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Oracle Cloud IT

Oracle's Surprise Unannounced Layoffs 'Clear-Cut Teams of Engineers' (ieee.org) 180

Posted by EditorDavid from the chopping-block dept.
Oracle "swung the layoff axe" Thursday, reports IEEE Spectrum, saying that the move "clear-cut teams of engineers." The exact numbers of employees cut and their specific roles have not been reported by the company, but the layoffs are clearly significant. Fifty in Mexico, 50 in New Hampshire, 100 in India, at least that many in Silicon Valley -- the numbers, according to anecdotal reports on theLayoff.com and from internal chatter, are adding up quickly....

Oracle's layoff day started at 5 a.m. Pacific Time, when an email from Oracle executive vice president Don Johnson with the subject line "Organizational Restructuring" arrived in employee inboxes. The email informed staff members that, going forward, everything in the company would revolve around the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) operation... Then the email continued with a perky sentence that made some employees furious: "OCI's business is stronger than ever, and this team's future is bright." At approximately 10 a.m., I'm told, just five hours after that email, the layoffs began -- and according to anecdotal reports included significant cuts within at least part of that stronger-than-ever, bright-future cloud business.

Those affected were given 30 minutes to turn in company assets and leave the building, and were told that Friday (today) would their last official day. "The morning felt like a slaughter," one Oracle employee told me. "One person after another...." And, that employee said, the layoff process was handled very badly, with entire teams being ushered into conference rooms as groups and told that they no longer had jobs. This employee indicated that technical teams, particularly those involved in product development and focused on software development, data science, and engineering, seemed to take the biggest hit.
Business Insider reports that Oracle hasn't formally announced the number of people laid off, but adds that "One source we spoke to was told by his manager that 1,500 people worldwide were cut."
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Oracle's Surprise Unannounced Layoffs 'Clear-Cut Teams of Engineers' More

Oracle's Surprise Unannounced Layoffs 'Clear-Cut Teams of Engineers'

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  • 1500 out of 137000 seems comparatively small (Score:4, Insightful)

    by blind biker ( 1066130 ) on Saturday March 23, 2019 @09:30AM (#58320186) Journal

    Regardless, I await confirmation that the main cuts were in their cloud operations.

    • Re:1500 out of 137000 seems comparatively small (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 23, 2019 @09:51AM (#58320262)

      End game for Oracle is to only employ lawyers and salesmen.

      • Maybe hairdressers will stay too.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jlowery ( 47102 )

        As the financial sector has shown, there's more money to be made shuffling virtual paper around than there is in actually making useful things.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jafac ( 1449 )

        aw, how cute. You think that Salesmen will still be useful when Larry gets everyone vendor locked-in.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by PCM2 ( 4486 )

          They get locked in to the software, not the cost of it.

          For example, lately Oracle has been offering to "forgive" some backdated license fees if a customer agrees to become an Oracle Cloud subscriber. Gotta pump those usage figures!

  • Oracle sucks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mobby_6kl ( 668092 ) on Saturday March 23, 2019 @09:33AM (#58320194)

    A few hundred is hardly a significant number across a large organization like Oracle, my own company (a competitor) is cutting way more than that. What seems to be the difference is they're handling it absolutely in the worst possible way, for no reason kicking people out on the spot instead of relying on attrition, early retirements or at least providing a reasonable heads-up to those affected.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I remember when I was finishing at my state college way back in '91 and learning programming was all the rage. "If you become a programmer you'll be set for life."
      I didn't believe them and, although I did lear some programming, I never put all of my eggs in a single basket. I do PC, Mac and server support along with web coding and design and technical writing for support manuals.

      It's damned hard to look at a promised "career" like programming and realize it was nothing but a "job" to your boss.

      Bread line is

    • Re:Oracle sucks (Score:5, Informative)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Saturday March 23, 2019 @09:50AM (#58320256) Homepage Journal

      A few hundred is hardly a significant number across a large organization like Oracle,

      A few hundred employees are not a large percentage of Oracle's total number, but the headline implies that they are firing programmers, and their total number of programmers is vastly less than the total number of persons in their employ. If they are truly letting a large number of engineering staff go, it's a sign of further impending change.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Plus any decent engineering staff left, will be looking for work now, especially in the cloud space which is in huge demand.

      • Layoffs come in threes.
        I've been in big corporations long enough to know the runes.

        I was once laid of, and I learned about it from the CEO of another company, who'd been told by the CEO of the company I worked for. He head hunted me before I was laid off.

        Out the door Monday at 11.00am, after the 'big announcement'. 12.00 noon, working and the new place. Unemployed for 1 hour.

      • which are doing very well for them, so they just fired a bunch of highly trained and useful people in a profitable product line.

      • And if you paid attention to how they handled the lay-off announcements, it is an excellent reason never to interview at Oracle.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Creepy ( 93888 )

        With that said, it was a 1% workforce cut. I've been in far worse technical layoffs - one company I worked for (that eventually fired me as well) had massive layoffs filling auditoriums in multiple waves - roughly 40%, followed by 30% - when the tech bubble broke in 2001, Then they rebuilt and had a 30% layoff again in 2008. In my case I survived the worst of it but my salary bubbled to the top and I got caught in a 15% cost cutting layoff along with several of the best engineers in the company. Honestly, I

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by rnturn ( 11092 )

      ``...no reason kicking people out on the spot instead of relying on attrition, early retirements or at least providing a reasonable heads-up to those affected.''

      Summer's coming. Maybe Larry needs to gas up the yacht.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tomhath ( 637240 )

      they're handling it absolutely in the worst possible way

      Nope. Heavy handed as it seems, the only way to make cuts like this is to identify the people who have to go and get it over with quickly. Otherwise the good people leave and you're stuck with people you don't want.

      • Re:Oracle sucks (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Saturday March 23, 2019 @11:47AM (#58320806)

        I''ll disagree with this. The "good people" taking off is always a risk when money at a company is tight and the economy is not tumbling. It can make sense to cut entire teams and projects. The _remaining_ good people are now, all of them, flight risks, because they know that they will be treated poorly and their teams discarded abruptly.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tomhath ( 637240 )
          Good people are always a flight risk because they can get another job easily; but that also gives them some reassurance when they survive a layoff (been there several times). Jumping ship just because there was a layoff doesn't make sense anyway, because there's no guarantee you're going to a more secure job than the one you left.

    • relying on attrition, early retirements or at least providing a reasonable heads-up to those affected.

      Attrition means the best people leave, because they have the greatest opportunities elsewhere.

      Offering early retirement is similar, good people leave, and they are stuck with the dregs.

      Giving people a "heads-up" means you have people on payroll for weeks or months that know they are being cut, are not doing much useful work, and are dragging down morale.

      Oracle made the cuts in the best way they could. If a product line is being ended, it is silly to keep people around with no useful work to do. It is bad

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        On the other hand, offering some severance and help finding the next job is a cheap way to avoid lawsuits and cultivate the right image to retain people who might otherwise contemplate jumping ship on their own time table.

        • On the other hand, offering some severance and help finding the next job ...

          Oracle is offering severance, and anyone who can't find a new job in today's economy has no pulse.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by OYAHHH ( 322809 )

      I really hate to burst your bubble but you have zero idea what you are talking about.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Njovich ( 553857 )

      A few hundred is hardly a significant number across a large organization like Oracle, my own company (a competitor) is cutting way more than that.

      A competitor of Oracle, is that like the IRS? Mafia? Or do they compete in a different area than brutally forcing companies to transfer money?

    • Oracle is already known for cutting positions all the time. It is surprising that anyone would bother to be more cutthroat than the usual. Probably someone's MBO gave a number for shifting resources out of some divisions, so that those salaries could be spent building up their cloud offering, and that executive realized that the easiest way to make the quarter's full bonus was to just take the direct path.

    • Let me introduce you to Larry Ellison's favorite management technique "Environment of Fear" where everyone stabs each other in the back in the hopes that they're not the next one to be shown out the door.

      It's the poison that fucking asshole introduced to our industry. Every time he takes his fucking racing yacht out I hope it flips and rends him into unrecognizable catfood sized shards.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday March 23, 2019 @09:36AM (#58320202)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Define long-term? Larry Ellison is going to die a very, very rich, old man.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Bullying and extortion is not a valid long term business strategy.

      It's worked for MS and Oracle for 3+ decades. That's "long term" by corporate standards.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Neither is spending billions on stock buy backs to keep the price up. They've spent a bundle in 2017-18 on buy backs and are continuing it...well, what better place to put the last tax giveaway. It's all the rage among big companies and Oracle never had any new ideas of their own.

    • Corporations are legal fictions. It's all people — and some of the people at Oracle are scum. Of course, those aren't the people getting laid off. They're the ones deciding that these people will be laid off.

  • Find a better employer (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It always sucks to lose your job unexpectedly, but on the other hand, maybe this is a good opportunity to find a more ethical employer that isn't a negative influence on the entire industry.

    Engineers who work for companies like Oracle and Facebook should understand that their salary literally comes from doing evil in the world.

  • Oracle "swung the layoff axe...

    I like to think of it as: 'drawing the magic cost cutting sword from the stone of greed'.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Larry Ellison: "I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK."

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jafac ( 1449 )

        That's a matter of opinion.

        When your product is technology, and you fire engineers, .
        Instead of the executives who did nothing but planned the company into a corner, risking nothing, maybe those are the people who are "not needed".

  • ... I'm always getting emails from recruiters letting me know that Oracle is hiring. Probably because I have nothing to do with database internals development and engineering. It will be interesting to see just what the final numbers are and what areas of the company got hit hardest.

  • Lifecycle of a Star (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Suns become Oracles, Oracles become Supernovae, spreading new engineering to the galaxy. The only thing that remains is the Great Cloud of Externalies, the shell of what once was.

    • I remember a while back that it was damn near impossible to get a resume for an engineer that didn't have Televideo on it.

    • If Oracle went supernova it wouldnt just spread new engineering to the galaxy. It'd be showering the galaxy with f***ing lawyers too

  • Gearing up for recession (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday March 23, 2019 @10:29AM (#58320416)
    the entire economy is prepping for recession. It sucks. We all know it's coming and nobody's doing a damn thing to stop it. Instead companies are slashing staff so they can use the money for buy backs to boost their stock when it hits so the CEOs don't take a pay cut.

    We could stop this easily. End buy backs. Increase regulatory oversight so that companies can't gamble on the economy and then hold us all hostage for a bail out. Start spending on Demand Side economics. Do the Green New Deal, not for the "Green" part but for the "New Deal" part. Do single payer healthcare so employees can switch jobs for better pay w/o fear of losing insurance for a few months.

    It's frustrating because we know exactly how to stop all this and we just don't do it. And the same folks who say we shouldn't pick winners and losers will be on TV telling us why we need to bail out the losers next time. And we will to. We've done it every 10 years since I started paying attention, and I bet if I looked we did it before then.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by tomhath ( 637240 )
      The US economy is doing great, it's the EU that's dragging things down. Centrally managed economies always fail, and the Green New Deal would cause a Depression (not Recession).

    • Re:Gearing up for recession (Score:5, Informative)

      by MouseR ( 3264 ) on Saturday March 23, 2019 @10:58AM (#58320560) Homepage

      I dont think this has anything to do with recession planning.

      Been in that company nearly 22 years and I've gone through (/survived) *many* restructuring operation (more than 10). It's never been about "surviving the next quarter". It's usually about optimisation of teams or product direction.

      I know people in the Montreal group that have been affected. Don't ask numbers, I dont have em. But I do know other people in that group that didn't get axed. One VP there has had his manager teams' constituents affected. Dont know where—we're spread out globally. (I work in a different group and my teams mates spread from California to London plus a couple more in India.)

      I'm not sure if there's a better way to handle things. I'm not even sure how they handled it in this case. But when our startup was acquired, they did the "everyone in this room still has a job" thing.

      THAT, was by far, the worse I have witnessed. And it was before the acquisition so it's not on Oracle.

      Obligatory "this is my opinion" thing and "I dont speak for Oracle".

      • Yeah, being part of a Fortune 100 company for some years, I can attest they do this regularly.

        Some times it is known beforehand and announced.

        Some other times the reaper scythe just comes and razes entire groups.

        Good companies tend no to do this without warning, but they still are slaves to the quarterly earnings balance spreadsheet.
    • Recession layoffs usually come after the recession has started, that way the company can use the recession as the excuse and they don't get the same negative PR.
      • for the last one. So I don't think they need to care. There won't be any bad PR because it's all pretty much the same corporate owned media whether it's Fox, MSNBC or CNN. There's a few lefty outlets talking about it (and Bernie and Warren, both of which have been bitching about it years, Bernie for decades) but you'd really have to go looking to find those.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Well, we did know how to stop it back when we weren't in hock for $22 Trillion. Now, we've peed on seed corn and there is no help possible from the Fed. Government. Oh, and if a recession hits soon, expect that $22 Trillion to get much larger.

      Hmmm....I seem to recall a lot of bluster about the last tax cut paying for itself. I guess the American people were lied to one more time...and believed it one more time.

    • Do the Green New Deal, not for the "Green" part but for the "New Deal" part.

      Both are important. Global warming threatens jobs and infrastructure, which means it threatens the economy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jafac ( 1449 )

      ha.
      who will stop the buybacks?

      The bribed congressmen?

  • According to a report [usatoday.com] by USA Today, Oracle has a history of discriminating against job applicants who are American citizens. The managers prefer foreigners, whom the lawyers at Oracle help to get H-1B visas.

    We should scrutinize the layoff to determine whether American citizens are overrepresented among the terminated employees.

  • Maybe I’m unusual (okay that’s a given, stop snickering), but - I have a fair bit of my own stuff at my work office, even if you exclude all the little work-related mementos I’ve accumulated over time. I don’t think it would be physically possible to clear it out and “return company assets” in anything close to 30 minutes.

    Heck, most of the time I take transit to and from work. I couldn’t carry all my stuff on transit, at least without some time to plan ahead.

  • I've been in the IT business for over 20 years. No one remotely technical voluntarily does business with Oracle. The executives get sold on the dream by Oracle's sales force, but I have a feeling they're having a very hard time convincing companies to put even more of their eggs in the Oracle basket.

    The company I work for is a PeopleSoft customer and they operate in over 130 countries, so I'm sure it's nearly impossible to switch HR software without massive pain. I happen to know the people doing the licens

  • . . . these major corporations always show such warmth and loyalty to their productive employees. Brings tears to one's dry eyes . . .
  • I've worked at Oracle Engineering (in the middleware division), and there was lot's of unnecessary and incompetent engineers. The deep pockets of the corporation reached a level where you had principal engineers who couldn't code. Some people would just close tickets as "implemented" and wait for QA to report a bug on it to actually implement it. That way metric were always fine. Everything is on time, managers look good. My guess is that this round of layoffs is not nearly enough.

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