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Oracle slashes 30k jobs

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Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#281

Post by WalterBright »

secstate wrote: post #214
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which I would definitely prefer. A couple of years ago, two weeks before Thanksgiving, management announced there would be layoffs. No timeline on when the cuts would be shared or number impacted. People had to sit around for weeks, wondering if they had a job. Should I buy Xmas presents? Who knows!

At-will employment is hard. Honestly, if you aren't planning to lose your job tomorrow when your at-will, you're not being honest with yourself. I wish it were different, but outside a union contract or some other fairly well-combed over business contract, you should not assume you will get paid tomorrow.

The best strategy is to save up at least 6 months of runway.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#282

Post by riffraff »

jollymonATX wrote: post #208
imglorp wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels correct. Their business model is squeezing anyone who can't migrate off their properties and suing the rest. Why would go $58B in debt to support a new feature that no one will want after alienating everyone above?

They have not pulled the pin on the ZFS grenade yet, but I expect at some point it happens.

but what would be the blast radius for ZFS?

Most enterprises don't seem to be running ZFS with Linux, and the only large target using FreeBSD I can think of is Netflix, but AFAIR they don't use ZFS either.

Oracle sues when there's $$$ to make, but I don't think ZFS would warrant them much.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#283

Post by wil421 »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #267
seanhunter wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short answer: today I think there is genuinely nothing that anyone should use oracle for, but their database used to be seriously far ahead of the competition. A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2 databases that worked for use cases where you needed high availability and vertical scalability and those were Oracle and Sybase and Oracle was really the only game in town if you actually wanted certain…

Just curious, how was SQL Server perceived at the time compared to Sybase and Oracle? I know it originated as a port of Sybase.

Depends if the director or VP liked Microsoft or not. I’ve worked at places that loved SQL Server and Microsoft server products in general. Others did not use them anywhere in their datacenter and wouldn’t have considered them. Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft were very dependent on if the people in charged liked them. Not so much technical merits.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#284

Post by lenerdenator »

alephnerd wrote: post #62
dafelst wrote: post #2

More victims of AI. Not actually of "AI is replacing jobs", more "oh shit we are spending too much and the product isn't good enough for us to ever make a return on our absurd over-investment".

> More victims of AI According to the article as well as blind, the main teams hit were associated with Cerner (EHR) and NetSuite (ERP). Oracle's AI spend is part of Oracle Cloud. That said, I guess it can be argued that Cerner and NetSuite being on the chopping block can be attributed to AI because now procurement has the choice to either build in-house via an Anthropic or OpenAI SI like Accenture or TCS or they can…

> That said, I guess it can be argued that Cerner and NetSuite being on the chopping block can be attributed to AI because now procurement has the choice to either build in-house via an Anthropic or OpenAI SI like Accenture or TCS or they can negotiate better purchasing terms from a best-in-breed product in HRM and ERP like SAP instead.

Cerner isn't an EHR, it's an EMR. EHR == Electronic Health Record. Your FitBit data is an Electronic Health Record. EMR == Electronic Medical Record. Your doctor's records, how much blood thinner that nurse is supposed to give grandpa, and whether or not he's a fall risk are things you'd put in an EMR.

You can't just vibecode your way to replacing an EMR. Cerner Millennium has a shrinking, but substantial, footprint at healthcare systems across the country and around the globe. There are 25+ years of bugfixes, caveats, architecture, and other pieces of knowledge to be tracked and accounted for, and you must do so, because if you don't, people under the care of doctors could die.

It's also worth noting that the DoD uses Millennium for active service members, and I think they also use it for TriCare. American taxpayers are on the hook for dealing with the problems that Oracle's cost cuts will produce.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#285

Post by dpark »

zerr wrote: post #166
lateforwork wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the alternative? Have 30,000 meetings? How long will that take?

6+ months' notice with a severance package equal to at least an annual salary.

Why would you give someone 6 months notice? What good is that for the employee? Especially if the severance is generous.

“Hey, we’re going to fire you in 6 months. Just a heads up.”

Nah. Give me the year of salary and send me home today. Better for the employee and for the company than pointlessly dragging it out. Again, this is assuming generous severance.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#286

Post by jabl »

hulitu wrote: post #153
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even at 100k employees I’m still dumbfounded by that number. What do all these people do all day?

Solaris ?

Didn't they fire most of Solaris devs some time ago? Incidentally, Solaris been stuck on 11.4.x for, well, forever and a half..

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#287

Post by DrJokepu »

seanhunter wrote: post #248
kyledrake wrote: post #157

The bulk of the comments in here are focused on comparing Larry Ellison to a lawn mower, so I'll try a new tack and say that I'm genuinely confused at what the value prop of Oracle is. Given the history of their business model being licensing of important databases that are hard to switch off of, I've actually made a point to avoid using Oracle as much as possible (even so far as to leave MySQL when they acquired it,…

Short answer: today I think there is genuinely nothing that anyone should use oracle for, but their database used to be seriously far ahead of the competition. A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2 databases that worked for use cases where you needed high availability and vertical scalability and those were Oracle and Sybase and Oracle was really the only game in town if you actually wanted certain…

There was also DB2. DB2 was (still is) an excellent database that IBM has completely fumbled.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#289

Post by rbanffy »

jvanderbot wrote: post #194
kyledrake wrote: post #157

The bulk of the comments in here are focused on comparing Larry Ellison to a lawn mower, so I'll try a new tack and say that I'm genuinely confused at what the value prop of Oracle is. Given the history of their business model being licensing of important databases that are hard to switch off of, I've actually made a point to avoid using Oracle as much as possible (even so far as to leave MySQL when they acquired it,…

Oracle and Java are deeply embedded in US gov work. How deep? Let's just say a large number of classified developer jobs hire for Java. Ellison has been a huge proponent of a surveillance state, and that likely ingratiates him with certain three letter agencies. The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

We all have different circles. I work for a bank and the bulk of the LOB code here is Java (or something that runs under a JVM). There are no Oracle databases as far as I know, but my visibility is limited.

Also, Oracle Applications for things like HR.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#290

Post by seanhunter »

killerstorm wrote: post #276
seanhunter wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short answer: today I think there is genuinely nothing that anyone should use oracle for, but their database used to be seriously far ahead of the competition. A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2 databases that worked for use cases where you needed high availability and vertical scalability and those were Oracle and Sybase and Oracle was really the only game in town if you actually wanted certain…

What's about DB2? I have no experience with it but I guess IBM specifically designed it for enterprise-scale transaction processing workloads...

DB2 was crazy good for certain use cases but very weird. For one, the pattern for DB2 efficiency was pretty much the exact opposite of every other database. Every other database would say "Normalize your tables, use BCNF, blah blah, small reference tables, special indices etc".

DB2, the pattern was "denormalize everything into one gigantic wide table". If you did that it was insanely fast for the time and could handle very large datasets.

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