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

881–890 of 890 posts

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#881

Post by asdff »

jaccola wrote: post #342
wnevets wrote: post #308

Very often people will defend these kind of layouts as the result of overhiring but then shouldn't the leadership that over hired 30K people also be held accountable?

I think this sucks for the people being laid off but what exactly should they be held accountable for? It's not like over-hiring or laying people off is a crime. The employees presumably knew the deal going in (that they could be laid off). They got compensated for the time they worked. No one owed them a job at Oracle in the first place. (Again, not to diminish how bad it feels / shocking it can be to be laid off!)

>I think this sucks for the people being laid off but what exactly should they be held accountable for?

They literally failed at their job. Came up with a 30k headcount budget shortfall. If I did something like that I'd certainly be fired.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#883

Post by burnt-resistor »

frm88 wrote: post #807
burnt-resistor wrote: post #767

Problem part A. Working for a greedy, reckless corporation without belonging to a union and investing way too much time, effort, and emotional energy in a parasocial, dishonest, unfair, and fragile arrangement. Problem part B. Not working for a sustainable, worked-owned co-op that prioritizes authenticity, fairness, stability, worker happiness, and customer satisfaction. Such environments have extremely low turnover.…

There are a few to scale, like Emilia Romana (Italy, 8000 employees) or Mondragon in Spain (79K employees), unfortunately not in tech. I only know of DATEV with some 8000 employees in that sector. The co-op model in general is so very promising and those that still exist are really successful and from video documentations I watched, the employees seem to be content, if not getting rich. The problem is that this model…

Because too many people are miseducated and brainwashed to be obedient slaves rather than to respect themselves and others honesty.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#884

Post by brailsafe »

greazy wrote: post #874
brailsafe wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been laid off or fired ~7 times, in slightly different ways, some more humane than others, and it's quite a... traumatizing/colouring experience that stays with you from that point forward, even when I was over the job anyway. I once had my access cut off while I was working late, albeit from a much smaller company. Got to go to sleep knowing I didn't have an income in the morning. Incidentally, in retrospect I'…

I hope you're doing better these days, friend. That sounded rough.

Thanks, I appreciate the sentiment :)

I'm doing pretty well for now actually. The things that stay with me though are the little signals that something might be going sour, and a much more tangible anticipation for the next time I'll need to prepare for another full year or more looking for work. I never really feel like I can make big commitments that depend on future income, even if the income is stable now.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#885

Post by monksy »

bombcar wrote: post #710
dpark wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you give someone 6 months notice? What good is that for the employee? Especially if the severance is generous. “Hey, we’re going to fire you in 6 months. Just a heads up.” Nah. Give me the year of salary and send me home today. Better for the employee and for the company than pointlessly dragging it out. Again, this is assuming generous severance.

A "performance improvement plan" is almost always a 6-month/1 year warning that you're going to get fired/laid off. It's common in some companies.

PIPs are like a month.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#886

Post by Breza »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #851
8ytecoder wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were building a payments system in the early 2000s and got a diktat to not use Oracle. The amount of things we had to build to satisfy the availability and durability requirements were so huge it consumed the first few years of work. We didn’t get to the business side of things until much later. Funny thing is we ended up giving up on MySQL and went back to oracle after all that work. The whole thing was scraped a…

Salesforce have been building an Oracle replacement based on Postgres for years, named Sayonara and as far as I know, it’s not ready yet. https://www.theregister.com/2016/05/16/salesforce_replace_or...

I remember when Salesforce was a true innovator. I attended a Salesforce conference the other day. Sounds like they're all-in on their "agentic" vision. I miss when the Salesforce conferences were tailored to nerds like me and included products that the CEO would never hear about but my team would fight tooth and nail to keep in the budget.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#887

Post by Breza »

nimbius wrote: post #131
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".

Blame it on whatever you like. oracle has been a rudderless leech for nearly 30 years now. - overpricing the database led to a predictable exodus and new players with often times better performance. - acquisition of MySQL led to a predictable exodus and new players like maria with often times better performance. - Oracle cloud arrived late to spectacular skepticism and low user turnout from customers who had been bur…

Well said. There are so many better companies out there. It reminds me of Microstrategy before their Bitcoin madness started... why would anyone use it?

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#888

Post by BlueRock-Jake »

perching_aix wrote: post #168
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…

> 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. This is sure to be good for workers You jest, but that's pretty much South Korea if this video (and my interpretation of it) is to be believed: https://youtu.be/pjjhrwVYPE8 For those not interested in watching 30 mins of this, long story short, it does…

That is insane. Like a turbo charged pension

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#889

Post by thiago_fm »

strongpigeon wrote: post #138
thiago_fm wrote: post #64

It's still a company worth $400B that makes $3B of profits and not even $20B of revenue. And full of debt from AI datacenters full of hardware with a 6 year depreciation cycle, possibly even lower depending on what NVidia releases next. So overvalued!

Oracle has >$60B in revenue and $16B in net income. It doesn’t seem crazily overvalued to me? Perhaps you were looking at quarterly statements? https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ORCL/financials/

It is very, of course, if you compare it to Tesla, anything can look good.

But if you compare to other companies with similar rev/profit numbers, you'll be amazed with how cheap they are.

I don't believe Oracle has a wide moat other than its DB -- the Datacenters are mostly commodity.

Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs

#890

Post by zulux »

renewiltord wrote: post #568
zulux wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only problem with this is: Some of my best people are those that "I gave them a chance." I'd only hire perfect people from my tribe if I had to have them forever.

And what about those who you have a chance to and they didn’t cut it? Their life is ruined by being fired.

Haha.. No. I've rehired people I've fired, so I know that's not the case. Had one guy pop back a decade later and thank me for saving his life. I was fully aware he had a drinking problem and lived in a van. It didn't work out for long, but the job gave him enough stability to sort some things out.
Post reply on HN