Oracle lays off more than 200 California-based workers

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/oracle-lays-off-more-than-200-california-based-workers/

by kungfudoi • 4 years ago

119 65 4 years ago

datacenterdynamics.com

m0llusk• 4 years ago

Oracle seems to be optimized for profit. Maybe the workers should unionize.

GoldenMonkey• 4 years ago

it’s not like they’re hourly shift workers.

plenty of high tech salaries.

1letterunixname3• 4 years ago

All workers should unionize. There is no need to punch down or be classist in any direction.

Know how the 40 hour work week became a thing, paid time off, etc.? Collective action by workers.

Employee-owned co-ops are actually the fairest structures for workers of all sorts.

If you're not an owner, then you're the product, being cheated, and at the mercy of the corporation to fire or replace you at any time.

knorker• 4 years ago

Basically all companies are optimized for profit.

dijit2• 4 years ago

Technically correct.

There is a difference, though, between maximising profit and delivering value for everyone.

A corner store is technically optimising for profit, but they also ensure value so that you don't go elsewhere.

Oracle does more of the former, they maximise profit above what the value is.

You could ask then "Who are there customers, surely someone has value", which is a valid claim but I would put hard money on: a lot of Oracle customers used to have value but are now just being squeezed hard.

Maybe a minority actually get a good value out of them though.

wcfields• 4 years ago

Timing is right before their largest conference in Las Vegas next week on the 17th, Cloud World[1]

[1] https://www.oracle.com/cloudworld/

systemvoltage2• 4 years ago

Every single person hates Oracle to death on HN and elsewhere, so I should probably do the exact opposite and try to see what cool new things they're doing. I dabbled in their cloud offerings (hey, free arm core instances) and everything looks super polished and excellent. Pricing is fair, interface is way better than AWS. I am tempted to tune into Cloud World.

Anyone got any positive things to say about Oracle? What cool things are they doing?

AmericanChopper2• 4 years ago

Their RDBMS is an amazing product. There’s reasons you might _prefer_ SQL Server, or reasons you might need something more specialized, and the open source alternatives are really quite good as well. But I’ve always loved their RDBMS technology. None of the reasons that I hate Oracle relate to the quality of their products.

themitigating• 4 years ago

https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/16/oracle_settles_with_s...

Wyoming23• 4 years ago

They're incredibly innovative in the intellectual property space. Their lawyers have successfully sued an incredibly diverse range of people using a wide range of unique and esoteric arguments.

Even when they're not successful in court, they're still generally successful in a business sense by forcing smaller companies into bankruptcy, takeover or into accepting licensing on terms favorable to Oracle.

They're doing lots of "cool" things, it's just all evil corporate legal things. They don't do anything "cool" in terms of developing technology.

EmilyHughes• 4 years ago

They basically saved Java when they bought it, tons of great features and quick updates nowadays. There was almost zero innovation for about a decade while it was with Sun.

flarg• 4 years ago

They leverage their hard won reputation to provide business opportunities for smaller rivals, an act of selfless business practice I have not seen from any other organisation outside of, say, Norton.

tinco• 4 years ago

That's like saying everyone hates going into that part of the forest because there's a grizzly bear roaming around so I should probably do the exact opposite. Look how many berries there are, and I wonder if there's any good salmon in that creek over there.

Good luck getting mauled to death. I'd rather chew on a stick than go into business with Oracle.

KptMarchewa• 4 years ago

Their stewardship of Java is great. I have high confidence that both language and runtime will evolve in direction useful to giant majority of Java devs.

dijit2• 4 years ago

I have a friend who works in Oracle Cloud, he convinced me that it would be good and that there was a "forever free" tier to try it out.

I had a really really bad experience with their cloud relating to billing, they are still chasing me for it, basically they forced me to pick one of two "shapes" and both shapes were paid. I should have had alarm bells ringing when they asked for billing info.

I saw the payment on my card and tried to shut everything down, it was something like $80 which for me was a lot at the time, but even when deleting as much as I could something remained and it was still charging me $80 every month.

I'm not stupid, I use cloud's professionally, so I'm not sure what I did wrong.

Essentially they kept charging me and I cancelled my debit card, which caused them to finally shut down my account and then they put the outstanding amount ($160~) to collections.

I can definitely be in the wrong here, but I really did try to give them a shot and all I got was bitten, which is literally what everyone says about Oracle.

So, no, don't give them a chance, they are trying to rob you.

bfung2• 4 years ago

The article says “201” - yes, technically more than 200. Other articles says “hundreds of jobs”.

Keep in mind Oracle is a 140,000 to 170,000 large company, so this is a 0.14% reduction, compared to other tech companies planning to cut 10s of percents.

Compare that to others:

    Docusign: ~670
    Intel: ~ planning to layoff thousands
    Twilio: 800-900 (~11% cut)

There’s a lot of sensationalism in reporting here.

buscoquadnary2• 4 years ago

You got it all wrong man. Oracle only has 205 engineers, so this is devestating to their workforce.

Everyone else at Oracle is either in legal or a proctologist.

romeoblade• 4 years ago

Everyone else at Oracle is either in legal or a proctologist.

Lmao. Man you don't know how much I needed to laugh that hard after the last few weeks I had. Thank you.

smarks• 4 years ago

I know, right? When Oracle bought Sun they forced all the engineers to choose between legal and proctology; I chose the latter. After ten years I’m starting to regret my decision. At least Sun wasn’t bought by IBM. (That was actually in play before the Oracle deal.) At IBM they force the engineers to go into Sales. That would have been far, far worse.

bfung2• 4 years ago

I actually worked at a company, acquired by oracle in mid 2010s.

I ended up leaving seeing how it took 5 proctologists, 37 lawyers, and 3 engineers to meet and make decisions when it only needed the 3 engs to begin with.

The stats of the M&A were usually only 1/3 of the acquired company’s staff would stay on w/Oracle. While this layoff probably doesn’t map geographically with the Cerner M&A, not surprised with some minor team restructuring.

thaumasiotes2• 4 years ago

The article says “201” - yes, technically more than 200.

I don't really see the problem with this. You usually want the estimate to be close to the true value. If the headline was "Oracle lays off more than 200 workers", when Oracle had laid off 437 workers, everyone would slam the headline writer for getting it wrong. Because "more than 200" is not an appropriate way to describe 437 unless the category "numbers that are more than 200" is already relevant for some other reason.

jslaD• 4 years ago

You could also literally say 201 which is shorter than “more than 200”

pgt• 4 years ago

201. So, technically a success?

datavirtue3• 4 years ago

....and it's just a gesture by Oracle (like the other tech companies) to make the remaining employees feel lucky to have a job (to quell attrition and tamp down salaries). They didn't need to lay anyone off. That notion is ridiculous.

soared• 4 years ago

Oracle lays off a lot more than that every March-ish and September-ish, this is not an indicator of recession/etc.

nopenopenopeno• 4 years ago

IIRC Oracle is also in the process of opening new offices in Guadalajara, Mexico.

ohiovr• 4 years ago

Hopefully we can get this story to 201 points. One for each worker.

yellowapple4• 4 years ago

At that point it should be converted into an epic.

not_enoch_wise• 4 years ago

No lawyers were harmed in the execution of this restructuring.

cbm-vic-20• 4 years ago

I worked at Oracle for many years. Oracle has a lot of very talented engineers, of all levels of experience, all over the world. Lots of less-talented ones too, but that's not the point. The problem is those talented engineers are often suppressed by upper management who don't recognize that value that those engineers bring, in favor of their own pet projects. Every once in a while, there's a group that doesn't run into this: the Java team is one of them. OCI is better than people give it credit for, but all that is overshadowed by the dumb decisions made by VP-and-above management.

metadat• 4 years ago

How many of these were engineers, though?

"Workers" is pretty meaningless.

Oracle lays off more than 200 California-based workers

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