I am told that Oracle's main business activity is suing its own customers. Hopefully they fired 21,000 lawyers.
AI bet goes awry: Oracle fires 21,000 employees
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Re: AI bet goes awry: Oracle fires 21,000 employees
#32It feels like the end is near for Oracle, and good riddance? I'm not an American, so I'm not familiar with Oracle's database tech but looking through history of what good/bad Oracle has done for the world: - good: btrfs for linux - good: mysql (inherited) - good: openjdk (inherited) - good: virtualbox - bad: oracle v google (copyrighting APIs) - bad: mass surveillance (i.e. BlueKai) - bad: aggressive value extraction…
I don't understand why Oracle is hated more on HN than other large companies. I saw that whole "don't anthropomorphize Oracle" but I suppose it's hard to understand if you weren't there.
Oracle is detested in the Javascript community because having inherited the trademark for Javascript, it did nothing to develop or use the language for decades but continued to aggressively enforce its ownership rights.
Oracle has not monetized ownership of the trademark and apparently had no business reason for this course of action.
On the face of it, it is just ugly. Much like Ellison's own surgically-altered features.
Re: AI bet goes awry: Oracle fires 21,000 employees
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm shocked regulators didn't budge. Good.
There must be something else going on. It's 2026. How in the world could a local government in the USA just... fail to let a corporation break the rules and do anything it wants? It defies belief.
It's what happens when the people speak up and policy makers realize they can't sweep the potential PR blowback under the rug.
Never let people say your voice doesn't matter. That's the one thing the Boomer generation was really good at that fell by the wayside over subsequent generations.
Re: AI bet goes awry: Oracle fires 21,000 employees
#34>According to the annual report of the computing giant published this week, the company had 141,000 employees as of May 31, 2026. This is a significant downsizing compared to the corresponding period last year, when the number of employees at Oracle stood at approximately 162,000 people. The report further reveals that the company paid a massive fortune of $1.84 billion for severance pay and other retirement expenses…
20k layoffs is still humongous, something that easily shows up on a monthly labor report.
Put another way, this is 13% of their workforce. It may be trying to be normalized, but it is in fact not normal to remove over an 8th of your business at once.