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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."
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.
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.
Its hard to find someone that makes you feel warm and fuzzy for Bill Gates.
But neither of them are CEOs of those companies. Maybe a decade or two ago, but not now. You should instead focus on current management?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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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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.
Tech jobs: Great shot at a stable low 6 figure salary.
Business jobs: Bad shot at a VP job making high 6 figures.
Sure, you can make more money and do less in business, but the competition is fiercer. You need to have the right look, be good with people, know the right people, etc.
For the tech people who got fired, who gives a fuck. If I got fired tomorrow Iâ(TM)d shrug my shoulders, I get offers for jobs 24/7 because I keep my resume up to date and I am always learning new things. If they cannot get a new job then they were coasting and they suck, more reason for them to have gotten fired.
Its hard to find someone that makes you feel warm and fuzzy for Bill Gates.
And yet Larry Ellison almost makes it look easy. That's quite a talent.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Yeah. And you think those yachts are free? How many people are employed building one of those boats? Hundreds? All down the supply chain, that's probably not an unreasonable guesstimate. All of that $120M is plowed right back into the economy at the lowest level you can - Construction jobs.. That money is spent in the community and works its way up..
Bill Gates work, while beneficial to humanity, doesn't create a whole lot of jobs. A few scientists and aid workers I suppose. Ellison's money is directly beneficial to American workers.
How many people to crew the yacht? 23 full time jobs. Just for his boat! His previous yacht (now owned by David Geffen) has a crew of 45.
Fuck off, socialist! Your kind will be dealt with in course...
Probably? Of course they got unemployment.. It's specifically for people who are laid off (of fired without cause).
No shit it's a First World Problem.. That's why why so many people move here from shitty countries. The US imports 1,000,000 (and has peaked at 2,000,000 in recent decades) people a year who have decided HERE is better than THERE.
HERE is better than THERE because we run shit differently. Fuck you and your obvious anti-west bias.
They were on the hook for the back pay anyhow. When you purchase a company you assume all of its liabilities and debts. The backpay was not optional.
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
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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You say that like fascism and socialism were incompatible. Fascists never pretended they were laissez-faire capitalists.
All of that $120M is plowed right back into the economy at the lowest level
Yeah, because the people running the yacht-building company are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, and they're not collecting any profit. Er, wait...
Bill Gates work, while beneficial to humanity,
Bill Gates started with BASIC on paper tape, and if your tape was bad and broke he wouldn't replace it.
Then he CEO'd Microsoft, which was found to have abused its market position in basically every possible anticompetitive fashion.
Then he moved his ill-gotten gains into the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, where they can't be taxed. (And there are numerous ways to get your money back out of a charitable trust.) Since then he's spent his money spreading Big Pharma's chosen IP laws around the globe, and on "improving" education in ways that actual educators (and those who study education) say actually harms education. He has eradicated zero diseases, at least in part because some governments won't deal with him, because you have to agree to strong IP law protection for pharmaceutical companies in order to get medical aid.
IOW, Bill Gates' work is neither beneficial to humanity nor job-creating.
How many people to crew the yacht? 23 full time jobs. Just for his boat! His previous yacht (now owned by David Geffen) has a crew of 45.
Wow, that's two drops in the bucket!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
They don't create wealth.
Customers create wealth
Workers create products
Products bring in customers who spend
Capitalists just keep development money unavailable to those who don't create the MOST income for the LEAST product in the SHORTEST time.
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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which are doing very well for them, so they just fired a bunch of highly trained and useful people in a profitable product line.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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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You underestimate the control they still have. Think about it: who in the world could confront Bill Gates over any substantive Microsoft issue (for example, CEO succession) without being summarily evicted from any relationship with Microsoft?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
. . . these major corporations always show such warmth and loyalty to their productive employees. Brings tears to one's dry eyes . . .
Yep. If he was really charitable there wouldn't be entire communities in the US Appalachian region without indoor plumbing and electricity....it's more fashionable on the "world stage" to solve problems outside the US than within it. He doesn't care if parts of tbe US are effectively akin to an u der developed, third world, country, he cares about showing off by exploiting one to "try" to help the other.
Feck the people who think they are world savers. Feck the people who think CS jobs belong anywhere near being related to actual science and engineering jobs or are any more demanding than other technical jobs. The more programmers put out to pasture, the less overhyped automation bullsh#t salespitches we will have. And all the world will be the better for it.
https://youtu.be/otgjdSa6ceA
Larry's not running Oracle anymore.
Mark Hurd is their current hatchet man.
Demand + [good | service] creates wealth, not supply.
I could create thousands of balls of bellybutton lint. If no one wants them, they're worthless. There's no demand for them. OTOH, I could create a car windshield that is totally hydrophobic and obviates the need for windshield wipers and frost scrapers. There would be great demand for that and that would create wealth. If I could produce enough that is.
The improvement in the quality of life is the ultimate end goal. Jobs and money are means to that end.
Bill Gates is pretty warm and fuzzy these days.
Check out his charity tennis event with Roger Federer and John Isner.
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.
But think of if the government had been directing the construction. They could have paid a cut of the money to attacking the tea party.
This whole thing about government not getting to attack people based on their political beliefs is a race to the bottom !