Discussion

Oracle slashes 30,000 jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email

kwanbix: [delayed]

dafelst: 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".

baal80spam: Let's not forget that ORACLE is actually an acronym.

dolphinscorpion: Unless you're being offered a very good package, any firing email is cold. Let's be honest

codemog: Don’t work for evil companies.

liveoneggs: your local food bank only has so many open positions

bix6: It feels like Oracle has made some massive strategic missteps in the past year. I’m curious if they can turn it around.

2OEH8eoCRo0: Imagine slashing 30,000 jobs for a measly 2% share price bump.

TwoNineA: > 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: 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.

muskstinks: 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.

CoolGuySteve: Even at 100k employees I’m still dumbfounded by that number. What do all these people do all day?

ra_men: I’m guessing development is so slow that they have stacks of teams working in parallel to accomplish what 1 team could normally.

sethev: > They clearly did something crazy at coronaThey acquired Cerner, which had ~30k employees.

newsoftheday: What "massive strategic missteps"? They continue to attract cloud customers coming from Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

raw_anon_1111: Citations?

kaladin-jasnah: 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 what I originally wanted, 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).Also, evil is undefined in some sense. Is it wrong to do something "good" at a company that has an "evil" aspect?

dryarzeg: "One Rich A*[CENSORED] Called Larry Ellison"? : )

RobRivera: You need to pair hc with revenue, otherwise this data tells only one story, hc growth.

raw_anon_1111: So exactly what for profit company is on the side of the angels?

georgemcbay: > 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 you or I.

quelsolaar: Do not make the mistake of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison.

hyperpape: 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.

SoftTalker: 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.

Quarrelsome: I think its very impolite to not do it face-to-face.

renewiltord: 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.

shepherdjerred: It’s not unethical to lay someone off

stackskipton: 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: Sure but what did those guys do all day? 400 people is a lot of people

irl_zebra: Creating powerpoints. Presenting the powerpoints to others in synchronous meetings.

kjksf: 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: 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?

davidw: "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?!"

the_real_cher: Termination will take on a while different meaning of this turns out to come true on some Black Mirror future.

ge96: Cool to be part of history I used to go into that office Innovations campusSaw someone had a license plate say MPAGES ha

Waterluvian: Whatever you do, do not ever book a 1:1 meeting on a Friday afternoon for Monday morning titled, "The Future."

thinkingtoilet: 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.

newsoftheday: List successful companies you would not define as evil.

mirekrusin: 37signals, vanguard, costco, proton, fastmail, mullvad vpn, framework, automattic, valve, patagonia, lego, linear, hetzner, tarsnap, ...

antonymoose: Valve has been making money hand over fist by getting kids addicted to gambling…

rvz: This is AGI.

newsoftheday: Meanwhile, the super yachts, whole islands, etc. of the other billionaires you're not worried about I guess.

geon: Where did he say he's not worried about other billionaires?

newsoftheday: Where did he say that he is, that's the point. Otherwise their comment is disingenuous at best or engineered to be divisive against Oracle at worst.

cyanydeez: should be an interesting parlay: hope this whole fascist, AI, far right nationalist takeover actually replaces workers before everything goes up in smoke.And this ain't paranoia guys, have a brain cell longer than the LLMs being covetted.

thiago_fm: 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!

NickC25: 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.

alephnerd: > More victims of AIAccording to the article as well as blind, the main teams hit were associated with Cerner (HRM) 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.

js8: 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.

lateforwork: What is the alternative? Have 30,000 meetings? How long will that take?

doublerabbit: Furries are a distaste but Larry Elison as such. Wouldn't surprise me.

razingeden: lawnmower don’t give a fuuuuuck

stackskipton: 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: 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.

hyperpape: 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.

mikeyouse: 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)

bux93: "Any unvested restricted stock units, however, were forfeited immediately."wow.

baumy: I remember reading this post years ago, and it has stuck in my brain ever since: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941So 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: That is really wild

gib444: Where's the annual revenue for context? Those numbers are almost useless alone.

diehunde: 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: There is no bubble

B1FF_PSUVM: 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" ...

kyledrake: 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.

jvanderbot: 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.

nunez: Disgusting.

BoredPositron: It's like IBM for legacy business the German Banking System runs all oracle in the backend.

BeetleB: > My point is: it's very, very, very hard to do this, especially with my set of interestsIt 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.

vasco: Government contracts. You get good at bidding, there's money to be made there. And those bidding processes are way more than just the tech. That's their main value prop I think. Having the bureaucratic machine to bid and win contracts.

jeffbee: 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: 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.

passive: 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: Disney is also a target? Or are you confusing Warner Bros Discovery with Disney?

passive: Yup, completely confusing Warner Bros and Disney. Thanks for catching that!

imglorp: 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?

ivell: 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: 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.

toast0: 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: the practicalities of the issue don't stop it from being impolite.

HelloMcFly: 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: 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.

newsoftheday: > I'm genuinely confused at what the value prop of Oracle is.I asked Gemini, "Do you have citations proving or disproving whether Oracle Cloud is still attracting cloud customers away from Azure, AWS and GCP?"..."Gemini said Research from 2025 and early 2026 indicates that while Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) remains a smaller player by total market share, it is outpacing the "Big Three" (AWS, Azure, and GCP) in percentage-based growth, largely by positioning itself as the preferred utility for heavy AI training and specialized enterprise database workloads."

lenerdenator: The question then becomes, does Java warrant the valuation Oracle has when the language itself is mostly FLOSS?

mooreds: 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...

xvxvx: 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: This one is so over the top, it begins to verge on satire.

newsoftheday: I used Google Gemini to confirm before I posted my comment. You're welcome to do the same.

raw_anon_1111: “I used AI to confirm what I said” is not exactly the great comeback you think it is…

newsoftheday: It wasn't a comeback, it was a truthful answer to your question.

raw_anon_1111: And your response tells me that you still don’t get why you shouldn’t use “AI told me” as a citation..

vincentastral: 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.

mft_: 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.)

bobthepanda: 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: Amazon, among others, write a lot of java, but they want absolutely nothing to do with oracle licenses for java

bobthepanda: 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: > Right, I just feel like this is a bit over the topWell, the writer said the only Java devs THEY KN OW, not all Java devs.

dryarzeg: > at your local mormon templeSounds 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: 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: 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.

WalterBright: Mandated perpetual employment is bad for workers because the company will be extremely reluctant to hire and take on such an open-ended liability.

BeetleB: 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: 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.

dtdynasty: Isn't this normal? I thought that's how it typically works when an employee leaves a company with any method.

tmoertel: 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...

01284a7e: The right thing to be said here. Oracle is trash. Would you expect rude idiots to be nice smart people all of a sudden?

burningChrome: >> 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.

samuelknight: This is standard in every tech RSU vest schedule I have seen.

iamjake648: 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.

tombert: 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: One only need look at the job postings for Apple to see quite how common Java backend is there.

butterlesstoast: Checks out https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?search=java&sort=relevan...

post-it: 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.

pydry: 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.

fredgrott: Context of scale....They took on 58billion in debt which halved their stock price...Expected savings is only 8BillionWhat 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.

Gualdrapo: 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: Or, with emotions flaring, could say something that becomes grounds for a wrongful termination or discrimination claim.

seanhunter: 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: Just curious, how was SQL Server perceived at the time compared to Sybase and Oracle? I know it originated as a port of Sybase.

dryarzeg: 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: > feels that it's already tough for Oracle and that many companies betting on AI have finally understood the real risks involvedThis 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: > 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 fatYes, 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...

chasd00: you can get a gauge on Oracle debt by looking at CDS prices ( basically insurance that pays out if Oracle defaults on debt ). The link is from 4 months ago and it feels weird to link to reddit but CDS prices have risen quite a bit which implies loaning Oracle money is feeling riskier than it use to be. I don't know what the prices are now.https://www.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/1p6f5ra/what_is_ha...I wish i could remember exactly but there was some financing bet or debt structuring thing that Oracle did that didn't go according to plan and put them in a bad spot.

faangguyindia: Java sucks, it will consume lots of ram. Just write your services in Golang.

mrguyorama: 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.

mr_mitm: 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.

nimbius: 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: > 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.

rbanffy: > What on earth were those 30k people doing?!Could be lawyers.Would we be sad if they were lawyers?

rbanffy: > 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: 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.

WalterBright: > layoffs are deeply immoralIt's no more immoral than you deciding to buy from Safeway, even though you'd been buying from Fred Meyer before.

wiseowise: 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: 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.

kleiba: Between employers and employees, loyalty is only expected one way.

sneak: 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: > 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.

troyvit: 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.

WalterBright: 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: 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!

rbanffy: Indeed. Oracle runs on z/OS as well.

jeffbee: OK but for most people a 16-week acceleration is still forfeiting 92% of unvested shares.

saidnooneever: 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.

lazide: It’s a common ‘large enterprise’ dependency often due to some internal CRN/Accounting/Compliance software, so I suspect you are right.

rbanffy: People also marry the database when a significant amount of logic is in stored procedures.

stego-tech: 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.

wnevets: 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?

BeetleB: > 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.

jollymonATX: They have not pulled the pin on the ZFS grenade yet, but I expect at some point it happens.

kstrauser: 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.

paxys: It's a trash source. No one has confirmed 30k job cuts. They just made it up.

intexpress: Usually the big tech companies leak the layoff numbers to the press themselves

paxys: rollingout.com is a clickbait site. Companies aren't leaking info to them.

uberduper: 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: 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.

DrJokepu: There was also DB2. DB2 was (still is) an excellent database that IBM has completely fumbled.

gorjusborg: 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.

steve_adams_86: 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: The realistic alternative is to regularly cut a smaller number of people, which is awful for morale.

lokar: 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.

intrasight: 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.

micromacrofoot: open ai sitll pouring money into oracle btw

wiseowise: > 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?

rbanffy: > ClojureApple should do more of that - they make cool computers, and should use cool languages.

Wowfunhappy: Back in the day, Objective-C was considered a cool hip language, wasn't it?

rishabhaiover: 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.

sellmethepen: 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

jaccola: 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!)

chekibreki: 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 RequiredTo 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 LeadershipSource: https://www.reddit.com/r/employeesOfOracle/comments/1s8jadx/...

rossant: "eliminate".Right.

arkaic: Irresponsible, careless, negligent. No planning leads to all of this. Ultimately unethical from this point of view