Blame it on whatever you like. oracle has been a rudderless leech for nearly 30 years now.

- overpricing the database led to a predictable exodus and new players with often times better performance.

- acquisition of MySQL led to a predictable exodus and new players like maria with often times better performance.

- Oracle cloud arrived late to spectacular skepticism and low user turnout from customers who had been burned by high cost and users burned from decisions like the death of opensolaris. it exists on federal life support these days by the grace of the prevailing administration.

- more than 80 products, with hundreds of thousands of patches and updates, yet no coherent or meaningful reform of the build for more than forty years. DB 19c still ships broken for redhat 9 as a means of driving users to oracle linux, and patching the installer is a 1970s experience in itself. DB 23's greatest improvement has been to tack the letters "AI" onto it to chum what shallow AI waters Oracle deigns to tread outside of an investment portfolio.

- dumping cash into oracle enterprise linux despite it only having around 2500 active corporate users.

this is nearly 20% of the company being laid off.

I don't think its that easy.

Look at their employee numbers over the years:

(ai generated):

Oracle Corporation Employee Count (2010 - 2025)

Legend: Each '' represents approximately 4,000 employees.

  Year | Employees
  ------------------------------------------------------------------
  2010 |  (105,000)
  2011 |  (108,000)
  2012 |  (115,000)
  2013 |  (120,000)
  2014 |  (122,000)
  2015 |  (132,000)
  2016 |  (136,000)
  2017 |  (138,000)
  2018 |  (137,000)
  2019 |  (136,000)
  2020 |  (135,000)
  2021 |  (132,000)
  2022 |  (143,000)
  2023 |  (164,000)
  2024 |  (159,000)
  2025 |  (162,000)

They clearly did something crazy at corona and undoing this as a lot of companies did before already.

I think you're mostly right.

This round of layoffs was telegraphed at a month or so ago. It's all related to banks getting spooked and pulling funding for their massive data center project and the OpenAI deal being on the rocks.

So, I don't think it's really about their product being good enough, it's more that they've bet the company on data centers and it's starting to look like they just don't have the skills to execute on it.

"Oracle leadership" sounds like nobody wants to take responsibility but they do like the share price to go up so say good bye to [auto generated name in header]'s job.

How to tell you we are running out of money because of AI without spooking the investors ?

Is it AI or is it Larry subsidizing his dipshit son’s media exec fantasy/throwing money at Trump’s patronage system?

One of the ideal things that companies can do is not hire people. A company that never hires someone will never let anyone go and consequently is the only ethical company. The worst thing that a company could do is pay someone to do a job for a while. In fact, one thing we could do is make sure that all jobs should be perpetual. If someone hires you, they can't stop paying you until they die or declare bankruptcy. This is sure to be good for workers.

[dead]

[flagged]

> More victims of AI

According to the article as well as blind, the main teams hit were associated with Cerner (EHR) and NetSuite (ERP).

Oracle's AI spend is part of Oracle Cloud.

That said, I guess it can be argued that Cerner and NetSuite being on the chopping block can be attributed to AI because now procurement has the choice to either build in-house via an Anthropic or OpenAI SI like Accenture or TCS or they can negotiate better purchasing terms from a best-in-breed product in HRM and ERP like SAP instead.

I also find it interesting how American and European HNers are much more negative about AI compared to their Chinese, Indian, and Israeli peers even though they have a significant amount to lose as well.

I don't understand this sentiment. I'm absolutely significantly more productive with AI; so much moreso that I now have freetime and we haven't needed to replace an engineer who left. On the flip side my coworkers who think they're above AI are drowning. I think there is an endemic problem of senior engineers who think they're above learning AI and agents who don't want to use them, and these cuts are about forcing them to get with the times or drown in work.

Replacing jobs is a bit of a misnomer, but it's certainly allowing us to build out more features in shorter amounts of time.