen wrote:
| This! They do _everything_.
|
| In the real world, there are a lot of things you need to
| run a business: HR, ERP, Financing, Cloud, Compliance,
| CRM, etc. There is really only one company who can sell
| them all to you on one piece of paper, and that's Oracle.
| bombcar wrote:
| Salesforce does one aspect of what Oracle can do (Access
| as a Service) and they have 83,000 employees. Oracle may
| actually be pretty lean.
| hulitu wrote:
| Solaris ?
| jabl wrote:
| 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..
| shusaku wrote:
| When you send your database a query, who do you think is
| gathering those tables?
| kwisatzh wrote:
| More than 70% of the employees are probably
| Sales/Support/Service -- on par with any large enterprise
| firm (Think Cisco/Salesforce/ServiceNow etc)
| hyperpape wrote:
| 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.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| You did the Python right but the analysis wrong. Looking at
| it on a graph you can see that interpreting a single growth
| rate for the entire period (even if you stop pre-covid)
| doesn't make sense.
|
| You can see linear growth from 2010-2017. Then slow decline
| or at best a flatline from 2018-2021. Then they went crazy
| in 2022-2025.
|
| Now if we just do 162k - 30k we are back to 132k, basically
| same ballpark as pre-COVID.
| franktankbank wrote:
| That's not how stocks are measured on wall street. They
| picked the dumb metric.
| throwaway5465 wrote:
| 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.
| RobRivera wrote:
| You need to pair hc with revenue, otherwise this data tells
| only one story, hc growth.
| sethev wrote:
| > They clearly did something crazy at corona
|
| They acquired Cerner, which had ~30k employees.
| ge96 wrote:
| Cool to be part of history I used to go into that office
| Innovations campus
|
| Saw someone had a license plate say MPAGES ha
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| > (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.
| jonas21 wrote:
| The graph in your Macrotrends link shows the exact same
| numbers as the AI source, but is harder to read and the
| page is half ads. It's not an authoritative source -- the
| data was most likely parsed out of Oracle's earning reports
| by some janky regexp. I don't know why you would trust this
| more than AI.
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| > harder to read and the page is half ads
|
| with an adblocker ... there is one ad on the page just
| above the graph about "Unlock Macrotrends Premium" which
| takes up 1.5/2cm of the page, while the graph underneath
| it takes up like 15cm. Then there's a bunch of other
| information on the page, none of which are ads. yes,
| there's a "you only get 5 page visits free" whole page
| pop-up thing, but there's an easy and well-known way
| round that for individuals who understand basic internet
| browser usage.
|
| maybe start using an ad-blocker? pretty much everyone
| else does these days.
|
| > the data was most likely parsed out of Oracle's earning
| reports by some janky regexp.
|
| which is probably what the ai would do... or more likely
| it's just stealing it from the source i linked, since the
| numbers are exactly the same...
|
| also, probably not because see (1b) below.
|
| > I don't know why you would trust this more than AI.
|
| because (1a)
|
| > Fundamental data from Zacks Investment Research, Inc.
|
| > Built on Zacks Investment Research -- trusted by
| institutional investors, academics, and financial
| professionals for over 45 years. [0]
|
| I'd take _people_ who have been doing this stuff for 45
| years over some new-fangled toy that 's _well known to
| hallucinate and get things wrong in ways that appear
| authoritative_.
|
| also, on that (1b)
|
| > Zacks employs a rigorous quality control process to
| make sure all data points are recorded accurately. For
| each company, a trained analyst enters the data from SEC
| filings, which is then double checked by a senior
| analyst. Once the data is entered, a senior analyst signs
| off on final completion after reviewing all the data. In
| addition, the data is subjected to a battery of automated
| checks to verify balancing relationships and correct
| errors. All data items are reviewed by multiple sets of
| trained eyes as well as automated computer checks. [1]
|
| and (2) because that site provides other contextual
| information that is helpful, like the fact that Oracle's
| stock price has been trending downwards, which is
| possibly a reason why they felt the need to make cuts
| now. [2]
|
| ai gives you the answer you want -- not the answers you
| might actually need.
|
| [0]: https://zacksdata.com
|
| [1]: https://zacksdata.com/static/docs/Zacks_Fundamental_
| Data_Ove...
|
| [2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracl
| e/stock-...
|
| edit1: apparently you're not using an adblocker, wtf
| dude, it's 2026. use an adblocker.
|
| edit2: added (1b)
| adi_kurian wrote:
| It's okay to use the chatbot. Nothing bad will happen.
|
| ---
|
| > Yes -- the universal fallback is `full-time employees`.
| That phrase appears in the employee-count disclosure
| across Oracle's filings in this run. ([Securities and
| Exchange Commission][1]) > > If you want the exact string
| to paste into `Cmd-F`, use these: > > * FY2010: `As of
| May 31, 2010, we employed approximately 105,000 full-time
| employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][1]) > *
| FY2011: `As of May 31, 2011, we employed approximately
| 108,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange
| Commission][2]) > * FY2012: `As of May 31, 2012, we
| employed approximately 115,000 full-time employees`
| ([Securities and Exchange Commission][3]) > * FY2013: `As
| of May 31, 2013, we employed approximately 120,000 full-
| time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][4])
| > * FY2014: `As of May 31, 2014, we employed
| approximately 122,000 full-time employees` ([Securities
| and Exchange Commission][5]) > * FY2015: `As of May 31,
| 2015, we employed approximately 132,000 full-time
| employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][6]) > *
| FY2016: `As of May 31, 2016, we employed approximately
| 136,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange
| Commission][7]) > * FY2017: `As of May 31, 2017, we
| employed approximately 138,000 full-time employees`
| ([Securities and Exchange Commission][8]) > * FY2018: `As
| of May 31, 2018, we employed approximately 137,000 full-
| time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][9])
| > * FY2019: `As of May 31, 2019, we employed
| approximately 136,000 full-time employees` ([Securities
| and Exchange Commission][10]) > * FY2020: `As of May 31,
| 2020, we employed approximately 135,000 full-time
| employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][11]) > *
| FY2021: `As of May 31, 2021, we employed approximately
| 132,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange
| Commission][12]) > * FY2022: `As of May 31, 2022, we
| employed approximately 143,000 full-time employees`
| ([Securities and Exchange Commission][13]) > * FY2023:
| `As of May 31, 2023, we employed approximately 164,000
| full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange
| Commission][14]) > * FY2024: `As of May 31, 2024, we
| employed approximately 159,000 full-time employees`
| ([Securities and Exchange Commission][15]) > * FY2025:
| `As of May 31, 2025, we employed approximately 162,000
| full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange
| Commission][16]) > > If the browser/PDF viewer is
| annoying, use this order: `full-time employees` - `As of
| May 31, 20XX` - `Employees`. The first one is usually the
| fastest. > > [1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data
| /1341439/000119312510... > [2]: https://www.sec.gov/Archi
| ves/edgar/data/1341439/000119312511... > [3]: https://www
| .sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312512... >
| [4]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/0001
| 19312513... > [5]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/dat
| a/1341439/000119312514... > [6]: https://www.sec.gov/Arch
| ives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312515... > [7]: https://ww
| w.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312516... >
| [8]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/0001
| 19312517... > [9]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/dat
| a/1341439/000119312518... > [10]: https://www.sec.gov/Arc
| hives/edgar/data/1341439/000156459019... > [11]: https://
| www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000156459020... >
| [12]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000
| 156459021... > [13]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/d
| ata/1341439/000156459022... > [14]: https://www.sec.gov/A
| rchives/edgar/data/1341439/000095017023... > [15]: https:
| //www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000095017024...
| > [16]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/0
| 00095017025... ```
| muskstinks wrote:
| I verified it before and generated the graph with gemini
| for c&p it into hn
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| To be fair, the stats are more trustworthy with a source
| link. Especially if you admit to using AI to generate the
| text in your comment (which is now actually against the
| guidelines, but I suspect most will forgive it if it's
| not too egregious, even after such an admission; in this
| case, it's nice formatting for being inline with the
| comments on this page), it would help to disclose where
| the actual data is coming from. I'd just include the link
| to where you verified the numbers, otherwise the comment
| is fine. (I mean, that's just my opinion, but there you
| have it.)
| gib444 wrote:
| Where's the annual revenue for context? Those numbers are
| almost useless alone.
| muskstinks wrote:
| Feel free to add more info to this discussion.
|
| I only wanted to point out that number of jobs in context
| of the company growth. I found 160k already a huge/gigantic
| number though.
| hbn wrote:
| What's the point of posting statistics if they're not fact-
| checked and come from no verifiable source? At best they're
| right but we don't know until someone else fact-checked it
| for you, and at worst you're just spreading misinformation
| and we don't know until, again, someone else fact-checked it
| for you.
|
| If you want to use AI to find information like this, tell it
| to grab you a source and post that.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| From what I've heard Epic can be as bad, but at least
| they're dedicated to one product.
| mandevil wrote:
| In June 2022 the Oracle acquisition of Cerner (a EMR now
| billed as Oracle Health) closed, so that would be after the
| 2022 date and before the 2023 date. Cerner was 28,000
| employees.
|
| If they do cut back to their size before the acquisition,
| while continuing to try and support the EMR, they will be
| doing a lot more with fewer employees.
|
| The acquisition has already had a lot of bad consequences:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-cerner-health-
| larry-e...
| jimbokun wrote:
| So they are returning to 2015 headcount.
|
| (EDIT: or 2021)
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| Termination will take on a while different meaning of this
| turns out to come true on some Black Mirror future.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| It's not unethical to lay someone off
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| When done for profit maximizing reasons it's not any worse
| than capitalism itself, but then this degrades into whether
| capitalism is ethical which is off topic
| WalterBright wrote:
| Profit maximization makes for the high standard of living
| we enjoy.
| wiseowise wrote:
| The one where one trip to ER can leave you on the street
| and students have six digit debts?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Ironically, you picked two systems that are heavily
| interfered with by the government.
|
| Back in the Great Depression, my great grandmother got
| sick and was hospitalized, and they took care of her
| until she passed. My grandfather did not have enough to
| pay the bill. The hospital told him not to worry, just
| pay what he could. It took him a while, but he paid the
| bill in full.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Back in Great Depression
|
| Why not civil war?
|
| > It took him a while, but he paid the bill in full.
|
| How long was "a while" specifically? And how much did it
| affect your grandfathers life?
| Synthetic7346 wrote:
| Heavily interfered how? Canada / UK / Australia have
| healthcare which is "heavily interfered" as you call it,
| and they're better off for it
| razakel wrote:
| Was the hospital affiliated with a religious order?
| js8 wrote:
| 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.
| christkv wrote:
| Yeah because marxists systems "take such good care" off
| people in comparison.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Marxist systems don't exist in real life.
| christkv wrote:
| They do in some peoples heads as an utopian dream.
| BeetleB wrote:
| It's a job. Not a tribe.
|
| The role an employer plays in societies varies from
| culture to culture, but note that in _many_ cultures, it
| is "just a job".
| js8 wrote:
| Yes, that's what people tell themselves to deal with it
| psychologically. That it's just a job, not a community,
| and you better not make friends in the workplace (despite
| spending majority of your life there). And that when
| you're unemployed, life just goes on, as if it doesn't
| mean much.
|
| Like when a traumatised kid never loved by the parents
| concludes that life is harsh and love doesn't exist, so
| better be tough.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Yes, that's what people tell themselves to deal with it
| psychologically. That it's just a job, not a community,
| and you better not make friends in the workplace (despite
| spending majority of your life there). And that when
| you're unemployed, life just goes on, as if it doesn't
| mean much.
|
| That's a lot of stuff _you 're_ saying. Not what I'm
| saying.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Sure. Also the profitability of a company is just a
| number, and shareholders dividend is just fiduciary
| fictions, and company hierarchy is just arbitrary title
| attaching this or that person to this or that loosely
| defined role.
|
| Drama is just in the head of people melted in the ambient
| narrative, sure.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > layoffs are deeply immoral
|
| It's no more immoral than you deciding to buy from
| Safeway, even though you'd been buying from Fred Meyer
| before.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Safeway won't starve and die if I decide to buy from Fred
| Meyer. You really don't see that an individual is not on
| equal footing with multibillion company? It is absolutely
| immoral. And I'm not even talking about charity, those
| people were hired and did actual job for the fucking
| trillion dollar company.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Several grocery stores in Seattle have closed recently.
| The same with local Starbucks outlets. Locations that
| don't make money get closed, even if the rest of the
| company is doing well.
|
| Also, employees can quit anytime, no notice required.
| Nobody is obliged to work.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Several grocery stores in Seattle have closed recently.
| The same with local Starbucks outlets. Locations that
| don't make money get closed, even if the rest of the
| company is doing well.
|
| Irrelevant to the topic at hand. Don't give me a sob
| story about mom and pop shop, we're talking about a
| trillion dollar company.
|
| > Also, employees can quit anytime, no notice required.
| Nobody is obliged to work.
|
| Okay? What's your point?
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Don't give me a sob story about mom and pop shop
|
| The grocery stores were run by national chains. Starbucks
| is global.
|
| > What's your point?
|
| It's symmetric. Companies employ at will, and workers
| work at will.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > The grocery stores were run by national chains.
| Starbucks is global.
|
| So you're confirming my point that billion dollar
| companies (like Starbucks killing mom and pop shop) have
| disproportionately more power over individuals or what
| are you saying?
|
| > It's symmetric. Companies employ at will, and workers
| work at will.
|
| Workers don't work at will. Last time I checked UBI is
| not there, so workers work to pay the bills and put food
| on the table.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| My employer is not my "tribe". That is crazy. We have a
| contract saying I do X units of work and they pay me Y in
| return. Either of us end it at any time.
|
| At least this is in the case in the US. What you are
| saying might be true in other cultures.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| And yet, employers love to use the "we're a family",
| "we're a team", and other such messaging, especially in
| the tech industry. They elide the transactional nature of
| the entire relationship.
| bombcar wrote:
| What we have in the USA is not necessarily the final and
| best form of all interactions, as much as it pains me to
| say it.
|
| Most people's reactions to large-scale movements like
| this seem to imply that we _feel_ there should be
| something more than a simple "money duty" between
| employer and employee, and we seem to also have respect
| for companies that act that way (e.g, some Japanese
| companies perhaps, or baseball teams keeping a sick
| player on the payroll so they get healthcare even though
| they never play another game).
|
| Attempting to realize that duty and at the same time
| abscond it to the state or the family may be an aspect of
| the failing.
| throwaway85825 wrote:
| It's an unpriced negative externality.
| Zigurd wrote:
| 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.
| wiseowise wrote:
| 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.
| arkaic wrote:
| Irresponsible, careless, negligent. No planning leads to
| all of this. Ultimately unethical from this point of view
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Oracle has record revenue and has for many years in a row.
| Laying people off is a result of mismanagement and not
| because they can't afford to keep them. In an ideal world I
| believe we'd have human centered employment instead of profit
| centered, and while I know that's unlikely to happen, it
| doesn't mean we can't criticize profit centered
| WalterBright wrote:
| > 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.
| psychoslave wrote:
| https://academic.oup.com/ser/article/22/4/1843/7644954?lo
| gin...
| zulux wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| And what about those who you have a chance to and they
| didn't cut it? Their life is ruined by being fired.
| perching_aix wrote:
| > 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Mandated perpetual employment is bad for workers because the
| company will be extremely reluctant to hire and take on such
| an open-ended liability.
| triceratops wrote:
| > One of the ideal things that companies can do is not hire
| people
|
| This, but unironically. Companies that make money without
| hiring anyone provide the most "value".
|
| Simultaneously we should stop calling business owners "job
| creators". They're actually "job minimizers". They only hire
| people when there's no other choice.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Make money? Seems kind of corpofascistic. That's profit
| that should be shared with workers. If no employees it
| could be distributed to unions.
| triceratops wrote:
| Ok go for it.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > 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.
| SlinkyOnStairs wrote:
| -
| alephnerd wrote:
| 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.
| SlinkyOnStairs wrote:
| > 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.
| rus20376 wrote:
| Anyone with even a passing familiarity with EHR systems
| will know that nobody wants to build their own. I once
| worked for a large hospital system that abandoned a
| decades old institutionally built and maintained system
| for Epic. The choice was celebrated by almost everyone
| who worked there.
|
| The value is in the "system" itself. The tooling,
| plugins, knowledge that your staff has the familiarity
| and skills so as to not require retraining, the
| interoperability of data with other systems and vendors.
|
| The idea that AI is going to enable a variety of bespoke
| competitors is truly laughable!
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > 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.
| shigawire wrote:
| Minor nit - enterprise EMRs brand themselves as EHR because
| they consider it more encompassing than just medical
| records.
|
| I agree on other points.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > You can't just vibecode your way to replacing an (sic)
| EMR
|
| Absolutely, but you can now demand a market leader like
| Epic to give you a significantly better discount (eg.
| 20-30% over the 10% you may have previously been offered).
|
| And that is the crux of the "SaaSpocalypse" and why you are
| seeing targeted layoffs in Oracle specifically for their
| ERP and EHR products.
|
| > It's also worth noting that the DoD uses Millennium for
| active service members, and I think they also use it for
| TriCare. American taxpayers are on the hook for dealing
| with the problems that Oracle's cost cuts will produce
|
| Absolutely, but they were already on the hook for that
| before Cerner became a part of Oracle.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > Absolutely, but you can now demand a market leader like
| Epic to give you a significantly better discount (eg.
| 20-30% over the 10% you may have previously been
| offered).
|
| Is this on the grounds that you can do it yourself?
| alephnerd wrote:
| What larger procurement teams are saying is "we would
| rather pay Accenture+Anthropic $50M for 2 years and if
| they fail, sign a $75M contract with Epic in 3 years
| instead of spending $150M for 5 years".
|
| Even at the lower ends of the funnel, companies are now
| extracting significant discounts from market leaders _as
| well as_ their incumbent vendors becuase they are quote
| shopping.
|
| Oracle isn't in a position to push back because it isn't
| a market leader in the segments that NetSuite and Cerner
| compete in, which makes discount even more critical,
| which means margins management _also_ becomes
| significantly more critical.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Who in the healthcare space has actually pulled the
| trigger on Accenture+Anthropic so that BATNA is even
| remotely credible?
|
| Sorry, but that sounds as mythical as Bigfoot.
| alephnerd wrote:
| No one has, but _every_ buyer is using this line across
| vast swathes of Enterprise SaaS to extract the most
| competitive quote available from either the dominant
| player or their existing vendor.
|
| It doesn't matter if the customer is serious because the
| general sentiment across the board amongst procurement
| teams is that existing quotes are too high, and that they
| want to maximize discounting where possible.
|
| If you are a non-dominant player in a market segment as
| Oracle is in ERP and EHR, they lack leeway to better
| manage margins pressures and win in a price war.
|
| It is in this vein that mass layoffs like the one Oracle
| announced occur.
|
| Why pay a premium for a tier 2 product when I can buy the
| tier 1 product on a discount?
| nimbius wrote:
| Blame it on whatever you like. oracle has been a rudderless
| leech for nearly 30 years now.
|
| - overpricing the database led to a predictable exodus and new
| players with often times better performance.
|
| - acquisition of MySQL led to a predictable exodus and new
| players like maria with often times better performance.
|
| - Oracle cloud arrived late to spectacular skepticism and low
| user turnout from customers who had been burned by high cost
| and users burned from decisions like the death of opensolaris.
| it exists on federal life support these days by the grace of
| the prevailing administration.
|
| - more than 80 products, with hundreds of thousands of patches
| and updates, yet no coherent or meaningful reform of the build
| for more than forty years. DB 19c still ships broken for redhat
| 9 as a means of driving users to oracle linux, and patching the
| installer is a 1970s experience in itself. DB 23's greatest
| improvement has been to tack the letters "AI" onto it to chum
| what shallow AI waters Oracle deigns to tread outside of an
| investment portfolio.
|
| - dumping cash into oracle enterprise linux despite it only
| having around 2500 active corporate users.
|
| this is nearly 20% of the company being laid off.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > a rudderless leech for nearly 30 years now.
|
| Yeah, from small interactions over the past two decades, I
| have no idea how they could have been so bad while employing
| so many people. What on earth were those 30k people doing?!
| Their solutions were crap for ages.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >I have no idea how they could have been so bad while
| employing so many people
|
| There is a significant correlation between how many people
| you employ and how much nothing you accomplish. It means
| you've gotten big enough to survive long bouts of doing
| _something_ and achieving nothing with large amounts of
| people.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Amazon empoloys 300k corporate employees. Apple has 170k.
| How is this a significant correlation.
|
| It seems there's literally no correlation between people
| and what is accomplished.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > What on earth were those 30k people doing?!
|
| Could be lawyers.
|
| Would we be sad if they were lawyers?
| jimbokun wrote:
| I hadn't realized their stock price has been cut in half over
| the past year.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| It's been cut in half year-to-date. It's about where it was
| a full year ago right now.
| guywithahat wrote:
| I don't understand this sentiment. I'm absolutely significantly
| more productive with AI; so much moreso that I now have
| freetime and we haven't needed to replace an engineer who left.
| On the flip side my coworkers who think they're above AI are
| drowning. I think there is an endemic problem of senior
| engineers who think they're above learning AI and agents who
| don't want to use them, and these cuts are about forcing them
| to get with the times or drown in work.
|
| Replacing jobs is a bit of a misnomer, but it's certainly
| allowing us to build out more features in shorter amounts of
| time.
| lljk_kennedy wrote:
| Are you paid significantly more for your newfound
| productivity?
| chasd00 wrote:
| he mentions being paid more in terms of time, "I now have
| freetime". I can relate, in the right use cases it is nice
| to do some work estimated for 12 hrs in 2.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| Is it AI or is it Larry subsidizing his dipshit son's media
| exec fantasy/throwing money at Trump's patronage system?
| random__duck wrote:
| How to tell you we are running out of money because of AI
| without spooking the investors ?
| superfrank wrote:
| I think you're mostly right.
|
| This round of layoffs was telegraphed at a month or so ago.
| It's all related to banks getting spooked and pulling funding
| for their massive data center project and the OpenAI deal being
| on the rocks.
|
| So, I don't think it's really about their product being good
| enough, it's more that they've bet the company on data centers
| and it's starting to look like they just don't have the skills
| to execute on it.
| xyst wrote:
| This isn't ai, this is the Ellison family gambling on their
| awful multibillion dollar deal to acquire Warner.
| kwanbix wrote:
| Those super yatchs of larry have to be paid somewhow.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Imagine slashing 30,000 jobs for a measly 2% share price bump.
| TwoNineA wrote:
| > Imagine slashing 30,000 jobs for a measly 2% share price
| bump.
|
| One lost job is a tragedy. 30,000 jobs lost is statistics.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| 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.
| kjksf wrote:
| 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?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| 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?
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Or maybe you just want to skip to the end of the line
| and seize means of production from private citizens to
| bask in the warm glow of collectivism?
|
| Interesting how "American dream" was forgotten and now
| it's either under corporatist boot or collectivism.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| These companies didn't create the system and they are only
| rich and profitable because they act accordingly.
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| codemog wrote:
| Don't work for evil companies.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| your local food bank only has so many open positions
| troyvit wrote:
| The more people who believe this, the easier it is for me to
| find a job at a place I respect, so thank you.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| List successful companies you would not define as evil.
| fsflover wrote:
| Pine64. ("Successful" doesn't have to mean "a megacorp".)
| jjice wrote:
| Costco maybe?
| mirekrusin wrote:
| 37signals, vanguard, costco, proton, fastmail, mullvad vpn,
| framework, automattic, valve, patagonia, lego, linear,
| hetzner, tarsnap, ...
| antonymoose wrote:
| Valve has been making money hand over fist by getting kids
| addicted to gambling...
| throwaway85825 wrote:
| The snowball of government intervention has started
| rolling on them.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| ivell wrote:
| "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see
| yourself become the villain"
|
| It is only a matter of time...
| mirekrusin wrote:
| People can't wait to make heroes villains.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Valve takes 30% of revenue from developers because they
| have cornered the distribution market. Their margins on the
| steam store are probably second only to the apple store's,
| another heinously immoral product.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| If everybody does it wrong and you know the right way -
| sounds like you're sitting on a million dollar idea.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Consumers have no incentive to switch because they don't
| care that devs are being taken advantage of, that's what
| makes the scheme evil.
| tombert wrote:
| Ok, and when you apply for and get rejected from all those
| companies, what do you do then? Suppose you give me a list
| of literally every company you think is ok, and I were
| declined by all of them, then what?
|
| This isn't a theoretical question for me. I've applied to
| and been declined from all the companies you listed (except
| tarsnap because I didn't see a careers page). What exactly
| do I do then? Do I then just decide that food is overrated
| and be content with not having paycheck?
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Create your own company.
| tombert wrote:
| Ok, great. Let's say I agree that that's a good response.
| I would still likely need investor money, which I don't
| even know how to get but even if I did then I have a
| similar problem of having to make sure that I only have
| ethical investors. I'm not saying that they don't exist
| but I'm not exactly fond of the big institutional VC
| firms.
|
| Let's not also forget that most companies go broke, and
| realistically most of us don't have any ideas that are
| likely to make a sustainable business.
|
| I'm not saying that you shouldn't try and find an ethical
| place to work for or start a business, I'm just saying
| that it's not as easy as "just apply to places that don't
| suck".
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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.
| Steve16384 wrote:
| Ideally it would be "don't buy from Oracle", but we don't get
| to affect those decisions.
| WarmWash wrote:
| Ironically this would just fuel more layoffs.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > 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.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| So exactly what for profit company is on the side of the
| angels?
| bix6 wrote:
| 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.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Are those startups self funded or funded by VCs? If they
| are funded by VCs, it doesn't matter what your company
| wants.
| troyvit wrote:
| 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.
| BeetleB wrote:
| GitLab is for profit, isn't it?
| troyvit wrote:
| I tried to focus on for-profit, but I'm just saying
| there's nothing wrong with non-profits either. In fact I
| don't think I consciously mentioned a non-profit but I
| might have.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Because for profits have the most employment opportunities?
| All of the companies named in replies to my initial comment
| hire a minuscule number of people.
| troyvit wrote:
| If you're looking to scale, then you're looking for
| companies that scale, and if you're looking for companies
| that scale, you're not looking for angels. I used to
| think Cloudflare was an exception to this belief but
| today I'm not so sure.
| tombert wrote:
| Wait what's wrong with Cloudflare?
| troyvit wrote:
| https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/12/cloudflare_vs_ital
| y/
|
| Definitely my bias here so take it with a grain of salt.
| I still use cloudflare and I'd probably still work for
| them.
| tombert wrote:
| I'm not unemployed right now, but in the past have applied
| to literally every one of those companies and been declined
| from every one of those companies.
|
| It's hard to find jobs at companies that aren't run by
| monsters; even if you can identify a company that isn't
| terrible, there's still a relatively low likelihood of
| getting a job there.
|
| I'm not blaming the companies for not hiring me, I'm sure
| they have their reasons for their terrible decision of
| passing up on someone as handsome and smart as me [1], and
| I am certainly not entitled to a job, but when I run out of
| companies that seem ethical, what do you do then?
|
| It's easy to say "well start your own company!", and sure
| if you have the ability to do that then that's great, but I
| don't even really know where to begin with finding
| investors for stuff I'm working on, and I'm not sure that
| anything I'm working on would be interesting to investors
| anyway.
|
| [1] It's true, my mom told me!
| troyvit wrote:
| Haha I built that list almost entirely from companies
| that rejected me so I hear you.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Sometimes the lesser evil is truly a lesser evil.
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| 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?
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Yes. I work at boring companies that are not evil instead.
| Never went to my local magnate (Comcast), left a company when
| they off/onshored entire teams to HCL slaves, etc.
|
| No i won't make 350K as a dev. Yes i will have a paltry
| middle class existence while we still have a profession
| called IT.
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| I used to work on software for non-profits. I found it
| fulfilling but it was hard to do the work since I found
| fullstack technically uninteresting (this is my own
| shortcoming).
|
| Finding a balance in that is difficult. I have seen that it
| might be easier to find a societally good job the less
| technically deep the job gets. Networking research seems to
| be both technically interesting and connected to societal
| impact (eg. because of the ties to censorship, security,
| net neutrality etc)
|
| It seems hard to continue doing this sort of research after
| your PhD though, as in both your school name matters
| immensely (i.e. you're screwed if you didn't go to
| Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, or MIT) and so does your
| publishing success to land a research job, which seems like
| an enormous task.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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".
| BeetleB wrote:
| > 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.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| I honestly think is it bad for you to be that morally
| insistent against "evil" companies.
|
| I also think it's not as easy as most people make it. It's
| not the poor and innocent people that are oppressed by all
| this evil companies. These companies are just a reflection of
| the people and the society we live in.
| 01284a7e wrote:
| The right thing to be said here. Oracle is trash. Would you
| expect rude idiots to be nice smart people all of a sudden?
| sleepybrett wrote:
| It's very very hard to do this because any public company will
| be evil in the name of 'shareholder value' EVERY.SINGLE.TIME.
| tombert wrote:
| Easier said than done. Most of us end up working for monsters
| if you go high enough up on the ladder.
|
| I'm certainly not saying that you shouldn't have boundaries;
| there are certain companies that I will absolutely _not_ work
| for no matter what they pay me (e.g. Palantir). I 'm just
| saying that if you draw the line at "don't work for bad
| company", it's going to be hard to pay your bills since due to
| the lovely world of capitalism the people on top are usually
| sociopaths.
|
| To be clear, I do agree broadly; if you can find a company that
| has decent people running it and doesn't appear to be evil to
| you, you should probably work for that company. The problem is
| that the job market is very competitive and you often have to
| take what you can get.
|
| I'm in a privileged position to where I can be a little choosy
| with my work (for now!), but I can't really judge someone who
| has a family to take care of for doing what they need to to pay
| the bills.
| bix6 wrote:
| It feels like Oracle has made some massive strategic missteps in
| the past year. I'm curious if they can turn it around.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| What "massive strategic missteps"? They continue to attract
| cloud customers coming from Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Citations?
| newsoftheday wrote:
| I used Google Gemini to confirm before I posted my comment.
| You're welcome to do the same.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| "I used AI to confirm what I said" is not exactly the
| great comeback you think it is...
| bombcar wrote:
| I will wait for Netcraft to confirm.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| It wasn't a comeback, it was a truthful answer to your
| question.
| bix6 wrote:
| They massively over committed to data center deals with debt.
| Safra leaving is also a big deal. Look at the stock price
| since she left.
| AptSeagull wrote:
| 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.
| Steve16384 wrote:
| Like the OpenAI deal?
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I mean bribing trump to get all those sweet government cloud
| contracts seems like it could end up being either the best
| bribe ever or a good way to get your company disbanded.
| dolphinscorpion wrote:
| Unless you're being offered a very good package, any firing email
| is cold. Let's be honest
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Whatever you do, do not _ever_ book a 1:1 meeting on a Friday
| afternoon for Monday morning titled, "The Future."
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I had to let an employee go because he didn't do any work,
| took forever to respond to chats (in a remote position),
| and was always late for meetings. I scheduled the 4pm
| Friday meeting to let him go. He was 15 minutes late.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Sounds like me on site, ADHD is a bitch, people probably
| think I don't anything too.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I've found that there can be a chasm between "what people
| think I do" and "what I actually do." But also, there can
| be a chasm between "what I think I do" and "what I
| actually do."
|
| If the system in which you operate does not attempt to
| measure this, I think it's worth it for anyone to measure
| it themselves. We can so easily be overconfident or
| underconfident. Collect the data and see the kinds of
| things you've actually been accomplishing over a year.
|
| I'll feel like I'm getting nothing done, and then I look
| at the year's changelogs and realize I'm actually doing
| just fine for where I want to be.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| I think its very impolite to not do it face-to-face.
| toast0 wrote:
| What time is a good time for everyone to show up for a
| face-to-face layoff meeting for a global company?
|
| If you don't do it simultaneously, you're going to hear by
| rumor rather than by official email, which is IMHO worse.
|
| If you do it simultaneously, everyone will know something
| is up, because there's never simultaneous global meetings.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| the practicalities of the issue don't stop it from being
| impolite.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| There is no perfect or right way to do this. Every
| approach will have criticism (and not every approach is
| equal), and different people will appreciate different
| things about the trade-offs.
|
| Is it polite to let people stew for hours, or days, as
| virtual meetings spread across the company to convey the
| news in person? It is polite to schedule those meetings
| all at once with the implications clear - how is that any
| different than just confirming it an email? Is that
| better or worse than scheduling such calls with short
| notice, so that every employee must wonder for days
| (maybe weeks, depending on staffing and leverage model)
| whether they still have a job, when that information
| could have been communicated immediately to allow for
| immediate preparations?
|
| You and I as senior managers might both apply the golden
| rule in this situation, but that could lead to different
| decisions.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| You're just making excuses for them. The approach they
| chose was rude and cowardly. Even within this cowardice,
| further cowardice shows, with the email being sent from
| no specific individual but simply an amorphous "Oracle
| Leadership".
|
| Oracle as a company are cowardly and rude and the
| practicalities are simply an excuse. There's clearly one
| "better way" which is to put a name at the end of the
| email, for perhaps Larry himself to take responsibility
| as he should.
|
| If anything the practicalities show how arbitrary the
| decision was. Checking the Oracle subreddit we got people
| with "exceeds expectations" as their average still
| getting culled. It would appear how they decided upon the
| cuts reflects on how they have performed them. With all
| the sophistication of a child in a candy shop trying to
| buy more candy than their piggy bank can afford and then
| just dropping the excess on the floor, walking away and
| trying to forget that it ever happened.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| > You're just making excuses for them.
|
| I am communicating my own sincerely held belief on
| _general practices_ with large-scale layoffs, and my
| sincere disagreement with the black-and-white declarative
| than a mass email is _definitely_ worse than individual
| conversations. Reasonable people can disagree.
|
| I am not evaluating the full list of circumstances in
| this specific situation as I wouldn't be able to even if
| I were interested in doing so. If we were taking wagers,
| I'd wager my opinion of the Ellisons is at least as
| negative as yours independent of anything to do with this
| story.
|
| > There's clearly one "better way" which is to put a name
| at the end of the email, for perhaps Larry himself to
| take responsibility as he should.
|
| Completely agree with that, though ultimately it should
| be many names, not just one.
| 01284a7e wrote:
| I'm sorry but you work at Oracle. Terrible people. Very
| rude people. You should expect it.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| I don't, so I can still call how they do things: rude.
| lokar wrote:
| I agree. But, IMO it's what you should expect going to work
| for a giant company. It's a machine, it does not care about
| you. Some of the people will care about you, but often
| their influence is quite limited. It's important to
| understand this at the start.
| troyvit wrote:
| I think the headline is not the best headline, but what it
| meant by "cold" is that there was no advance warning. So like
| cold-calling somebody, but to fire them, and an email
| instead.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| 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!
| secstate wrote:
| At-will employment is hard. Honestly, if you aren't
| planning to lose your job tomorrow when your at-will,
| you're not being honest with yourself. I wish it were
| different, but outside a union contract or some other
| fairly well-combed over business contract, you should not
| assume you will get paid tomorrow.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The best strategy is to save up at least 6 months of
| runway.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is the real underlying story, and it may be unfair
| to expect people to "do this on their own" but in the
| USA, you _really_ need to do this on your own.
| s3p wrote:
| I'd prefer this honestly. Would take 1-2 weeks to start
| updating my resume and listing out all accomplishments,
| relevant projects, etc.
| ahtihn wrote:
| > Should I buy Xmas presents? Who knows!
|
| If losing your job means you can't afford buying
| presents, isn't it _good_ to know your job is at risk?
|
| Better than buying presents and then getting fired right?
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| That's the point. Tell me today if I still have a job. Do
| not make everyone sweat about it for an undetermined
| amount of time. That's unnecessary financial stress on
| all of the people who were not impacted.
| bombcar wrote:
| In one case it was "we may be considering layoffs" told
| to us in September, and right after thanksgiving was "we
| will be doing layoffs after Christmas" - but the list of
| those laid off wasn't available.
|
| Maybe we need the corporate version of "Good night,
| Wesley, I'll no doubt fire you in the morning."
| WalterBright wrote:
| The problem with advance warning is the employee who
| decides to sabotage in revenge.
|
| For example, a company I knew in the 80s had a wholly owned
| subsidiary. It was losing money, so it was decided to close
| the subsidiary. Management decided that they'd be nice
| guys, and notified the subsidiary that it would be closed
| in 90 days and then everyone would be laid off.
|
| 90 days later, management arrived to close the facility. It
| was empty, stripped clean of everything. Not a lick of work
| was done in the 90 days, and nobody was there. There were
| reports that trucks had come to the loading dock, and took
| everything they could carry.
|
| The cost of that led to the collapse of the company.
| lljk_kennedy wrote:
| I find it hard to blame the workers in this story... it's
| a poor indictment of the management if they only checked
| in 3 months later and got this surprise - no wonder the
| company collapsed!
| WalterBright wrote:
| The workers who left the company while still collecting a
| paycheck for 90 days are essentially stealing, and the
| ones who stripped the premises were also thieves.
|
| I agree it was poor management to not oversee what was
| happening.
|
| This is why management does not give advance notice of
| layoffs. Usually, when a person gets laid off, their
| first notion of it is a security guard is there to help
| them fill a box with their personal items and escort them
| out.
|
| Nobody likes this, but it's the inevitable result of a
| bad apple now and then. For example, most people aren't
| thieves, but banks still need security guards because
| there are thieves.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The company is free to pay the salary and tell the
| employee not to show up during that time.
| bombcar wrote:
| Which is so common it's called "garden leave".
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| And traceability.
|
| In a 1:1 meeting you could fire me and say a gazillion things
| and I'd forget 99.9% of them.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Or, with emotions flaring, could say something that becomes
| grounds for a wrongful termination or discrimination claim.
| epolanski wrote:
| Even if you're being offered a very good package, being fired,
| regardless of how, is cold.
| ghaff wrote:
| Depends on the circumstances. There are people who are ready
| to go any the time of a layoff if the terms are right.
| lateforwork wrote:
| What is the alternative? Have 30,000 meetings? How long will
| that take?
| Barbing wrote:
| Can you imagine a company spending a long time on meetings?!
| zerr wrote:
| 6+ months' notice with a severance package equal to at least
| an annual salary.
| dpark wrote:
| Why would you give someone 6 months notice? What good is
| that for the employee? Especially if the severance is
| generous.
|
| "Hey, we're going to fire you in 6 months. Just a heads
| up."
|
| Nah. Give me the year of salary and send me home today.
| Better for the employee and for the company than
| pointlessly dragging it out. Again, this is assuming
| generous severance.
| zerr wrote:
| Job hunting takes time. Also, they won't be deported in
| 30 days, along with their families.
| dpark wrote:
| I can do a lot of job hunting with a year of severance.
|
| Valid point about employees on visas though.
| HomeDeLaPot wrote:
| Maybe they could be kept on the payroll without access to
| actually work.
|
| But the real problem is any law that would deport someone
| 30 days after they were laid off, even if they had been
| working for years. That should be 6 months minimum.
| dpark wrote:
| Keeping them on the payroll also enables companies to
| easily manage and extend medical insurance. I'm pretty
| sure that what you propose is what a lot of companies
| actually do, too. They keep them on the payroll for the
| duration of their severance but do not expect them to
| actually work.
|
| Agree that no one should be getting deported on 30 days
| because they got laid off.
| bombcar wrote:
| A "performance improvement plan" is almost always a
| 6-month/1 year warning that you're going to get
| fired/laid off.
|
| It's common in some companies.
| emmp wrote:
| 6 months notice + 12 months salary, which is what you are
| proposing, seems strictly worse to me than just 18 months
| salary and no notice.
| HomeDeLaPot wrote:
| Giving any kind of notice about layoffs while expecting
| employees to continue working is just bad for everyone.
|
| The employees stress out about whether they're going to be
| impacted. Nobody gets much work done as they update their
| resumes and prepare for the worst. The best people start
| looking for other opportunities and find them. If specific
| employees are told they're going to be laid off, some seek
| revenge.
|
| Much better to immediately notify those impacted, revoke
| their access, give them generous severance instead of
| expecting them to work, and let everyone else know they're
| safe.
| zerr wrote:
| You immediately notify to the affected persons with the
| given notice period. This is how it's done in civilized
| countries.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| A great alternative would be operating a company correctly so
| you don't end up in a situation where you need to cut 30k
| jobs at once with no notice. That's a bizarre thing that's
| becoming practically normalized in the USA tech industry.
| IshKebab wrote:
| The realistic alternative is to regularly cut a smaller
| number of people, which is _awful_ for morale.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Does it have to be awful for morale if the reasoning is
| clear and compassionate? People understand that shit
| happens.
|
| And I don't mean this in a mean or evil way, but (of
| course there's a but) I wonder if this would motivate
| people to work more effectively as well. My organization
| has had cuts lately, but it hasn't in a decade. It has
| been transformative. People are reminded that their jobs
| depend on them showing up and being valuable.
|
| I don't want people to be scared for their jobs. Perhaps
| this cycle creates false security, though. There must be
| a balance in here somewhere.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Were those people not already having regular 1-on-1 meetings
| with a manager?
| lateforwork wrote:
| In many cases the manager is among those laid off. In fact
| some VPs and their entire org have been laid off.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| In the US, different countries have processes more favorable to
| employees.
| ilovefrog wrote:
| It's crazy to me that companies are allowed to do this, given
| that staff are generally expected to be accommodating and give
| notice when they quit.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Expected, yes, required, not at all.
|
| It is completely legal to just stop showing up one day.
| bombcar wrote:
| You also don't have to give back 6-12 weeks of pay when you
| give your 2 weeks notice.
| baal80spam wrote:
| Let's not forget that ORACLE is actually an acronym.
| dryarzeg wrote:
| "One Rich A*[CENSORED] Called Larry Ellison"? : )
|
| EDIT: LOL, I haven't expected to be downvoted for simply
| putting this in a way I like : )
| NickC25 wrote:
| 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.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| 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.
| dryarzeg wrote:
| > at your local mormon temple
|
| Sounds like a kind of insult to me. I'm not related to them
| in any way.
|
| And, to be honest, I'm just trying to kind of follow the
| guidelines. There's too much of bad news and negativity
| around me, I'm fed with it already, thanks. I want to have
| fun if it's possible.
| NickC25 wrote:
| Not an insult at all - the mormons are explicitly against
| swearing of any and all forms, moreso than any group of
| people i've ever met. they self-censor in a very unique
| way, they are super clean in how they speak.
| dryarzeg wrote:
| 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.
| ping00 wrote:
| I enjoyed this little exchange :)
| rconti wrote:
| I'm getting so exhausted by these weird Reddit/social media
| posts where my brain says "wait, is 'corn' a typo? Why did
| they write 'k*ll'", and so on.
|
| The algorithm did something explicit censorship never
| could.
| ZenoArrow wrote:
| 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!
| milkytron wrote:
| I think the intention was a joke: One Rich A*hole Called
| Larry Elison.
| ZenoArrow wrote:
| Ah okay, thanks!
| jsk2600 wrote:
| I thought it is reverse of EL CARO ("expensive" in Spanish)
| dryarzeg wrote:
| Am I the only one who, when they see this, feels that it's
| already tough for Oracle and that many companies betting on "AI"
| have finally understood the real risks involved, and that they
| risk simply failing? I mean, if Oracle is doing that, they're
| clearly having some problems. I don't know how to properly
| express that (I'm sorry, I'm not very fluent with English), but
| for me it seems as some kind of signal of _potential_ start of
| the downfall. It 's like they stepped on the path that leads them
| to fall, and while they still can change it, if they don't,
| they're doomed.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > feels that it's already tough for Oracle and that many
| companies betting on AI have finally understood the real risks
| involved
|
| This has nothing to do with AI, whose capex largely falls under
| Oracle Cloud.
|
| The main teams hit - RHS, SVOS, and NetSuite India - are
| associated with Cerner and NetSuite, both of which are the
| kinds of legacy SaaS apps that are most likely to see reduced
| spend in the world today - it's cheaper to hire
| Accenture/PWC/Deloitte or WITCH combined with Anthropic or
| OpenAI to build and manage your own custom in-house _or_ use
| that threat to purchase an actual market leader in those
| categories like Veeva or SAP respectively.
| dryarzeg wrote:
| > 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...
| alephnerd wrote:
| > 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...
| dryarzeg wrote:
| > Because the ERP and EHR market is almost entirely
| dominated by SAP and Epic.
|
| And still they were trying to compete, weren't they?
|
| > Which is largely attributed to the growth in spend on
| Oracle Cloud.
|
| That's exactly what I'm trying to say. Why have their
| cloud services are suddenly started to make more money,
| roughly speaking? And at the same time, what is
| (seemingly) the main reason for their recent debt
| increase? They do cut out the fat, yes, I agree, but what
| exactly pushed them to do it right now? What made them to
| act so quickly and urgently? That's what I'm trying to
| say.
| dryarzeg wrote:
| > 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 : )
| dryarzeg wrote:
| > Edit: can't reply
|
| That's strange. You mean you can't see the "reply" button
| or there's something else? I just have seen this only
| once (no "reply" button"), and reloading after a couple
| of minutes helped. Not sure if it's your case though.
|
| > The "SaaSpocalypse" [0].
|
| I'm very grateful that you have decided to spend your
| time explaining this. Seriously, I am. Thank you very
| much. I now understand that way better than before.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| HN rate limits replies for some or all users. Could be
| triggered automatically based on the controversiality of
| a post (I think) or some posters might get marked for it
| permanently by a moderator.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > to stave off a "build with
| Accenture/WITCH+OpenAI/Anthropic" disruption.
|
| idk, i mean you could try to build in house, wait for it
| to be done, and hope it's correct with respect to your
| business which i would give about a 5% chance of success
| or buy saas and concentrate on implementation/migration.
|
| AI or not, unless your business already has the teams and
| governance in place to manage custom software you're
| going to be tied to Accenture or some other firm
| indefinitely which will be expensive. Besides, something
| of the magnitude of a global ERP is going to be almost
| impossible even with GenAI. Writing the code and the
| technical architecture, where GenAI will help the most,
| is the easiest most straightforward part of a project
| like that. The real difficulty will be business process
| definition, alignment, and requirements
| gathering/refinement same as always. Finally, business
| doesn't stop while you're implementing something in-
| house, once it's done (which it will never be truly done)
| you still have to migrate to it which is another multi-
| year process. I think where most of these projects will
| end up is still paying for saas but then for certain
| processes you use the in-house system. ...So it's the
| worst of both worlds basically.
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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_h
| a...
|
| 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.
| neya wrote:
| 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...
| quelsolaar wrote:
| Do not make the mistake of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison.
| bombcar wrote:
| The lawnmower does not have feedback, it does not stop just
| because it encounters human flesh.
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| 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 / ?)
| razingeden wrote:
| lawnmower don't give a fuuuuuck
| bcantrill wrote:
| 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.
| secstate wrote:
| Outside of 90s television, this might be the most universal
| reference I have in my life.
| Verdex wrote:
| Whenever the lawnmower thing comes up, I try to also mention
| dtrace. As far as things to be remembered for, they make some
| strange bedfellows... although it's better than anything I've
| managed so I guess congrats.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| DTrace was absolutely a product of pre-Oracle Sun, not
| Oracle.
| Verdex wrote:
| Hey friend, check the user name of the person I'm
| responding to (and perhaps check out the people
| responsible for dtrace and larry ellison lawnmower
| comparisons). I might appear more coherent afterwards.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Yeah, I see what you mean now. Sorry.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's not like Sun wasn't also lawyer heavy.
| oblio wrote:
| Hey, at least it's better than your other one.
|
| https://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/kissedagirl.html
| bombcar wrote:
| I forgot how much I hated the mixture of top and bottom
| quoting
| bcantrill wrote:
| For whatever it's worth (perhaps not much?), I was actually
| asked about this three-decade-old post (!) recently on the
| Peterman Pod[0], which allowed for a slightly more nuanced
| discussion.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhSL-5GtmQM&t=3757s
| chrismorgan wrote:
| 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.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| fresh spring grass erupting fast
|
| the distant engine purr comes
|
| ouch goes the lawnmower
| 0______0 wrote:
| Beautiful. How did you come up with that? It's strangely
| captivating.
| thiago_fm wrote:
| It's still a company worth $400B that makes $3B of profits and
| not even $20B of revenue.
|
| And full of debt from AI datacenters full of hardware with a 6
| year depreciation cycle, possibly even lower depending on what
| NVidia releases next.
|
| So overvalued!
| strongpigeon wrote:
| 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/
| danny_codes wrote:
| 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!
| rvz wrote:
| This is AGI.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| That CapEx must be really out of control. Soon enough they will
| be left with 200 data centers and 300 poor bastard running the
| ship.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| Their free cash flows turned negative for the for the first
| time in forever.
| oblio wrote:
| No way this will end badly, when Alphabet (!!!) had to issue
| bonds for the first time in its history.
|
| In 2 years' time we will look back fondly at the Global
| Financial Crisis.
| xvxvx wrote:
| Anytime there are mass layoffs like this, I like to look at the
| company career page and revel in the HR horseshit they jam down
| everyone's throats: https://www.oracle.com/careers/
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| This one is so over the top, it begins to verge on satire.
| shmerl wrote:
| _> The layoffs are directly tied to Oracle's aggressive and debt-
| heavy expansion into artificial intelligence infrastructure._
|
| The actual culprit.
| axpy906 wrote:
| Post should be hire. People are missing the point they traded
| out data center cost for human cost.
| jaccola wrote:
| "Hire" an unfortunately ironic typo!
| gethly wrote:
| 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.
| chekibreki wrote:
| 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/...
| rossant wrote:
| "eliminate".
|
| Right.
| niek_pas wrote:
| > As a result, today is your last working day.
|
| As a European, I never realized that this is allowed under US
| labor law. That is absolutely insane.
|
| EDIT: some commentors have pointed out that the workers collect
| severance and unemployment --- I was not aware this is law in
| California, and that changes matters. I would, though, still
| find being suddenly out of a job fairly traumatic.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Crazy society they built over the pond.
|
| They really have some of the best & beautiful land on earth,
| never been bombed in modern times, plenty population, the
| best schools in the world.
|
| Yet they made a hellscape of cars and asphalt and same day
| termination. Just sad.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Why? They get a severance which is going to be multiple
| months salary, as well as approximately $2000/mo unemployment
| from the state (assuming in California).
|
| Personally, I'd rather just get the money and not have to
| work, rather than be forced to come into the office knowing I
| was getting canned in 3 months or whatever
| niek_pas wrote:
| I did not know they got severance. In any case, I'm still
| not sure I'd prefer that scenario --- coming into your work
| to suddenly find you've been terminated and subsequently
| sitting on your ass for a couple months while looking for
| another job seems pretty emotionally damaging to me, but to
| each their own.
| jakeydus wrote:
| I got laid off at a previous job and they asked me to
| stay on six months to train my replacement(s) and finish
| my project(s). In return I'd get my normal severance and
| a significant bonus for staying the whole time. I did so
| and worked hard for the entire time. A few months later I
| got lunch with my former manager and they informed me
| they would have absolutely coasted the entire time. In
| hindsight, I'm not sure why I put the effort in. Live and
| learn, I guess.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It's insane to force businesses to take on the government's
| responsibilities (providing food/shelter/income/energy
| security).
|
| A buyer and seller should be free to start and stop buying
| and selling whenever they want, absent contracts stating
| otherwise.
|
| The government should be there to directly support all of the
| people, not to police and cajole businesses to support some
| of the people that happened to be hired by a business.
| niek_pas wrote:
| I completely agree, and apparently in California this is
| already the case --- I had no idea. In most contexts,
| though, I'd argue governments fall down on this task
| completely and people are, unfortunately, still very
| dependent on their employer. Same-day termination seems
| very socially risky in those cases.
| rwmj wrote:
| The US government doesn't exactly go out of its way to
| support people either.
| sowbug wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
| tombert wrote:
| The at-will firing is just how it is in the US, but I do find
| it odd how accepting we've become with these corporations
| massively overhiring.
|
| If they have to fire twenty percent of the company, shouldn't
| that be a signal to investors that the people in charge are
| morons for overhiring thirty thousand people in the first
| place? Software engineers aren't cheap; assuming an average
| compensation of $250,000/year (which I think is pretty
| conservative if you count total comp like insurance and
| stock) then that's 7.5 _billion_ dollars of investor money
| they 're wasting per year.
| niek_pas wrote:
| Yeah, the "just how it is" part was the part I wasn't aware
| of. Sibling comment has pointed out that apparently the US
| is the only country in the world where this is the case.
| And totally agree on the latter point.
| tombert wrote:
| I'm not an economist, but I have heard that there's an
| argument to be made the easy firing also makes it so that
| it's easier to hire too, so it creates more jobs.
|
| That's one of those things that sounds like bullshit, so
| I don't know that I believe it, but that's what I've
| heard anyway.
| Izkata wrote:
| The other part is that at-will goes both ways: you can
| just walk out of a bad job with no legal repercussions.
| Not always the best idea due for social/professional
| ones, though.
| oblio wrote:
| That argument is definitely BS, though.
|
| What do you think happens in the most restrictive labor
| market in Europe? We're not slaves. There is a short
| notice period, usually 1 month or even shorter (notice
| periods for companies are longer, usually double or
| longer).
|
| And if it's a bad job people just phone it in, take
| medical leave, etc during their notice period.
|
| Hardly the end of the world to last 1 month.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > apparently the US is the only country in the world
| where this is the case.
|
| The US law isn't translated directly to other countries,
| but every country allows companies to do layoffs. They
| just have different requirements for including someone in
| a layoff.
|
| In some countries the requirements are as minimal as
| saying that there's not enough work for the person to do.
| It's basically the same thing with extra steps.
|
| The real difference is requirements for notice periods or
| severance. Note that in tech companies like Oracle
| they're giving severance as well.
|
| The other side of this debate is that companies in the
| United States are much less resistant to hiring people
| when they know it's easy to scale back later. In our
| European offices we had to be much more cautious about
| hiring because the managers in our various European
| offices were afraid of getting stuck with a bad hire for
| a long or costly notice period. They also had a lot of
| games with "trial period" work that I don't fully
| remember, but I can think of several trial period
| employees who were dismissed because they were borderline
| and their managers didn't want to take the risk of having
| them past the period where letting them go was easy.
| manquer wrote:
| Not employees are hired though, a fair amount are added
| through acquisitions. Reducing staff could be just
| streamlining redundancies . Not the case here [1], but it
| not always bad planning.
|
| Even without acquisitions, business conditions can change
| rapidly things like tariffs, interest rates , war or
| competition due to newer tools etc , as an investor you can
| would want leadership to move fast and course correct,
| rather than be held by the sunk cost fallacy.
|
| All else being equal, the way investors would see a change
| like this - is now the company is no longer wasting 7.5B/yr
| in the future and their current cost was already priced in.
|
| However all else is rarely the same, there could be other
| factors, like slowing sales growth projections which can
| bring down the multiples .
|
| Oracle is still trading at 28x P/E historically they
| typically traded at 15x, given the growth and risk profile
| a more realistic number .
|
| Since 2022 (ignoring 2020 spikes) the number has been going
| up are basis the expectation that their cloud business will
| really benefit from AI significantly.
|
| If the market no longer has the confidence --- it has
| already cooled a bit since October then stock will keep
| dropping, layoffs will only slow it down a bit .
|
| The timing is critical, because leverage/sale of Oracle
| stock is how the Warner Bros Discover acquisition is being
| funded .
|
| The increasing doubts about that financial viability is why
| that stock risk premium is increasing on Warner .-
| Currently trading at 27 although acquisition price is 31
| and it was trading at 29 a month back . Also senior
| executives like Zaslav are selling now at 27 which they
| less likely to if they believed deal will close at 31 soon.
|
| TLDR; this 30k layoff is an attempt to strengthen/save the
| other acquisition Oracle is indirectly financing.
|
| [1] although the Cerner acquisition added 30k employees to
| Oracle 3 years back. This doesn't seem related to that.
| Oracle did not have a strong overlapping BU, there were/are
| some redundancies as in any acquisition but certainly not
| 30k
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Dane here. I have had more than one coworker get that
| treatment.
|
| Sure the company still has to payout salary, as per the
| contract, but plenty of companies do not want laid of people
| around.
| Aurornis wrote:
| They are done working but will collect severance pay,
| typically scaled by years of service.
|
| Oracle software engineering compensation for mid-level
| software engineers is in the $200-300K range. The top of
| their scale extends into the $400K to $1 million range.
|
| From what I've seen, laid off employees will receive a
| minimum of 1 month of their compensation with 1 week of pay
| for every year worked, plus any remaining unused vacation
| time. So a mid-level employee who has worked their a few
| years and hasn't drawn their vacation balance to 0.0 could
| receive $30-50K or more beyond this date.
| ahtihn wrote:
| As a European, this seems normal?
|
| When someone is fired, they generally stop working
| immediately while getting paid through the notice period.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I have to be honest that I'm confused by the comment, too.
| Including the edit about how being out of work would be
| traumatic, as if losing a job was unique to the United
| States.
| niek_pas wrote:
| My point was that going from (let's say) 'employed,
| productive member of the workforce, with social
| relationships at work' to 'sitting at home collecting
| unemployment' with no transition, no coaching, in the
| scope of 5 minutes seems like a traumatic rupture.
|
| (I'm not saying I _know_ better, just how I think I would
| _experience_ such a thing.)
|
| Losing a job happens everywhere, but there are different
| ways to handle it, I guess.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I've been laid off. It's not fun and there a lot of
| emotions to process at first.
|
| Let me tell you, though. All of the gestures that come
| from the company doing the layoff like coaching services
| or transition resources felt pretty useless. They were
| actually trying, but everything in it seemed more like it
| was to soothe their conscience than to help me out.
|
| When other people get laid off I recommend they try not
| to put a lot of expectations into any transition services
| provided by their ex-employer because your time is better
| invested in your own job search.
| bombcar wrote:
| The best "layoff" support I've received has been early
| notice (e.g., you're laid off at the end of next month,
| but we give fuck-all cares if you even bother coming in
| anymore, feel free to) and _personal_ support from
| managers /those remaining behind.
|
| Anything an employer can do at scale can be reduced to
| cash, and cash is king.
| simsla wrote:
| Where I live, your employer basically has to give you
| notice (weeks to months, depending where you live). It's
| common for that notice period to turn into "garden leave"
| though, i.e. get paid but don't show up.
|
| Mass layoffs, or RIFs, operate under slightly different
| rules, but I still saw a stark difference between US and
| EU employees when I went through one at a different corp.
|
| US accounts were deactivated same day. EU employees were
| given until end of week to look over the proposed terms
| etc.
| macki0 wrote:
| The way this email is worded this would more likely be
| classified as a Redundancy as opposed to a Firing. So
| different laws/rules would apply
| on_the_train wrote:
| No they don't? You keep working for 2-10 months until you
| can leave whatever your contact says
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| > collect severance and unemployment --- I was not aware this
| is law in California,
|
| Unemployment benefits in California are capped at $450/week,
| and you only get 26 weeks of it. It's helpful, but doesn't
| even cover housing costs for many individuals, let alone for
| families.
|
| I don't think there's a state law requiring severance. It's
| often offered by the employer if the terminated employee
| agrees to sign an NDA.
| drmath wrote:
| The California WARN act effectively requires 2 months
| severance for large layoffs at large companies (or 2 months
| _notice_ , but companies almost always prefer severance).
| Rapzid wrote:
| All the extra notice in the world wouldn't make me want to
| trade our tech jobs market and salaries for that of Europe's.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| Such termination happens very much in Europe also. I have
| lived in Europe my whole life, half of my working life inside
| the EU, half of it outside. And I have seen this happening
| bot in- and outside:
|
| on the head-roll day HR sends a friendly message asking you
| to pay a visit in their office. While you do that, security
| folks clear your desk, and a few minutes later you are
| outside the building with the signed paperwork in your hands.
| And suddenly another guy gets a friendly message from HR...
|
| Of course the severance is paid according to the law - but
| such sudden (mass)termination does happen here too.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| In general, the reason why US companies often are abrupt /
| surprise is because they fear retaliation.
|
| I once was given about 6 weeks notice in the US, with a
| promise that if I completed a project I would be given
| severance. Given the situation I was in, where the product
| would be "done", it was a good situation to be in.
| thomasgeelens wrote:
| Every time I think: "do I live in a dystopia yet?" I get
| confirmation with these messages.
| asah wrote:
| "cold" is redundant/implied for Oracle.
| dominotw wrote:
| not any colder than any other company. spotify did the same to
| me.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Billions of dollars, yet not for thee
|
| The game where you, the people, will always be the loser
| bux93 wrote:
| "Any unvested restricted stock units, however, were forfeited
| immediately."
|
| wow.
| samuelknight wrote:
| This is standard in every tech RSU vest schedule I have seen.
| iamjake648 wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I've helped a number of people with negotiations and
| reviews of their employment offers.
|
| I would strongly disagree that accelerated vesting upon
| layoff is common. It's rare.
| dtdynasty wrote:
| Isn't this normal? I thought that's how it typically works when
| an employee leaves a company with any method.
| jvuygbbkuurx wrote:
| 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.
| tmoertel wrote:
| 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...
| jeffbee wrote:
| OK but for most people a 16-week acceleration is still
| forfeiting 92% of unvested shares.
| meatmanek wrote:
| By the same logic, wouldn't 4 months of severance pay be
| equivalent to forfeiting 92% of salary?
|
| For something paid at regular intervals like RSUs, you
| really should never be looking at the total value of the
| grant, and instead think of it in terms of how many
| shares per paycheck/month/quarter/year you vest.
|
| If you've got a cliff coming up, that's different. I'd be
| pissed if a company laid me off 11.5 months into a 12
| month cliff or a few weeks before an annual bonus and
| didn't accelerate the vesting / bonus.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That's exactly my point. "Losing" your RSUs is the same
| as losing all your other income that you did not earn
| because you don't work there any more.
| savant2 wrote:
| Google did this in 2023, and this blog was a good PR move
| to make people think they are still doing this today.
| ivell wrote:
| 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.
| bsimpson wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| Just an FYI, if you're ok with not being in Manhattan or
| the cool parts of Brooklyn, it's really not that bad.
|
| I live pretty far east in Brooklyn. I'm still only a few
| blocks away from a train; apartments in this area, even
| with a bedroom, can go for less than $2,000/month. Not
| "cheap" but not unlivable either.
| garbawarb wrote:
| Pretty vicious. As an employee I wouldn't consider working at
| Oracle or any company that's done this when there are plenty
| of companies which, despite layoffs sucking for everyone
| involved, at least compensate their employees decently when
| it happens.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That's what the word "vested" means.
| Aurornis wrote:
| That's the definition of "unvested"
|
| Anyone evaluating compensation and stock options should
| understand vesting periods and what they mean so they're not
| surprised by something like this.
| HomeDeLaPot wrote:
| Ouch. Imagine being let go just a few weeks from vesting.
| Doesn't seem fair to let someone work for months and months in
| anticipation of their big prize and then yank it away at the
| last minute.
| throwaway85825 wrote:
| How can we teach customers to never ever do business with oracle?
| passive wrote:
| So Ellison's big investors wouldn't back his ridiculous (-Disney)
| Warner Bros bid without him juicing the performance of Oracle in
| this way?
|
| (thanks for the reply correcting the company)
| bhouston wrote:
| Disney is also a target? Or are you confusing Warner Bros
| Discovery with Disney?
| passive wrote:
| Yup, completely confusing Warner Bros and Disney. Thanks for
| catching that!
| josefritzishere wrote:
| It's almost like Larry Ellison is a bad CTO and needs to step
| down.
| kyledrake wrote:
| 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.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| 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!
| jeffbee wrote:
| Oracle has made a large bet on being a cloud, but nobody wants
| their terrible cloud, which is reflected in their dollar-store
| prices. They staffed up and built facilities that they can't
| sell so I am not surprised they are now swinging the axe.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| 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.
| nemomarx wrote:
| you could post the citations?
| kstrauser wrote:
| Well, that clinches it.
| silisili wrote:
| I use it only for the free(for now) tier. I always thought
| AWS console was about the worst UI/UX could get.
|
| Not to be outdone, Oracle came along and said 'hold my beer.'
| cloudfudge wrote:
| Oracle Cloud isn't actually "terrible cloud", but it
| definitely isn't geared toward smaller users like startups
| and individuals. It's downright hostile to casual use. But
| for fortune 500 companies who don't mind being in bed with
| Oracle, the price can be right.
| post-it wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| It's a common 'large enterprise' dependency often due to some
| internal CRN/Accounting/Compliance software, so I suspect you
| are right.
| rbanffy wrote:
| People also marry the database when a significant amount of
| logic is in stored procedures.
| pydry wrote:
| I worked for one company that used it. Everybody on the
| ground hated it but the costs of migrating away were enormous
| because every system they relied upon was tightly coupled to
| every other system. It would have been a multiyear project to
| get off it.
|
| Their software wasn't just more expensive than using open
| source equivalents it was worse, too. It's just very, very
| sticky.
|
| At the same time the sales team wine and dine key decision
| makers and try to strike the fear of god in to them so they
| don't rock the boat.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| We heard you're planning to migrate away from Oracle. We
| understand, but unfortunately, that means we have to get
| rid of the 75% discount we gave you, so we'll make a decade
| of revenue in the two years it'll take you to get rid of
| us. Still planning to migrate away?
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Every company I've worked for has avoided Oracle software
| of any kind.
|
| Lucky you. Sadly, not all companies are new enough to be able
| to do that. Some embarked on Java when it was Sun, and Oracle
| when the only alternative would have been SQL Server (or DB2
| on AIX, AS/400, or MVS).
| TheGRS wrote:
| A past company I worked for made SaaS and On-prem and we
| supported Oracle with the on-prem. The simple act of
| supporting and testing that option was enormous for our
| company, but the customers we had that needed it were highly
| lucrative.
| arethuza wrote:
| 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!
| Hizonner wrote:
| They make a lot of money off of the cloud services and their
| layered "enterprise" applications. Selling "just the database"
| isn't what Oracle's been about for a very long time.
| bilekas wrote:
| 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.
| paulddraper wrote:
| NetSuite
|
| There are alternatives, but NetSuite is the gold standard
| unless you want to fork over for SAP.
| glenstein wrote:
| Truth. I don't know of a better plug and play option than
| Netsuite for middle to big companies.
| imglorp wrote:
| 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?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > Why would go $58B in debt to support a new feature that no
| one will want after alienating everyone above?
|
| Short term shareholder equity gains during an over exuberant
| hype cycle you do not know when might repeat.
|
| "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and
| dance." -- Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince (symbolizing Wall
| Street's reckless persistence in risky lending despite signs
| of a market downturn)
|
| _The Overvaluation Trap_ - https://hbr.org/2015/12/the-
| overvaluation-trap - December 2015
|
| > The trap is an almost inevitable consequence of what many
| managers might regard as a blessing, because it occurs when
| the capital markets overvalue a company's equity--and
| especially when stock overvaluation is common in a particular
| sector. In the following pages, we'll describe the trap, show
| how it has played out in various industries, and suggest
| where it may be playing out once again.
|
| "If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table
| and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Paul
| Newman
|
| Edit: tsunamifury wrote a prescient comment a decade ago,
| referencing the same hrb piece:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10851527
| jollymonATX wrote:
| They have not pulled the pin on the ZFS grenade yet, but I
| expect at some point it happens.
| riffraff wrote:
| 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 $$$ to make, but I don't think ZFS
| would warrant them much.
| toast0 wrote:
| > the only large target using FreeBSD I can think of is
| Netflix, but AFAIR they don't use ZFS either.
|
| I can't quite remember, but I think they might have
| mentioned using ZFS rather than UFS for the OS, but I'm
| pretty sure they're not using it for the CDN data
| partitions. I love ZFS, but for CDN nodes, I think it
| would be more harmful than helpful; especially how ARC is
| separate from the FreeBSD 'Unified Buffer Cache', and how
| much work Netflix has done to reduce the number of times
| data hits RAM on the way from disk to the user.
|
| > Oracle sues when there's $$$ to make, but I don't think
| ZFS would warrant them much.
|
| (Agreeing with you), if they are using ZFS for the OS and
| Oracle makes ZFS toxic, it shouldn't take long to ditch
| it.
| uberduper wrote:
| There's no zfs grenade. It's CDDL, feel free to use it
| wherever you want. Oracle can't come after you for
| violating the gpl even if somehow using zfs on linux
| violates the gpl.
| mort96 wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer. I don't k is what Oracle's lawyers can
| and can't do. Even if I'm legally in the right, Oracle's
| lawyers could break me if they wanted. I can't know if
| there is a ZFS grenade, and neither can you. But we can
| choose to not deal with Oracle.
| bombcar wrote:
| At that point, if they wanted to, they could sue _mort96_
| for saying something bad about Oracle. It 's unlikely
| they'll do that and perhaps a bit less unlikely they'll
| sue over ZFS.
|
| Most of their legal shenanigans appear to be restricted
| to companies that already license some software from
| them.
| mort96 wrote:
| We have pretty good laws and systems protecting our right
| to say something bad about companies. I trust that to
| protect me.
|
| We have less good laws and systems protecting our right
| to use software in ways which Oracle considers breach of
| license.
| jollymonATX wrote:
| Everything I have read is that the cddl is not compatible
| with binary deployments of zfs on linux so actually
| wouldnt that mean yes they could press that if you
| bundled it with gpl? Actual lawyers have said yes it
| could which is what I am refering to, however I think the
| actual answer is that Oracle has created a latch by
| inaction on this subject for so long now.
| uberduper wrote:
| CDDL is more permissive than gpl. It's not a violation of
| cddl to intermingle with code under a different license.
| GPL is the issue and it's the individual contributors to
| linux that _could_ sue.
| imglorp wrote:
| They can sue for a variety of reasons from trade secret
| to trademark.
|
| It doesn't mean they'll win anything in court but they'll
| ruin you long before they notice the spend.
| kstrauser wrote:
| It's why I run btrfs on my lab machines. I've used ZFS for,
| _looks at calendar_ oh, wow, literally decades now. It's
| fantastic. But the miasma of Oracle's infection keeps me
| from recommending it for anything commercial.
|
| ZFS, in a vacuum is fantastic. But it's not in a vacuum.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| I'm not sure Larry would be interested in suing Matt Ahrens
| (one of the original designers), or a handful of LLNL
| employees (ie the US government).
| scentoni wrote:
| The present US government would delight in finding a new
| way to funnel more yachtloads of cash to Larry Ellison,
| legally or otherwise, as long as someone in the regime
| gets something out of it.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Because you can get the government to buy it via corruption?
| vasco wrote:
| 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.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| It's like IBM for legacy business the German Banking System
| runs all oracle in the backend.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Indeed. Oracle runs on z/OS as well.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Java is not uncommon. Off the top of my head, a certain
| rainforest company and a lot of banks and EMR providers use
| it.
| wredcoll wrote:
| Amazon, among others, write a lot of java, but they want
| absolutely nothing to do with oracle licenses for java
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Right, I just feel like this is a bit over the top
|
| > The only developers I know who write Java full time
| work in systems that take pictures of things from far
| away.
| burnte wrote:
| > 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| mort96 wrote:
| I'm sure GraalVM is nice enough technology but I don't
| understand why anyone would actively choose to use a JVM
| from Oracle if they can avoid it.
| tombert wrote:
| The Ahead of Time compilation is pretty nice for some
| stuff. Generally startup time is significantly improved,
| so if you're writing command line tools in particular it
| can be cool.
| mort96 wrote:
| Most languages I write are ahead of time compiled with
| pretty good startup time so it's not really a need I have
| that I feel GraalVM solves?
| vips7L wrote:
| HotSpot also has lots of things to speed up start time.
| Project Leyden has made a lot of advancements. AOTCache
| and crac etc.
| coredog64 wrote:
| They have their own OpenJDK distribution (Amazon
| Corretto)
| sleepybrett wrote:
| 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).
| glitchc wrote:
| The financial market infrastructure heavily relies on Java.
| Transactions at commercial banks across North America are
| mostly executed on Java codebases.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| jen20 wrote:
| One only need look at the job postings for Apple to see
| quite how common Java backend is there.
| butterlesstoast wrote:
| Checks out https://jobs.apple.com/en-
| us/search?search=java&sort=relevan...
| shrikant wrote:
| Yeah I can see that, even when a recruiter contacted me a
| few years back for a data engineering position, they were
| looking strictly for experience in JVM-based languages.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Clojure
|
| Apple should do more of that - they make cool computers,
| and should use cool languages.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, I wish they did more Clojure as well. As far as I
| could tell, it was kind of snuck in about ~12 years ago,
| and it kind of grew from there.
|
| To be fair, I know people hate on it, but I honestly do
| kind of think Objective C is kind of a cool language. I
| think it's ugly but I think the message-passing style
| semantics are kind of neat.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Adding Smalltalk message passing as an extension to C was
| very clever and allowed writing very efficient code and
| dynamic high level UI code in a single language. The
| semantics were kept clear by the distinctive syntax of
| message passing. And allowed access to any existing C
| libraries.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Objective C is neat inasmuch as it managed to add a
| simple but practical object system to C without all the
| added baggage of C++. It wasn't without its downsides -
| in particular, the overhead of a method call was
| significantly higher than in C++ - but I still appreciate
| it for its minimalism.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Back in the day, Objective-C was considered a cool hip
| language, wasn't it?
| steve1977 wrote:
| There was a time (around the beginnings of Mac OS X) when
| Java was considered a first class citizen in Mac OS X, next
| to Objective-C.
|
| Some NeXT products like WebObjects got ported to Java (and
| ran not only the iTunes backend but also things like the
| original Dell online store) and there was something called
| the Java bridge which allowed you to program Cocoa
| applications with Java.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/C
| o...
|
| Oh, and with Yellow Box for Windows, this was also possible
| on Windows.
|
| If you look at the screenshots here, it's mostly Windows
| 2000: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documenta
| tion/Le...
| giobox wrote:
| It wasn't just Apple, in the late 90s/early 2000s there
| was a not insignificant number of folks in
| business/academia who thought Java would take over the
| world. Windows XP also shipped with an embedded JVM for
| running Java apps out of the box at one stage too, just
| before Microsoft doubled down on c#/.NET.
|
| Along with MacOS X, Apple's Xcode IDE even had native
| java project support briefly in this era as well.
| steve1977 wrote:
| There was even a Microsoft Visual J++ (and later J#).
|
| It was definitely _the thing_ for a while. Although I
| remember my very first steps with Java and Swing and my
| primary impression was "this is so slow".
| bombcar wrote:
| Java really _could_ have taken over the world, and it can
| be performant, too.
|
| One of the versions of the most popular game in the world
| is written in Java, and it's quite capable of being very
| fast.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Are you talking about minecraft? Minecraft was known for
| working only because it is so simple graphically compared
| to other games. It was said to allocate and deallocate
| hundreds of megabyte of memory every frame.
| jug wrote:
| Yup, this brings back my academia years in 1998, sitting
| with KDE 1.0 and Java 1.1. It was mostly Java, then Perl
| as this fabulous scripting/glue language, teeny bit of C
| and MIPS Assembler for the low level courses.
|
| We didn't touch a fairly esoteric language called Python
| much. Because we saw the future. Java and IPv6 was about
| to change everything.
| adolph wrote:
| > entire backend for iTunes (Jingle) was written in Java
|
| Wasn't that because iTunes started out as a NextStep
| WebObjects application? WebObjects started on Objective C,
| transitioned to a framework for Java in early 2000's, came
| to Apple with the Next acquisition.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| iCloud is mostly Java (or was, about 10 years ago when I
| was there)
| mooreds wrote:
| 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...
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You're right of course, but we only just met! You're the
| first of probably many counter examples.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| The question then becomes, does Java warrant the valuation
| Oracle has when the language itself is mostly FLOSS?
| layer8 wrote:
| Oracle effectively still largely controls the evolution of
| the language and of OpenJDK, and Java is still a registered
| Oracle trademark. While it could be forked and renamed if
| necessary (as happened in the javax -> jakarta transition),
| that would likely end up being quite disruptive and costly.
|
| That being said, Oracle's valuation is based on their huge
| integrated ecosystem. That they also control Java, while
| not insignificant, probably only plays a minor role there.
| iamjake648 wrote:
| Interesting, the _majority_ of developers I know write in JVM
| languages - mostly Kotlin for new stuff at this point.
|
| Typically I see folks using the Amazon Corretto java
| distribution.
| geodel wrote:
| It could mean you know very few developers.
|
| > Typically I see folks using the Amazon Corretto java
| distribution.
|
| It means nothing. ~90% of core development of JDK and JVM
| is done by Oracle employees and it is shared by all
| distributions by various vendors.
| bjord wrote:
| 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
| rbanffy wrote:
| > The only developers I know who write Java full time work in
| systems that take pictures of things from far away.
|
| We all have different circles. I work for a bank and the bulk
| of the LOB code here is Java (or something that runs under a
| JVM). There are no Oracle databases as far as I know, but my
| visibility is limited.
|
| Also, Oracle Applications for things like HR.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Yeah, lots of corporate backend code is Java, and Java is a
| great choice for backend/server code. I've never seen
| Oracle anywhere, though, not in banks and not in
| governments. I've mostly seen Postgres and MSSQL and some
| MongoDB.
| JackFr wrote:
| I've been working in Wall St. banks for the past 30
| years, and I've never used an Oracle database. The
| investment banks were all Sybase shops in the 90's, and a
| bunch of them still are. In my experience those that do
| move are most likely to go to SQL Server, since its
| Sybase roots make the transition a little easier.
|
| When something has been there for 20+ years switching
| costs are big.
| pjc50 wrote:
| We use Java.
|
| We have Oracle blocked at the router (!) to prevent anyone
| downloading the Oracle JDK and incurring the wrath of Oracle
| licensing.
| layer8 wrote:
| Look at who is making OpenJDK distributions besides Oracle:
| Amazon, Microsoft, Red Hat, IBM, Eclipse, SAP, ... It's being
| used everywhere.
| ghurtado wrote:
| > The only developers I know who write Java
|
| It sounds like your personal anecdote is particularly
| uninformative then.
| prepend wrote:
| Useful for letting us know that GP has a limited network
| and situational awareness.
|
| I always find these "relative to me" claims not very
| informative on the internet. But it fun when every once in
| a while you notice the claimer is Bill Joy or Linus
| Torvalds or someone where the relativeness holds weight.
| losvedir wrote:
| What? What kind of ridiculous bubble are you in? Isn't Java
| one of the main languages at Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc?
| amiga386 wrote:
| There are probably millions of corporate projects written in
| Java. One of the reasons Oracle bought Sun Microsystems (who
| invented Java) was because Oracle itself had written so much
| middleware crap in Java.
|
| Both Java and C#/.NET are super-popular in Enterprise land,
| with the choice between them mainly being if the enterprise
| is a Microsoft shop or not.
|
| Everything SAP touches is written in Java too, and it's
| boring old payroll stuff. There's the entire Android user
| interface with millions of Java-only app developers.
|
| Oracle may well be in bed with the spooks, but it's not a
| Java-specific thing.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| There are literally millions of us that write Java and don't
| work for the CIA. It's like still in the top 3 of all
| languages.
| bombcar wrote:
| I was surprised at first to learn Minecraft was a CIA plot
| and then I thought about it and it all fit together :)
| malfist wrote:
| Amazon is predominantly a java shop as is a lot of big
| enterprise
| grishka wrote:
| > The only developers I know who write Java full time work in
| systems that take pictures of things from far away.
|
| Huh??? Google, the search engine part, is written in Java as
| far as I know. Yandex uses Java extensively. Odnoklassniki,
| once second most popular Russian social network, is written
| in Java. Banks like Java. Android apps are written in Java
| (and Kotlin, which I consider an abstraction over Java).
|
| And that's only what I can remember right away. A sizable
| chunk of the world runs on Java.
| p2detar wrote:
| > The only developers I know who write Java full time work in
| systems that take pictures of things from far away.
|
| This can't be a serious comment. I'd say probably half the
| world's B2B and enterprise runs on Java. Especially in
| Europe.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| That is a silly take. The absolute majority of Java devs in
| the world does not work in spy agencies (sounds like it's
| more about your personal network being close to that world)
| raverbashing wrote:
| And you know that they will be using Java 6 just because...
| kace91 wrote:
| >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.
| gytisgreitai wrote:
| 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
| rockinghigh wrote:
| 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.
| mft_ wrote:
| 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.)
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I have a theory that being cash-rich _creates_ an atmosphere
| of technological cluelessness, or more specifically
| weaponized incompetence. A cash-rich company attracts
| sociopathic executives, who are focused on the prestige of
| working at a top company. These executives display a unified
| front outwardly, but internally they are all stabbing each
| other in the back constantly. And any executive who champions
| in-house software is just giving other executives ammunition
| whenever said software has the smallest bug.
| vachina wrote:
| Precisely this. They prey on outsource-happy big orgs that
| have 1 million different SaaS all tied together by scotch
| tape (because their IT dept. is also outsourced)
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| And, their product have worked correctly for decades.
|
| So if you have a lot of money and don't want to take any risk
| you go the oracle route. It's not the best product today, but
| you won't have any surprise, except cost, that you can
| justify because it's oracle.
|
| Which is the same as using a tank to go grocery shopping
| because you're afraid of an accident on the way. You need
| everything in house to support a thank, special garage,
| specifically trained crew, specific fuel...
|
| And it's way harder to drive than a civic.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Non-tech companies have bigger fish to fry in cost
| optimization than IT infrastructure.
|
| For example, nobody buying, insuring and operating
| supertankers will care that much about Oracle licensing or
| even renewing a mainframe contract.
| torginus wrote:
| The whole medical industries business model is that they
| create so much compliance regulation that you need every
| compliance product under the sun to comply with them, thereby
| you can keep out competition.
| seanhunter wrote:
| 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.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| Just curious, how was SQL Server perceived at the time
| compared to Sybase and Oracle? I know it originated as a port
| of Sybase.
| seanhunter wrote:
| I remember talking to one tech leader at the time who
| described it as "surprisingly good, for a microsoft
| product" which sort of summed it up. But it had similar
| characteristics to sybase except more so because you had to
| run it on an NT server (iirc) and so there was an even
| harder cap on the scale of hardware you could run it on,
| whereas you could run oracle on really top-end sparc
| hardware that was way more powerful than anything that ran
| windows.
| wil421 wrote:
| 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.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| MS SQL Server was forked from Sybase in 1993. Not sure how
| much the code had diverged by 2000. Informix was also a
| contender back then.
| trueno wrote:
| we still have an informix db for an old early 2000s
| application we have to support. shit runs on centos5
| lmao. it's actually not too bad, around v12 there's cdc
| capabilities (requires you to build your own agent
| service to consume the data) that made the exercise of
| real time replicating the app db in our edw a cakewalk.
| which ironically has greatly extended the lifespan of the
| application since no one has to query informix anymore
| directly.
|
| ibms docs and help sites suck butt tho.
| minkeymaniac wrote:
| 7 was a rewrite, from c to c++, also went from 2k pages
| to 8k pages
| fipar wrote:
| My experience at the time was that it was perceived as not
| serious enough and lacking important features. If my memory
| isn't very bad, I believe as late as 2000 SQL Server still
| only supported AFTER triggers.
|
| In my experience in the late 90s and early 00s, besides
| Oracle and Sybase, DB/2 and Informix were also regarded as
| good. Oracle was considered the best though.
| minkeymaniac wrote:
| 2000 for sure had instead of triggers.. I used them :-)
| zerkten wrote:
| SQL Server 2000 was well received in the segments that
| mattered as a _challenger_. Oracle was in first place
| running on Unix. However, it was viewed as expensive and
| the procurement experience was regarded as unpleasant.
| People wanted competition even if they didn 't think SQL
| Server, or another alternative, could unseat Oracle for the
| most important stuff.
|
| Windows was really picking up steam and there was a move to
| web development in the Windows-based developer space.
| Visual Basic and Delphi were popular but desktop
| development had peaked. ASP was for building your apps and
| SQL Server was the natural backend. SQL Server fed off this
| wave. It wasn't dislodging Oracle, but rather than every
| app being built on Oracle, more apps started to use SQL
| Server as the backend.
|
| Then ASP.NET appeared on the scene and demand grew even
| more. It was a well-integrated combo that appealed to a lot
| of shops. I started my career in a global pharma and there
| was a split between tech budget. IT was a Windows shop for
| many reasons and ran as much on SQL Server as possible. R&D
| was Unix/Linux with Oracle. There was a real battle going
| on in the .NET vs Java (how about some EJB 1) and the
| databases followed the growth curves of both rather than
| competing against each other.
|
| The SQL Slammer worm brought a lot of attention to the
| product. There were instances running everywhere and IT
| didn't expect so much adoption. Back then you had a lot
| more servers running inside offices than you do today. My
| office was much like my homelab today. This validated the
| need so the patches got applies, IT got involved in the
| upkeep, and adoption continued to grow.
|
| Oracle's sales folk and lawyers were horrible to deal with.
| I had some experience of this directly as they tried
| pushing Java-related products and my boss dragged me into
| the evals. One of my in-laws was outside counsel in the IT
| space doing work with enterprise-sized companies. He claims
| they are the worst company he's ever had to deal with and
| wouldn't delegate any decision-making locally which
| endlessly dragged out deals. They had a good product but
| felt they could get away with anything. Over time he saw
| customers run lots of taskforces to chip away Oracle usage.
| This accelerated with SaaS because you could eliminate the
| app AND Oracle in one swoop.
| chasil wrote:
| This is a very short comment on SQL Server's code
| improvements (post-Sybase).
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18464429
|
| The top comment in the post is a long complaint about the
| code quality of the Oracle database (worth a read).
| password4321 wrote:
| SQL Server's claim to fame was GUI admin tools making life
| easier for many who bore DBA responsibilities only in
| anger.
|
| It remains one of the most reliable Microsoft products, but
| few would claim that is a high bar.
| prepend wrote:
| TOAD was fantastic for Oracle, though. I liked it better
| than SQL's stuff.
| password4321 wrote:
| I can't really speak to 3rd party utilities, I think
| Management Studio was sufficient to keep most competition
| from ever starting.
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| SQL Server was Sybase until (I think) version 4.9, just
| rebranded as Microsoft SQL Server.
|
| Then the two versions split and I don't think that any of
| the Sybase source code remains in what is SQL Server today.
|
| That said, a lot of the concepts (like a significant number
| of system stored procedures) and also TSQL remain almost
| the same, with small differences (except for system
| functions, which SQL Server has a lot more functionality).
|
| When you come from the Sybase world getting a start on SQL
| Server is quite straight forward when it comes to handling
| the database.
|
| Internals and other low level nuts and bolts differ
| nowadays, of course.
| billywhizz wrote:
| SQL Server was very good and used in a lot of enterprises.
| ime the decision between Oracle and SQL Server tended to be
| down to whether the IT department or company was a
| "Microsoft Shop" or not. There were a lot of things that
| came free with SQL Server licenses and it had really nice
| integrations with other Microsoft enterprise systems
| software and desktop software.
|
| Oracle was definitely seen as the more mature and resilient
| (and expensive!) RDBMS in all the years I worked in that
| space. It also ran on Unix/Linux whereas SQL Server was
| windows only. Many enterprises didn't like running
| Microsoft servers, for lots of (usually good) reasons.
| killerstorm wrote:
| What's about DB2? I have no experience with it but I guess
| IBM specifically designed it for enterprise-scale transaction
| processing workloads...
| seanhunter wrote:
| 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.
| silisili wrote:
| That sounds oddly similar to how people recommend using
| Dynamo. It's super hard to do coming from SQL because
| everything just feels wrong.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| So it was an early version of mongoDB?
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > DB2, the pattern was "denormalize everything into one
| gigantic wide table". If you did that it was insanely
| fast for the time and could handle very large datasets.
|
| Nobody got fired for buying IBM^W NoSQL
| rowls66 wrote:
| I have not had much experience with DB2, but given that
| the relational data model and normalization was invented
| at IBM (Codd) and IBM's implemenation of those concepts
| was DB2, DB2 performing poorly with a normalized data
| model seems strange.
|
| My recollection was that DB2 did not support multi
| version concurrency control like Oracle and Postgres did.
| The result was a lot of lock contention with DB2 if you
| were not careful. MVCC was eventually added to DB2, but
| by then it was too late.
| twoodfin wrote:
| DB2 had/has excellent data compression capabilities,
| achieving ratios for OLTP that would only be equaled by
| later OLAP columnar systems.
|
| For raw performance needs, many financial services schema
| were going to be denormalized anyway. Compression was a
| great way to claw some of the resulting inefficient
| storage back.
| DrJokepu wrote:
| There was also DB2. DB2 was (still is) an excellent database
| that IBM has completely fumbled.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| It's very amusing to me that you bring up IBM in a
| discussion of the value of Oracle.
|
| I came here to say that if you want to understand Oracle's
| value, think IBM with less history.
| DrJokepu wrote:
| Kind of, but there are some subtle differences in my
| opinion. Oracle is top-to-bottom evil, whose business
| model basically boils down to screwing over their clients
| and everyone else at every possible opportunity,
| comparable to the likes of McKinsey or Accenture.
|
| IBM is a bit more nuanced. My wife grew up in an IBM town
| and a lot of her family and her friends' families used to
| work there in the 70s and 80s. People, especially the
| engineers, used to take pride in their work there.
| RankingMember wrote:
| I think of IBM and GE as being cut from the same cloth
| back then- they treated their people well and dominated
| their markets.
| soperj wrote:
| Didn't they famously help both the Nazis and Apartheid
| South Africa?
| chasil wrote:
| There are three different Db2 databases.
|
| I believe the mainframe version was first.
|
| There is a version baked into the os/400 operating system
| (i series).
|
| Then unix/windows Db2 came last, if memory serves.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Db2
| DrJokepu wrote:
| I only ever worked with the Linux/Windows variant. I
| can't believe I am saying this about an IBM product, but
| I found it to be actually rather pleasant to work with.
| hxugufjfjf wrote:
| You'd never say that if you've been on the inside of a
| mainframe DB2. _shudders_
| cyberpunk wrote:
| It's def got 80's hacker movie vibes, typing "Iniate log
| rotation sequence;" etc just screams out for a green
| terminal emulator.
| reactordev wrote:
| I was around back then and I call Bullshit on everything you
| claim. There were more database options in 2000 than there
| were in 1996. Even before that there was FoxPro... c'mon man.
| Oracle's only value was they built a NO EXIT clause into
| their contracts...
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Oracle was the ONLY game in town if you were serious. It
| was like buying IBM in the 80s. Source: programmed PL/SQL
| and embedded SQL at the Toronto Stock Exchange in the early
| 90s, on SCO Unix and Oracle.
| bdangubic wrote:
| it was soooooo the only game in town that they were like
| NVDA now, yea you got alternatives but you really don't
| and hence you charge insane prices and everyone is paying
| up with a grin on their faces. oracle was the only game
| in town 100% if you were serious!
| bombcar wrote:
| Nobody was building WoW on FoxPro, c'mon.
|
| You'd have to assume businesses were insane/stupid to go
| with Oracle to the tune of billions and billions of dollars
| if you believe that they had zero value to sell.
| smoyer wrote:
| "At the time, MySQL existed ..."
|
| You had to be careful with MySQL back then as constraints
| were syntactic sugar but not enforced. PostgreSQL was indeed
| much tougher to manage but more full-featured.
| Izkata wrote:
| Not just constraints, transactions were also a no-op. The
| MyISAM engine is still available in modern versions if you
| want to experience this, it's just not default anymore.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| I love Postgres in 2026, but it really was not a viable
| enterprise option before 2010. MySQL had decent binlog
| replication starting in 2000 which made up for a lot of the
| horrible warts it had.
| bombcar wrote:
| mysql was great in 2000 if you knew all the foot guns to
| avoid and set it up correctly (and not just what
| _sounded_ correct).
| da_chicken wrote:
| Really, you've always had to be careful with MySQL. It
| really was the PHP of RDBMSs.
|
| The silent "SHOW WARNINGS" system, nonsense dates like Feb
| 31, implicit type conversions like converting strings to
| 0s, non-deterministic group by enabled by default, index
| corruption, etc.
| prepend wrote:
| I disagree as I was running clustered sql server 6.5 and 7 in
| 1998 for hundreds of concurrent users doing millions of reads
| per hour on NT basically commodity boxes. Replaced it with
| Oracle for 100x cost and lost performance.
|
| I think even back then you were usually better off with
| distributed databases running mysql or postgres over Oracle.
| Although people liked to think a giant Oracle db was better.
| whatisthiseven wrote:
| For others like me who might be skeptical to hear
| throughput in any metric other than seconds (and is used to
| large numbers in hours/days being used to inflate), I think
| millions per hour is actually quite high for 1998.
|
| Assume that means 5_000_000/hour. 5M/hr => 83k/min =>
| 1400/s. That is impressive for late 90s. I was generous on
| what "millions per hour" meant, but even if its 2.5M/hr
| that would be 700/s, which is still quite good.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Those are big numbers especially for non-enterprise DBs
| in the 90s.
|
| MySQL's big breakthrough(not specifically talking about
| perf) was innodb in 2010.
|
| Just 15+ years ago Postgres had major issues with
| concurrency as we think about it today.
|
| And just 10+ years ago a LOT of DB drivers weren't thread
| safe and had their own issues dealing with concurrency.
|
| So nearly 30 years ago? Fuhgeddaboudit.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| We were building a payments system in the early 2000s and got
| a diktat to not use Oracle. The amount of things we had to
| build to satisfy the availability and durability requirements
| were so huge it consumed the first few years of work. We
| didn't get to the business side of things until much later.
| Funny thing is we ended up giving up on MySQL and went back
| to oracle after all that work. The whole thing was scraped
| after a couple of years.
|
| To get to the level of scale that oracle can handle we had to
| build sharding and cluster replication from scratch. It still
| didn't get to even 1/10th of a single oracle node. Obviously
| we made a lot of poor architecture decisions as well - in
| hindsight, of course.
| ifwinterco wrote:
| We should really be more thankful for the existence of
| PostgreSQL
| abalashov wrote:
| Yes, although a lot of the most advanced PostgreSQL
| features that would bear comparison in this discussion
| are relatively recent. PostgreSQL didn't have them in the
| 2000s, either, and where it did, the ergonomics were much
| worse than they are today.
| spixy wrote:
| Java and VirtualBox. But both are free.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Sort of. The VirtualBox Extension Pack is free for personal
| or educational use. It is explicitly _not_ free for work
| use[0]. You can download it for free, but accepting the
| license to do so obligates you to pay them for it.
|
| [0]https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2
| databases that worked for use cases where you needed high
| availability and vertical scalability
|
| ... and both of them were Postgres.
|
| I used it in the late 90s for the backend for websites
| written in PHP3, but everyone said this was ridiculous and
| silly and don't you know that everyone's using the MySQL
| thing.
|
| So I used this MySQL thing, but by about 2005 I'd gone back
| to powering my lawnmower with a 500bhp Scania V8 because I
| just preferred having that level of ridiculous overkill in an
| engine.
|
| Nowadays? Key/Value store in RAM is probably fine for testing
| -> Sqlite is often Good Enough -> Ah sod it, fire Postgres
| into a docker container and warn the neighbours, we're going
| down the Scanny V8 route yet again.
| sharadov wrote:
| SQL Server was pretty good until they went the Oracle way
| with their licensing shenanigans, but even with that they
| were a lot cheaper than Oracle. In fact SQL server was one of
| the few great products that came out of MS.
| pimeys wrote:
| Having written a rust client for it, even their
| documentation is absolutely stellar. You just read how the
| protocol works from the PDF and implement it.
|
| Can't say the same about Oracle.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I keep landing into projects with Oracle, SQL Server, DB 2.
|
| Naturally our customers aren't companies that care about HN
| audience.
| sehugg wrote:
| IIRC they also had the first native (100% Java) JDBC driver,
| so you could run from any platform and without weird JNI
| locking issues when using threads.
| EliRivers wrote:
| 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.
| trelane wrote:
| Java is used a _lot_ , but not Oracle's version.
|
| One of the best things Sun ever did was open sourcing Java.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| 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.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > I don't think they have much in common with the needs of
| your run-of-the-mill startup.
|
| that's right, Oracle's databases are for things like Visa and
| Mastercard transactions and maybe the US IRS and Social
| Security systems of record.
| faangguyindia wrote:
| Java sucks, it will consume lots of ram. Just write your
| services in Golang.
| stego-tech wrote:
| It's stickiness.
|
| Their biggest asset is ERP. That's how they get orgs locked in,
| because migrating ERP systems after deployment can take
| _decades_ of work and cost multitudes more than just eating
| Oracle 's renewal increases. Could orgs jettison them into the
| sun? Totally. Is it fiscally sensible? Yeah, absolutely. Can
| you sell that to the board? _Nope_.
|
| The best way to kill Oracle - because such a toxic organization
| absolutely deserves to fail - is to avoid building anything
| atop their infrastructure ever again going forward. Don't use
| their Java tooling, don't use their software suites, don't use
| their cloud services.
|
| Just don't use Oracle for anything new, and work to get the
| fuck off of it for anything that remains.
|
| The only reason Oracle survives is because rich dumb fucks keep
| giving them money.
| balderdash wrote:
| A while ago we were looking at migrating ERP - netsuite was a
| not a good price proposition and candidly feels a bit dated -
| but when you mapped features it was pretty impressive and for
| a lot of business that have some complexity (multi-entity,
| multi-currency, multi site mfg or inventory), there is not a
| whole lot of good alternatives because you can't use quicken
| but you definitely don't want SAP
| stego-tech wrote:
| The irony is that the ERP space is ripe for innovation and
| disruption, but _nobody_ wants to get into ERP because it
| 's a goddamn nightmare.
|
| Every business runs _slightly_ differently than everyone
| else, and ERP tries to be this all-encompassing monolith. I
| wonder if the solution to ERP isn 't just targeted
| microservices exposing data via APIs...
| saidnooneever wrote:
| oracle is deeply embedded in enterprise and a lot of other
| enterprise solutions also use it. they have no value
| proposition for startups. likely just on existing clients and
| ppl who end up using stuff that requires their products.
| benced wrote:
| If you are buying GPUs today, they really are massively cheaper
| than other clouds.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Until you become addicted, and then plan for the price to
| spike.
| progbits wrote:
| If you are not yet in Oracle's clutches you have to be
| extremely naive or shortsighted to be using Oracle cloud.
| Obviously the low prices are because they have a shit
| product and shit reputation, and the moment they think they
| captured large enough audience they are going to hike them
| kstrauser wrote:
| Yup. They're not offering those prices out of generosity.
| They're offering them because that's the most they can
| charge big players who understand what it means to buy
| from Oracle.
| diogomqbm wrote:
| i know they're also one of the AI data center providers of this
| era. Making partnerships with NVIDIA and helping GPUs get to
| market.
| sellmethepen wrote:
| There's more to it than just pure databases. They have a pretty
| large vertical of SaaS apps, specifically ERP. Oracle Saas
| (their ERP platform) is used by thousands of customers - these
| are systems implemented with SI's and run super critical
| functions like payroll, manufacturing, etc really hard to rip
| out once they're put in place. This has been fueling their
| growth for some time, and seems like OCI is picking up now from
| a pure infra POV. But yeah I don't think I'd ever use any
| Oracle components voluntarily or at the very least find ways to
| have exit paths
| balderdash wrote:
| on this point the netsuite ecosystem is huge and there are
| not that many options for SME's that are too big/complex for
| inacct or quicken (even campfire/rillet etc) but don't want
| to get anywhere near SAP, Infor, IFS, oracle (not netsuite).
| x0x0 wrote:
| Yeah, many of these comments are extremely misinformed.
| Oracle has been an application software vendor for a long
| time.
|
| For example, Oracle sell Opera. Opera manages hotels, both
| individual and chains. And integrates with their amusement
| park management software.
|
| People complain about them, but software like that is much
| closer to an sdk than a finished product. It is generally
| customized for each buyer for their needs. And the quality of
| the customization is more on the buyer than on Oracle.
|
| Oracle have a giant suite of these products for POS, guest
| experiences, amusement parks, hospitality, marketing (b2b and
| b2c), etc. And companies buy from Oracle because they're not
| good at making software and because you do leverage some
| economies of scale.
| bombcar wrote:
| Enterprise software as an SDK with a demo is a perfect way
| of explaining it - I'll have to remember that.
|
| Jira, installed fresh, is nice. Jira after it implements
| your enterprise disfunction, is a new level of hell Dante
| couldn't've dreamed of.
| ventana wrote:
| I assume you would use Oracle Cloud if, for whatever reason
| possibly related to legal or competition, you cannot use AWS,
| or GCP, or Azure. It's hard for me to imagine a startup that
| needs cloud and would onboard to Oracle Cloud and not to any of
| the top 3 providers instead.
| drillsteps5 wrote:
| Oracle the company has not been about Oracle the DB server for
| 20+ years.
|
| Oracle the company specializes in acquiring software,
| integrating it in their ecosystem, selling the installations,
| and living off the recurring licensing fees (NetSuite is one
| example).
| daneel_w wrote:
| From small-scale use over the course of several years, I've
| found their "cloud" (OCI) to be a solid and well-planned
| product. Additionally, I've experienced not one single outage
| or hiccup so far (Stockholm region).
| amiga386 wrote:
| > Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle
|
| Oracle buys smaller enterprise companies with rich customers
| that were already using Oracle DB, or makes them rely on it,
| then cashes in on licensing.
|
| So for example, they bought Micros (most EFTPOS terminals in
| the world are powered by them, I think), they bought Cerner
| (big supplier of IT to healthcare companies), they bought
| PeopleSoft. If your big company isn't using SAP, it's probably
| using that. Mundane but essential things for large businesses:
| CRM, ERP, payroll/HR.
|
| So that's what you'd use Oracle for. Or perhaps you wouldn't
| use Oracle, then Oracle would buy your IT supplier and either
| you have to change your IT supplier (costing you millions) or
| congrats you're an Oracle customer now.
| bequanna wrote:
| It sounds like you don't use Oracle, Oracle uses you.
| oogali wrote:
| Your phone calls and SMS messages that touch the phone
| network, likely touch Oracle. Yes, nearly all of them.
|
| For a tech-adjacent example of an acquisition of an
| entrenched supplier, look at Tekelec, a telecom hardware and
| software vendor which Oracle purchased in 2013[1].
|
| Tekelec had a number of products but Oracle really cared
| about one: the EAGLE family, which is a suite of hardware and
| software for handling network signaling and routing over SS7.
| For any customer, EAGLE sits at the _core_ of their networks
| and it is why your calls actually get connected and billed
| correctly.
|
| EAGLE had a customer base that included nearly all of the
| important global telecom carriers. From the press release:
|
| > Tekelec's technology enables service providers to deliver,
| control and monetize innovative and personalized
| communications services and is utilized by more than 300
| service providers in over 100 countries.
|
| Verizon[2][3] runs EAGLE STP in their core, as does AT&T[4]
| (f/k/a SBC). Old business win press releases from Tekelec
| mean Bell Canada and Rogers still likely do. Based on job
| postings, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile use EAGLE STP for
| exchanging SS7 messages to/from roaming partners. And from
| public RFPs, the US Department of Defense[5] runs their own
| private phone networks, with EAGLE STP at the core.
|
| Given how prevalent EAGLE deployments were in the early
| 2000s, how SS7 is needed to make the phone network
| functional, and how STPs are fixtures that do NOT get swapped
| out often, I feel very confident in saying that Oracle has
| had a supporting hand in most, if not all, of the phone calls
| and text messages you've placed since 2013.
|
| 1: https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oracle-buys-
| te...
|
| 2: https://www.verizon.com/about/sites/default/files/2025-03-
| 07...
|
| 3: https://www.verizon.com/business/content/dam/business-
| market...
|
| 4: https://www.lightreading.com/business-management/tekelec-
| win...
|
| 5: https://sam.gov/opp/2227eac9a05f7c33f25b19a6ed5ab634/view
| abalashov wrote:
| Hey Oogali! Long time. :)
|
| "When you read an unusually high-expertise HN comment and
| realise you know the author..."
| amiga386 wrote:
| Isn't SS7 going away?
|
| It's not used in 4G/5G; Diameter is used instead. Most
| cellular telcos are ending or planning to end their 2G/3G
| networks (3G moreso than 2G). In the US, the FCC continues
| to push for IP-only networks, and AT&T is turning off their
| landline services (though they keep pushing out the date,
| it's currently at 2029). Obviously, the US is not the only
| country, but this seems to be the global direction.
|
| Nonetheless, I can imagine that Oracle will still worm its
| way into telco recordkeeping and billing systems even if
| the protocol changes...
| ralphc wrote:
| I didn't save the tweet I saw it in but I saved the joke - "I
| wish I had enough money to run Oracle instead of Postgres."
| "Why do you want to do that?" "I don't, I just wish I had
| enough money to."
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Many organizations are extremely low capacity. I am aware of a
| company that has merely a few hundred gigabytes of data and is
| stuck on Oracle.
| rwmj wrote:
| I actually sat through an Oracle sales presentation around 1999
| (I was the product engineer, along with company executives) and
| honestly it sounded pretty good. At the time we were using
| Lotus Notes for a database so even pencil and paper would have
| been better. Oracle absolutely was the market leader and there
| was no doubt about its technical chops. Oracle Parallel Server
| could run active-active across two sites separated by many
| miles of fibre, which was a remarkable thing to do back then.
|
| Oracle came back with a quote that was so far outside what our
| company could afford that we went with Informix ( _not_ a cheap
| database). Pretty lucky escape.
|
| A year or two later I ported the whole stack to PostgreSQL and
| it worked absolutely fine since we didn't have that much scale.
| Unfortunately when I left the guy who took over was a huge
| Informix fan so he deleted all the PG code and went back.
| bombcar wrote:
| Oracle was (and I assume is) able to provide "hardware" level
| support for their software, if you paid enough and your
| database was shitting itself at 2 AM, they'd have engineers
| on the phone and maybe on the plane to get you back up and
| running.
|
| For smaller companies and businesses? Not needed. For big
| multinationals where a minute of downtime is millions of
| dollars in revenue? Oracle is cheap.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| I think the big use case for Oracle products are for businesses
| that are not in the IT space. A lot of reasons for this, a big
| one is the breadth of Oracle's products is very solid and,
| similar to Microsoft, you can be sold on Oracle solving _all_
| your database needs across your business: HR, asset management,
| customer relationship stuff, your actual business, all with a
| single vendor. Non-IT management will be told that it all
| integrates seamlessly, you don 't need to hire IT staff dealing
| with software from 10 different vendors, just the one.
|
| For instance, I work in the utility industry. They offer
| specialized utility-specific software for managing data from
| our meters, our customer and billing system, asset management,
| HR, accounting, reporting from all these systems. Even more
| specialized stuff exists that we don'tbuy. No doubt if you had
| a different use case, Oracle would sell us on their ability to
| handle it. I think this is the model they follow. They are not
| trying to sell to startups, tech platforms, software companies,
| etc. They are trying to sell to your bank.
| TheGRS wrote:
| Totally agreed looking at them from a development and cutting-
| edge viewpoint. They own what was once very competitive
| platforms and languages, which they still support. They have
| largely transitioned into rent seekers.
|
| From the investment standpoint they still have a lot of value
| to siphon from, but its all rent seeking behavior, its not
| producing new ecosystems like them or Sun did in the past.
| Long-term blue chip play.
|
| Though all the Paramount stuff is loosely coupled to them now,
| so tough to say if its a good long-term play anymore.
| mbloom1915 wrote:
| yeah... their "value prop" is keeping monoliths trapped and
| embedded in their systems with customizations out the wazoo.
| slow, painful death
| willio58 wrote:
| > From my chair, they make an expensive database they try to
| sell to golf executives.
|
| This is basically it. You wouldn't want to use oracle for
| anything, and they know that. What they also know, very very
| well, is that they can get their fingers into high-dollar orgs
| and shmooze people that have little knowledge on the matter to
| lock themselves into basically never ending contracts for
| garbage products.
|
| Oracle is a perfect distillation of capitalism in that way.
| tchalla wrote:
| The answer to your question lies in Oracle 10K.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| maybeeee SPARC based Solaris? Probably not a major usecase
| nowadays (Oracle bought Sun for Java, not for Sun) but it seems
| to be limping along
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > Oracle bought Sun for Java, not for Sun
|
| My recollection is that they also qanted Sun's storage
| hardware products, to sell alongside their existing DB
| software.
| elif wrote:
| They aren't a database company. They are a full spectrum B2B
| SaaS contract company. They make far more by up selling
| services than they do from databases total. Half of their stack
| will run on whatever db you want.
| lateforwork wrote:
| Oracle database has unparalleled scalability. Ask someone who
| works at Microsoft SQL Server division what their bug database
| looks like. They will tell you that a single SQL Server
| instance cannot scale to the entire SQL Server division. Oracle
| on the other hand has a single database for the entire company.
| No other database is this scalable.
|
| But Oracle is not just a database company. Oracle started as a
| database company, but today they are more an applications
| company than a database company. They have ERP back-office
| applications (finance, operations, HR), and CRM front-office
| applications (sales, marketing, service). Oracle bought a large
| number of applications software companies such as Seibel,
| PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, NetSuite and Cerner to become this big.
|
| Of course Oracle is also a major cloud services provider and
| provide AI superclusters, and GPU instances from NVIDIA and AMD
| (context for today's layoffs).
| kpil wrote:
| I'm actually impressed by the amount of abuse our Oracle
| instances are able take from our developers.
|
| Massive amounts of parallel single reads and writes with
| millisecond responses mixed with mega-joins of incorrectly
| indexed tables that works flawlessly "on their machine" that
| limp on well enough to sneak past performance testing with
| just the planner silently writhing in agony.
| topspin wrote:
| The original question does discount the capability of
| Oracle's database too much, as only something "golf
| executives" buy. When you have a large problem that is best
| solved with a relational model, Oracle delivers and can
| indeed be worth all the money and license hell involved.
| jjav wrote:
| In a world of continuous change, at least we can always rely on
| oracle being consistently evil.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Also, their inability to make a NewSQL DB rivaling Spanner or
| Cockroach (they basically just had to clone one of these or
| acquire Cockroach) puts them out of any serious competition for
| the future of databases. Their "Oracle Autonomous DB" ain't it.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| You are missing the business model - buy has-been platforms and
| frameworks and charge big bucks for maintenance. Customers
| eventually manage to migrate off you, but it is fine cause you
| buy some other has-been stack and then overcharge for that.
| bdangubic wrote:
| moat
| elorant wrote:
| Support, that's what you'd use them for. Something breaks and
| your team can't figure it out? You make a phone call and
| someone will be there in a jiffy to work things out. And if he
| can't either they'll fly a whole team from a different city or
| even a different country until they solve it.
| outside2344 wrote:
| They do own some vertically integrated products like PeopleSoft
| that use these lower level foundational pieces. But I agree, I
| don't know why anyone in their right mind would use Oracle
| outside of golf and sailing bribes.
| temporallobe wrote:
| Oracle is used for mission-critical legacy applications, which
| is common in the federal government IT space. Replacing with
| OSS is a nontrivial undertaking, but it is happening. For the
| most part, replacing Oracle's Java with OpenJDK is relatively
| painless, but some agencies preferred the licensed version
| because it includes support. Replacing a database, however, is
| a much scarier task, even when you have experienced and
| competent DBAs.
| xtracto wrote:
| I just read a tech "policy" document of one of the largest
| packaged food makers in Mexico. They explicitly say they ONLY
| use paid services/software to ensure there is liability and
| support.
|
| There are A Lot of businesses thar are happy to burn cash for a
| false sense of security. They don't know better.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Cool stuff like distributed transactions, the database as OS
| with raw disks, the database as application platform with APEX.
|
| Then again, I guess I am one of those folks that enjoys cool
| toys, that only big corporations pay for.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I have a cousin who owns a business that decided to contract
| with Oracle, and as he described this my first thought was "why
| tf would you ever sign an agreement with Oracle, don't you know
| about them?"
|
| But as he described the whole dealings (for some SEO product,
| I'm not sure of the specifics) it became clear to me they
| bamboozled him, gave him a bait and switch, and left him on the
| hook for a huge bill he never thought he'd have to pay.
|
| So to answer your question I don't think there is a value prop,
| I think it's actually a giant grift.
| vector_spaces wrote:
| The comments on this subthread are a bit out of touch in a very
| coastal-tech way -- yes, Oracle is a monster, yes, their tech
| is garbage, yes, their products are awful.
|
| But Oracle owns Cerner Health (now Oracle Health, but to most
| users it is still Cerner), i.e. 25% market share of the EHR
| space, and PeopleSoft, which you are painfully familiar with if
| you work for a bigcorp or anywhere in the public sector in
| North America. Their database product is very far from their
| only LOB.
| s_dev wrote:
| Oracle run a huge % of the worlds POS devices.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| If you're a massive organization and have need for a mission
| critical database that cannot fail for any reason, with massive
| scale and scalability, security, reliability, high
| availability, high throughput, etc., and you want instant
| expertise available to solve any DB problems, then you're not
| using Postgres, a cloud database or rolling your own noSQL
| solution.
|
| I'm talking about huge, billion dollar institutions like banks,
| financial services, governments, logistics, manufacturing,
| software, etc. These are the companies run by the "golf
| executives" who want guaranteed database dependability and are
| willing to pay for it.
|
| In this case, you'll use Oracle or IBM DB2.
|
| For example, if you're TikTok dealing with billions of
| interactions, or Boeing, maintaining critical databases of
| millions of parts, you'll be totally willing to spend huge
| amounts of money to make sure your data is rock solid, even if
| it's overpriced (Apparently, Microsoft is one of Oracle's
| biggest customers of all companies!)
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| If you want to build a system of monolith services and be
| locked into a 30 year old waterfall development model, then
| Oracle is for you.
|
| I've had this argument with several DBAs. They always claim
| "Oracle is the most performant," while quite possibly true
| technically, they also tend to run a single _massive_ instance
| that inevitably leads to a complete failure of the site under
| heavy load. Oracle is often designed to be the single point of
| failure. I believe that is by design. The same problems can be
| solved with modern event driven architectures, better caching,
| horizontal dynamic scaling, etc.
| sublinear wrote:
| Why doesn't anyone ever mention project stargate when discussing
| these financial struggles of Oracle and OpenAI? That's your
| answer.
| diehunde wrote:
| 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.
| MattDamonSpace wrote:
| There is no bubble
| diehunde wrote:
| Love the confidence. The logic can catch up later.
| zarzavat wrote:
| The automobile bubble has lasted longer than expected but
| the horses are sure to get their jobs back soon.
| diehunde wrote:
| At least you didn't go with electricity or the internet.
| Respect.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| When everyone says it is a bubble it's very likely not a
| bubble.
|
| Also LLMs have a lot of value because it is a way to steal
| intellectual property without anyone beeing able to do
| s.th. about it.
| diehunde wrote:
| Well clearly not everyone is saying it's a bubble (you
| maybe?) so I don't know where that leaves us. Also, IIRC
| there are massive lawsuits underway so there's definitely
| people doing s.th. about it
| chasd00 wrote:
| Follow the datacenter companies like Coreweave, when they start
| to have problems everyone else will start to have problems.
| Coreweave was bailed out by Nvidia once already and managed to
| get another $8B loan today. They and others are up to their
| eyeballs in debt so any trouble will show up first in companies
| like Coreweave trying to build the datacenters and bring them
| online.
| nunez wrote:
| Disgusting.
| 10ca1d1me wrote:
| Come work for me instead!
| yieldcrv wrote:
| an unceremonious email blast is more than I expected from Oracle
| kleiba wrote:
| Between employers and employees, loyalty is only expected one
| way.
| sneak wrote:
| Not really. You can quit at any time, too. A job today isn't
| (and shouldn't be) any guarantee of a job tomorrow.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > A job today isn't (and shouldn't be) any guarantee of a job
| tomorrow.
|
| Also relationships, kids and stability. Spend all your life
| in perpetual anxiety, rent all your life, you will own
| nothing and be happy! Also, here's a bowl of insect protein
| while we're at it.
| sneak wrote:
| You can quit your relationships at any time, too. That's a
| fundamental tenet of our society - consent to an
| interaction between free people can be withdrawn at any
| moment for any reason.
|
| That's not perpetual anxiety - that's the way things work
| today, and the way things have worked for generations.
| Anyone pretending otherwise is fooling themselves with
| lies.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Before I continue with this thread, how old are you? And
| have you ever been in a long time relationship with
| someone? Do you own a house? Have kids?
| HomeDeLaPot wrote:
| You want the government to force employers to provide a
| social safety net rather than the government providing it
| directly?
|
| The problem isn't that people can be fired, it's that their
| food, housing, and medical care are all dependent on or
| provided through their employer.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > A job today isn't (*and shouldn't be*) any guarantee of
| a job tomorrow.
|
| This is nonsense and shouldn't be normalized.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| In germany you have the opposite and it is also nonsense.
|
| You have to work with people that do literally nothing
| (usefull to the goal of the company) and they can't be
| fired.
|
| Companies are afraid to hire. Young people only get short
| therm contracts. If a company needs to cut jobs it has to
| keep employees with children over the others.
|
| What society will be more productive?
| wiseowise wrote:
| What makes you think that productivity is the most
| important goal? I'll take Germany way over Silicon Valley
| bullshit any time of the day.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| You have actually more to give if you are more
| productive.
|
| Germany acts like money grows on trees. Reality will come
| and hit hard.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Reality will come and hit hard.
|
| Like it hit Block and Oracle workers already?
| kleiba wrote:
| I guess what I meant to say is that clearly, one side here
| _expects_ loyalty from the other side but isn 't really
| _giving_ any themselves.
| amelius wrote:
| With those software engineers gone, they can now return to their
| core business: suing people.
| vincentastral wrote:
| 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.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > 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.
| butterlesstoast wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| My Amazon layoff notice came at 5am. Same deal. I thought it was
| fake because it came to my personal email. Then I logged into my
| work computer and found that all my email had been erased except
| for a copy of the layoff notice and an invite to a 10am Zoom with
| HR. The funny part was the invite had everyone who had been laid
| off in the To: line.
|
| I was able to send internal only emails until 1pm, and then it
| logged me off and the computer was a brick.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I'm not sure if companies understand the emotional impact on
| the laid off and the layoff survivors. It almost seems like a
| terror campaign, whether intended or not.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| Honest question, why would they care?
| danmaz74 wrote:
| For the morale of remaining employees?
| kibwen wrote:
| Honest question, why would they care? The rancher does
| not care about the morale of the cattle as they're being
| led to slaughter.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| And that includes them, the people doing the layoffs, who
| are employees as well. And what we often don't realize is
| that causing the pain to others most often causes pain to
| us as well. Human group output and productivity can rely
| a lot on trust, and if that trust is damaged, it can
| hinder all productivity.
| bombcar wrote:
| I've seen layoffs with severance so good that the
| remaining employees felt bad themselves.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Ha! So true. Our last layoff had severance so generous
| that I told my manager next time pick me.
| viccis wrote:
| As far as actual people? Depends on their personal moral
| code and is why colleges make people take ethics, even if I
| don't think that results in anything other than more
| elaborate ways to justify doing whatever they feel like
| anyway. Most people would agree that you should minimize
| suffering in others if you can, but people who make it to
| upper management and C suites often got there by not being
| bothered by such scruples.
|
| As far as the company is concerned, obviously there's no
| reason not to care aside from not wanting to lose any
| critical employees who value stability. That's why many of
| the labor protections we take for granted now were fought
| for many years in the past.
| potsandpans wrote:
| This is largely the world we've created with litigation
| practices.
|
| Corpo is very careful to show empathy that can be perceived
| in some way as accepting blame in a way that would open them
| to litigation.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Yeah, our litigation culture to me is just an inability for
| individuals/companies to resolve conflicts and escalate it
| to the legal system. And unfortunately there are many
| elements in the system that discourage us from reconciling
| and push us towards escalating.
| tech_ken wrote:
| Yes in my (somewhat tinfoil) opinion the point is to have an
| emotional impact on the workforce overall (or at least, one
| of the points is). Tech workers had a really good 20 years in
| the US, and kind of forgot that they were ultimately still
| wage workers. I think the culture circa 2018 took for granted
| a basic level of respect and cooperation from upper
| executives, and were beginning to exercise their power to
| achieve political goals, which was annoying to the tech
| ownership class. I think one of the major strategic turns of
| last 4ish years is the usage of precarity and high turnover
| to corrode worker solidarity in fields which used to be
| ironclad and respectable white-collar work. By simultaneously
| narrowing the hiring window ('junior devs are replaceable
| with AI') and also expanding the opportunities to be culled
| ('we are axing this division to cover our moonshot outlays')
| capital cultivates a desperate and compliant workforce.
| Bottom-up culture is woke, in the 2020's the folks in power
| want top-down directives that are followed unquestioningly;
| similar approach to how the executive branch was brought to
| heel by DOGE.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| Or the current crop of companies has just ossified and are
| waiting for a disrupter to kill them. You can't get that
| big and be around for that long without having the original
| culture die, it seems. This isn't the first wave of
| companies this sort of thing has happened to, is it?
| jedberg wrote:
| They understand, but they are more concerned about you
| exfiltrating data and suing them.
|
| But you're right, the survivors don't even get a list. They
| have to find out when something they're waiting for never
| shows up because that person doesn't work there anymore.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| This is why it's important to have a network off of company
| property.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Eh, that's brutal, wondering why someone isn't replying to
| your email only to find out they get let go. Almost like
| finding out a friend died, in a professional way.
|
| I think we often just don't understand the full
| dimensionality of layoffs.
| rustystump wrote:
| Contrary to what people may think, the most humane way is a
| fast clean cut. Drawing it out in anyway doesnt help anyone.
| This does assume communication is clear about employee next
| steps for HR related tasks.
|
| This is also why in the other direction a fast clean cut
| works too. I mean if they want two weeks of "work", i always
| consider that severance.
|
| The fast clean cut is true in all industries. Drawing it out
| only makes it more painful. It is similar to breaking up in a
| relationship.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| It sounds as if you're describing how to humanely kill a
| living being.
|
| There are alternatives to killing things and I don't think
| fast clean cut is true in all industries. I think people
| want it to be true because then it hides away the
| complexity of the emotions we feel. Just cut it off and
| pretend that the cutting off won't bother us or them after
| the event.
|
| I think that strategy may appear helpful but just buries
| most of the feelings, which don't go away, most likely just
| to fester underneath and erode trust.
| rustystump wrote:
| Killing is an escalation to what i said.
|
| The reality is the layoff decision has been made. There
| is no undo. It is better to cut cleanly as it allows
| people to move on faster than drawing it out.
|
| The best thing for the most people is to help them move
| on to the next gig quickly.
|
| The people u work with bosses included, are what make or
| break this. In my experience, people help one another. I
| have seen ceo's push resumes of people let go to other
| execs in their network. This is outside company policy or
| communication for legal reasons but not everyone is dirt
| bag.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Oh I didn't mean to say that's what you wanted it to
| mean, just that I've heard clean cut in two main spaces:
| taking off bandages and slaughtering animals.
|
| If you mean clean cut as in only cleanly cut the
| contract, but then maintain the relationship in other
| ways, I think that could make sense, as it doesn't
| pretend the decision hasn't already been made. I think I
| was reacting to clean cut the relationship completely,
| which I don't even think works well. But yeah, I'd
| appreciate if the individuals or even the company helped
| the people out.
|
| It'd be like ending a relationship with someone who was
| financially dependent on you and just letting them fall
| of the cliff, compared to saying that you know it doesn't
| work for you two together, but you'll financially help
| them transition. I dunno, some people should say clean
| cut the relationship, drop friendships, never talk, cold
| turkey, I just don't know how well that works for human
| well being in the long term.
| ponector wrote:
| This is American way. There are no people, only resources.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Literally, "Human Resources". Such a disgusting phrase.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| * in the USA
|
| Here we get 1-3 month notice.
|
| But it goes both ways, if I want to leave I have to work the
| mandated period.
|
| https://www.unionen.se/in-english/notice-to-termination
| Aurornis wrote:
| > But it goes both ways, if I want to leave I have to work
| the mandated period
|
| Do companies actually force people to continue working
| during that period? I would expect that in tech they'd
| allow them to leave early because employees who have chosen
| to leave the company are some times not the most helpful to
| keep around for months
| the_biot wrote:
| I have never, ever understood this whole mandated period
| thing. Aside from what you mention -- do you really want
| to keep these people around against their will -- I don't
| understand how your (ex-)employer can force you to do
| anything against your will. All you have to do is say
| "no".
|
| Yet people keep believing mandated work after a layoff is
| a thing.
| duckmysick wrote:
| It's not against their will. It's a part of the contract
| they signed when they started working at the company. The
| contract stipulates how it can be terminated (in
| accordance with the local law). If it says each party can
| terminate a contract with a prior notice of two weeks,
| the contract is enforced for those two weeks after giving
| in the notice. There's still an employee-employer
| relationship at this point, even if the employee gave
| their notice.
|
| In some countries the notice period can go for months.
| Usually it gets longer with the tenure. It allows both
| parties to transition and prepare in advance.
| zelos wrote:
| I was forced to work out a 3 month notice period at my
| previous company in the UK. I don't see the point of
| keeping an already-checked out employee around so long
| when you have basically no way of getting anything but
| the bare minimum out of them.
| julenx wrote:
| Some employees in the company might understand the emotional
| impact, but companies themselves would only look for
| certainty in protecting what belongs to them, which will
| hardly align with fairness or emotions towards employees in a
| situation like this.
| viccis wrote:
| One of the most surreal meetings I've ever been to was a
| company All Hands after a 20% layoff round. The upper
| management people who decided who was laid off took turns
| talking about how upset it made them to have to do it. They
| showed a diagram of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief and went
| back and forth talking about what stage of grief they were in
| having to lay all these people off. Was like something out of
| the UK version of The Office. It was so tone deaf that it was
| bleakly comedic at a certain point.
|
| The extra kicker was that there were a bunch of UK people in
| this meeting who knew they'd be laid off, but it takes longer
| to do the redundancy process over there, so they had to
| listen to these people complaining about how sad firing them
| feels.
| bombcar wrote:
| The sad thing is they _probably did feel bad_ about it! But
| _nobody cares_ and talking about it at that time is
| incredibly tone-deaf.
| Aurornis wrote:
| One of my past employers tried to give laid off employees a
| dignified send offs including not immediately revoking their
| access.
|
| The number of people who snap and make rash decisions to try
| to exfiltrate data, plant backdoor logins for themselves, or
| sabotage company work in those hours was a much larger number
| than I would have guessed prior to seeing it.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Maybe the solution is to not do mass layoffs. Not sure
| there's a dignified way to let go of many humans at the
| same time with almost no reason for why they're being let
| go except maybe a vague profitability scorecard.
|
| And also to expect and manage people snapping and giving
| them an off-ramp, financially but emotionally as well and
| maybe professionally, too. Why not try to help them find
| other jobs?
|
| Companies don't just provide money, they provide people
| with meaning, routine, social circle, and so much, and
| layoffs cut all of those immediately.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Maybe the solution is to not do mass layoffs. Not sure
| there's a dignified way to let go of many humans at the
| same time
|
| The number of people included in a single layoff wasn't a
| factor.
|
| The people who snapped treated it as a personal affront
| and wanted revenge on the company. If anything, being
| laid off in a large group made it feel less personal to
| people. The people who felt unfairly singled out were the
| angriest. If an entire satellite office was closed or a
| department was laid off together they didn't take it as
| personally.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Yeah that makes sense to me and I appreciate you saying
| it. If the whole team gets laid off, it's we all go down
| with the ship. But if one person gets laid off on a team,
| I think it can create intense dynamics. Like why them
| specifically? It wasn't about the department, it was
| about them. I can see why they'd take it personally and
| why the survivor guilt might be stronger on that team as
| well.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Yeah, but of that list, the only thing I want my employer
| to provide me is the money. The rest I can do on my own.
| brailsafe wrote:
| > Companies don't just provide money, they provide people
| with meaning, routine, social circle, and so much, and
| layoffs cut all of those immediately.
|
| I think that in a way, to really learn why you shouldn't
| depend on your company for your social circle, it sort of
| requires being laid off (not really, but kind of; some
| sudden permanent intervention in your work-life). I
| consider it a blessing in disguise that I realized this
| early, even if it meant a job loss. People who get comfy
| in marriages or long-term jobs or buy a house early on
| tend to spend their resources in the obvious optimal
| efficient ways, which is to make their friends at work or
| through their partner or literally right next door to
| their house. But those are not _generally_ or reliably
| resilient to significant change. Proximity will always be
| important, but if your friends need to be literally where
| you work every day or over the fence, you are isolated
| and socially vulnerable. If you leave the job or move, it
| 's now dramatically more expensive for both parties to
| encounter each other, and it's best to incur that expense
| intentionally before you end up needing to.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| Yeah, I'm confident that didn't happen
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| I have seen that too. People on the way out trying to get
| access to production systems. Layoffs suck, but the
| business needs to protect itself from those who are
| departing. The company used to have more lax separation
| procedures but after that incident everything got locked
| down.
| xXSLAYERXx wrote:
| When i was first laid off during the dot com bust I was
| working on a sales floor. All open no cubes. We didn't know
| layoffs were coming. Manager walks in and taps this one guy
| on the shoulder, says grab your personal things and come with
| me. Manager came back in did the same to a few others. Then
| it was me. Talk about embarrassing! Also, was 2 weeks before
| quarter ended. If you were not working for the company at the
| end of the Q, no bonus. 2 weeks! I'll never forget that. That
| was my first taste of how nasty a company can be. Not the
| layoffs, hey things happen. But the timing. Feels diabolical.
| oblio wrote:
| Don't worry, big companies are doing similar things now.
|
| Layoffs after the main activity period is over, laying off
| HR people after they held layoff meetings for other
| departments, etc.
|
| Reptiles.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Do not say "companies". They are managers who do this. It is
| them who are to blame.
| tombert wrote:
| I've noticed people are shockingly good at filtering out
| their empathy through bureaucracies. Instead of feeling bad
| about their personal decision that they made to lay someone
| off, they instead can tell themselves it was the only way to
| do business and then happily absolve themselves of guilt.
| ctxc wrote:
| I was going to type you a sympathetic message and took a peek
| at your profile, and...well that's quite a resume you got
| there!
| jedberg wrote:
| Heh thank you. It was a few years ago that this happened,
| when they were doing the big RTO.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I've been laid off or fired ~7 times, in slightly different
| ways, some more humane than others, and it's quite a...
| traumatizing/colouring experience that stays with you from that
| point forward, even when I was over the job anyway.
|
| I once had my access cut off _while_ I was working late, albeit
| from a much smaller company. Got to go to sleep knowing I didn
| 't have an income in the morning. Incidentally, in retrospect
| I'm glad they made the decision for me, since I eventually was
| forced to leave my awful hometown in search of greener
| pastures, so it's not always a bad thing long-term, and I
| ratted them out to the tax man which I'm sure they had fun
| with.
| xyst wrote:
| Boomers wonder why current generations don't give a shit about
| corporate life anymore. One of the many examples.
| fredgrott wrote:
| 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.
| ozzafar wrote:
| Java isn't really uncommon
| paxys wrote:
| It's a trash source. No one has confirmed 30k job cuts. They just
| made it up.
| intexpress wrote:
| Usually the big tech companies leak the layoff numbers to the
| press themselves
| paxys wrote:
| rollingout.com is a clickbait site. Companies aren't leaking
| info to them.
| intexpress wrote:
| Yahoo reported the same 30,000 number in February
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-may-
| slash-30-000-11441...
| intrasight wrote:
| I went looking and have to agree. There's no legit news source
| with any real numbers.
|
| Perhaps this will be higher than the standard 10% cull, but I
| suspect not that much higher.
| mindracer wrote:
| https://thenextweb.com/news/oracle-layoffs-march-2026
| wnevets wrote:
| Very often people will defend these kind of layouts as the result
| of overhiring but then shouldn't the leadership that over hired
| 30K people also be held accountable?
| jaccola wrote:
| I think this sucks for the people being laid off but what
| exactly should they be held accountable for?
|
| It's not like over-hiring or laying people off is a crime. The
| employees presumably knew the deal going in (that they could be
| laid off). They got compensated for the time they worked.
|
| No one owed them a job at Oracle in the first place. (Again,
| not to diminish how bad it feels / shocking it can be to be
| laid off!)
| dominotw wrote:
| making wrong decisions at work has no consequences for you?
| where do you work?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Tech shareholders want executives to take risks building
| new products. Of course they'd prefer the products be
| successful but if the options are "hire 30k people 50%
| chance we have to lay them all off" or "don't build new
| products" most tech shareholders want option 1.
| dominotw wrote:
| where do you pull 50 percent number for oracle?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Even if the number is 10% they want the company to take
| risks. Big tech shareholders number one goal is not
| becoming IBM
| dominotw wrote:
| anyone can get any random shower thought funded by this
| logic. Thats not how investing works.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Then why dont executives got punished by investors when
| they take risks and fail? The answer clearly is that
| investors want the risks to be taken and understand the
| downside that comes from taking risks.
| dominotw wrote:
| > Then why dont executives got punished by investors when
| they take risks and fail?
|
| they do?
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Politics.
| wnevets wrote:
| > but what exactly should they be held accountable for?
|
| For over hiring 30K people.
| triceratops wrote:
| > what exactly should they be held accountable for?
|
| Bad leadership. Costing the company a ton of money and
| goodwill. Need I go on?
| wnevets wrote:
| The wasted cashed is only part of the story.
|
| Just think of the wasted man hours spent on integrating 30K
| new employees that supposedly the company didn't need. The
| time spent in meetings about restructuring departments, new
| points of contacts, reassignment of duties, figuring out
| who to promote, training the new hires, etc.
|
| Now the company gets to it all again in reverse with much
| lower moral and excitement. The amount of hours & employee
| focus wasted on the bureaucracy of the hiring and firing
| over 30K employees instead of spending that time on
| improving the business should get you fired from
| leadership.
| triceratops wrote:
| > Just think of the wasted man hours...
|
| That's all money.
| wnevets wrote:
| I view the opportunely cost, moral reduction, corporate
| politics, etc. differently then just money. I wanted to
| emphasize the long term effects of hiring then firing 30K
| has on businesses beyond what people typically focus on
| like payroll.
| tombert wrote:
| If I am bad at my job, I get fired. For better or worse, this
| is what happens.
|
| If a CEO is bad at his or her job (e.g. wasting billions of
| dollars on employees that they don't need), apparently he or
| she can fire 20% of the company and give himself a bonus for
| making such a tough decision.
| keybored wrote:
| Labor is a commodity. You don't apologize to the commodity
| for changing your spending habits and walking past it in the
| store.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| If you follow the "stock price is the golden indicator of
| company's well being attitude", then over-hiring at that point
| was a great decision. And cutting the headcount is also a great
| decision right now. So they did nothing wrong.
|
| I personally don't agree with this, but it's easy to say
| "overhiring was bad", when at that point, it might've been a
| great business decision. Things just have changed now.
| bipinrimal1 wrote:
| Does everyone at this point wonder, when is it going to be my
| time next at the company?
| rishabhaiover wrote:
| I find it bizarre than no one here seems to be commenting on the
| insane amount of capex redirected towards AI infrastructure build
| out as a reason for such decisions. I only hear bad product or
| covid over hiring but they seem like cope to my cynical mind.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| open ai sitll pouring money into oracle btw
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I've heard of people working there that has cozy, low effort
| jobs, I'm not surprised. More surprised if took them this long.
| baggachipz wrote:
| What makes you sure that those are the ones laid off?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Not confident, but that's a good question. :)
| grossiweb wrote:
| Honestly, isnt this going to happen in every SAAS based company?
| My feeling is the bigger and more staff they have the more they
| will unload. I feel like its almost a necessity otherwise some
| 3-5 man team agentic first solution will just come with the same
| offering at 80-90% discount and eat their lunch.
| silveira wrote:
| At least they had a decency of avoiding the ambiguity of doing
| this during April 1st.
| snihalani wrote:
| Do people here believe in karma? I can't empathize with these
| management practices.
| esaym wrote:
| > The layoffs are directly tied to Oracle's aggressive and debt-
| heavy expansion into artificial intelligence infrastructure.
| According to analysis from TD Cowen, the job cuts are expected to
| free up between $8 billion and $10 billion in cash flow -- money
| the company urgently needs to fund a massive buildout of AI data
| centers.
|
| Interesting that they admit that the layoff off is due to a pivot
| from software to hardware.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| 30000 jobs equals 10 billion dollars?
|
| 10,000,000,000 / 30,000 = 333k per employee?
|
| I guess that tracks for a company that is 50% lawyers for suing
| their own customers /s
| nickvec wrote:
| Are there any serious union efforts happening in big tech right
| now? It's asinine to me that tech workers haven't unionized at
| this point and that folks still fall head over heel just to get a
| job somewhere that would dispose of you without a second thought.
| mandeepj wrote:
| If larry hadn't sucked dRump's c*ck that hard, he'd not be in the
| free downfall that he is in today. He's dismantling America brick
| by brick. I hope he goes bankrupt soon.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Free up some $ for Skydance WB acquisition if needed?
| HardCodedBias wrote:
| I think its clear that a lot of companies over hired during the
| pandemic, and it seems like we are getting more out of our entire
| staff with AI tools.
|
| Given that it makes sense to cut if the company doesn't have new
| product ideas to spend that excess resources.
| fs111 wrote:
| This was leaked weeks ago
| https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/oracle-layoffs-tech-...
| elzbardico wrote:
| Ethical Dillemas.
|
| You found the cure of cancer. If you release it now, you'd giving
| back humanity millions of LifeYears, but if you release it in a
| few years, Larry Elison won't be able to take advantage of it.
|
| How do you proceed?
| tombert wrote:
| Release the patent and specify a very strict "free usage for
| anyone not named Larry Ellison, and violators will be punished
| to the fullest extent of the law" clause.
|
| You'd probably get a few innocent people aren't the Larry
| Ellison from Oracle, but it's a start.
| keeda wrote:
| Huh, layoffs in India? That's weird, because most tech companies
| are freezing headcount and laying off people in the US and
| increasing headcount in India. I wonder if that says something
| about the prospects of NetSuite, which is the org they've been
| cut from...
| milkytron wrote:
| When I worked for Oracle in 2015 during my co-op there, IDC was
| generally just another office. NetSuite may be their focus, but
| I think they generally cover almost all Oracle software.
| jaygray0919 wrote:
| this is the cost of getting into the movie business
| xtracto wrote:
| Is this related to the massive layoffs in the Mexico/GDL offices
| that happened a couple of days ago?
|
| My LinkedIn was full of people opening for work. Pretty sad.
| Jaco07 wrote:
| Another consequence of the AI boom. Not in the simplistic sense
| that "AI is replacing jobs," but rather in the sense that
| companies are realizing they have overspent dramatically on a
| product that still is not strong enough to justify the scale of
| that investment or deliver a meaningful return.
| esaym wrote:
| Posted 23 days ago: (Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47298183
| greatgib wrote:
| At the same time I'm happy about this news for the feeling of
| "justice" to have people without ethic working for such a bad
| company getting what they deserves. And the company going down
| even if just a little bit.
|
| But on the other side, I'm afraid that the fired employees will
| go to work for other companies contaminating them with the
| harmful spirit against customers.
| h4kunamata wrote:
| And just like that, another US tech becoming a Kodak.
|
| MySQL is no longer the only choice for database, MariaDB is fully
| open-source.
|
| VMWare, there are far better options like Proxmox, build a
| Proxmox server using second hand Dell PC you find in bulk on
| eBay, increase the memory, add GPU passthrough and you are
| golden.
| xyst wrote:
| Got to pay for that awful deal to acquire Tik tok, Warner.
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