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Oracle

'Horrible', 'Chaos': Former Oracle Employees Describe Recent Layoffs (businessinsider.com) 109

After layoffs at Oracle, Business Insider spoke to current and former employees, learning that some marketing teams reportedly saw their headcount "slashed by anywhere from 30% to 50%."

One former marketing employee complained that "It's just a horrible environment left. It's complete chaos...." "The common verb to describe Oracle's Advertising and Customer Experience team is that they were obliterated," said a person who works at Oracle. Insider was unable to determine exactly how many ACX employees were cut, but one person familiar said it may have reached 80% of the division... "There's no marketing anymore," a senior marketing leader who was laid off on Monday told Insider. "We're not even supposed to say we're in marketing because there is no marketing division...." One recently laid off marketing leader told Insider that their team was cut in half, and no successor has been appointed to take their place. "My team is texting me; they still have no idea who they work for," the person said. "No one told them I was gone, so they're just floating in the wind...."

While the company is known for cutting workers every year, some employees said they were shocked by how many senior, experienced, and high-performing staffers were let go on Monday. For example, Oracle's code base is so complicated that it can take years before engineers are fully up to speed with how everything works, and workers with over a decade of experience were cut, some employees said.

Other employees who were laid off in recent months have said they're furious they were cut before their restricted stock units were scheduled to vest, costing them tens of thousands of dollars in expected compensation. "It's just deplorable," said a recently-laid off marketing leader whose primary compensation package included stock. "I know there were people on medical leave laid off. I know people on parental leave that were laid off."

The article points out that in June Oracle also reported $191 million on restructuring costs for the previous fiscal year — and another $431 million for the year before. ("Oracle did not respond to requests for comment from Insider at the time of publication.")

A recently laid-off marketing employee told the site that "We've been kind of working like zombies the last couple of weeks because there's just this sense of 'What am I doing here?"

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid for sharing the article.
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'Horrible', 'Chaos': Former Oracle Employees Describe Recent Layoffs

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  • by glomph ( 2644 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @01:44PM (#62769340) Homepage Journal

    Shitty company does shitty stuff to employees.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Shitty company does shitty stuff to employees.

      You should know better than to use such language when referring to you betters, peasant! These people won the greatest meritocracy in the universe.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        "Meritocracy" is a lottery for the nouvelle aristocratie now?

        That sure explains a lot. Down to the snooty arrogance.

    • Alexa, order me the smallest violin in the catalog...

  • by Gabest ( 852807 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @01:48PM (#62769348)

    Twenty years ago we had to take a course in SQL and it was an Oracle database. Terrible Java based tools. It was about the same time when MySQL became popular and also open source in general. I'm surprised Oracle is still around.

    • by SpzToid ( 869795 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @02:03PM (#62769386)
      Oracle inherited MySQL as part of the SUN acquisition, so a lot of folks freaked out with Oracle as MySQL's overlord and the MariaDb fork took place. I'm just sayin' some folks saw this event coming long, long ago. Surely other examples exist. (Not that Oracle's consulting services have earned themselves a stellar reputation).
    • Their formula was never to please engineers but to appeal to the higher-level executives who never have to code anything but they do decide where the money is spent. I know the very thought is anathema to the average /. reader but there are decision makers that are not engineers or even javascript coders.

      And as for the technician and engineers, I have read many times that those that use Oracle products like them precisely because, not in spite of, how quirky they are to set up and program. It makes th

    • by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @02:53PM (#62769486)

      Oracle is embedded deeply in many enterprises. Enough so that maybe that's why they felt they didn't need marketing anymore. It's such a big backbone in so many places that it's not a surprise that many there took the job seriously and tried to make things better rather than move on to another DB maker.

      • > Oracle is embedded deeply in many enterprises. Enough so that maybe that's why they felt they didn't need marketing anymore.

        Enterprises die, or have their own cost saving initiatives so this would be a shrinking space. They rely on marketing to get new customers, or Oracle too, will die.

        Yahoo was big once.

      • Which brings the question: Due new enterprises choose to build new things on top of Oracle databases, or at this point Oracle is a provider of legacy support like Unisys? If they are a provider of legacy support like Unisys, they don't need marketing indeed.
        • by _merlin ( 160982 )

          Oracle has benefits when you have a lot of concurrent accesses, or really big databases and you need a proper transactional store. When you get to that kind of scale, there isn't much competition. But the thing is, for lots of other use cases, open source databases have improved enormously over the last twenty years. It's got to the point where a lot of businesses no longer need something like Oracle (or DB2 or whatever) and can use one of the open source alternatives.

          • I'm surprised you don't mention Microsofts offerings, which have improved drastically over the last decade while Oracle stagnated. Its the database of choice for many, except when you raakt scale up, in which case there are plenty of alternatives that aren't as expensive or litigious as Oracle.

            • by _merlin ( 160982 )

              MS and Sybase fill a different niche. They scale up to pretty big databases, but they don't work well with lots of concurrent accesses. In particular, if you have a lot of concurrent reads while writes are happening, Oracle does better. They're a lot cheaper than Oracle, and they really shine if you have a database that's read-only most of the time and only occasionally updated (e.g. something that's updated in overnight batches).

    • I'm still reeling in shock that Oracle has a Customer Experience team. What did they use them for? Window washers? Gardening services?
  • It's hard to be too sympathetic; marketing is an arms race, so seeing cut backs by Oracle may see others stop wasting money on the game.

    Given there's a shortage of teachers, their skill at marketing could be helpful when they get a useful job...

    • by aaarrrgggh ( 9205 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @02:31PM (#62769448)

      Yeah... I guess the othe 50-70% just haven't gotten their layoff notices yet. Who needs marketing when you have lawyers to enforce licensing terms?

  • by suezz ( 804747 )

    sounds like att

  • by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @02:00PM (#62769376)
    Creating products that require expensive hand-holding partners is a dead concept in the west. Oracle continues to push the channel sales concept in India, Africa, etc. Salesforce is a cautionary tale on Oracle lock-in. Oracle attempts to compete with the CRM provider that may well be the biggest driver of Oracle database sales in the west. Salesforce has been threatening to move off of Oracle for over 5 years, but they can't. No amount of marketing is going to overcome the issues Oracle creates for itself.
    • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @02:24PM (#62769428) Journal
      Arguably the expensive hand-holding model has only been modified(in a move that Oracle mostly missed the boat on) rather than abandoned.

      Any of the 'cloud' guys who offer services at a layer of abstraction higher than the classic basic VPS level; especially the ones who most strongly encourage 'serverless' fully abstracted services(eg. Amazon will certainly sell you psuedo-bare metal VMs that you can run as database servers; but they would prefer that you go with Amazon RDS; and really prefer that you switch from targeting an existing DB, either managed by you or managed by them, and target 'Aurora' instead, where the backend is pretty much invisible to you) is effectively taking on the same role as the traditional fancy vendor consultant/approved implementation pal; it just looks different because the people doing the product-specific witchcraft are doing it on the vendor's systems and just selling you access to the results, rather than being directly attached to your operations headcount or a given project's dev team.

      Just for clarity, none of this is to argue that that Oracle is competitive value for money(in the vast majority of cases I have strong doubts); just that, if anything, 'cloud' has actively been chipping away at the amount of software designed and sold under the expectation that it can be implemented and operated either by a competent generalist who knows how to RTFM or by the sort of relatively widely available specialists that organizations of decent but not exceptional size can reasonably readily hire on the open market rather than get exclusively from the vendor or one of their blessed partner consultancies. It's just a lot easier to take some relatively complex product and sell it as-a-service than it is to make it less complex or train up the necessary expertise in sufficient quantities that it's a commodity hire rather than vendor/partner support.
      • A lot of companies make a huge amount of profits based upon professional services. It really hasn't gone away. Make a complex system that everyone gets locked into, then charge money to help them set it up, customize it, train on it, fix it, etc.

        Back in the 90s, on the only business oriented application company I ever worked on, it had a ton of professional services. We also were trying to integrate *with* oracle because a lot of customers preferred that rather than having our own "non standard" database

  • by sethmeisterg ( 603174 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @02:17PM (#62769410)
    For the people left, now is the time to get your resumes in order and get out of there. There are many better places that don't treat you like a disposable commodity!
    • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      > For the people left, now is the time to get your resumes in order and get out of there.

      They've been stuck in the "region-beta paradox" too long.

    • I was at a company that had a huge brain drain. Those that were left weren't necessarily the dummies, but many of them did feel that the current job was where they would be most useful and that their skills in other sorts of products were feeble. So a lot stuck around because they felt like there weren't so many options. Some stuck around hoping things would get better. Others were naively hoping to get a severance after being laid off (which didn't happen).

  • by aerogems ( 339274 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @02:35PM (#62769452)

    If they really laid off people who were on medical/parental leave... The EEOC may have something to say about that. I'm guessing their lawyers are banking on being able to claim that it was part of a large mass layoff, so they weren't targeting them specifically, but not really sure it's going to matter.

    Seems like these days, instead of hiring lawyers who basically don't give a shit, companies and politicians want to find "true believers" who are usually inexperienced, make all kinds of mistakes, let their personal beliefs blind them to what the law actually says, and/or just end up causing even more problems for their clients. Oracle definitely gives off the vibe of having gone that route. Cheaping out on the lawyers which will end up coming back to bite the company hard when they're being investigated by federal regulators and sued all across the country. Which is on top of all the business they're likely going to lose as a result of going after so many senior level people.

    • I would have wished you were right, but I don't think you are. The US Government are the lapdogs of big business and will do nothing that might aid in workers rights or interfere with the profitable conduct of business (except in California, where they don't care about the profitable conduct of business). After all, if you lay off somebody on medical leave, their medical insurance expires, they can't pay their doctor's bill, and they die, thus decreasing the burden on society and also decreasing the surplu

  • Deliberate timing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mrbester ( 200927 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @02:41PM (#62769468) Homepage

    > they were cut before their restricted stock units were scheduled to vest

    I've been offered stock options in lieu of pay several times. I've refused them every single time because companies repeatedly pull shit like this.

    • The key is the vesting schedule. A promise to vest you after 12 months is a big massive NOPE nowadays, in most circumstances. 12 months might as well be forever. Monthly, incremental vesting is another matter. But that’s almost nonexistent.
      • Re:Deliberate timing (Score:4, Interesting)

        by sjames ( 1099 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @03:53PM (#62769620) Homepage Journal

        I won't be accepting options in lieu of pay without a clause that all options vest immediately upon termination. I'm guessing that's not on offer anywhere.

        • You can occasionally find it at smaller companies. I worked at a company that had a 4-year vesting schedule. You got 25% after 12 months, monthly vesting afterwards, accelerated vesting if you were laid off in the first year. So if you were laid off after 6 months (which happened to some people after Covid hit) you got 12.5% of your options vested immediately. If within the first year you left voluntarily or were terminated for cause like for example for bringing hookers into the office after hours I'm look

  • How many people does marketing really need? My experience with a Fortune 500 company told me that it was top-heavy with fluff. Every marketing flake had to express their opinion and the designers had to keep them all happy which put the products constantly behind schedule.

    Or has the marketing budget been gutted for ESG?

    • by ffkom ( 3519199 )
      I'm also surprised Oracle still had marketing. What for? Their business model for many years has been to milk a slowly shrinking group of vendor-locked-in companies who were stupid enough to make themselves dependent on Oracle's ridiculously overpriced software. You don't need marketing to do that.
      • by Anonymous Coward

        You need marketing to find new potential victims, develop an understanding of the dynamics of their business, then produce a successful bullshit pitch about how having a database that can generate whizbang answers will result in ROI greater than it actually is. Even successful drug dealing enterprises need marketing.

  • Bad news for Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)

    by OpenSourced ( 323149 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @03:12PM (#62769538) Journal

    Oracle's code base is so complicated that it can take years before engineers are fully up to speed with how everything works, and workers with over a decade of experience were cut

    I've seen this done, in a telecom-equipment big company. I couldn't believe it. One engineer, best brain I've ever worked with, if a bit bipolar, was let go. She was the only one that had in her head the whole software structure of one of the main products but she was let go. Her boss had received orders of firing a number of persons, she had a certain age and experience so was expensive, she was fired with compensation. Some others too.

    Fast forward two years and the whole engineering division (soft and hard) in that country and company was shut down, some services externalized, some changed to engineering in another country. I heard the customers weren't very happy with the new level of service.

    I asked my boss at the time how was it a good policy to fire such people and he told me that it was a good policy for the executives doing it, because they could show good numbers for the next quarter, and they planned on changing companies before the manure hit the fan.

    Bottom line, don't buy Oracle databases now, or Oracle stock for the medium term.

    • by Strider- ( 39683 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @05:39PM (#62769894)

      Happened to me at a communications equipment company that was a defence contractor. I was laid off when things slowed down as I was the expensive field tech. Unfortunately, I was also the only one trusted by a couple of our customers.

      After I was told I was let go, I wrote a good message to all my key customers, letting them know that effective immediately, I was no longer with the company and who their new support contact was, CCing my (now former) manager, so that everything was on the up-and-up.

      I heard later that within hours, two of the customers cut off our VPN access, and stopped contacting them. Meanwhile, they contacted me through other means and all wound up hiring me on a contract basis to tie up loose ends and complete various projects. Since non-competes are unenforceable where I am, I made out like a bandit and lived the next two years on about 12 weeks work, letting me pursue a passion project. It was glorious.

    • by GoRK ( 10018 )

      > Bottom line, don't buy Oracle databases now

      This advice is 20 years old, buddy.

    • The moral of the story of a single employee keeping the whole division afloat is not what you think it is. The leadership failed when it allowed its success to depend on one person.

      • Not saying she was irreplaceable. But she was certainly invaluable in meetings when deciding new features, or changes, and how they would affect other parts of the system.

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      > I asked my boss at the time how was it a good policy to fire such [knowledgeable] people and he told me that it was a good policy for the executives doing it, because they could show good numbers for the next quarter, and they planned on changing companies before the manure hit the fan.

      Technology and short-term thinking are often at odds.

  • Ellison (Score:4, Insightful)

    by alw53 ( 702722 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @03:19PM (#62769562)
    Meanwhile Larry Ellison owns 98% of a Hawaiian island that 100 years ago belonged to Hawaiians.
  • by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @03:31PM (#62769578) Journal

    Oh sweet lord in heaven that is music to my ears. Finally that pig-sucking waste of a company will fall off the earth.

  • This is to be expected from a database company that names itself after an ancient woman who huffed methane and spouted whatever came into her head as the wisdom of the ages...

  • Marketing department (Score:5, Informative)

    by Wokan ( 14062 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @04:09PM (#62769658) Journal

    I thought the lawyers were the marketing department. "License everything we sell or we'll sue you into oblivion" is their opening pitch.

  • Those are the exact words, an Oracle admin used to describe his impression of the software, at least the company is consistent and you know beforehand what you are getting into.

  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday August 07, 2022 @06:54PM (#62770120)

    "I know there were people on medical leave laid off. I know people on parental leave that were laid off."

    Oracle has medical leave?
    Oracle has parental leave?

    That's the news part.

  • Found him! (Score:4, Funny)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @07:41PM (#62770244)

    Now we know where Robert'); DROP TABLE SalesStaff;-- went to work after graduation.

  • ... some employees said they were shocked by how many senior, experienced, and high-performing staffers were let go ...

    Those are the expensive ones. Anyone in accounting will tell you to fire the highly compensated employees and keep the cheap employees if you want help the short-term balance sheet.

    Other employees who were laid off in recent months have said they're furious they were cut before their restricted stock units were scheduled to vest, costing them tens of thousands of dollars in expected compensation.

    Again, from a bottom-line perspective, what's good for the employee is bad for the employer's financials. At least in the short term. Over the long run it helps to have people that know how and why the software works, but payroll/accounting has no focus beyond the current business year.

    Yea it sucks. Been there. This is S

  • by SigIO ( 139237 ) on Sunday August 07, 2022 @09:44PM (#62770538)

    Full disclosure, I've dealt with Oracle DB and ERP for the past 20+ years, so my opinions are as biased as they come.

    IMHO, Oracle can't win with their putrid Cloud Strategy and Fusion. Even after buying Sun, Peoplesoft, JDE, RightNow, Siebel, Retek, ATG...and probably a few more I can't even remember, their non-RDBMS products are all 2nd rate, aging, dying, or dead. They've done a poor job of attempting to be too many things to too many people, while best-of-breed solutions run them out of their respective markets. So where do they go now? A tough-to-penetrate quasi-government vertical that relies heavily on their database (and maybe some storage) technologies. A pretty smart move with guaranteed revenue...if they can keep the competition at bay.

    So yes, they kick the crap out of the SG&A maggots, temporarily cutting costs while they work on a real cash-cow that may outlive their RDBMS revenue. But make no mistake, Oracle is a cut-throat sales organization in possession of a database licensing corporation. The maggots will be back.

  • I joined a small software company, about 60 with 10 software devs in 2018. They used 11g because that's what CTO/Engineer #1 was used to. They wouldn't upgrade because it was a perpetual license and the upgrade license was mid 6 figures.

    Because there was so much raw SQL in the code, it was difficult to make the pitch to go open source - particularly PostgreSQL. Eventually we found that place where the go ahead was given. That Oracle SQL syntax was weird too.

    Conversions were painful, but it freed up our world so much. Cost was about space and EC2 instances, not licensing worries. It doesn't make it free but we could breathe easier. We could spin up test instances and backups. So much better.

    It wasn't entirely painless. We did learn that Oracle give a pass on writing some rather inefficient SQL. I can imagine a lot of the code is to "make this query style work."

    Now I'm at a new 2000 person company and I'm back with a fat Oracle 19 instance on my machine. I still haven't had to dig into the SQL, mostly just the Java app server stuff, but damn, I thought I was done with that DB.

  • Granted, I've only had RSUs with one large company, but under its terms, a layoff meant prorated compensation.

    Resignation or termination for cause was the only way you would lose it outright.

  • This would not have been a surprise to any employees if they had any actual oracles working for them.
  • Also, I bet Larry has a nice job for you on his private Hawaiian island! (Psych, read up on THOSE stories)
  • It's a good idea to put in your contract that Restricted Stock Units should vest automatically if you are being laid off. Usually RSUs that vest in the future over 3-4 years are a way to bind you to the company for at least that amount of time. In a way, it's a breach of contract of they stop requiring your services before the end of that period.
  • The current recession is going to take a bite out of the large tech companies. The next one in line is Facebook, you can see Zuckerberg knows that the whole Meta thing isn't working out and is losing patience with workers obsessed with perks. Netflix is losing customers, Google has regulators breathing down their neck, etc.

    While most of the workers who get axed should find new employment it will more than likely be a big step down. They are going to have to get used to regular jobs with regular benefits u
  • Chaos like this is happening in every big corporate these days. To keep top 500 index look good has consequences.

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