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Oracle Dumps PeopleSoft Employees
curtain writes "The first move in Oracle's dismantling of PeopleSoft has begun. The cuts will affect about 9% of the 55,000 staff of the combined companies.
From the article:
"We're mourning the passing of a great company," Peoplesoft worker David Ogden as saying. Other employees said they would rather be sacked than work for Oracle."
What a troll. It has absolutely nothing to do with the economy, and is exactly what happens during all tech aquisitions, regardless of overall economic conditions. The jobs aren't going to India -- they're being eliminated completely.
The first to go are redundant positions, i.e., HR, finance / legal, etc. Then most of the rest (dev, PS, and sales / marketing) are typically kept for a time to absorb what they know, and then axed. The creme of the crop are kept or induced to stay, but, like the article says, most of the PeopleSoft folks I know would rather quit than work for Orifice / Horricle.
Well, that was the point, wasn't it? Reduce headcount, cut costs, profit.
I suppose Oracle also wanted to get closer to a monopoly by gaining market share. The point of the whole exercise was profit, and maybe personnal aggrandizement, given the participants.
Larry Ellison may be good at business, be he sure isn't very ethical. This is a very cold, uncaring move to dominate a market. But could I expect any less from him...not really. That's why I don't use Oracle for anything.
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
Maybe there is a justification for eliminating some of these jobs, but Wall St's myopic viewpoint (job cuts => profit!!!) has always bugged me.
Step 1. Buy Competing Technology
Step 2. Destroy Said Technology
Step 3. Slowly Move Those Customers To Core Product
Step 4. Profit!
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
1. Corporations are not a democracy.
/waits for the revolution
2. Corporations do best for the shareholders.
3. The majority shareholders are mostly a small group of already wealthy people.
4. Aquire companies with "leveraged synergies".
5. Fire redundant pawns. Feed jobs overseas.
6. Lower competition.
7. Handfull of shareholders get even richer at the expense of thousands of families and the business es they patronize.
8. Most people and the local economy lose.
Welcome to the American Way.
IT people are not being laid off. Back-office people are being laid off. When you merge two companies, you wind up with two payroll departments, two HR departments, two legal departments, two accounting departments, etc.
Fifty years ago, you mostly kept everyone because everything was done manually. Today, if you have a (computerized) payroll system that can handle 40,000 employees, it can probably handle 55,000. If it can't, you generally add more hardware/IT resources, not more people. The same thing is largely true about most back-office jobs.
So, what do you do with thousands of redundant people? It's not realistic to think that you can retrain them all, or that they all want to be retrained ("hey, mister SPHR-certified HR specialist with 20 years' experience, here's a book on Java!")
The people who usually survive mergers are (a) people in the acquiring company, (b) people in the acquired company who are responsible for making/developing the product, and (c) good salespeople in the acquired company. That is certainly the pattern here.
I'm not saying that Oracle/Ellison is some lilly-white invisible-glad-hand or that the Oracle-Peoplesoft merger is a good thing...just saying that is the way it works in business and this wasn't really any surprise. This notion that "Wall Street loves job cuts" or "corporate America is so short-sighted" etc. doesn't survive that "well, what would you suggest instead?" test.
Advice: on VPS providers
"If you could somehow *require* all stockholders to keep their stocks for at least a couple years before selling, then you'd see people thinking more "long-term". But things like "job cuts = profit!" are a result of shorter-term thinking. "This move means my stock is goin' up so it'll be ready to sell next month!""
I think you're forgetting that a lot of stock is actually held in mutual funds. The one's doing the buying and selling aren't the actual people who own the stock, but intermediates. You want to complain? Complain about them. Just remember a lot of people have their retirement (IRAs, 401Ks, pension plans) invested in them.* Not just the "get rich quick" artist.
*There's also those "living off of" such plans. Just as some "live off of" eBay.
Not exactly. Merging two companies does avoid some duplication of effort. Do they need two accounting departments, for example?
The fact is, that the two companies merged. With any successful merger the outcome is that overall costs are cut...
Yeah, I know what 'two companies merged' really means.
I interned at a company in college that was 'merged' with another company. This was at a telecom company in the mid 1990's. One day there was a Big Boss type giving a lossy PowerPoint presentation on Big changes in the industry (i.e. the Inernet.) The next day all the old company's signs came down off the building. The day after that? I got to move from an intern cubicle to a manager's office. Of the hundreds of engineers on my floor, only a few of the interns and managers were left. Everybody got fired.
I watched super-programmers with 35 years of coding under their belts walk out and forge start-ups that made them personally rich. Meanwhile, the remaining interns^H^H^Hemployees toiled away on building 'glue' code. Once learning to do world-class software engineering, we now migrated data from the original, unsupported and well-designed systems to the new company's 'manadatory upgrade' (and piss-poor) products.
Oracle+Peoplesoft will be just as bad. I can garuntee that as soon as what's left of Peoplesoft finishes the needed 'glue' code to migrate Peoplesoft data into Oracle 11i or whatever there will be a sudden increase in PeopleSoft 'alumni.'
Any merger that *doesn't* cut jobs, surely at least, partially a failure. You may not embrace capitalism wholeheartedly, but look around you, it's not too bad.
Megers, feh! There are only stupid takeovers and product assimilation in the business world. Someone is either buying your top talent (never happens) or your top product (to shut it down.) If you couldn't hire away the top talent before, they won't stay now. Product closures is just capitalism in reverse. There is less competition and far too often the inferior product is the only product left in the market. People that think mergers are like happy marriges of two companies have never personally seen the look of pure greed on a pre-merger CEO's face.
I'm not bitter though, it's just that the idea of mergers and the reality of mergers have nothing to do with each other.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
It wasn't unexpected -- Larry made an Oopsie and announced his plans for merging the two companies waaay before it was a done-deal. I expect the top talent bailed out almost immediately.
So, the regular-Joe Peoplesoft employees knew it was coming, and at least could make other plans. Contrast that with the implosion at Enron, where the average worker had no idea that the company was on the precipice.
Whether the local economy can support 5000 new job seekers is another question. I wouldn't doubt that some of the senior management will start new firms, employing some of those recently laid off. Others will have to uproot their lives, and move to where there's work.
Chip H.
I don't know anything about any of this, but I do know that PeopleSoft made a crappy, awful product, which my school insists on using. Seeing as how their software couldn't possibly get any worse, from a UI perspective, tearing apart the company can't help but result in something better, making my life easier.
1. if you are good at anything you will not have any trouble finding something else to do.
2. if you are good at what you are doing at work - you will not be fired
3. If you are not good at anything then why do you expect some one to support you?
I admire your ability to have that point of view. It was my own a few years back. The idea that pops into my head when I hear someone say such things now is 'young' or 'sheltered'.
Now, please do not get offended. I know these are not attributes that people want to be known for, but in this case, it also means you are lucky.
I hope that you can live your life without ever having to change the viewpoint you have.
This would mean that you never suffered a politically motivated coup at your job, or a stab in the back from a coworker that you never expected, or a layoff of a crew of great employees because management is concerned with how analysts will respond to week growth in the quarter.
These types of things happen, and none of them have anything to do with you as an individual. They are circumstances, things which are by definition not under your control.
If it's not one thing, it's Steve's Mother
... fire hot.
Does this surprise anyone at all? Was this move really to bolster Oracle's position in the market or to drive a competitor out of it?
In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.
-- Yun-Men
I agree that Ellison is as autocratic as a Chinese emperor (including modern "Party Chairmen"). But your tsunami example is bad. "China", the government and the country, doesn;t have enough money to provide basic needs to millions of its own people - for them, it's a tsunami over the horizon with every sunrise. This is a perpetual crisis at the same scale, or larger, than the tsunami: hundreds of thousands of deaths, and millions without adequate shelter, medicine or food to survive. Every day - all the time, with the casualties matching probably in a month (or even a week) what which arrived by tsunami in an hour - but which won't return for years, decades, centuries. While the US, Japan, Australia and the rest have vast billions of "discretionary" money available. Which we spend on what we see on TV, another factor which doesn't influence most Chinese.
Taiwan has little excuse for their stinginess, nor truly does the "special zone" of Hong Kong - their capitalist greed seems clear from the numbers. But the actual spending of the aid money is also controlling the donations. Much is going to the Indonesian military, which is an enemy of "China" (collectively), but an ally of the US, Japan and Australia. Of course there are strings attached by "our" governments, mostly relating to the suppression of Indonesian populations in the oil/gas rich Aceh region. The other regions in Thailand and even Sri Lanka have similar political/military polarization. Norway, a major oil producer, no doubt has interests along those same lines, though that country's global donations in general lead all nations in what should be a competition to fund sustainable global development.
So there's no barbarism going down. Except, I note, in your racist attitude towards Chinese Americans. Lots of them in Silicon Valley, so a SV company will inevitably become like China, the country most of them fled at personal sacrifice? Your comparison of Oracle's labor policies to China's really is an insult to the term "utter brutality". China tortures workers who complain, or threaten to organize; Oracle at worst browbeats them or doesn't renew their contract, leaving them free (the essential difference) to find another $100K:y job up the street.
Overall, you need a sense of proportion. Your oversimplifications betray the kind of severe error that any thinking based on racism will generate. Ellison is something of a Genghis Khan, but the Chinese "communist" mafia is not a metaphorical khanate, but nearly indistinguishable from their historical predecessors. Neither are particularly worthwhile, but you'll have a hard time finding people sympathetic to your anger when you've got nothing additional to offer.
--
make install -not war