Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Oracle slashes 30k jobs

rollingout.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 890 posts

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#251

Post by trelane »

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,…

Java is used a lot, but not Oracle's version.

One of the best things Sun ever did was open sourcing Java.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#252

Post by hbn »

muskstinks wrote: post #9
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".

I don't think its that easy. Look at their employee numbers over the years: (ai generated): Oracle Corporation Employee Count (2010 - 2025) Legend: Each '' represents approximately 4,000 employees. Year | Employees ------------------------------------------------------------------ 2010 | (105,000) 2011 | (108,000) 2012 | (115,000) 2013 | (120,000) 2014 | (122,000) 2015 | (132,000) 2016 | (136,000) 2017 | (138,000) 20…

What's the point of posting statistics if they're not fact-checked and come from no verifiable source? At best they're right but we don't know until someone else fact-checked it for you, and at worst you're just spreading misinformation and we don't know until, again, someone else fact-checked it for you.

If you want to use AI to find information like this, tell it to grab you a source and post that.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#253

Post by lenerdenator »

> RHS (Revenue and Health Sciences) — employees described a reduction in force of at least 30%, with 16 or more engineers from individual business units cut in a single action.

Hm. So, likely old Cerner operations.

Y'know, the ones that keep EMR systems running.

Ol' Larry just doesn't see the value proposition in making sure that your health information is accurate.

As a side, the fact that you can just slash someone's job without any warning needs to be addressed by law.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#254

Post by WalterBright »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #99
shepherdjerred wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not unethical to lay someone off

When done for profit maximizing reasons it's not any worse than capitalism itself, but then this degrades into whether capitalism is ethical which is off topic

Profit maximization makes for the high standard of living we enjoy.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#255

Post by shusaku »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #29
muskstinks wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its that easy. Look at their employee numbers over the years: (ai generated): Oracle Corporation Employee Count (2010 - 2025) Legend: Each '' represents approximately 4,000 employees. Year | Employees ------------------------------------------------------------------ 2010 | (105,000) 2011 | (108,000) 2012 | (115,000) 2013 | (120,000) 2014 | (122,000) 2015 | (132,000) 2016 | (136,000) 2017 | (138,000) 20…

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

When you send your database a query, who do you think is gathering those tables?

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#256

Post by tombert »

wredcoll wrote: post #220
bobthepanda wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java is not uncommon. Off the top of my head, a certain rainforest company and a lot of banks and EMR providers use it.

Amazon, among others, write a lot of java, but they want absolutely nothing to do with oracle licenses for java

I worked for a drug discovery company doing Java [1] since we were using Kafka Streams very liberally, but everything was done with the OpenJDK Temurin distribution. It was drilled into our heads on the first day do not install anything from Oracle. I think they were afraid of some weird lawsuit unless they bought an expensive license.

I totally get it, but it made me a bit sad because they were even weary of something like GraalVM for some projects where startup time was becoming an issue; I think the Community Edition for GraalVM would have been fine but I think they had this "we don't touch anything with an the Oracle name directly attached with a ten foot pole". Which is totally fair.

[1] It's not hard to find which one but I politely ask that you do not post it here in relation to this thread.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#257

Post by iamjake648 »

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.

Interesting, the _majority_ of developers I know write in JVM languages - mostly Kotlin for new stuff at this point.

Typically I see folks using the Amazon Corretto java distribution.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#258

Post by butterlesstoast »

If it's anything like the layoffs I went through at my company, it's always nuanced.

Lots of talented hard working engineers are laid off at the same time that they lay off people just checking Slack on their phone on the plane to avoid taking PTO.

Reading the r/employeesOfOracle is a bit gutting. Hoping for the best for the people. Don't really care much for Oracle; especially their business model.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#259

Post by WalterBright »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #91
renewiltord wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the ideal things that companies can do is not hire people. A company that never hires someone will never let anyone go and consequently is the only ethical company. The worst thing that a company could do is pay someone to do a job for a while. In fact, one thing we could do is make sure that all jobs should be perpetual. If someone hires you, they can't stop paying you until they die or declare bankruptcy. Th…

Oracle has record revenue and has for many years in a row. Laying people off is a result of mismanagement and not because they can't afford to keep them. In an ideal world I believe we'd have human centered employment instead of profit centered, and while I know that's unlikely to happen, it doesn't mean we can't criticize profit centered

> Laying people off is a result of mismanagement and not because they can't afford to keep them.

Markets are a chaotic system and the needs of a business must constantly adapt - or they go out of business.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#260

Post by bjord »

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.

it's not purely gov work—lots of legacy software (especially outside of the US) is java-based

and if you hire an offshore outsourcing company, odds are that they will insist on something java (spring) based, as that's where their experience is

Post reply on HN