We should really be more thankful for the existence of PostgreSQL

There are three different Db2 databases.

I believe the mainframe version was first.

There is a version baked into the os/400 operating system (i series).

Then unix/windows Db2 came last, if memory serves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Db2

It's very amusing to me that you bring up IBM in a discussion of the value of Oracle.

I came here to say that if you want to understand Oracle's value, think IBM with less history.

Really, you've always had to be careful with MySQL. It really was the PHP of RDBMSs.

The silent "SHOW WARNINGS" system, nonsense dates like Feb 31, implicit type conversions like converting strings to 0s, non-deterministic group by enabled by default, index corruption, etc.

Not just constraints, transactions were also a no-op. The MyISAM engine is still available in modern versions if you want to experience this, it's just not default anymore.

I love Postgres in 2026, but it really was not a viable enterprise option before 2010. MySQL had decent binlog replication starting in 2000 which made up for a lot of the horrible warts it had.

Having written a rust client for it, even their documentation is absolutely stellar. You just read how the protocol works from the PDF and implement it.

Can't say the same about Oracle.

DB2 was crazy good for certain use cases but very weird. For one, the pattern for DB2 efficiency was pretty much the exact opposite of every other database. Every other database would say "Normalize your tables, use BCNF, blah blah, small reference tables, special indices etc".

DB2, the pattern was "denormalize everything into one gigantic wide table". If you did that it was insanely fast for the time and could handle very large datasets.

SQL Server was very good and used in a lot of enterprises. ime the decision between Oracle and SQL Server tended to be down to whether the IT department or company was a "Microsoft Shop" or not. There were a lot of things that came free with SQL Server licenses and it had really nice integrations with other Microsoft enterprise systems software and desktop software.

Oracle was definitely seen as the more mature and resilient (and expensive!) RDBMS in all the years I worked in that space. It also ran on Unix/Linux whereas SQL Server was windows only. Many enterprises didn't like running Microsoft servers, for lots of (usually good) reasons.

SQL Server 2000 was well received in the segments that mattered as a challenger. Oracle was in first place running on Unix. However, it was viewed as expensive and the procurement experience was regarded as unpleasant. People wanted competition even if they didn't think SQL Server, or another alternative, could unseat Oracle for the most important stuff.

Windows was really picking up steam and there was a move to web development in the Windows-based developer space. Visual Basic and Delphi were popular but desktop development had peaked. ASP was for building your apps and SQL Server was the natural backend. SQL Server fed off this wave. It wasn't dislodging Oracle, but rather than every app being built on Oracle, more apps started to use SQL Server as the backend.

Then ASP.NET appeared on the scene and demand grew even more. It was a well-integrated combo that appealed to a lot of shops. I started my career in a global pharma and there was a split between tech budget. IT was a Windows shop for many reasons and ran as much on SQL Server as possible. R&D was Unix/Linux with Oracle. There was a real battle going on in the .NET vs Java (how about some EJB 1) and the databases followed the growth curves of both rather than competing against each other.

The SQL Slammer worm brought a lot of attention to the product. There were instances running everywhere and IT didn't expect so much adoption. Back then you had a lot more servers running inside offices than you do today. My office was much like my homelab today. This validated the need so the patches got applies, IT got involved in the upkeep, and adoption continued to grow.

Oracle's sales folk and lawyers were horrible to deal with. I had some experience of this directly as they tried pushing Java-related products and my boss dragged me into the evals. One of my in-laws was outside counsel in the IT space doing work with enterprise-sized companies. He claims they are the worst company he's ever had to deal with and wouldn't delegate any decision-making locally which endlessly dragged out deals. They had a good product but felt they could get away with anything. Over time he saw customers run lots of taskforces to chip away Oracle usage. This accelerated with SaaS because you could eliminate the app AND Oracle in one swoop.

I remember talking to one tech leader at the time who described it as "surprisingly good, for a microsoft product" which sort of summed it up. But it had similar characteristics to sybase except more so because you had to run it on an NT server (iirc) and so there was an even harder cap on the scale of hardware you could run it on, whereas you could run oracle on really top-end sparc hardware that was way more powerful than anything that ran windows.

Depends if the director or VP liked Microsoft or not. I’ve worked at places that loved SQL Server and Microsoft server products in general. Others did not use them anywhere in their datacenter and wouldn’t have considered them. Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft were very dependent on if the people in charged liked them. Not so much technical merits.

SQL Server was Sybase until (I think) version 4.9, just rebranded as Microsoft SQL Server.

Then the two versions split and I don't think that any of the Sybase source code remains in what is SQL Server today.

That said, a lot of the concepts (like a significant number of system stored procedures) and also TSQL remain almost the same, with small differences (except for system functions, which SQL Server has a lot more functionality).

When you come from the Sybase world getting a start on SQL Server is quite straight forward when it comes to handling the database.

Internals and other low level nuts and bolts differ nowadays, of course.

MS SQL Server was forked from Sybase in 1993. Not sure how much the code had diverged by 2000. Informix was also a contender back then.

SQL Server's claim to fame was GUI admin tools making life easier for many who bore DBA responsibilities only in anger.

It remains one of the most reliable Microsoft products, but few would claim that is a high bar.

This is a very short comment on SQL Server's code improvements (post-Sybase).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18464429

The top comment in the post is a long complaint about the code quality of the Oracle database (worth a read).

My experience at the time was that it was perceived as not serious enough and lacking important features. If my memory isn't very bad, I believe as late as 2000 SQL Server still only supported AFTER triggers.

In my experience in the late 90s and early 00s, besides Oracle and Sybase, DB/2 and Informix were also regarded as good. Oracle was considered the best though.

For others like me who might be skeptical to hear throughput in any metric other than seconds (and is used to large numbers in hours/days being used to inflate), I think millions per hour is actually quite high for 1998.

Assume that means 5_000_000/hour. 5M/hr => 83k/min => 1400/s. That is impressive for late 90s. I was generous on what "millions per hour" meant, but even if its 2.5M/hr that would be 700/s, which is still quite good.

Sort of. The VirtualBox Extension Pack is free for personal or educational use. It is explicitly not free for work use[0]. You can download it for free, but accepting the license to do so obligates you to pay them for it.

[0]https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ

Oracle was the ONLY game in town if you were serious. It was like buying IBM in the 80s. Source: programmed PL/SQL and embedded SQL at the Toronto Stock Exchange in the early 90s, on SCO Unix and Oracle.

Nobody was building WoW on FoxPro, c'mon.

You'd have to assume businesses were insane/stupid to go with Oracle to the tune of billions and billions of dollars if you believe that they had zero value to sell.

You're right of course, but we only just met! You're the first of probably many counter examples.

Yeah, lots of corporate backend code is Java, and Java is a great choice for backend/server code. I've never seen Oracle anywhere, though, not in banks and not in governments. I've mostly seen Postgres and MSSQL and some MongoDB.

There was a time (around the beginnings of Mac OS X) when Java was considered a first class citizen in Mac OS X, next to Objective-C.

Some NeXT products like WebObjects got ported to Java (and ran not only the iTunes backend but also things like the original Dell online store) and there was something called the Java bridge which allowed you to program Cocoa applications with Java.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

Oh, and with Yellow Box for Windows, this was also possible on Windows.

If you look at the screenshots here, it's mostly Windows 2000: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Le...

One only need look at the job postings for Apple to see quite how common Java backend is there.

> Clojure

Apple should do more of that - they make cool computers, and should use cool languages.

> entire backend for iTunes (Jingle) was written in Java

Wasn't that because iTunes started out as a NextStep WebObjects application? WebObjects started on Objective C, transitioned to a framework for Java in early 2000's, came to Apple with the Next acquisition.

iCloud is mostly Java (or was, about 10 years ago when I was there)

It could mean you know very few developers.

> Typically I see folks using the Amazon Corretto java distribution.

It means nothing. ~90% of core development of JDK and JVM is done by Oracle employees and it is shared by all distributions by various vendors.

Amazon, among others, write a lot of java, but they want absolutely nothing to do with oracle licenses for java

Useful for letting us know that GP has a limited network and situational awareness.

I always find these “relative to me” claims not very informative on the internet. But it fun when every once in a while you notice the claimer is Bill Joy or Linus Torvalds or someone where the relativeness holds weight.

I was surprised at first to learn Minecraft was a CIA plot and then I thought about it and it all fit together :)

Oracle effectively still largely controls the evolution of the language and of OpenJDK, and Java is still a registered Oracle trademark. While it could be forked and renamed if necessary (as happened in the javax –> jakarta transition), that would likely end up being quite disruptive and costly.

That being said, Oracle’s valuation is based on their huge integrated ecosystem. That they also control Java, while not insignificant, probably only plays a minor role there.

but what would be the blast radius for ZFS?

Most enterprises don't seem to be running ZFS with Linux, and the only large target using FreeBSD I can think of is Netflix, but AFAIR they don't use ZFS either.

Oracle sues when there's $$$ to make, but I don't think ZFS would warrant them much.

I'm not sure Larry would be interested in suing Matt Ahrens (one of the original designers), or a handful of LLNL employees (ie the US government).

It’s why I run btrfs on my lab machines. I’ve used ZFS for, looks at calendar oh, wow, literally decades now. It’s fantastic. But the miasma of Oracle’s infection keeps me from recommending it for anything commercial.

ZFS, in a vacuum is fantastic. But it’s not in a vacuum.

There's no zfs grenade. It's CDDL, feel free to use it wherever you want. Oracle can't come after you for violating the gpl even if somehow using zfs on linux violates the gpl.

Enterprise software as an SDK with a demo is a perfect way of explaining it - I'll have to remember that.

Jira, installed fresh, is nice. Jira after it implements your enterprise disfunction, is a new level of hell Dante couldn't've dreamed of.

People also marry the database when a significant amount of logic is in stored procedures.

We heard you're planning to migrate away from Oracle. We understand, but unfortunately, that means we have to get rid of the 75% discount we gave you, so we'll make a decade of revenue in the two years it'll take you to get rid of us. Still planning to migrate away?

The original question does discount the capability of Oracle's database too much, as only something "golf executives" buy. When you have a large problem that is best solved with a relational model, Oracle delivers and can indeed be worth all the money and license hell involved.

The irony is that the ERP space is ripe for innovation and disruption, but nobody wants to get into ERP because it's a goddamn nightmare.

Every business runs slightly differently than everyone else, and ERP tries to be this all-encompassing monolith. I wonder if the solution to ERP isn't just targeted microservices exposing data via APIs...

If you are not yet in Oracle's clutches you have to be extremely naive or shortsighted to be using Oracle cloud. Obviously the low prices are because they have a shit product and shit reputation, and the moment they think they captured large enough audience they are going to hike them

Well, that clinches it.

you could post the citations?

>I have no idea how they could have been so bad while employing so many people

There is a significant correlation between how many people you employ and how much nothing you accomplish. It means you've gotten big enough to survive long bouts of doing something and achieving nothing with large amounts of people.

> What on earth were those 30k people doing?!

Could be lawyers.

Would we be sad if they were lawyers?

It's been cut in half year-to-date. It's about where it was a full year ago right now.

The graph in your Macrotrends link shows the exact same numbers as the AI source, but is harder to read and the page is half ads. It's not an authoritative source -- the data was most likely parsed out of Oracle's earning reports by some janky regexp. I don’t know why you would trust this more than AI.

I verified it before and generated the graph with gemini for c&p it into hn

Or a pickup from 2015 - 2021 which was 0% growth.

It's tricky to pick an end-of-decade year also - recessions tend to happen +/- 2 years of the end of each decade in the USA, or at least have done since records began in the 19th century. For example 2010 was recovery over 2008/2009's bust. It's not like comparing March to Ma4ch for a crude seasonal adjustment.

You did the Python right but the analysis wrong. Looking at it on a graph you can see that interpreting a single growth rate for the entire period (even if you stop pre-covid) doesn’t make sense.

You can see linear growth from 2010-2017. Then slow decline or at best a flatline from 2018-2021. Then they went crazy in 2022-2025.

Now if we just do 162k - 30k we are back to 132k, basically same ballpark as pre-COVID.

Cool to be part of history I used to go into that office Innovations campus

Saw someone had a license plate say MPAGES ha

1. They maintain and sell one of the largest relational databases.

2. They're the primary maintainer of one of the largest programming languages.

3. They do tons of HR/ERP type software.

4. They have a supply chain division (my company is a direct competitor, and we have 2000 employees--it's a drop in the bucket, but a few thousand here, a few thousand there and it starts to add up. Afaik, their supply chain org is bigger than ours).

5. Other things I probably don't know about.

Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency, which swells the number of workers by a lot.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not remotely a fan, I like to quote Bryan Cantrill's rant. However, they do a lot of things.

I remember reading this post years ago, and it has stuck in my brain ever since: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

So I suspect the answer is: they need _at least_ 10x as many engineers to get things done as you would expect. Maybe more like 50x

Unless you have worked with Oracle or other big enterprises, you may not realize the scale of how these companies operate and the breadth of what they actually do. Just by looking at their product page[0] you can see they offer software, hardware, cloud, consulting, support, and even financing solutions. In addition to the technology and product people (of which there are many), you also need HR, sales, marketing, accounting, support, etc for the entire global organization.

Sure, 100,000 people is a lot, but Oracle also does a lot.

[0] https://www.oracle.com/products/

Oracle sells alot of software that is accompanied by hordes of consultants to set it up.

Last F50 I was at did a PeopleSoft migration. We probably had 400 Oracle employees pass through the doors over 2 years helping to get it off the ground.

Most Enterprises don't just buy software and that's it. They buy software + support to implement it for their business.

Almost certainly a large amount of support staff, so management/HR/IT etc... Then you've got your customer account managers, sales, lawyers/finance etc.... Given they do an insane amount of B2B and government sales I can see this being easy to reach tbh. Governement contract processes require an insane amount of bureacracy and negotations.

I’m guessing development is so slow that they have stacks of teams working in parallel to accomplish what 1 team could normally.

More than 70% of the employees are probably Sales/Support/Service -- on par with any large enterprise firm (Think Cisco/Salesforce/ServiceNow etc)

When you send your database a query, who do you think is gathering those tables?

Well, whatever Oracle is doing, which brings us back to a question very similar to your original one.

Solaris ?

Me too. Anyone here to enlighten us?

From what I've heard Epic can be as bad, but at least they're dedicated to one product.

Feel free to add more info to this discussion.

I only wanted to point out that number of jobs in context of the company growth. I found 160k already a huge/gigantic number though.

Make money? Seems kind of corpofascistic. That’s profit that should be shared with workers. If no employees it could be distributed to unions.

And what about those who you have a chance to and they didn’t cut it? Their life is ruined by being fired.

It's a failure of hiring, planning, and management. It's an off the books opportunity cost. It's an off the books cost of hiring a replacement. And if over hiring was done willfully, then yes it's straight up unethical.

Irresponsible, careless, negligent. No planning leads to all of this. Ultimately unethical from this point of view

Actually, it is. You have been blinded by capitalism to consider it ethical.

The tribes usually treat the members as a family. While kicking someone from a tribe can happen, it's considered to be a harsh punishment.

In a tribe, when hard times come, people usually redistribute. That's a normal, human way of dealing with that situation. Not a layoff.

The other aspect is the economic crises. When a central bank decides to increase interest rates, it decreases lending to new investments in favor of lower inflation. This can lead to layoffs, instead of having inflation inflicted on everyone (especially the rich with huge savings). So that decision is essentially some random guys get kicked out of economic (and societal) participation in order to prevent more redistribution of existing wealth.

If you think about it, yes layoffs are deeply immoral. But we can understand, why they happen in capitalism, as a sort of big tragedy of the commons.

It's an unpriced negative externality.

It is unethical, if there was nothing wrong with their performance and the company never tried to find a replacement position within the company. Stop licking boots, I heard they don’t even taste that good.

When done for profit maximizing reasons it's not any worse than capitalism itself, but then this degrades into whether capitalism is ethical which is off topic

> Laying people off is a result of mismanagement and not because they can't afford to keep them.

Markets are a chaotic system and the needs of a business must constantly adapt - or they go out of business.

That isn't though.

Both Cerner (EHR) and NetSuite (ERP) were laggards in their market segments for years.

If I'm the Director of Enterprise Applications and have a budget allocated to procurement, I have no reason to purchase a laggard product like Cerner or NetSuite even with the Oracle bundle when SAP is giving significant discounts because OpenAI, Anthropic, and GCP are offering partnerships with systems integrations like Accenture or Deloitte to fully build out and manage your own hyperspecific ERP or EHR.

There's no reason to keep investing in products in a market that was already past it's growth stage pre-AI with a clear market winner, especially now that there is downstream pressure that makes build much more attractive than buying an inferior product.

Based on your response, I doubt you even cared to read my entire post.

Edit: can't reply

> I didn't read it because it didn't exist yet, you added it in an edit

It did when I posted. The only edit I made after you posted was fixing HRM to EHR.

> You're not even disagreeing with my response, merely elaborating the mechanism behind it. This is bad faith posting.

I strongly disagree. My entire thesis is that Cerner and NetSuite were bad businesses. If a business is bad you kill the business.

No need to gaslight me and delete your response.

Minor nit - enterprise EMRs brand themselves as EHR because they consider it more encompassing than just medical records.

I agree on other points.

> You can't just vibecode your way to replacing an (sic) EMR

Absolutely, but you can now demand a market leader like Epic to give you a significantly better discount (eg. 20-30% over the 10% you may have previously been offered).

And that is the crux of the "SaaSpocalypse" and why you are seeing targeted layoffs in Oracle specifically for their ERP and EHR products.

> It's also worth noting that the DoD uses Millennium for active service members, and I think they also use it for TriCare. American taxpayers are on the hook for dealing with the problems that Oracle's cost cuts will produce

Absolutely, but they were already on the hook for that before Cerner became a part of Oracle.

he mentions being paid more in terms of time, "I now have freetime". I can relate, in the right use cases it is nice to do some work estimated for 12 hrs in 2.

I have to be honest that I'm confused by the comment, too. Including the edit about how being out of work would be traumatic, as if losing a job was unique to the United States.

The way this email is worded this would more likely be classified as a Redundancy as opposed to a Firing. So different laws/rules would apply

No they don't? You keep working for 2-10 months until you can leave whatever your contact says

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.

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

I did not know they got severance. In any case, I'm still not sure I'd prefer that scenario --- coming into your work to suddenly find you've been terminated and subsequently sitting on your ass for a couple months while looking for another job seems pretty emotionally damaging to me, but to each their own.

I completely agree, and apparently in California this is already the case --- I had no idea. In most contexts, though, I'd argue governments fall down on this task completely and people are, unfortunately, still very dependent on their employer. Same-day termination seems very socially risky in those cases.

The US government doesn't exactly go out of its way to support people either.

Maybe the solution is to not do mass layoffs. Not sure there's a dignified way to let go of many humans at the same time with almost no reason for why they're being let go except maybe a vague profitability scorecard.

And also to expect and manage people snapping and giving them an off-ramp, financially but emotionally as well and maybe professionally, too. Why not try to help them find other jobs?

Companies don't just provide money, they provide people with meaning, routine, social circle, and so much, and layoffs cut all of those immediately.

I have seen that too. People on the way out trying to get access to production systems. Layoffs suck, but the business needs to protect itself from those who are departing. The company used to have more lax separation procedures but after that incident everything got locked down.

Yeah, I'm confident that didn't happen

This is why it's important to have a network off of company property.

Eh, that's brutal, wondering why someone isn't replying to your email only to find out they get let go. Almost like finding out a friend died, in a professional way.

I think we often just don't understand the full dimensionality of layoffs.

Don't worry, big companies are doing similar things now.

Layoffs after the main activity period is over, laying off HR people after they held layoff meetings for other departments, etc.

Reptiles.

It sounds as if you're describing how to humanely kill a living being.

There are alternatives to killing things and I don't think fast clean cut is true in all industries. I think people want it to be true because then it hides away the complexity of the emotions we feel. Just cut it off and pretend that the cutting off won't bother us or them after the event.

I think that strategy may appear helpful but just buries most of the feelings, which don't go away, most likely just to fester underneath and erode trust.

> But it goes both ways, if I want to leave I have to work the mandated period

Do companies actually force people to continue working during that period? I would expect that in tech they'd allow them to leave early because employees who have chosen to leave the company are some times not the most helpful to keep around for months

Yeah, our litigation culture to me is just an inability for individuals/companies to resolve conflicts and escalate it to the legal system. And unfortunately there are many elements in the system that discourage us from reconciling and push us towards escalating.

Literally, "Human Resources". Such a disgusting phrase.

The sad thing is they probably did feel bad about it! But nobody cares and talking about it at that time is incredibly tone-deaf.

For the morale of remaining employees?

As far as actual people? Depends on their personal moral code and is why colleges make people take ethics, even if I don't think that results in anything other than more elaborate ways to justify doing whatever they feel like anyway. Most people would agree that you should minimize suffering in others if you can, but people who make it to upper management and C suites often got there by not being bothered by such scruples.

As far as the company is concerned, obviously there's no reason not to care aside from not wanting to lose any critical employees who value stability. That's why many of the labor protections we take for granted now were fought for many years in the past.

DTrace was absolutely a product of pre-Oracle Sun, not Oracle.

I forgot how much I hated the mixture of top and bottom quoting

Which I would definitely prefer. A couple of years ago, two weeks before Thanksgiving, management announced there would be layoffs. No timeline on when the cuts would be shared or number impacted. People had to sit around for weeks, wondering if they had a job. Should I buy Xmas presents? Who knows!

The problem with advance warning is the employee who decides to sabotage in revenge.

For example, a company I knew in the 80s had a wholly owned subsidiary. It was losing money, so it was decided to close the subsidiary. Management decided that they'd be nice guys, and notified the subsidiary that it would be closed in 90 days and then everyone would be laid off.

90 days later, management arrived to close the facility. It was empty, stripped clean of everything. Not a lick of work was done in the 90 days, and nobody was there. There were reports that trucks had come to the loading dock, and took everything they could carry.

The cost of that led to the collapse of the company.

I had to let an employee go because he didn't do any work, took forever to respond to chats (in a remote position), and was always late for meetings. I scheduled the 4pm Friday meeting to let him go. He was 15 minutes late.

Or, with emotions flaring, could say something that becomes grounds for a wrongful termination or discrimination claim.

What time is a good time for everyone to show up for a face-to-face layoff meeting for a global company?

If you don't do it simultaneously, you're going to hear by rumor rather than by official email, which is IMHO worse.

If you do it simultaneously, everyone will know something is up, because there's never simultaneous global meetings.

I agree. But, IMO it's what you should expect going to work for a giant company. It's a machine, it does not care about you. Some of the people will care about you, but often their influence is quite limited. It's important to understand this at the start.

I'm sorry but you work at Oracle. Terrible people. Very rude people. You should expect it.

The realistic alternative is to regularly cut a smaller number of people, which is awful for morale.

Why would you give someone 6 months notice? What good is that for the employee? Especially if the severance is generous.

“Hey, we’re going to fire you in 6 months. Just a heads up.”

Nah. Give me the year of salary and send me home today. Better for the employee and for the company than pointlessly dragging it out. Again, this is assuming generous severance.

Giving any kind of notice about layoffs while expecting employees to continue working is just bad for everyone.

The employees stress out about whether they're going to be impacted. Nobody gets much work done as they update their resumes and prepare for the worst. The best people start looking for other opportunities and find them. If specific employees are told they're going to be laid off, some seek revenge.

Much better to immediately notify those impacted, revoke their access, give them generous severance instead of expecting them to work, and let everyone else know they're safe.

6 months notice + 12 months salary, which is what you are proposing, seems strictly worse to me than just 18 months salary and no notice.

In many cases the manager is among those laid off. In fact some VPs and their entire org have been laid off.

You also don't have to give back 6-12 weeks of pay when you give your 2 weeks notice.

The wasted cashed is only part of the story.

Just think of the wasted man hours spent on integrating 30K new employees that supposedly the company didn't need. The time spent in meetings about restructuring departments, new points of contacts, reassignment of duties, figuring out who to promote, training the new hires, etc.

Now the company gets to it all again in reverse with much lower moral and excitement. The amount of hours & employee focus wasted on the bureaucracy of the hiring and firing over 30K employees instead of spending that time on improving the business should get you fired from leadership.

Politics.

Tech shareholders want executives to take risks building new products. Of course they’d prefer the products be successful but if the options are “hire 30k people 50% chance we have to lay them all off” or “don’t build new products” most tech shareholders want option 1.

I used Google Gemini to confirm before I posted my comment. You're welcome to do the same.

You want the government to force employers to provide a social safety net rather than the government providing it directly?

The problem isn't that people can be fired, it's that their food, housing, and medical care are all dependent on or provided through their employer.

You can quit your relationships at any time, too. That's a fundamental tenet of our society - consent to an interaction between free people can be withdrawn at any moment for any reason.

That's not perpetual anxiety - that's the way things work today, and the way things have worked for generations. Anyone pretending otherwise is fooling themselves with lies.

Google did this in 2023, and this blog was a good PR move to make people think they are still doing this today.

OK but for most people a 16-week acceleration is still forfeiting 92% of unvested shares.

Just an FYI, if you're ok with not being in Manhattan or the cool parts of Brooklyn, it's really not that bad.

I live pretty far east in Brooklyn. I'm still only a few blocks away from a train; apartments in this area, even with a bedroom, can go for less than $2,000/month. Not "cheap" but not unlivable either.

I've helped a number of people with negotiations and reviews of their employment offers.

I would strongly disagree that accelerated vesting upon layoff is common. It's rare.

Ah okay, thanks!

> at your local mormon temple

Sounds like a kind of insult to me. I'm not related to them in any way.

And, to be honest, I'm just trying to kind of follow the guidelines. There's too much of bad news and negativity around me, I'm fed with it already, thanks. I want to have fun if it's possible.

Let us not forget the poor Nasser, whose username when combined with the Scunthorpe problem becomes N***er. Text censorship is not always a win.

I'm getting so exhausted by these weird Reddit/social media posts where my brain says "wait, is 'corn' a typo? Why did they write 'k*ll'", and so on.

The algorithm did something explicit censorship never could.

Yahoo reported the same 30,000 number in February

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-may-slash-30-000-11441...

you can get a gauge on Oracle debt by looking at CDS prices ( basically insurance that pays out if Oracle defaults on debt ). The link is from 4 months ago and it feels weird to link to reddit but CDS prices have risen quite a bit which implies loaning Oracle money is feeling riskier than it use to be. I don't know what the prices are now.

https://www.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/1p6f5ra/what_is_ha...

I wish i could remember exactly but there was some financing bet or debt structuring thing that Oracle did that didn't go according to plan and put them in a bad spot.

> Yes, but, well... why do they need to do that at all

Because the ERP and EHR market is almost entirely dominated by SAP and Epic. Frankly, the Cerner bet was already a bad bet when they took it in the early 2020s as was NetSuite to a certain extent.

No business has an obligation to hire you in perpetuity. Similarly, you have no obligation to remain at a company you don't like.

> Although... >> All of this is happening even as the company posted a 95% jump in net income — reaching $6.13 billion — last quarter.

Which is largely attributed to the growth in spend on Oracle Cloud.

---

I work in this industry and once you remove the AI washing, much of Oracle's current strategy is around building a hyperscaler business that is comparable to GCP and Azure in size. Already over the past 2 years I've seen 2 fortune 500s completely shift off AWS or Azure to Oracle Cloud because of better terms and strategic hires by Oracle Cloud.

Edit: can't reply

> Thanks for explanation

No worries! Infra, Enterprise, Cloud, and Cybersecurity has a very different dynamic from other businesses

> And still they were trying to compete, weren't they

Sure, 5 years ago. But not anymore.

> Why have their cloud services are suddenly started to make more money, roughly speaking

Becuase around 2-3 years ago Oracle Cloud began strategically hiring enterprise sales leadership from Azure, AWS, and GCP with preexisting relationships with F1000 accounts who were getting hit by contract renegotiations from the other 3.

> what exactly pushed them to do it right now

The "SaaSpocalypse" [0].

Basically, non-market leading Enterprise SaaS products cannot justify their current prices and valuation because the choice is to now either buy best-in-breed at a significant discount or build in-house working with a systems integrator for Anthropic, OpenAI, or Gemini.

If you weren't already a market leader in your specific segment of Enterprise SaaS you are most likely going to see your dealbook reduce significantly over the next 2-4 years as customers shift to dominant market players who are offering significant discounts to stave off a "build with Accenture/WITCH+OpenAI/Anthropic" disruption.

[0] - https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/01/saas-in-saas-out-heres-wha...

I used to work on software for non-profits. I found it fulfilling but it was hard to do the work since I found fullstack technically uninteresting (this is my own shortcoming).

Finding a balance in that is difficult. I have seen that it might be easier to find a societally good job the less technically deep the job gets. Networking research seems to be both technically interesting and connected to societal impact (eg. because of the ties to censorship, security, net neutrality etc)

It seems hard to continue doing this sort of research after your PhD though, as in both your school name matters immensely (i.e. you're screwed if you didn't go to Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, or MIT) and so does your publishing success to land a research job, which seems like an enormous task.

Are those startups self funded or funded by VCs? If they are funded by VCs, it doesn’t matter what your company wants.

I'm not unemployed right now, but in the past have applied to literally every one of those companies and been declined from every one of those companies.

It's hard to find jobs at companies that aren't run by monsters; even if you can identify a company that isn't terrible, there's still a relatively low likelihood of getting a job there.

I'm not blaming the companies for not hiring me, I'm sure they have their reasons for their terrible decision of passing up on someone as handsome and smart as me [1], and I am certainly not entitled to a job, but when I run out of companies that seem ethical, what do you do then?

It's easy to say "well start your own company!", and sure if you have the ability to do that then that's great, but I don't even really know where to begin with finding investors for stuff I'm working on, and I'm not sure that anything I'm working on would be interesting to investors anyway.

[1] It's true, my mom told me!

Because for profits have the most employment opportunities? All of the companies named in replies to my initial comment hire a minuscule number of people.

GitLab is for profit, isn't it?

Ok, and when you apply for and get rejected from all those companies, what do you do then? Suppose you give me a list of literally every company you think is ok, and I were declined by all of them, then what?

This isn't a theoretical question for me. I've applied to and been declined from all the companies you listed (except tarsnap because I didn't see a careers page). What exactly do I do then? Do I then just decide that food is overrated and be content with not having paycheck?

Valve has been making money hand over fist by getting kids addicted to gambling…

There are those who attribute evil to Lego, and they may have a case (historically or now).

Automattic has apparently gone insane, but that's not the same as evil.

Valve might be the closest to a HN-agree on "good company" - and even that has a comment below mine attributing gambling to them.

Valve takes 30% of revenue from developers because they have cornered the distribution market. Their margins on the steam store are probably second only to the apple store's, another heinously immoral product.

"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"

It is only a matter of time...

The automobile bubble has lasted longer than expected but the horses are sure to get their jobs back soon.

When everyone says it is a bubble it's very likely not a bubble.

Also LLMs have a lot of value because it is a way to steal intellectual property without anyone beeing able to do s.th. about it.

These companies didn't create the system and they are only rich and profitable because they act accordingly.

There's an argument to be made about bad incentives driving large public companies.

But it's way less satisfying that emotional appeals.

The base of your statement is just wrong.

A company is a legal fiction. It doesn't have thoughts, wants, desires. It's not rich or poor. It's a piece of paper. It's an entry in government database.

What is not a fiction is Oracle's owners i.e. shareholders.

They are not rich. Majority of them, either direct owner of stock or in-direct owners via pension plans etc. are like you and me. They are not rich and the price of Oracle shares can be a difference between them being able to pay rent today or being able to retire tomorrow.

Those people rightfully care about the share price.

The executive are correctly responding to wishes of owners of the company by managing it to make a profit and therefore keep the stock price high.

What in the above chain do you find objectionable?

That millions of Americans investing in public companies depend on and therefore care about stock price?

That management of public companies is correctly responding to demands of owners of those companies by managing companies for profit?

Or maybe you just want to skip to the end of the line and seize means of production from private citizens to bask in the warm glow of collectivism?