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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."

26 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. 1500 out of 137000 seems comparatively small by blind+biker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:1500 out of 137000 seems comparatively small by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      End game for Oracle is to only employ lawyers and salesmen.

    2. Re:1500 out of 137000 seems comparatively small by Kokuyo · · Score: 2

      Not that Oracle has a lot of experience with "useful things" :D.

    3. Re:1500 out of 137000 seems comparatively small by careysub · · Score: 2

      Oracle has vendor lock-in for major corporations. Getting off of Oracle, with all its SQL customizations, is very expensive and time consuming. This is much harder than swapping Linux for Solaris.

      I haven't encountered any recently founded firms (last 15 years is "recent" here) who use Oracle. Who want to be subjected to Oracle's "audits"?

      But the long terms savings in not having to ship slabs of corporate revenue off to Larry Ellison's portfolio are considerable.

      --
      Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
  2. Oracle sucks by mobby_6kl · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Oracle sucks by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.'"
    2. Re:Oracle sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Plus any decent engineering staff left, will be looking for work now, especially in the cloud space which is in huge demand.

    3. Re:Oracle sucks by rnturn · · Score: 2

      ``...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.''

      Summer's coming. Maybe Larry needs to gas up the yacht.

      --
      CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
    4. Re:Oracle sucks by tomhath · · Score: 2

      they're handling it absolutely in the worst possible way

      Nope. Heavy handed as it seems, the only way to make cuts like this is to identify the people who have to go and get it over with quickly. Otherwise the good people leave and you're stuck with people you don't want.

    5. Re:Oracle sucks by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I''ll disagree with this. The "good people" taking off is always a risk when money at a company is tight and the economy is not tumbling. It can make sense to cut entire teams and projects. The _remaining_ good people are now, all of them, flight risks, because they know that they will be treated poorly and their teams discarded abruptly.

    6. Re:Oracle sucks by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      relying on attrition, early retirements or at least providing a reasonable heads-up to those affected.

      Attrition means the best people leave, because they have the greatest opportunities elsewhere.

      Offering early retirement is similar, good people leave, and they are stuck with the dregs.

      Giving people a "heads-up" means you have people on payroll for weeks or months that know they are being cut, are not doing much useful work, and are dragging down morale.

      Oracle made the cuts in the best way they could. If a product line is being ended, it is silly to keep people around with no useful work to do. It is bad for them, it is bad for Oracle, and it is bad for the wider economy.

    7. Re:Oracle sucks by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 2

      Layoffs come in threes.
      I've been in big corporations long enough to know the runes.

      I was once laid of, and I learned about it from the CEO of another company, who'd been told by the CEO of the company I worked for. He head hunted me before I was laid off.

      Out the door Monday at 11.00am, after the 'big announcement'. 12.00 noon, working and the new place. Unemployed for 1 hour.

      --
      I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
    8. Re: Oracle sucks by sjames · · Score: 3, Insightful

      More succinctly, first they downsize, then they rightsize, finally they capsize.

  3. My sympathies for the people.. by CptLoRes · · Score: 5, Informative

    but none for the company. Bullying and extortion is not a valid long term business strategy.

  4. Re:Larry Ellison by voss · · Score: 5, Funny

    Its hard to find someone that makes you feel warm and fuzzy for Bill Gates.

  5. Gearing up for recession by rsilvergun · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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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    1. Re:Gearing up for recession by MouseR · · Score: 4, Informative

      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".

    2. Re:Gearing up for recession by gtall · · Score: 2

      Well, we did know how to stop it back when we weren't in hock for $22 Trillion. Now, we've peed on seed corn and there is no help possible from the Fed. Government. Oh, and if a recession hits soon, expect that $22 Trillion to get much larger.

      Hmmm....I seem to recall a lot of bluster about the last tax cut paying for itself. I guess the American people were lied to one more time...and believed it one more time.

  6. Disproprotionate Impact on American Citizens? by reporter · · Score: 2

    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.

  7. Re:Larry Ellison by haruchai · · Score: 2

    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
  8. Re:Larry Ellison by jpaine619 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  9. Re:First world problems... by jpaine619 · · Score: 2

    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.

  10. Re:Well yeah by Livius · · Score: 2

    You say that like fascism and socialism were incompatible. Fascists never pretended they were laissez-faire capitalists.

  11. Re:Larry Ellison by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.'"
  12. The media fell in line lock and stock by rsilvergun · · Score: 2

    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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  13. Re:Layoff Axe? by jafac · · Score: 2

    That's a matter of opinion.

    When your product is technology, and you fire engineers, .
    Instead of the executives who did nothing but planned the company into a corner, risking nothing, maybe those are the people who are "not needed".

    --

    These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.