alt Hacker NewsThe at-will firing is just how it is in the US, but I do find it odd how accepting we've become with these corporations massively overhiring.
If they have to fire twenty percent of the company, shouldn't that be a signal to investors that the people in charge are morons for overhiring thirty thousand people in the first place? Software engineers aren't cheap; assuming an average compensation of $250,000/year (which I think is pretty conservative if you count total comp like insurance and stock) then that's 7.5 billion dollars of investor money they're wasting per year.
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Not employees are hired though, a fair amount are added through acquisitions. Reducing staff could be just streamlining redundancies . Not the case here [1], but it not always bad planning.
Even without acquisitions, business conditions can change rapidly things like tariffs, interest rates , war or competition due to newer tools etc , as an investor you can would want leadership to move fast and course correct, rather than be held by the sunk cost fallacy.
All else being equal, the way investors would see a change like this - is now the company is no longer wasting 7.5B/yr in the future and their current cost was already priced in.
However all else is rarely the same, there could be other factors, like slowing sales growth projections which can bring down the multiples .
Oracle is still trading at 28x P/E historically they typically traded at 15x, given the growth and risk profile a more realistic number .
Since 2022 (ignoring 2020 spikes) the number has been going up are basis the expectation that their cloud business will really benefit from AI significantly.
If the market no longer has the confidence —- it has already cooled a bit since October then stock will keep dropping, layoffs will only slow it down a bit .
The timing is critical, because leverage/sale of Oracle stock is how the Warner Bros Discover acquisition is being funded .
The increasing doubts about that financial viability is why that stock risk premium is increasing on Warner .- Currently trading at 27 although acquisition price is 31 and it was trading at 29 a month back . Also senior executives like Zaslav are selling now at 27 which they less likely to if they believed deal will close at 31 soon.
TLDR; this 30k layoff is an attempt to strengthen/save the other acquisition Oracle is indirectly financing.
[1] although the Cerner acquisition added 30k employees to Oracle 3 years back. This doesn’t seem related to that. Oracle did not have a strong overlapping BU, there were/are some redundancies as in any acquisition but certainly not 30k
Yeah, the "just how it is" part was the part I wasn't aware of. Sibling comment has pointed out that apparently the US is the only country in the world where this is the case. And totally agree on the latter point.