Live data from Hacker News

Oracle slashes 30k jobs

rollingout.com

241–250 of 890 posts

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#244

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.

My employer is actively hiring java engineers and we don't "take pictures of things from far away".

There are vibrant java user's groups all around the world. There are many java community conferences. The most recent redmonk language rankings[0] show java at #3.

The world is big :) .

0: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2...

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#245

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 question then becomes, does Java warrant the valuation Oracle has when the language itself is mostly FLOSS?

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#246
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".

I don't understand this sentiment. I'm absolutely significantly more productive with AI; so much moreso that I now have freetime and we haven't needed to replace an engineer who left. On the flip side my coworkers who think they're above AI are drowning. I think there is an endemic problem of senior engineers who think they're above learning AI and agents who don't want to use them, and these cuts are about forcing them to get with the times or drown in work.

Replacing jobs is a bit of a misnomer, but it's certainly allowing us to build out more features in shorter amounts of time.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#247
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not unethical to lay someone off

Actually, it is. You have been blinded by capitalism to consider it ethical. The tribes usually treat the members as a family. While kicking someone from a tribe can happen, it's considered to be a harsh punishment. In a tribe, when hard times come, people usually redistribute. That's a normal, human way of dealing with that situation. Not a layoff. The other aspect is the economic crises. When a central bank decides…

> layoffs are deeply immoral

It's no more immoral than you deciding to buy from Safeway, even though you'd been buying from Fred Meyer before.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#248

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 features like online backups and certain replication configurations.

At the time, MySQL existed and was popular for things like websites but had really hard scalability caps[1] and no replication so if you wanted HA you were forced to go to oracle pretty much. Postgres also wasn't competitive above certain sizes of tables that seem pretty modest now but felt big back then, and you used to need to shut postgres access down periodically to do backups and vacuum the tables so you couldn't use it for any sort of always-on type of use case.

Oracle also had a lot of features that now we would use other free or cloud-hosted services for like message queues.

[1] in particular if you had multiple concurrent readers they would permanently starve writers so you could get to a situation where everyone could read your data but you could never update. This was due to a priority inversion bug in how they used to lock tables.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#249

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,…

Why use Oracle indeed.... Here's a tale from somewhere around the year 2000.

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A-Software-Problem%2C-A-Mar...

For Jason R., it was an exciting time. His company was trying to break into the telecom market with a new product that they'd get to build almost entirely from scratch. The only part that he wasn't excited about was that the major customers had very specific requirements that his team would have to meticulously follow. In this case, some bigtime POTS operators demanded that all servers must come from Sun, and any databases must be built on Oracle 8i.

One of the applications they were building had to interface with the clients' call data records (or CDRs). The most important use of CDRs is for phone bill calculation, so naturally they were stored in properly designed and indexed tables. The CDRs were stored alongside all billing records, and were frequently accessed by mission-critical internal applications, and they weren't prepared to expose all of that to a third party. So instead, Jason's company would have to construct CDRs on their own from the signaling message flow. Because the CDRs would be processed right away, they wouldn't even need to store them. The tentative architecture called for an Oracle database for CDR pipelining from the front end to the application backend.

When the analysis was being conducted, the team grew concerned with the costs — both in terms of budget and disk I/O. Oracle licenses are incredibly expensive, and there would be a huge volume of CDR data written to and read from the database. Finally, it dawned on someone that the database was completely superfluous since records were processed as they came in. In fact, a single, low-end Sun server with a few hundred megs of RAM could easily handle the CDR generation and application backend.

Excited about their good news, they called up a meeting with the product managers. "We've discovered that we can deliver the product at a fraction of what our original estimates were." The managers left the room, some looking happy, others just looking incredulous.

Later that day, Jason got a call from the VP of Engineering. "Jason, while I understand what you're proposing is technically valid, you have upset the marketing team."

"I'm sorry... did I say something?"

"It's just that they've promised the customer that our product would use Oracle 8i, and now they're going to be made liars. Can you just humor me and add Oracle 8i to the design somewhere?"

"Uh..."

"I have enough trouble politically as it is. I really appreciate this favor!" click

After delivering the news to his team, they argued a bit on what to use Oracle for. Ultimately they delivered the final product with an Oracle database that had a single table which was used to store a handful of configuration parameters.

It was the most expensive individual table Jason had ever created in his entire career.

Post reply on HN