At approximately 10 a.m., I’m told, just five hours after that email, the layoffs began—and according to anecdotal reports included significant cuts within at least part of that stronger-than-ever, bright-future cloud business. Those affected were given 30 minutes to turn in company assets and leave the building, and were told that Friday (today) would their last official day.
“The morning felt like a slaughter,” one Oracle employee told me. “One person after another. People who have shaped me, who’ve been instrumental in my own success, who are good, smart, capable, wonderful. It’s been a terrible day. A company’s most valuable asset is the people it employs. Today’s cuts leave me to wonder if Oracle will ever realize the mistake it has made in letting these people go.”
And, that employee said, the layoff process was handled very badly, with entire teams being ushered into conference rooms as groups and told that they no longer had jobs. This employee indicated that technical teams, particularly those involved in product development and focused on software development, data science, and engineering, seemed to take the biggest hit.
In the 1990’s I was working at a company that had a mass layoff. Everyone was shepherded into one of two rooms depending on whether they were being kept or fired. I was in the bathroom when HR went around and segregated everyone. I had a “heads up” that this would be happening. I was pretty sure I wasn’t getting laid off but when I came out of the crapper and realized what had happened (no one around - oh shit, this must be the layoff!) I didn’t know which of the two rooms I was supposed to go into. I couldn’t see or hear who was where. I tried listening at both doors but still couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t want to go into the layoff room and say “oops - uh, was on the crapper when this went down - wrong room - bummer guys” and leave for the other room. So I just went back to my desk and waited. It was very awkward. The HR lady eventually came around, quite distressed, wanting to know where I had been.
Oracle took over one 100% cloud company called NetSuite one or two years before for 8B or 9B level. Now, they are consolidating (cutting off) employees to keep minimum workforce.
Oracle has outdated its Enterprise Version (i.e. old version Support cost is doubled) and forced all existing and future customers to cloud environment.
It got worse.
When the HR lady found me she said the CEO needed to talk to me the next day. I had put in to take the next day off - it was my mom’s 70th birthday. Her health was failing. She wanted to go up to the top of Montara Mtn in Pacifica and it was pretty clear she didn’t have a lot of time left where her health would allow that. The CEO was leaving for some appointment. HR is beside herself. First, she didn’t get me where I was suppose to go. Second, after being selected as one of the people to NOT get fired I’m blowing off the CEO.
Everyone knows the drill. Company is in trouble, there’s a layoff, CEO give the survivors a pep talk on how the future can still be rosy so he doesn’t lose the people he still needs. No one makes a decision based on this. Staying can be lucrative (was for me) - the next tranch of stock options is cheap, raises are generous. But - maybe the company won’t make it. Got kids? Got a spouse? You need to do your homework. Can’t take risks on their behave. Anyways no way no how was I going to blow off my mom to play the post-layoff patycake game with the CEO. So he made time to talk to me before he left. I was on HR’s shit list from then on (not that it mattered).
Short ORCL. It sells overpriced products. Plenty of reasonably priced products in the market. Ask those highly paid SWEs migrate away from this POS to open source DBMS and ERP.