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Oracle shed about 20k roles globally in the last year
- lordluca 3mo agoTech CEOs suddenly love blaming AI for mass job cuts
- angoragoats 3mo agoIMO it’s not sudden, the AI excuses have been gradual and ramping up for a couple years now.
- jchw 3mo agoYeah, the actual funny thing is they've been blaming AI since almost GPT-3 era.
- VladVladikoff 3mo agoMaybe because the models keep getting better and the tools are slowly getting good enough to replace people? Keep in mind we’re talking about oracle here, it’s not like we’re talking about humanity’s best and brightest.
- reliabilityguy 3mo ago> Maybe because the models keep getting better and the tools are slowly getting good enough to replace people? I am not sure we are there yet. In my experience even the SoTA models are faaaaar away from replacing humans, maybe making them a bit faster.
- repelsteeltje 3mo agoThe correlation between job cuts and ai growth is real. But it's related more to ai cost than ai performance. Especially in Oracle's highly leveraged case.
- mschuster91 3mo ago> I am not sure we are there yet. When talking about bullshit jobs like, say, taking a bill received by paper and manually extracting data from it (company name, invoice number, bank account details) to enter into an accounting program, AI is already good enough according to the pareto principle.
- missedthecue 3mo agoThis conversation always gets lost in the weeds. You don't need a SOTA model to replace an entire engineer role from the time he gets into the office until he leaves. If you have a team of 10 and make them all a little faster, you can do the same amount of work with 9. Run this out over the entire industry and it's hundreds of thousands of roles that are redundant.
- angoragoats 3mo agoDo you have any research, empirical data, or other hard evidence that shows that a model (especially a non-SOTA model) makes engineers even "a little faster"? I'm aware of anecdotes, but nothing more.
- missedthecue 3mo agoThe cleanest positive study is Cui et al., because it used randomized rollout in real companies. Developers at Microsoft, Accenture, and a Fortune 100 electronics manufacturer were randomly given access to an AI coding assistant. Pooled across 4,867 developers, the authors estimate a 26.08% increase in completed tasks among users. They also report increases in commits and builds. While that research was published in 2026, it analyzed the 2023 period. Very much NOT sota models! https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2025.00535 https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2025.00535
- angoragoats 3mo agoThank you!
- fartcoin67 3mo ago[dead]
- dofm 3mo agoI doubt we are there yet, no. But we are talking about a corporation that is one of the most sociopathic in modern business history.
- cm2187 3mo agoSay what you want about their business practices, their products are top notch.
- angoragoats 3mo agoMaybe. But the models weren't good enough 2+ years ago. And to cite just one example, in February 2024 Grammarly laid off over 20% of its employees, citing AI. So you'll have to forgive me if I am extremely skeptical of CEOs citing that as the reason today. It's a very convenient excuse, especially given the apparent lack of public backlash to it, compared to, say, "the business isn't profitable and we need to save money."
- Twirrim 3mo agoA few years back I heard (via a friend who knows a CEO, so take it with appropriate pinch of salt given not a direct experience), that Gartner was asking the CEOs in its group meetings how many of them were laying off people due to AI, with the question presented in a very leading fashion that implied anyone not was behind the curve and failing their business or whatever.
- bluGill 3mo agoIt is the latest fad. They blamed other fads for job cuts in the past.
- eagerpace 3mo agoYou can’t read the headlines, they’re marketing like anything else. Companies are free to spin them however they want and journalists are happy to write them however they will scare you the most. Those are the only truths.
- thinkingtoilet 3mo agoI think a lot of them have drank the kool-aid. They go to conferences and then some talking head from one of the AI companies gets on stage and tells them things like they don't need developers and how AI is already good enough to revolutionize the world. They buy it hook, line, and sinker and then do stuff like this.
- conartist6 3mo agoIt's a move I would only wish on my worst enemy. Good riddance to them
- xbmcuser 3mo agowhere its sits with the AI bubble I think Oracle is the 1 of the major companies apart from the OpenAI that would go belly up once the AI bubble crashes.
- AznHisoka 3mo agoWhy? They’re way too big to fail. Tons of corporations rely too much on them
- dofm 3mo agoThey are not. Maybe they will be treated as such if the bubble bursts while while Trump is in power, because of loyalties. But Oracle could relatively easily be broken up and sold off. Essentially all of the global consulting business units could sell to competitors in the various niches, the hardware business and the cloud hosting business could be separated, etc. Plenty of companies worldwide would be up for buying pieces of Oracle at a bargain price. "Too big to fail" only really applies in extreme circumstances (which might happen, admittedly) and with essentially monolithic businesses (or banking). I don't think even Microsoft is too big to fail. And I don't think people should casually entertain the idea that really any tech industry company is too big to fail, because tech corporations that cannot die point the way to a Rollerball future.
- nosioptar 3mo agoNothing would make me happier than to piss on Oracle's grave.
- hunterjrj 3mo agoI think you underestimate just how entrenched Oracle’s database offering is in the enterprise.
- marcyb5st 3mo agoTrue, but they also took huge debts to build AI DCs and not sure if the DB part of the company can cushion such a fall. According to [1] their IaaS line of business brings 4.8B USD/quarter (so say 20B/year), but they have ~120B of debt (outstanding + new debt they are trying to find people to pay for). They are justifying that on commitments (500+B USD), but 300B of those are tied to OpenAI. So, if OpenAI goes belly up or at least doesn't follow their crazy growth projections, they would have to find the same amount of consumption quickly to repay the interest on said debt and eventually the principal. It is a lot of money for a company the size of Oracle (~500B market cap). [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/oracle-500-billion-backlog-vs-175401264.html https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/oracle-500...
- usrnm 3mo agoOut of 141000, about 15%
- Oras 3mo agostill a large percentage.
- mrhottakes 3mo agoYes, that is a large percentage.
- henriquenunez 3mo agohttps://youtube.com/watch?v=aooiDA-AsNo https://youtube.com/watch?v=aooiDA-AsNo Ah yes, fire to rehire via the model training gig economy
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Cider9986 3mo ago14 hours ago 6 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636590
- jabedude 3mo agoFor those curious, this is a report about firings from the last year. Not a new round of layoffs: > Oracle shed about 21,000 roles globally in the last year as the US technology giant reshapes its business around artificial intelligence (AI), the firm's latest annual report shows.
- ramon156 3mo agoWhat's even weirder is the Founder of canonical has a #hiring badge on their LinkedIn profile. What kind of message is that?
- desultory 3mo agoFire and re-hire from a desperate pool of anxious workers who will accept any offer to escape unemployment.
- Tade0 3mo agoWell, not "any". -15% seems to be the magic number looking at my network and has been like that for 2 years now. They're going to flip us all like burger patties eventually - we're done on this side.
- trollied 3mo agoThey are hiring. I've seen one role listed for more than a year, and it's because of their hiring process. Here's a random job, by way of example: https://canonical.com/careers/3433732/application https://canonical.com/careers/3433732/application Search for "how did you perform", and be baffled at their recruitment strategy.
- kstrauser 3mo agoLOL, I’d forgotten about that idiocy. Imagine being a staff engineer and having an interviewer ask about your high school math performance. 1. I was in the top 0.01% in my state. (Actually true; who gives a crap; it was a quarter century ago and literally no one other than Canonical cares.) 2. You can’t prove me wrong. I can’t prove me right, because I’m not the kind of loser who has a wall of their high school accomplishments they never moved past. 3. The fact that you’re even asking shows that this is an amateur hour leadership team who cares about utterly irrelevant things. Anyone who has that stupid of a hiring process deserves to have unfilled roles. I’m hiring for several roles right now, and while I ask a great many things, I promise you that none of it relates to their high school math performance.
- Lucasoato 3mo agoHave they layoff their lawyers or engineers?
- ChrisArchitect 3mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636590
- GL26 3mo agoNow is precisely not the time to cut jobs, but to invest in people's usage of AI. You have domain expertise, and you are going to burn tokens trying to replace people's jobs, but the AI revolution is not at all about people replacement, its about a change of paradigm. Watch them closely rehire thousands of new employees (who won't have the domain expertise) once they see that you actually need people to operate their company :)
- breckenedge 3mo agoOracle overcommitted on behalf of OpenAI, taking on debt to meet their obligations. Not that healthy companies are not also doing ridiculous layoffs, but in this case, Oracle does have to do some drastic things to get out of this tailspin.
- missedthecue 3mo agoTailspin? Last quarter was their best quarter ever in terms of topline, and they cleared over $4B in profit.
- servo_sausage 3mo agoDepends on which jobs; at a big enough scale you have people who are so deep in the hierarchy that their real connection to the domain is low. Seems possible to flatten out a company, in a way the domain knowledge is kept. That being said, I haven't seen many layoffs that actually seem directly AI related, because the main effects are not hiring junior Devs, and not outsourcing to low cost/skill areas.
- disgruntledphd2 3mo ago> Seems possible to flatten out a company, in a way the domain knowledge is kept. This definitely seems possible, but I've rarely seen it work. That being said, the follow on from any layoffs (reduced morale, more switchers) make it hard to be certain here.
- ransom1538 3mo ago
- andrewshadura 3mo agoShed roles? They fired people, not "shed roles".
- cucumber3732842 3mo agoIf they're not hiring to fill the roll after firing it's kind of both.
- EnglishRobin96 3mo agoOh they're definitely hiring after firing.
- strongpigeon 3mo agoWhat’s crazy is how Oracle’s free cash flows have gone from “money-printing machine” to deep in the red due to their data center investments. My guess is that some of those cuts are to try to balance that?
- DanielHB 3mo agoWell you have to somehow both indicate that you are not behind in the AI race but also that you are not hemorrhaging money. That means crapping all over your org in order to fund the data center spending. All in the all-mighty fiduciary duty to your investors of course.
- thorin 3mo agoOracle is still mostly generating income from an old school model, a bit like IBM and SAP used to. They have huge contracts with mega-corps bringing in millions per year for a license. The have been pivoting to other things like consulting, cloud, AI for years but I still feel most of the income comes from these original db and product licenses. As someone who worked with Oracle since 1998 I'm kind of amazed they've kept at it for so long major Healthcare, Utilities, Banks still locked in and in some cases buying new contracts.
- donavanm 3mo agoYoure out of date. The revenue numbers from cloud infrastructure (iaas) are HUGE the past few years. DB licensing etc are mixed in to “ Cloud services & license support” so it is hard to pull out. But youll notice that: - “iaas” (OCI) is growing 50% yoy and the bulk of the revenue. - “cloud license and on prem license” (new software licensing) is $5B or ~10% of the segment - ERP, peoplesoft etc arent broken out but are also very large in their market categories.
- thorin 3mo agoI know they were pushing cloud very hard, and it was nice to see they were offering a lot of free tier to developers. What has been a surprise to me this year is working in the UK with certain enormous clients that they are still choosing Oracle products for new implementations which I was not expecting.
- mrtksn 3mo agoWhat's stopping anyone else from using AI and eat into Oracle's market? Maybe know how specific for the market but at least 20K people with know how on this business are available at this moment. I'm inclined to believe that its no longer the case of employees being replaced by AI but simply those businesses being replaced by AI and the current businesses who were able to benefit from AI are reaping the momentum they have but eventually this will end.
- cm2187 3mo agoA bit premature I think. Right now it is employees making room for AI investments
- WoodenChair 3mo ago> What's stopping anyone else from using AI and eat into Oracle's market? Open source databases have already been doing this for decades. You can’t just clone its products and expect to eliminate it. Oracle is driven by a strong sales culture and ruthless business strategy.
- mrtksn 3mo agoAnd why AI can't do all that? Apparently it can be a doctor, engineer, musician etc. but when it comes to do the jobs of certain class of people suddenly can't do that. It doesn't add up, maybe sales isn't as impossible to learn and do?
- 2000UltraDeluxe 3mo agoClaude has neither golf buddies nor a business network.
- samiv 3mo agoIt doesn't play golf at the club with the C level.
- nradov 3mo agoLLMs can certainly make sales faster and more efficient by automating things like updating CRM, prospecting, finding contacts, drafting emails, etc. There's a whole niche industry building AI sales tools now and some of them work extremely well. But in the end you still need human salespeople (often with lawyers backing them up) to close major enterprise deals.
- Roark66 3mo agoThey will be hiring frantically next year. These companies seem to be led by mind bogglingly short sighted people. Maybe they should be replaced by AI. It can't possibly get any worse than now, right?
- red75prime 3mo agoAn adjacent comment: "For those curious, this is a report about firings from the last year. Not a new round of layoffs."
- Twirrim 3mo agoNext year? There's a whole bunch of open roles at Oracle right now. https://careers.oracle.com/en/sites/jobsearch/jobs?keyword=Engineering%20and%20Development&location=United%20States&locationId=300000000149325 https://careers.oracle.com/en/sites/jobsearch/jobs?keyword=E... 700 of them within engineering.
- cryo32 3mo agoNone of this is due to AI. That’s just the cover story that stops the stock crashing. The reality is the market is contracting and it’s doing that because the extraction and monthly financial models are hurting other businesses which are also contracting because of lower customer demand.
- catigula 3mo agoSource >I made it up. It was invented by a writer.
- scary-size 3mo agoIIRC, WARN filings in NYC require to indicate whether lay-offs were due to AI. None of the filings of the past year checked that box [1] [1] https://www.hrgrapevine.com/us/content/article/2026-02-11-ai-absent-as-reason-for-layoffs-in-new-york-warn-filings https://www.hrgrapevine.com/us/content/article/2026-02-11-ai...
- catigula 3mo agoWe had the cops investigate themselves and they found no evidence of wrong-doing.
- protonbob 3mo agoBusinesses are incentivized to say it’s because of AI because it makes them look better. So not saying that when actually asked by a government entity is meaningful.
- catigula 3mo agoHow does firing people resultant of the most disliked and unpopular technology on the planet, and avoiding marking it off on an obvious entry-point into regulatory burden "make them look better"?
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- lenerdenator 3mo agoI'm trying to remember which Marvel capeslop movie it was where the kid gets a bunch of Oracle professional-grade computer hardware or something as a gift. Larry makes a cameo, of course. Maybe it was Iron Man 2? Like, mate, if you want to be a superhero in real life, stop laying off thousands of people and working the remaining people ragged. That's all you gotta do.
- shrubble 3mo agoA friend met with Oracle salesdroids (his company has spent a few million with them in the last few years). They told him everything is oriented towards AI, to the point that otherwise profitable software is not being updated and development has stopped on anything new. Oracle has a lot of niche solutions and the one my friend’s corporation uses is profitable but not on the AI path, so it is being put into maintenance mode.
- marcosdumay 3mo agoThat's rational. Oracle has bet the farm on AI, if they don't make it work they will fail.
- forinti 3mo agoIt doesn't seem rational to me that such a big company wouldn't prefer to diversify.
- marcosdumay 3mo agoOnce they made the loans they can only pay back if AI works out, no, it's completely rational to put all of their effort into making AI work out. Either that, or to declare bankruptcy earlier to get better terms.
- jcgrillo 3mo agoAbsolutely unhinged behavior. If orcl goes nuts over chatbots and dies that will make this strange and profoundly icky era in tech all worth it.
- __natty__ 3mo agoI’ve just been thinking about this and would like to ask those of you with more experience in the industry: do you prepare yourselves in any way for crises? Do you have any techniques for dealing with uncertainty? Let’s say someone is entering the IT job market today. How should they prepare for the responsibilities of adulthood, starting a family, buying (perhaps on a mortgage?) their first flat, and planning for a family? I’m not writing solely in the context of AI layoffs but broader. Over the last 10 years that I’ve been in the IT industry from EU/US perspective, I’ve perceived the market as economic cycles, the sine wave of which has narrowed significantly (more often markets demands changes and instability) and accelerated in the past years.
- glimshe 3mo agoThere's really nothing special about the current situation. Throughout history, jobs have been rarely anything close to guaranteed. You save a good deal of cash for emergencies, live below your means, keep your skill set up to date and face the world.
- dalyons 3mo agoThe speed of change is what’s special this time. Careers are being eliminated faster than people can reskill or change careers.
- robertlagrant 3mo agoI'm not sure that's true. Jobs have moved overseas at a rapid rate in the past. What careers have been eliminated, and over what time period?
- bob1029 3mo agoThe only sure thing is to live significantly below your means as often as possible. Becoming accustomed to life as a peasant when you could live like a king is what makes you economically bulletproof. I can go for a decade without another dime coming in the door. If I started using DoorDash and Amazon Prime every day, I'd last maybe 18-24 months. Just barely treading water is actually a great position to be in. It keeps you honest and any amount of work you do find on top of that feels like a windfall. An extra $500/m is a lot if you can make it happen consistently.
- rayiner 3mo agoI suspect these AI-displaced workers in the long run will suffer the same fate as workers affected by deindustrialization. They won’t die of starvation, obviously. But they will never be “retrained” to roles that offer them similar income, status, and leverage over employers. Instead they’ll be sucked into an ever-expanding economy of service work.
- danans 3mo ago> But they will never be “retrained” to roles that offer them similar income, status, and leverage over employers. Instead they’ll be sucked into an ever-expanding economy of service work. Which will probably depress wages of service workers - unless somehow there is a dramatic expansion in service demand, which apart from particular industries (i.e elder care), seems unlikely.
- selimthegrim 3mo ago>They won’t die of starvation, obviously. Narrator: This was not, in fact, obvious.
- tibbydudeza 3mo agoCA will buy the scraps.
- T-8805-5 3mo ago[dead]