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