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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."
but none for the company. Bullying and extortion is not a valid long term business strategy.
A few hundred is hardly a significant number across a large organization like Oracle,
A few hundred employees are not a large percentage of Oracle's total number, but the headline implies that they are firing programmers, and their total number of programmers is vastly less than the total number of persons in their employ. If they are truly letting a large number of engineering staff go, it's a sign of further impending change.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I dont think this has anything to do with recession planning.
Been in that company nearly 22 years and I've gone through (/survived) *many* restructuring operation (more than 10). It's never been about "surviving the next quarter". It's usually about optimisation of teams or product direction.
I know people in the Montreal group that have been affected. Don't ask numbers, I dont have em. But I do know other people in that group that didn't get axed. One VP there has had his manager teams' constituents affected. Dont know where—we're spread out globally. (I work in a different group and my teams mates spread from California to London plus a couple more in India.)
I'm not sure if there's a better way to handle things. I'm not even sure how they handled it in this case. But when our startup was acquired, they did the "everyone in this room still has a job" thing.
THAT, was by far, the worse I have witnessed. And it was before the acquisition so it's not on Oracle.
Obligatory "this is my opinion" thing and "I dont speak for Oracle".