Hearing that a bunch of folks laid off were months from having their shares vest and/or about to retire.
Oracle slashes 30k jobs
771–780 of 890 posts
Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#772The 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,…
> I'm genuinely confused at what the value prop of Oracle is.
Legal blame transfer.
Oracle has every single compliance checkbox you need for any certification you can name.
So, if your end customer (generally BigCorp or BigGovt) wants "NitWit Certification v4007", you call up the Oracle sales rep, get a quote, and pass the cost along with a significant markup.
Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#773Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
ah yes, the high standard of living inlcuding checks notes world-leading medical bankruptcies, collapsing life expectancy despite insane healthcare spending, crippling student debt, unaffordable housing that requires a trust fund just to rent, and wages that stagnated decades ago while corporate profits and CEO pay skyrocketed.
i spent $57 on a regular size pack of paper towels and toilet paper in the bay area yesterday
truly, the invisible hand is giving us the finger
Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#774Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
in other words: "won't somebody think of the economy!"
Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#775Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love Postgres in 2026, but it really was not a viable enterprise option before 2010. MySQL had decent binlog replication starting in 2000 which made up for a lot of the horrible warts it had.
mysql was great in 2000 if you knew all the foot guns to avoid and set it up correctly (and not just what sounded correct).
Not to mention there was Percona, and both Google & Facebook contributed a number of patches that made monitoring MySQL top notch (such as finding slow running queries, unused indexes, locks etc.).
Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#776Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Absolutely, but you can now demand a market leader like Epic to give you a significantly better discount (eg. 20-30% over the 10% you may have previously been offered). Is this on the grounds that you can do it yourself?
What larger procurement teams are saying is "we would rather pay Accenture+Anthropic $50M for 2 years and if they fail, sign a $75M contract with Epic in 3 years instead of spending $150M for 5 years". Even at the lower ends of the funnel, companies are now extracting significant discounts from market leaders as well as their incumbent vendors becuase they are quote shopping. Oracle isn't in a position to push back b…
From what I remember, EMRs - particularly parts that do things like manage blood banks and medication dispensers - aren't just something you can have a team of consultants from Accenture vibecode, or even plancode. In several countries, they fall under the same regulations as medical devices and are subject to the same scrutiny.
I wouldn't want to be the hospital executive sitting for a deposition on a medical malpractice suit, explaining how instead of using Epic or Cerner or whomever, they decided to let AI and a bunch of recent college grads from the lowest bidder consulting firm replace a known system. Sounds like a good way to wipe out whatever you saved in costs with court judgments.
Also, switching EMRs is a huge pain in the ass. When I was a fresh-faced employee at an EMR company they sent me and other employees out to help deploy a new system in a client's hospitals in another city. This took a small army of employees, contractors, travel nurses, and consultants to do. Your ass was up at 3 AM, back at your hotel room at 8 PM. Nurses didn't care about what your program did, they wanted it a certain way and they wanted it fixed now. You're hopefully not going to have the hospital leadership saying, "Yeah, you can try this and if you fail, we'll switch again in three years". I can't imagine many healthcare systems doing that, particularly if the physicians are a major component of management.
Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#777The 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,…
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Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#778Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kind of, but there are some subtle differences in my opinion. Oracle is top-to-bottom evil, whose business model basically boils down to screwing over their clients and everyone else at every possible opportunity, comparable to the likes of McKinsey or Accenture. IBM is a bit more nuanced. My wife grew up in an IBM town and a lot of her family and her friends’ families used to work there in the 70s and 80s. People, e…
Didn't they famously help both the Nazis and Apartheid South Africa?
Yes. Leased IBM equipment was a critical infrastructure component of the holocaust.
Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#779Earlier quoted context omitted.
My employer is not my “tribe”. That is crazy. We have a contract saying I do X units of work and they pay me Y in return. Either of us end it at any time. At least this is in the case in the US. What you are saying might be true in other cultures.
And yet, employers love to use the "we're a family", "we're a team", and other such messaging, especially in the tech industry. They elide the transactional nature of the entire relationship.
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Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#780Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the morale of remaining employees?
I've seen layoffs with severance so good that the remaining employees felt bad themselves.
The last time my company did layoffs they offered the same generous severance package afterwards to anyone else who wanted it. We had three people take the offer.