6 ms·

Oracle’s 6am layoff emails hit staff amid new wave of cuts

197 points by akis33 2mo ago

rf15 2mo ago
I love the smell of [layoff emails] in the morning. Makes me wonder why they're shedding so much and if Zitron was a little right after all.
- bix6 2mo ago
  Yeah what’s the end game here? Can they keep running with such deep cuts to staff and morale…
  - dyauspitr 2mo ago
    Morale has been low at oracle for years. Now it’s just a “we pay you and push you as hard as we can for it until you quit” shop.
    - shawn_w 2mo ago
      That's... most jobs.
      - doubled112 2mo ago
        Most work for least pay is just business, I thought? Beatings shall continue until morale improves.
  - ramesh31 2mo ago
    >" Can they keep running with such deep cuts to staff and morale…" ...First time? Oracle is literally the company Dilbert was making fun of
    - aaronbrethorst 2mo ago
      He worked at Pacific Bell between 1986 and June 30, 1995, and the personalities he encountered there inspired many of his Dilbert characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams
      - ghaff 2mo ago
        And probably no small part of the downturn of Dilbert (besides Adams going a bit nuts) is that Adams is no longer in a workplace he can satirize so it remains stuck largely in 90s cubeland.
        rootusrootus 2mo ago
        > Adams is no longer Indeed.
        georgemcbay 2mo ago
        > Adams is no longer in a workplace he can satirize He's also not in a place where he can draw cartoons, what with being dead and all.
        ghaff 2mo ago
        Yes, I was speaking of latterly and I could have been clearer with tenses.
  - usrnm 2mo ago
    > The latest cuts come after Oracle's workforce fell by roughly 21,000 employees, or 13%, during fiscal 2026 13% doesn't seem too different from other tech companies
    - oblio 2mo ago
      The difference is that they didn't overhire during Covid.
    - nerevarthelame 2mo ago
      The 13% quoted there was from previous layoffs that mostly took place in Q2 of 2026. This is another 20,000 - 30,000 (the exact number isn't public yet) on top of that.
  - Ekaros 2mo ago
    Well they do have their own interference capacity. So AIs to solve every single issue.
  - sailfast 2mo ago
    Depends on how many employees are on visas that depend on them working for Oracle I guess...
  - mohaine 2mo ago
    Well, we'll know to worry/celebrate when they start laying of lawyers. The software side can probably go many years without new features. Nobody picks Oracle in 2026 for the features.
  - Havoc 2mo ago
    > Yeah what’s the end game here? Just Ellison with a giant red borrow more button. All the other employees are just overhead
jmclnx 2mo ago
>The company has not disclosed how many workers were affected by the latest cuts One of the first things that "progressive" politicians should do if they take power is require large companies to disclose the exact number of firings before people are notified.
- Frieren 2mo ago
  This is how it works in Sweden: https://www.unionen.se/in-english/notice-to-termination https://www.unionen.se/in-english/notice-to-termination "Even if an employer does not have a collective agreement, they must negotiate major changes to working and employment conditions of employees who are members of a trade union as if the employer had a collective agreement." Negotiations include getting the lists of positions that will be terminated, number of employees affected, new positions that may be opened during a reorganization, etc.
- czinck 2mo ago
  That's already the law in the US, the WARN act. It requires 60 days notice before any mass layoffs. The way companies "get around" this is by not actually laying you off, but giving you 60 days notice that you will be laid off and then removing all your access during those 60 days, at the same time they report the 60 days notice of layoffs. It's essentially 60 days severance (plus reporting to the government), which IMO is better than everyone walking wondering who will actually be laid off in 60 days. You can even see that in the email they sent, "today is your last working day" but there will be an email with "details on your [...] termination date". It's unclear to me if this layoff doesn't qualify as a mass layoff (so no warning period needed) or if they just haven't filed it yet, but I'm guessing they'll file it soon enough.
dominotw 2mo ago
Thats how they usually happen ? They are always "cold"
- DonHopkins 2mo ago
  Unless you're C level, in which case you get promoted to "Vice President in Charge of Looking for a New Job" for a quarter.
- eterm 2mo ago
  This appears to be a UK new site*, and it's definitely not how they usually happen there. In fact, it's not even how they legally happen. > 100 or more redundancies - the consultation must start at least 45 days before any dismissals take effect https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/consultation https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/consultation If you want to have similar laws, you need to lobby your representatives, and get them to follow California's example, which introduced the Cal-WARN act: > “an employer may not order a mass layoff, relocation, or termination at a covered establishment unless, 60 days before the order takes effect, the employer gives written notice of the order” From https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Cal-WARNAct.html https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Cal-WARNAct.html But as others have said, it's not as strong as the UK laws, so it just becomes a de-facto notice period instead. It's still progress though. * Although not one I've ever heard of, which is a little suspicious.
  - dcrazy 2mo ago
    There’s a federal WARN act too. Neither the state nor federal versions gives the employees any legal right to try to change the business’s mind.
  - arccy 2mo ago
    even in the UK they still get announced as layoffs, employees get their access revoked, and they're in some sort of limbo while the consultations / process takes place.
    - fpoling 2mo ago
mikelitoris 2mo ago
Oh boy here we go again
chasd00 2mo ago
I doubt it was cold as in no prior information cold but more like "cold sounding". If the layoffs affected > 50 employees then it would have triggered the CALWarn act which is the California additions to the federal warn act. So the oracle employees got 60 days notice and have known the email was coming today for 2 months. If they didn't then Oracle owes them 60 days of pay and benefits.
- BryantD 2mo ago
  The usual way companies handle this is to set the actual layoff date as 60 days from when the email goes out. If you hear about a mass layoff including two months of salary for everyone affected, that’s what’s going on. Typically system access is revoked but the paychecks keep coming as usual and vacation keeps accruing, because you’ve got that extra two months of “employment.” The company also gets the benefit of being able to call you back in if it turns out there was something vital you were doing that never got documented. This, the company stays compliant with all the regulations but they don’t have to worry about disaffected employees during those 60 days.
  - spectra72 2mo ago
    I was an Oracle employee that was laid off in the March wave. That’s exactly how it worked. 6am email. You were an employee through any notification/WARN period. But no access. No work. Garden leave euphemistically. WARN varies by state and location. And usually is only applied to onsite employees. And only if the layoff affects certain number or more. So if you are a remote employee, you were done at the next pay period. For me in CO that was 4/10. Not 60 days obviously as I didn’t qualify for a WARN notice due to being remote. Various CA colleagues were through May or close to that.
petilon 2mo ago
Oracle's credit rating has been downgraded to a notch above "junk" status [1]. That means they can't borrow cheaply anymore. The only way to raise cash now is to cut payroll, and that's what they are doing. And what are they doing with the cash? Buying Nvidia hardware to rent out to OpenAI [2]. All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in. This is a commodity business, Oracle has no IP in this. To fund it they are making deep cuts to their software development business which does have proprietary IP. That may have made sense when it was originally announced because AI hype was at its peak at the time. Indeed, Oracle's stock shot up when Stargate was announced, and Larry Ellison briefly became the world's richest person. However, since then the AI hype has evaporated, and hyperscalers are no longer being rewarded with a higher stock price. Oracle stock has dropped more than 50%, and companies NOT investing 100s of billions in AI hardware are now being rewarded, such as Apple. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/magazine/takeaways-larry-ellison-oracle-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/magazine/takeaways-larry-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_LLC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_LLC
- gruez 2mo ago
  >However, since then the AI hype has evaporated What? Nvidia stock, for instance has been moving largely sideways for the past 4 months. Maybe it's not as jubilant as before, but it hasn't exactly "evaporated".
  - petilon 2mo ago
    That's relative to the hype we had before. Previously any involvement in AI was rewarded heavily, but now it is being punished. Wallstreet previously punished Apple for not enough AI now they are being rewarded for not throwing 100s of billions into AI hardware.
    - LoganDark 2mo ago
      Apple still did have to learn what it costs to invest in AI hype marketing, with all the lawsuits about the iPhone 16.
    - 2mo ago
freediddy 2mo ago
I'm confused... Did you expect anything different from Oracle?
rinconrex 2mo ago
As someone also freshly laid off (not Oracle though), let me solemnly acknowledge my new cohorts. Best of luck to everyone, it's tough out there. Stay sharp and focused, hoping for the best. Oracle is in a spiral it seems. Is Stargate still plugging along?
lambdaone 2mo ago
While I feel sorry for the people involved, Oracle as a company richly deserves this, for reasons far too familiar to everyone here. This is a come-uppance that has been waiting to happen for decades.
- jonas21 2mo ago
  I'm not sure this is the come-uppance you've been waiting for. Oracle still has a larger market cap than at any point in history except the last ~2 years.
3pm 2mo ago
I wonder how this holds up in the age of AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
- morkalork 2mo ago
  If you run sub-par agents on large codebase that's kinda what they do. Every task ends with duplication, added flags bifurcating the code and everything else described in that comment haha
- jiggawatts 2mo ago
  I remember that comment and thinking that the author is complaining about a kind of success. Oracle RDBMS is a critical component of huge and important application platforms from banking to infrastructure. Millions of tests are good! I would be concerned if it wasn’t a “test heavy” development process. A slow and measured pace with every consequence thought out is also good. Otherwise the product rots away in all but the most common combination of configurations. Etc… The only valid complaint is that the test farm is under-scaled. Increasing its capacity would direly increase development velocity.
  - 3pm 2mo ago
    I agree somewhat, but it took me a bit to articulate to myself. It is nuanced. Testing is what held everything together. They seem to have been taking it seriously and that alone was enough to keep a product of that scale (barely?) afloat. A success!? But it sounds like every other good practice went out of the window. They are drowning in unimaginable amount of technical debt, ossified over decades. That, and the complaint about testing infra indicates to me that even their tests are a pile of sh*. He wasn't running them locally, so they were integration tests. Meaning that had there been a foundation of unit tests - they wouldn't need that many slow integration tests. It sounds like they just brute forced all their problems with test farms. I'm almost sure they double down on AI - why make your code base better if AI can figure out how 100 flags can interact with each other.
    - 2mo ago
Traubenfuchs 2mo ago
Stop cheering. Oracle still offers a free arm 4x6GB kubernetes cluster and 2 free amd cpu‘s. It‘s the best free platform for learners and small scale operations.
- yieldcrv 2mo ago
  the only reason there is compute availability is because devs hate Oracle so much that they don't know about it an LLM told me about that option when I was seeking out free tiers
- mulmen 2mo ago
  It’s 12gb and two ARM instances now. If you can get one. They’re frequently out of capacity. They even suspended the over-provisioned legacy instances.
  - Traubenfuchs 2mo ago
    In paygo mode I still get 4. Their cost calculator also calculates with 4 free ones.
    - mulmen 2mo ago
      There's a 0.0% chance I trust my credit card number to Oracle. The Free Tier page says up to 2 VMs with 12GB of RAM. Compute Arm Compute Instance Arm-based Ampere A1 cores and 12 GB of memory usable as 1 VM or 2 VMs Always Free 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours per month https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
      - Traubenfuchs 2mo ago
        As opposed to google AI/gemini key catastrophes and aws billing adventures?
        mulmen 2mo ago
ags16 2mo ago
Banks threatened Larry with a margin call for his $80B loans with stock collateral?
nielsbot 2mo ago
Too bad they weren't unionized--I assume that would have helped. The workers who built the company and created its worth (obviously not evenly distributed) now get a "thank you very much goodbye" e-mail. I think they deserve ownership and to take part in these decisions.
- sailfast 2mo ago
  It might have helped draw out the layoff process, potentially. Still not convinced unions would optimize overall outcomes for employees _while_ employed. Maybe a better conversation to have as we keep moving through this AI Engineering era and a bunch of new companies are created. If you are considering founding a company, would you start it as a union shop? If not, why?
  - toomuchtodo 2mo ago
    Founders are management, unions protect employees from management and shareholders. If you can build without employees, go for it. Investors want to get wealthy, founders want to get wealthy, employees are just fuel for that machine. The examples are robust of how startup employees make out the vast majority of the time. Union support is at record highs, there will always people who think they can do better without, best to not argue with folks who ignore data and stats. Their belief system won’t be swayed with logic and reason. (a potential solution to this is for unions to turn into cooperatives and accelerators over time; they could build their own investment funds with their pensions an investor in their portfolio companies, if Bending Spoons was a union cooperative if you will, for example)
  - nielsbot 2mo ago
    Start as a union shop? Or a cooperative? (see peer comment) Good question--not sure at what size it makes sense to have a union? Is it 1 employee?
  - nielsbot 2mo ago
    Replying again to say: A union isn't the real objective. Greater share of profits and more democracy in the workplace is. So maybe that's union-shaped or maybe something else.
brycewray 2mo ago
Off-topic, but I hate the use of the word "photo" in the caption under the AI-gen'd image: > (PHOTO: GEMINI AI) Yells at cloud
a34729t 2mo ago
My employer has somehow managed to avoid the constant layoffs since 2022 trend, shockingly, and I think this is a big reason we have relatively low churn despite not having many promotions, refreshers, etc (on top of some relatively uncommon benefits for a large tech company). I was recently interviewing a few engineers from FAANG+ companies who are desperate to get out of the squid games and quarterly layoff fears. I wish more companies would realize what a selling point this is, and I wish my CEO would publicly brag about how is he is competent enough to not need to churn through 10+% of his workforce a year AND have great stock price growth over the last 6 years.
- nielsbot 2mo ago
  > desperate to get out of the squid games and quarterly layoff fears "If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world." — Satoru Iwata (former Nintendo CEO)
- sjs7007 2mo ago
  You could publicly brag about your company by naming it here :)
sailfast 2mo ago
> We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made during your time with us. Why do companies bother with this horse excrement? Does a sentence like this make anyone feel better? Most times, I wish they'd just send the honest truth. "Hey, we screwed up. We over-hired and ran out of funds so we had to let you go to make payroll" or "Our M&A strategists overpaid for an over-leveraged company and now we have to figure out how to pay down the debt. Your position was cut as a result." Obviously corporations owe nothing to nobody (apparently) but I'd love it if the patronizing language stopped.
- dyauspitr 2mo ago
  And open themselves up for liability and getting sued by admitting mistakes? In your dreams.
- vjvjvjvjghv 2mo ago
  They have the same psychology the leaders of communist states had. It's a constant litany of self-congratulation and tone-deafness that has no connection to reality.
  - mint5 2mo ago
    Why single out communist leaders? Seems more related to authoritarian leaders, of which communist leaders were just a small subset. Heck our current admin can’t do any wrong in their own eyes, every thing is perfect and winning including the morass in the Middle East that was arbitrarily started on whim and resulted in economic chaos. Or the trade war with Canada. Or Biden, he couldn’t do any wrong in his own eyes and that led to the current situation.
- ThrowawayR2 2mo ago
  There have been a couple of cases of honesty in tech layoffs in the last couple where the employer specifically said that the layoffs were for performance which added insult to injury to the people laid off in that round and damaged their future hiring prospects, e.g. https://www.fastcompany.com/91262263/meta-rebranded-performance-based-layoffs-non-regrettable-attrition https://www.fastcompany.com/91262263/meta-rebranded-performa.... I'd rather not have the honesty in that case; that's a terrible thing to do to people.
dzonga 2mo ago
oracle could've cruised nicely but nope greed and Larry Ellison's ego (add his son's too) - they bit off more than they can chew.
ath3nd 2mo ago
So...Ed Zitron was right?
maerF0x0 2mo ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/23/oracle-ai-job-cuts-layoffs-21000.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/23/oracle-ai-job-cuts-layoffs-2... Versus https://www.techtimes.co.uk/oracle-new-layoffs-restructuring-costs-2-8-billion-1808676 https://www.techtimes.co.uk/oracle-new-layoffs-restructuring... It's unclear how many were actually cut because the 21000 / 13% numbers were reported nearly 3 months ago?
toomuchtodo 2mo ago
Related: Here's the severance package Oracle offered laid-off US employees - https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-severance-package-us-employees-2026-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-severance-package-us-... - September 14th, 2026
horns4lyfe 2mo ago
How many h1bs are they filing for?

197 points by akis33 2mo ago

rf15 2mo ago

I love the smell of [layoff emails] in the morning. Makes me wonder why they're shedding so much and if Zitron was a little right after all.

bix6 2mo ago
Yeah what’s the end game here? Can they keep running with such deep cuts to staff and morale…
- dyauspitr 2mo ago
  Morale has been low at oracle for years. Now it’s just a “we pay you and push you as hard as we can for it until you quit” shop.
  - shawn_w 2mo ago
    That's... most jobs.
    - doubled112 2mo ago
      Most work for least pay is just business, I thought? Beatings shall continue until morale improves.
- ramesh31 2mo ago
  >" Can they keep running with such deep cuts to staff and morale…" ...First time? Oracle is literally the company Dilbert was making fun of
  - aaronbrethorst 2mo ago
    He worked at Pacific Bell between 1986 and June 30, 1995, and the personalities he encountered there inspired many of his Dilbert characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams
    - ghaff 2mo ago
      And probably no small part of the downturn of Dilbert (besides Adams going a bit nuts) is that Adams is no longer in a workplace he can satirize so it remains stuck largely in 90s cubeland.
      - rootusrootus 2mo ago
        > Adams is no longer Indeed.
      - georgemcbay 2mo ago
        > Adams is no longer in a workplace he can satirize He's also not in a place where he can draw cartoons, what with being dead and all.
        ghaff 2mo ago
        Yes, I was speaking of latterly and I could have been clearer with tenses.
- usrnm 2mo ago
  > The latest cuts come after Oracle's workforce fell by roughly 21,000 employees, or 13%, during fiscal 2026 13% doesn't seem too different from other tech companies
  - oblio 2mo ago
    The difference is that they didn't overhire during Covid.
  - nerevarthelame 2mo ago
    The 13% quoted there was from previous layoffs that mostly took place in Q2 of 2026. This is another 20,000 - 30,000 (the exact number isn't public yet) on top of that.
- Ekaros 2mo ago
  Well they do have their own interference capacity. So AIs to solve every single issue.
- sailfast 2mo ago
  Depends on how many employees are on visas that depend on them working for Oracle I guess...
- mohaine 2mo ago
  Well, we'll know to worry/celebrate when they start laying of lawyers. The software side can probably go many years without new features. Nobody picks Oracle in 2026 for the features.
- Havoc 2mo ago
  > Yeah what’s the end game here? Just Ellison with a giant red borrow more button. All the other employees are just overhead

jmclnx 2mo ago

>The company has not disclosed how many workers were affected by the latest cuts One of the first things that "progressive" politicians should do if they take power is require large companies to disclose the exact number of firings before people are notified.

Frieren 2mo ago
This is how it works in Sweden: https://www.unionen.se/in-english/notice-to-termination https://www.unionen.se/in-english/notice-to-termination "Even if an employer does not have a collective agreement, they must negotiate major changes to working and employment conditions of employees who are members of a trade union as if the employer had a collective agreement." Negotiations include getting the lists of positions that will be terminated, number of employees affected, new positions that may be opened during a reorganization, etc.
czinck 2mo ago
That's already the law in the US, the WARN act. It requires 60 days notice before any mass layoffs. The way companies "get around" this is by not actually laying you off, but giving you 60 days notice that you will be laid off and then removing all your access during those 60 days, at the same time they report the 60 days notice of layoffs. It's essentially 60 days severance (plus reporting to the government), which IMO is better than everyone walking wondering who will actually be laid off in 60 days. You can even see that in the email they sent, "today is your last working day" but there will be an email with "details on your [...] termination date". It's unclear to me if this layoff doesn't qualify as a mass layoff (so no warning period needed) or if they just haven't filed it yet, but I'm guessing they'll file it soon enough.

dominotw 2mo ago

Thats how they usually happen ? They are always "cold"

DonHopkins 2mo ago
Unless you're C level, in which case you get promoted to "Vice President in Charge of Looking for a New Job" for a quarter.
eterm 2mo ago
This appears to be a UK new site*, and it's definitely not how they usually happen there. In fact, it's not even how they legally happen. > 100 or more redundancies - the consultation must start at least 45 days before any dismissals take effect https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/consultation https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/consultation If you want to have similar laws, you need to lobby your representatives, and get them to follow California's example, which introduced the Cal-WARN act: > “an employer may not order a mass layoff, relocation, or termination at a covered establishment unless, 60 days before the order takes effect, the employer gives written notice of the order” From https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Cal-WARNAct.html https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Cal-WARNAct.html But as others have said, it's not as strong as the UK laws, so it just becomes a de-facto notice period instead. It's still progress though. * Although not one I've ever heard of, which is a little suspicious.
- dcrazy 2mo ago
  There’s a federal WARN act too. Neither the state nor federal versions gives the employees any legal right to try to change the business’s mind.
- arccy 2mo ago
  even in the UK they still get announced as layoffs, employees get their access revoked, and they're in some sort of limbo while the consultations / process takes place.
  - fpoling 2mo ago

mikelitoris 2mo ago

Oh boy here we go again

chasd00 2mo ago

I doubt it was cold as in no prior information cold but more like "cold sounding". If the layoffs affected > 50 employees then it would have triggered the CALWarn act which is the California additions to the federal warn act. So the oracle employees got 60 days notice and have known the email was coming today for 2 months. If they didn't then Oracle owes them 60 days of pay and benefits.

BryantD 2mo ago
The usual way companies handle this is to set the actual layoff date as 60 days from when the email goes out. If you hear about a mass layoff including two months of salary for everyone affected, that’s what’s going on. Typically system access is revoked but the paychecks keep coming as usual and vacation keeps accruing, because you’ve got that extra two months of “employment.” The company also gets the benefit of being able to call you back in if it turns out there was something vital you were doing that never got documented. This, the company stays compliant with all the regulations but they don’t have to worry about disaffected employees during those 60 days.
- spectra72 2mo ago
  I was an Oracle employee that was laid off in the March wave. That’s exactly how it worked. 6am email. You were an employee through any notification/WARN period. But no access. No work. Garden leave euphemistically. WARN varies by state and location. And usually is only applied to onsite employees. And only if the layoff affects certain number or more. So if you are a remote employee, you were done at the next pay period. For me in CO that was 4/10. Not 60 days obviously as I didn’t qualify for a WARN notice due to being remote. Various CA colleagues were through May or close to that.

petilon 2mo ago

Oracle's credit rating has been downgraded to a notch above "junk" status [1]. That means they can't borrow cheaply anymore. The only way to raise cash now is to cut payroll, and that's what they are doing. And what are they doing with the cash? Buying Nvidia hardware to rent out to OpenAI [2]. All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in. This is a commodity business, Oracle has no IP in this. To fund it they are making deep cuts to their software development business which does have proprietary IP. That may have made sense when it was originally announced because AI hype was at its peak at the time. Indeed, Oracle's stock shot up when Stargate was announced, and Larry Ellison briefly became the world's richest person. However, since then the AI hype has evaporated, and hyperscalers are no longer being rewarded with a higher stock price. Oracle stock has dropped more than 50%, and companies NOT investing 100s of billions in AI hardware are now being rewarded, such as Apple. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/magazine/takeaways-larry-ellison-oracle-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/magazine/takeaways-larry-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_LLC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_LLC

gruez 2mo ago
>However, since then the AI hype has evaporated What? Nvidia stock, for instance has been moving largely sideways for the past 4 months. Maybe it's not as jubilant as before, but it hasn't exactly "evaporated".
- petilon 2mo ago
  That's relative to the hype we had before. Previously any involvement in AI was rewarded heavily, but now it is being punished. Wallstreet previously punished Apple for not enough AI now they are being rewarded for not throwing 100s of billions into AI hardware.
  - LoganDark 2mo ago
    Apple still did have to learn what it costs to invest in AI hype marketing, with all the lawsuits about the iPhone 16.
  - 2mo ago

freediddy 2mo ago

I'm confused... Did you expect anything different from Oracle?

rinconrex 2mo ago

As someone also freshly laid off (not Oracle though), let me solemnly acknowledge my new cohorts. Best of luck to everyone, it's tough out there. Stay sharp and focused, hoping for the best. Oracle is in a spiral it seems. Is Stargate still plugging along?

lambdaone 2mo ago

While I feel sorry for the people involved, Oracle as a company richly deserves this, for reasons far too familiar to everyone here. This is a come-uppance that has been waiting to happen for decades.

jonas21 2mo ago
I'm not sure this is the come-uppance you've been waiting for. Oracle still has a larger market cap than at any point in history except the last ~2 years.

3pm 2mo ago

I wonder how this holds up in the age of AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

morkalork 2mo ago
If you run sub-par agents on large codebase that's kinda what they do. Every task ends with duplication, added flags bifurcating the code and everything else described in that comment haha
jiggawatts 2mo ago
I remember that comment and thinking that the author is complaining about a kind of success. Oracle RDBMS is a critical component of huge and important application platforms from banking to infrastructure. Millions of tests are good! I would be concerned if it wasn’t a “test heavy” development process. A slow and measured pace with every consequence thought out is also good. Otherwise the product rots away in all but the most common combination of configurations. Etc… The only valid complaint is that the test farm is under-scaled. Increasing its capacity would direly increase development velocity.
- 3pm 2mo ago
  I agree somewhat, but it took me a bit to articulate to myself. It is nuanced. Testing is what held everything together. They seem to have been taking it seriously and that alone was enough to keep a product of that scale (barely?) afloat. A success!? But it sounds like every other good practice went out of the window. They are drowning in unimaginable amount of technical debt, ossified over decades. That, and the complaint about testing infra indicates to me that even their tests are a pile of sh*. He wasn't running them locally, so they were integration tests. Meaning that had there been a foundation of unit tests - they wouldn't need that many slow integration tests. It sounds like they just brute forced all their problems with test farms. I'm almost sure they double down on AI - why make your code base better if AI can figure out how 100 flags can interact with each other.
  - 2mo ago

Traubenfuchs 2mo ago

Stop cheering. Oracle still offers a free arm 4x6GB kubernetes cluster and 2 free amd cpu‘s. It‘s the best free platform for learners and small scale operations.

yieldcrv 2mo ago
the only reason there is compute availability is because devs hate Oracle so much that they don't know about it an LLM told me about that option when I was seeking out free tiers
mulmen 2mo ago
It’s 12gb and two ARM instances now. If you can get one. They’re frequently out of capacity. They even suspended the over-provisioned legacy instances.
- Traubenfuchs 2mo ago
  In paygo mode I still get 4. Their cost calculator also calculates with 4 free ones.
  - mulmen 2mo ago
    There's a 0.0% chance I trust my credit card number to Oracle. The Free Tier page says up to 2 VMs with 12GB of RAM. Compute Arm Compute Instance Arm-based Ampere A1 cores and 12 GB of memory usable as 1 VM or 2 VMs Always Free 1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours per month https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
    - Traubenfuchs 2mo ago
      As opposed to google AI/gemini key catastrophes and aws billing adventures?
      - mulmen 2mo ago

ags16 2mo ago

Banks threatened Larry with a margin call for his $80B loans with stock collateral?

nielsbot 2mo ago

Too bad they weren't unionized--I assume that would have helped. The workers who built the company and created its worth (obviously not evenly distributed) now get a "thank you very much goodbye" e-mail. I think they deserve ownership and to take part in these decisions.

sailfast 2mo ago
It might have helped draw out the layoff process, potentially. Still not convinced unions would optimize overall outcomes for employees _while_ employed. Maybe a better conversation to have as we keep moving through this AI Engineering era and a bunch of new companies are created. If you are considering founding a company, would you start it as a union shop? If not, why?
- toomuchtodo 2mo ago
  Founders are management, unions protect employees from management and shareholders. If you can build without employees, go for it. Investors want to get wealthy, founders want to get wealthy, employees are just fuel for that machine. The examples are robust of how startup employees make out the vast majority of the time. Union support is at record highs, there will always people who think they can do better without, best to not argue with folks who ignore data and stats. Their belief system won’t be swayed with logic and reason. (a potential solution to this is for unions to turn into cooperatives and accelerators over time; they could build their own investment funds with their pensions an investor in their portfolio companies, if Bending Spoons was a union cooperative if you will, for example)
- nielsbot 2mo ago
  Start as a union shop? Or a cooperative? (see peer comment) Good question--not sure at what size it makes sense to have a union? Is it 1 employee?
- nielsbot 2mo ago
  Replying again to say: A union isn't the real objective. Greater share of profits and more democracy in the workplace is. So maybe that's union-shaped or maybe something else.

brycewray 2mo ago

Off-topic, but I hate the use of the word "photo" in the caption under the AI-gen'd image: > (PHOTO: GEMINI AI) Yells at cloud

a34729t 2mo ago

My employer has somehow managed to avoid the constant layoffs since 2022 trend, shockingly, and I think this is a big reason we have relatively low churn despite not having many promotions, refreshers, etc (on top of some relatively uncommon benefits for a large tech company). I was recently interviewing a few engineers from FAANG+ companies who are desperate to get out of the squid games and quarterly layoff fears. I wish more companies would realize what a selling point this is, and I wish my CEO would publicly brag about how is he is competent enough to not need to churn through 10+% of his workforce a year AND have great stock price growth over the last 6 years.

nielsbot 2mo ago
> desperate to get out of the squid games and quarterly layoff fears "If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world." — Satoru Iwata (former Nintendo CEO)
sjs7007 2mo ago
You could publicly brag about your company by naming it here :)

sailfast 2mo ago

> We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made during your time with us. Why do companies bother with this horse excrement? Does a sentence like this make anyone feel better? Most times, I wish they'd just send the honest truth. "Hey, we screwed up. We over-hired and ran out of funds so we had to let you go to make payroll" or "Our M&A strategists overpaid for an over-leveraged company and now we have to figure out how to pay down the debt. Your position was cut as a result." Obviously corporations owe nothing to nobody (apparently) but I'd love it if the patronizing language stopped.

dyauspitr 2mo ago
And open themselves up for liability and getting sued by admitting mistakes? In your dreams.
vjvjvjvjghv 2mo ago
They have the same psychology the leaders of communist states had. It's a constant litany of self-congratulation and tone-deafness that has no connection to reality.
- mint5 2mo ago
  Why single out communist leaders? Seems more related to authoritarian leaders, of which communist leaders were just a small subset. Heck our current admin can’t do any wrong in their own eyes, every thing is perfect and winning including the morass in the Middle East that was arbitrarily started on whim and resulted in economic chaos. Or the trade war with Canada. Or Biden, he couldn’t do any wrong in his own eyes and that led to the current situation.
ThrowawayR2 2mo ago
There have been a couple of cases of honesty in tech layoffs in the last couple where the employer specifically said that the layoffs were for performance which added insult to injury to the people laid off in that round and damaged their future hiring prospects, e.g. https://www.fastcompany.com/91262263/meta-rebranded-performance-based-layoffs-non-regrettable-attrition https://www.fastcompany.com/91262263/meta-rebranded-performa.... I'd rather not have the honesty in that case; that's a terrible thing to do to people.

dzonga 2mo ago

oracle could've cruised nicely but nope greed and Larry Ellison's ego (add his son's too) - they bit off more than they can chew.

ath3nd 2mo ago

So...Ed Zitron was right?

maerF0x0 2mo ago

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/23/oracle-ai-job-cuts-layoffs-21000.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/23/oracle-ai-job-cuts-layoffs-2... Versus https://www.techtimes.co.uk/oracle-new-layoffs-restructuring-costs-2-8-billion-1808676 https://www.techtimes.co.uk/oracle-new-layoffs-restructuring... It's unclear how many were actually cut because the 21000 / 13% numbers were reported nearly 3 months ago?

toomuchtodo 2mo ago

Related: Here's the severance package Oracle offered laid-off US employees - https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-severance-package-us-employees-2026-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-severance-package-us-... - September 14th, 2026

horns4lyfe 2mo ago

How many h1bs are they filing for?