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Oracle slashes 30k jobs

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661–670 of 890 posts

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#661

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1. They maintain and sell one of the largest relational databases. 2. They're the primary maintainer of one of the largest programming languages. 3. They do tons of HR/ERP type software. 4. They have a supply chain division (my company is a direct competitor, and we have 2000 employees--it's a drop in the bucket, but a few thousand here, a few thousand there and it starts to add up. Afaik, their supply chain org is b…

>> Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency, I have some anecdotal evidence for this. I worked at a medium sized family owned business. They were going through a massive ERP upgrade/replacement. One of the bids was from Oracle. The company was able to essentially test drive each company they were reviewing to see if…

That sales process is directly tied to the type of customer they're aiming for, which is larger than a "medium-sized family-owned business".

They mis-aligned but for someone like Boeing or United, they'd go gaga over the footy-crowd.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#662
post #360

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There are three different Db2 databases. I believe the mainframe version was first. There is a version baked into the os/400 operating system (i series). Then unix/windows Db2 came last, if memory serves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Db2

I only ever worked with the Linux/Windows variant. I can’t believe I am saying this about an IBM product, but I found it to be actually rather pleasant to work with.

You’d never say that if you’ve been on the inside of a mainframe DB2. shudders

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#663
post #94

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Unless you have worked with Oracle or other big enterprises, you may not realize the scale of how these companies operate and the breadth of what they actually do. Just by looking at their product page[0] you can see they offer software, hardware, cloud, consulting, support, and even financing solutions. In addition to the technology and product people (of which there are many), you also need HR, sales, marketing, ac…

This! They do _everything_. In the real world, there are a lot of things you need to run a business: HR, ERP, Financing, Cloud, Compliance, CRM, etc. There is really only one company who can sell them all to you on one piece of paper, and that's Oracle.

Salesforce does one aspect of what Oracle can do (Access as a Service) and they have 83,000 employees. Oracle may actually be pretty lean.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#664

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,…

The comments on this subthread are a bit out of touch in a very coastal-tech way -- yes, Oracle is a monster, yes, their tech is garbage, yes, their products are awful.

But Oracle owns Cerner Health (now Oracle Health, but to most users it is still Cerner), i.e. 25% market share of the EHR space, and PeopleSoft, which you are painfully familiar with if you work for a bigcorp or anywhere in the public sector in North America. Their database product is very far from their only LOB.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#665

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

There's no zfs grenade. It's CDDL, feel free to use it wherever you want. Oracle can't come after you for violating the gpl even if somehow using zfs on linux violates the gpl.

They can sue for a variety of reasons from trade secret to trademark.

It doesn't mean they'll win anything in court but they'll ruin you long before they notice the spend.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#666
post #51

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

I remember reading this post years ago, and it has stuck in my brain ever since: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 So I suspect the answer is: they need _at least_ 10x as many engineers to get things done as you would expect. Maybe more like 50x

It's even more wild when you realize that other similar-sized enterprise companies don't have all that and either leave bugs to sit around for decades, or randomly break shit trying to fix them.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#667

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There is no bubble

Love the confidence. The logic can catch up later.

When everyone says it is a bubble it's very likely not a bubble.

Also LLMs have a lot of value because it is a way to steal intellectual property without anyone beeing able to do s.th. about it.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#668
post #478

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There was a time (around the beginnings of Mac OS X) when Java was considered a first class citizen in Mac OS X, next to Objective-C. Some NeXT products like WebObjects got ported to Java (and ran not only the iTunes backend but also things like the original Dell online store) and there was something called the Java bridge which allowed you to program Cocoa applications with Java. https://developer.apple.com/library/…

It wasn't just Apple, in the late 90s/early 2000s there was a not insignificant number of folks in business/academia who thought Java would take over the world. Windows XP also shipped with an embedded JVM for running Java apps out of the box at one stage too, just before Microsoft doubled down on c#/.NET. Along with MacOS X, Apple's Xcode IDE even had native java project support briefly in this era as well.

Yup, this brings back my academia years in 1998, sitting with KDE 1.0 and Java 1.1. It was mostly Java, then Perl as this fabulous scripting/glue language, teeny bit of C and MIPS Assembler for the low level courses.

We didn't touch a fairly esoteric language called Python much. Because we saw the future. Java and IPv6 was about to change everything.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#669

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> A job today isn’t (*and shouldn’t be*) any guarantee of a job tomorrow. This is nonsense and shouldn’t be normalized.

In germany you have the opposite and it is also nonsense. You have to work with people that do literally nothing (usefull to the goal of the company) and they can't be fired. Companies are afraid to hire. Young people only get short therm contracts. If a company needs to cut jobs it has to keep employees with children over the others. What society will be more productive?

What makes you think that productivity is the most important goal? I’ll take Germany way over Silicon Valley bullshit any time of the day.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#670

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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…

The "Something crazy at corona" would likely be, in part, their purchase of Cerner Corporation in 2021-2022. I want to say there were 10k-ish employees? Maybe more? I have friends there who have described how bare-bones things were. This is only going to make it worse. I would not patronize a hospital system that intended on staying on Cerner Millennium EMRs for the foreseeable future. If things were bad before, they…

From what I've heard Epic can be as bad, but at least they're dedicated to one product.
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