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Oracle Finally Decides To Stop Prolonging the Inevitable, Begins Hardware Layoffs (theregister.co.uk)
Shaun Nichols, reporting for The Register: Oracle is starting layoffs that will hit its hardware division, The Register has learned. Current and some soon-to-be former staffers have whispered that the database giant is shipping out packages containing the paperwork for ending their employment. The workers have received alerts from FedEx that the packages, which will need to be signed for, are en route for a September 1 delivery. "One of my co-workers emailed that he received a notification from FedEx of a label created by Oracle America, Inc," writes one anonymous employee. "I just checked and a label has been created for my home address. This is in the US. Looks like Friday is it for Sparc MicroElectronics." The layoffs are hardly a surprise, given the performance of Oracle's hardware unit as of late. In the last financial year, Oracle reported hardware revenues of $4.15bn. By comparison, in 2016 the unit logged hardware revenues of $4.67bn. In 2015 it was $5.2bn, and 2014 saw $5.37bn.
Of course, this is terrible news for the people losing their jobs. Nobody wants to have their livelihood taken away. But in other ways this is a good thing.
It shows the tremendous work these people did in creating extremely powerful hardware. But we're also seeing improvements on the software side, too. Virtual machines and cloud computing have vastly increased the utilization of the hardware we do have. It's no longer a case of a company having 20,000 servers, and collectively they're idle 85% of the time. Now the same company has perhaps 1,500 powerful physical servers running 20,000 VMs, and the physical hardware is idle only 5% of the time.
The switch to VMs has also put more focus on writing efficient code, and using efficient programming languages like C++, Go and especially Rust. Native, highly optimized binaries are back in favor, after we've seen the alleged benefits of just-in-time compilation never pan out. Fewer computing resources, and much less energy, is needed to run this highly-optimized software written in efficient and effective modern programming languages.
This vast increase in efficiency, both at the hardware and software level, will unfortunately mean that some people will become unemployed. But the overall effect is a net win for society, the economy, and the environment. We're now doing a lot more with a lot less.
Oracle Linux: you squandered solaris, one of the great operating systems of our time, and did everything you could to make it a complete pain in the ass to own. Now you expect to slap an Oracle sticker on RedHat Linux/CentOS and ancicipate people will care? You do know that all the well-defined chicanery in the oracle unbreakable linux distro is easily recreated in any distribution a customer could desire, right? and that these distributions dwarf your kernel contributions and community? if customers choose to do 'oracle' in say, Arch or centos, they not only get to skip the 5 hours on the phone with your tech support, but they get to skip the outrageous quarterly fees for the privilege.
MySQL: Shes dead, jim. All your best and brightest jumped ship a long long time ago to projects like Maria and Percona and now the only people who still use mysql are the ones that havent migrated off redhat 5 yet. In short, the customers that are either transitioning to windows or hired someone to move them to something else.
zfs: now this ones a bit of a controversy but stick with me here. What sun did to ZFS was great, but its licensing was crippled intentionally. You've had every opportunity as its owner to do something about that and you havent. There isnt much indication you will, so why not GPL or BSD it fully and concentrate on what you do best: shaking down customers for license fees. In the absence of competent licensing ZFS has been attacked on all sides from Redhats LFS and resurgent life support commits to the XFS tree, as well as BTRFS, which already handles disk pools, dedup, and cow and in a few months will handle multi device raid. So if you take any interest in ZFS stop hobbling the community.
oracle cloud: no one has heard of this, its hardly advertised, and is dwarfed by ec3 and other more competitive providers. just...stop.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The EE degree isn't the problem. It's taking out student loans to get a MBA and not being able to find a job to pay off the student loans. I have several friends who graduated with EE in the 1990's, decided to get their MBA after getting laid off during the Great Recession, and now do IT support because they can't find a higher paying job. It's a bit of shock to go from $200K per year to $50K per year.
Yet while Obama was around things were bad for 8 years. Real bad.
Thanks to the Republicans who spent eight years dragging their feet. They're still dragging their feet because it's easier to say "no" but saying "yes" requires compromises. Not with the Democrats, but with themselves.