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Oracle's Surprise Unannounced Layoffs 'Clear-Cut Teams of Engineers' (ieee.org)
Oracle "swung the layoff axe" Thursday, reports IEEE Spectrum, saying that the move "clear-cut teams of engineers."
The exact numbers of employees cut and their specific roles have not been reported by the company, but the layoffs are clearly significant. Fifty in Mexico, 50 in New Hampshire, 100 in India, at least that many in Silicon Valley -- the numbers, according to anecdotal reports on theLayoff.com and from internal chatter, are adding up quickly....
Oracle's layoff day started at 5 a.m. Pacific Time, when an email from Oracle executive vice president Don Johnson with the subject line "Organizational Restructuring" arrived in employee inboxes. The email informed staff members that, going forward, everything in the company would revolve around the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) operation... Then the email continued with a perky sentence that made some employees furious: "OCI's business is stronger than ever, and this team's future is bright." At approximately 10 a.m., I'm told, just five hours after that email, the layoffs began -- and according to anecdotal reports included significant cuts within at least part of that stronger-than-ever, bright-future cloud business.
Those affected were given 30 minutes to turn in company assets and leave the building, and were told that Friday (today) would their last official day. "The morning felt like a slaughter," one Oracle employee told me. "One person after another...." And, that employee said, the layoff process was handled very badly, with entire teams being ushered into conference rooms as groups and told that they no longer had jobs. This employee indicated that technical teams, particularly those involved in product development and focused on software development, data science, and engineering, seemed to take the biggest hit.
Business Insider reports that Oracle hasn't formally announced the number of people laid off, but adds that "One source we spoke to was told by his manager that 1,500 people worldwide were cut."
Oracle's layoff day started at 5 a.m. Pacific Time, when an email from Oracle executive vice president Don Johnson with the subject line "Organizational Restructuring" arrived in employee inboxes. The email informed staff members that, going forward, everything in the company would revolve around the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) operation... Then the email continued with a perky sentence that made some employees furious: "OCI's business is stronger than ever, and this team's future is bright." At approximately 10 a.m., I'm told, just five hours after that email, the layoffs began -- and according to anecdotal reports included significant cuts within at least part of that stronger-than-ever, bright-future cloud business.
Those affected were given 30 minutes to turn in company assets and leave the building, and were told that Friday (today) would their last official day. "The morning felt like a slaughter," one Oracle employee told me. "One person after another...." And, that employee said, the layoff process was handled very badly, with entire teams being ushered into conference rooms as groups and told that they no longer had jobs. This employee indicated that technical teams, particularly those involved in product development and focused on software development, data science, and engineering, seemed to take the biggest hit.
Business Insider reports that Oracle hasn't formally announced the number of people laid off, but adds that "One source we spoke to was told by his manager that 1,500 people worldwide were cut."
He spends his fortune on on yachts and whiskey while Bill Gates spends his on vaccines in Africa.
Regardless, I await confirmation that the main cuts were in their cloud operations.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
A few hundred is hardly a significant number across a large organization like Oracle, my own company (a competitor) is cutting way more than that. What seems to be the difference is they're handling it absolutely in the worst possible way, for no reason kicking people out on the spot instead of relying on attrition, early retirements or at least providing a reasonable heads-up to those affected.
Is a greedy SUN of a bitch.
but none for the company. Bullying and extortion is not a valid long term business strategy.
It always sucks to lose your job unexpectedly, but on the other hand, maybe this is a good opportunity to find a more ethical employer that isn't a negative influence on the entire industry.
Engineers who work for companies like Oracle and Facebook should understand that their salary literally comes from doing evil in the world.
Oracle "swung the layoff axe...
I like to think of it as: 'drawing the magic cost cutting sword from the stone of greed'.
... I'm always getting emails from recruiters letting me know that Oracle is hiring. Probably because I have nothing to do with database internals development and engineering. It will be interesting to see just what the final numbers are and what areas of the company got hit hardest.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Suns become Oracles, Oracles become Supernovae, spreading new engineering to the galaxy. The only thing that remains is the Great Cloud of Externalies, the shell of what once was.
Who even uses it? And those that do, are they doing anything with it other than hosting an Oracle DB instance? If Oracle DB existed only in their cloud, they wouldn't have to deal with installation/maintenance support at all.
âoeFelt like a slaughter.â GMAFB. Probably get severance and unemployment. Ask the two girls in Morocco what a slaughter feels like after you reattach their heads. Damn whiners.
Buh-bye Larry!
My wife is a director of marketing has a liberal arts degree and a MBA in Marketing from a top 20 school.
Her annual bonus pays a year's tuition for one of our girls at a private university.
The free markets say that we techies aren't worth as much as we think.
Fortunately, my science loving daughter is pre-med and doing quite well - she got a 'B' in Organic Chemistry even though she had one of those asshole chemistry professors who thinks they've been anointed to "weed out" future doctors for some idiotic reason.
the entire economy is prepping for recession. It sucks. We all know it's coming and nobody's doing a damn thing to stop it. Instead companies are slashing staff so they can use the money for buy backs to boost their stock when it hits so the CEOs don't take a pay cut.
We could stop this easily. End buy backs. Increase regulatory oversight so that companies can't gamble on the economy and then hold us all hostage for a bail out. Start spending on Demand Side economics. Do the Green New Deal, not for the "Green" part but for the "New Deal" part. Do single payer healthcare so employees can switch jobs for better pay w/o fear of losing insurance for a few months.
It's frustrating because we know exactly how to stop all this and we just don't do it. And the same folks who say we shouldn't pick winners and losers will be on TV telling us why we need to bail out the losers next time. And we will to. We've done it every 10 years since I started paying attention, and I bet if I looked we did it before then.
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No he won't. Not only does that dude sleep soundly at night, he think's he is a great guy. People with narcissistic personality disorder actually believe that being an asshole is a good thing (as long as they are the asshole). That's why its a disorder and not just a point of view. They are biologically incapable of seeing it any other way.
Two thoughts:
According to a report by USA Today, Oracle has a history of discriminating against job applicants who are American citizens. The managers prefer foreigners, whom the lawyers at Oracle help to get H-1B visas.
We should scrutinize the layoff to determine whether American citizens are overrepresented among the terminated employees.
Maybe hairdressers will stay too.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
He should have been as boneheaded as the SUN folks and drive the whole company into bankruptcy, based on some useless "sharing" ideology.
Because Ellison comes down hard on software thieves ?
Use postgresql if you do not like Oracle's biz model.
unionizing is for pinko commie assholes - flexible work force is much better for the modern economy.
ahahahahaha
I worked on a contract that we'd had for 15+ yrs. Growing and shrinking as needed by the client. I was hired when only 6 people worked on it and the client had work for 22+. Due to the complexity of the work and specialized - nowhere-else-in-the-world - skills, it usually took 2 yrs to get someone new to any level of consistency or productivity. These jobs required DoD clearances.
In the 6th year, the contract contracted. 2 groups were involved - the applications team and the simulator team. Both were being cut 50%. The prime contractor was also taking 50% of the cuts, which showed how close our partnership with them was.
The new headcount in my group would be 11.
Anyway, all 22 of us in the team were called to the meeting room where the boss's boss explained the situation and said that he wanted to know if any of us were looking to leave, were interested in other jobs inside the company (we'd just one a 500+ person contract with very different skills), retirement. If any of that was our situation, we should talk with him today. 11 people basically volunteered to leave. Nobody was forced out of our team. I left a few weeks later, after finding another job inside the company on that other contract. That move totally changed my life for the better.
The simulator people weren't handled nearly as nicely. They were all called to the meeting room and the boss's boss wasn't there. She had made post-it notes and as she walked to the meeting, she up them up on their office doors like flags - "Come see me, M" Basically, everyone knew exactly who had been selected to leave just by the flags on the office doors. I've used this as a specific example of how NEVER to handle these situations. This manager wasn't a bad person, but just had few empathy skills.
Sending an email for wild distribution is a dick move. The people involved are going to have their lives upended and deserve a 3 minute, person, chat.
Maybe I’m unusual (okay that’s a given, stop snickering), but - I have a fair bit of my own stuff at my work office, even if you exclude all the little work-related mementos I’ve accumulated over time. I don’t think it would be physically possible to clear it out and “return company assets” in anything close to 30 minutes.
Heck, most of the time I take transit to and from work. I couldn’t carry all my stuff on transit, at least without some time to plan ahead.
#DeleteChrome
These people are still alive. Oracle left the job undone.
because Stalin and Mao weren't socialists, they were fascists.
You do understand that people can misrepresent themselves, right? If not, I've got a Nigerian prince I can introduce you too. I'll just need a finders fee of a few dozen bit coins to an unregistered wallet...
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I've been in the IT business for over 20 years. No one remotely technical voluntarily does business with Oracle. The executives get sold on the dream by Oracle's sales force, but I have a feeling they're having a very hard time convincing companies to put even more of their eggs in the Oracle basket.
The company I work for is a PeopleSoft customer and they operate in over 130 countries, so I'm sure it's nearly impossible to switch HR software without massive pain. I happen to know the people doing the license negotiation, and they were basically strong-armed into moving to Oracle Cloud hosting and accepting millions of dollars in "cloud credits" that they have no intention of using. This mirrors what I've heard from others as well -- Oracle is making it so expensive and painful to maintain on-premises licensing that it forces people running stuff like PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and Oracle's own ERP product into hosted cloud stuff.
Oracle seems to be incredibly desperate to become an AWS or Azure...but they don't seem to realize that only the execs are fooled anymore. Oracle Cloud is about as trustworthy as "Symantec Cloud" or "CA Cloud." This latest layoff just sounds like they're putting their foot down and saying every waking hour will be devoted to cloud, no more software packages. My company's doing something similar with DevOps these days...if your project doesn't have enough cloudy DevOps-y buzzwords and tools used, it's on the chopping block.
it won't cause famine any more than the last New Deal did. The "Green" part is just there to keep the Green party from spoiling another race.
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Business jobs: Bad shot at a VP job making high 6 figures.
It seems to me like business jobs making low to high end six figures are not actually that hard to get, as long as you have the entry credentials.
Now if they enjoy those jobs as much as tech workers, that I am not sure...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
for the last one. So I don't think they need to care. There won't be any bad PR because it's all pretty much the same corporate owned media whether it's Fox, MSNBC or CNN. There's a few lefty outlets talking about it (and Bernie and Warren, both of which have been bitching about it years, Bernie for decades) but you'd really have to go looking to find those.
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Oracle is yesterday's business. No one wants to pay bazillions of dollars for a database anymore. Oracle couldn't make/buy a decent smartphone OS, so they sued Google instead. Oracle's cloud is getting badly beat by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. But as badly as Oracle has run its business, the way they laid people off shows that Oracle management are dicks.
which are doing very well for them, so they just fired a bunch of highly trained and useful people in a profitable product line.
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Oracle doesn't respect engineers. Why would you want to cast your lot with Java when it's controlled by a colossal prick like Ellison, who is worse than Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer together on their worst days? Meanwhile, Microsoft has genuinely reformed under the leadership of Satya Nadella while Oracle remains unrepentant and committed to the bad old lock-in days of the 1980s and 1990s. Why not switch to an ecosystem where the engineer is acknowledged and respected? The consultation is free, switch today.
Guess somone has to make up for all the companies dropping Java and oracle due to high license cost....
so you're building up strawmen to attack me.
Fascism is when all public institutions are brought under a single, centralized control. That's not just the economy. It's the Economy, Gov't, Religion, Schools, Hospitals, etc, etc.
I'm not going to pretend I can explain it terribly well, so see here and also here. Look up Shaun on YouTube while you're at it.
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This is an unbelievable site and I can not prescribe you guardians enough.March Madness 2019 Live
Your response had nothing to do with the guy you're responding to... or even the guy before him.
Look up Alex Jones. Your rambling about strawman right wingers is of the same sort he does in the opposite direction.
. . . these major corporations always show such warmth and loyalty to their productive employees. Brings tears to one's dry eyes . . .
Hey!
In the Micron halls in Manassas, VA, there's a post that Micron intends to hire an H1B Oracle specialist (as they are legally obliged to do). Perhaps one of the laid off Oracle specialists already in the US with work authorization (citizen, resident, etc.) could fill that role.
Just sayin....
I've worked at Oracle Engineering (in the middleware division), and there was lot's of unnecessary and incompetent engineers. The deep pockets of the corporation reached a level where you had principal engineers who couldn't code. Some people would just close tickets as "implemented" and wait for QA to report a bug on it to actually implement it. That way metric were always fine. Everything is on time, managers look good. My guess is that this round of layoffs is not nearly enough.
So what happened to the federal law on having to give 30 days notice if 100 or more people are laidoff?