Oracle’s 6am layoff emails hit staff amid new wave of cuts(techtimes.co.uk) |
Oracle’s 6am layoff emails hit staff amid new wave of cuts(techtimes.co.uk) |
That means they can't borrow cheaply anymore. The only way to raise cash now is to cut payroll, and that's what they are doing. And what are they doing with the cash? Buying Nvidia hardware to rent out to OpenAI [2].
All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in. This is a commodity business, Oracle has no IP in this. To fund it they are making deep cuts to their software development business which does have proprietary IP.
That may have made sense when it was originally announced because AI hype was at its peak at the time. Indeed, Oracle's stock shot up when Stargate was announced, and Larry Ellison briefly became the world's richest person. However, since then the AI hype has evaporated, and hyperscalers are no longer being rewarded with a higher stock price. Oracle stock has dropped more than 50%, and companies NOT investing 100s of billions in AI hardware are now being rewarded, such as Apple.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/magazine/takeaways-larry-...
https://fortune.com/2025/09/28/larry-ellison-ai-surveillance...
1. Any cloud business essentially is "unpacking servers and plugging them in." Yet the cloud business has been exploding quarter-over-quarter ever since AWS came online. To the tune of double-digit billions cash flow every quarter for each of the hyperscalers, even before the AI boom.
2. Nvidia servers are at the moment even less commodity than typical cloud servers and are currently THE hottest hardware resource in the world. Everyone is scrambling desperately to procure them, and the US and China are battling geopolitically over access to these things, and they are actively being smuggled to bypass these restrictions.
> However, since then the AI hype has evaporated, and hyperscalers are no longer being rewarded with a higher stock price.
This is a misreading of what has been happening with hyperscaler stock prices. They have consistently been punished despite record estimate-beating earnings pretty much every quarter for the past multiple quarters, precisely because they keep incinerating all that money and more on the same CapEx that Oracle is.
At this point it is pretty clear that the biggest moat in the whole AI boom is access to compute, for which the demand has just kept exploding. (See: Anthropic paying its competitors through its nose to keep Claude up.)
I've little love for Oracle, so I fear they will actually make out like bandits with these moves.
No, major cloud providers are mainly a software business. They provide unique manage cloud offerings, which provides value add over raw hardware as well as lock in. People on AWS cannot just move to GCP, let alone DO. Hence amazon can charge a substantial premium over the price of the hardware, which is why they make so much money. If all you are doing is plugging in GPUs, you don't provide that value add and are going to have very slim profits.
But it's not if you can jump to the front of the GPU allocation line like Musk has done.
Where is the value coming from when all knowledge work (and later manual work) is 10-100-10000x cheaper done by AIs? You probably don’t want to build models, too easy to move to another provider when one is better, open models eat your lunch etc. But there are still means of production to be owned but it’s just GPUs
What? Nvidia stock, for instance has been moving largely sideways for the past 4 months. Maybe it's not as jubilant as before, but it hasn't exactly "evaporated".
"If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world."
— Satoru Iwata (former Nintendo CEO)
Why do companies bother with this horse excrement? Does a sentence like this make anyone feel better?
Most times, I wish they'd just send the honest truth. "Hey, we screwed up. We over-hired and ran out of funds so we had to let you go to make payroll" or "Our M&A strategists overpaid for an over-leveraged company and now we have to figure out how to pay down the debt. Your position was cut as a result."
Obviously corporations owe nothing to nobody (apparently) but I'd love it if the patronizing language stopped.
Oracle is in a spiral it seems. Is Stargate still plugging along?
Makes me wonder why they're shedding so much and if Zitron was a little right after all.
The software side can probably go many years without new features. Nobody picks Oracle in 2026 for the features.
13% doesn't seem too different from other tech companies
Just Ellison with a giant red borrow more button.
All the other employees are just overhead
...First time?
Oracle is literally the company Dilbert was making fun of
Versus https://www.techtimes.co.uk/oracle-new-layoffs-restructuring...
It's unclear how many were actually cut because the 21000 / 13% numbers were reported nearly 3 months ago?
Here's the severance package Oracle offered laid-off US employees - https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-severance-package-us-... - September 14th, 2026
The workers who built the company and created its worth (obviously not evenly distributed) now get a "thank you very much goodbye" e-mail. I think they deserve ownership and to take part in these decisions.
Maybe a better conversation to have as we keep moving through this AI Engineering era and a bunch of new companies are created. If you are considering founding a company, would you start it as a union shop? If not, why?
Investors want to get wealthy, founders want to get wealthy, employees are just fuel for that machine. The examples are robust of how startup employees make out the vast majority of the time.
Union support is at record highs, there will always people who think they can do better without, best to not argue with folks who ignore data and stats. Their belief system won’t be swayed with logic and reason.
(a potential solution to this is for unions to turn into cooperatives and accelerators over time; they could build their own investment funds with their pensions an investor in their portfolio companies, if Bending Spoons was a union cooperative if you will, for example)
One of the first things that "progressive" politicians should do if they take power is require large companies to disclose the exact number of firings before people are notified.
"Even if an employer does not have a collective agreement, they must negotiate major changes to working and employment conditions of employees who are members of a trade union as if the employer had a collective agreement."
Negotiations include getting the lists of positions that will be terminated, number of employees affected, new positions that may be opened during a reorganization, etc.
It‘s the best free platform for learners and small scale operations.
an LLM told me about that option when I was seeking out free tiers
> (PHOTO: GEMINI AI)
Yells at cloud
> 100 or more redundancies - the consultation must start at least 45 days before any dismissals take effect
https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/consultation
If you want to have similar laws, you need to lobby your representatives, and get them to follow California's example, which introduced the Cal-WARN act:
> “an employer may not order a mass layoff, relocation, or termination at a covered establishment unless, 60 days before the order takes effect, the employer gives written notice of the order”
From https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Cal-WARNAct.html
But as others have said, it's not as strong as the UK laws, so it just becomes a de-facto notice period instead. It's still progress though.
* Although not one I've ever heard of, which is a little suspicious.
For European standards, it's not only cold but would be absurdly illegal.
This, the company stays compliant with all the regulations but they don’t have to worry about disaffected employees during those 60 days.
6am email. You were an employee through any notification/WARN period. But no access. No work. Garden leave euphemistically.
WARN varies by state and location. And usually is only applied to onsite employees. And only if the layoff affects certain number or more. So if you are a remote employee, you were done at the next pay period. For me in CO that was 4/10. Not 60 days obviously as I didn’t qualify for a WARN notice due to being remote.
Various CA colleagues were through May or close to that.
It doesn't read so much like "honesty" to me as it does arrogance and spite (which, to be fair, aligns with everything I've heard about their corporate culture). Fundamentally, responsibility for layoffs is always on the shoulders of corporate leadership; regardless of individual employee performance, each of them was vetted extensively and ultimately hired by Meta; the company could have elected to work with them to bring performance up to a higher standard (if you believe their claim that it wasn't), but instead they chose to amputate them en-masse.
It's not "honest" to punish and blame a huge swath of your workforce in a single stroke for your hiring and management mis-steps, it's cowardly and lazy.
They didn't. Look at their headcount from 2010 until today.
Heck our current admin can’t do any wrong in their own eyes, every thing is perfect and winning including the morass in the Middle East that was arbitrarily started on whim and resulted in economic chaos. Or the trade war with Canada.
Or Biden, he couldn’t do any wrong in his own eyes and that led to the current situation.
So looks like they overcome their limitations.
[1] https://oracle-base.com/articles/26/assertions-26 [2] https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/security/deep-data-securi...
Oracle RDBMS is a critical component of huge and important application platforms from banking to infrastructure.
Millions of tests are good! I would be concerned if it wasn’t a “test heavy” development process.
A slow and measured pace with every consequence thought out is also good. Otherwise the product rots away in all but the most common combination of configurations.
Etc…
The only valid complaint is that the test farm is under-scaled. Increasing its capacity would direly increase development velocity.
Testing is what held everything together. They seem to have been taking it seriously and that alone was enough to keep a product of that scale (barely?) afloat. A success!?
But it sounds like every other good practice went out of the window. They are drowning in unimaginable amount of technical debt, ossified over decades. That, and the complaint about testing infra indicates to me that even their tests are a pile of sh*. He wasn't running them locally, so they were integration tests. Meaning that had there been a foundation of unit tests - they wouldn't need that many slow integration tests.
It sounds like they just brute forced all their problems with test farms. I'm almost sure they double down on AI - why make your code base better if AI can figure out how 100 flags can interact with each other.
2. Why can’t cloud providers do the same thing with GPUs that they do with other servers? Are GPUs somehow not amenable to managed cloud offerings wrapping them?
3. Literally just having any access to GPUs (or heck, even memory) itself is the value add today. Maybe when we have supply to match the demand things will change, but that seems to be a ways away and points 1 and 2 above will still be in play anyways.
Note that this doesn't make for a bad company! You can run a $0-profit company indefinitely and give employees nice jobs for providing nice services to your customers. There's nothing wrong with that. It's great! But you don't get the same multiples for that arrangment as you do for a company that's growing quickly. Lower multiples = stock drops = One Medium Wealthy Asshole Called Larry Ellison, and that's something I simply do not think he could tolerate.
That's true. This lets Oracle coast for a while. But if they coast for too long SAP will overtake them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...
This is another 20,000 - 30,000 (the exact number isn't public yet) on top of that.
Beatings shall continue until morale improves.
"That's life" in the RDBMS space. All of the major vendors are drowning in tech debt and there's (almost) nothing they can do about it because of backward compatibility limitations.
For example, Microsoft SQL Server 2025 will create new databases with default settings that are unchanged from SQL 7 -- from the previous century!
Oracle's stuff JustDoesn'tWork(tm) once you move past its core database offering. And even that (see: RAC) is sometimes problematic.
He's also not in a place where he can draw cartoons, what with being dead and all.
Indeed.
Compute
Arm Compute Instance
Arm-based Ampere A1 cores and 12 GB of memory usable as 1 VM or 2 VMs
Always Free
1,500 OCPU hours and 9,000 GB hours per month
Do you think GPUs will continue to be bought at the same rate as during the ai data center buildout gold rush era, at the same ultra high up prices?
btrfs ended up being basically a consumer version of a few of ZFS's most visible features - transparent compression, subvolumes, and copy-on-write - which then farms out the other most useful features - RAID + volume management + encryption - to the existing tooling. Makes sense for a smaller-scale project, no shade, but it definitely misses the mark if you've spent time on ZFS systems taking advantage of what ZFS has to offer (like recursive snapshots or vdevs).
Given different historical circumstances, it could probably have picked up more traction. But not sure what would change today even with an Oracle licensing change.
Relicensing it would probably make it into kernel within months and I am absolutely sure adoption would happen quickly. Mind you, ZFS is more important to servers than desktop.
btrfs is lighter on memory use and a bit easier to administer (until it eats your data). But if zfs licensing becomes cleared up and it becomes a normal part of the linux kernel that would be a lot more attractive than btrfs to me
XFS was dead to me 20 years ago. The only time I ever actually verifiably lost data to a system crash was on XFS. I had actual zero length files with XFS after a crash. Lost actual data. But the file system was in totally happy consistent metadata state. Never ever would I ever consider that filesystem ever again.
The ominous "reisserfs" everyone complained about? Never lost a single byte of data to it even when I pulled the plug in the middle of a write operation to test it. No issues with ext4, no experience with btrfs.
I vaguely know some of the backstory of moving off ext4 (as default). As I understood it at the time, it was less focused on some of the larger systems Red Hat was interested in.
I was merely talking about the experience with XFS "back in the day" and yes I was on reiserfs and then XFS "came up" and I changed my home partition to that, coz I was looking to move off of reisserfs. Power outage. Boom, lost half my home dir. Suddenly lots of totally fine metadata wise files had null length. I did go back to reiserfs until ext4 was stable enough after that. I will never try XFS ever again, sorry. Loosing data is the thing that a file system can't do to me if they want to "retain my business" so to speak.
And yes, reiserfs I actually tested and had survive some power outages totally fine too. I believed the XFS hype too much without proper testing. My bad I guess in that sense. We were all young once. But also: Never again XFS ;)
https://www.cbr.com/paramount-dismantling-star-trek-9-year-s...
You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle."
— Bryan Cantrill
But think of it this way. If Ellison’s acquisition of Warner Bros falls through Ellison must pay Warner Bros a $7 Billion breakup fee. That’s on top of the $2.8 Billion they paid Netflix to abandon its pursuit of Warner Bros.
So Ellison would have wasted $9.8 Billion and years of his life for absolutely nothing. And I think we can all agree that the world would be better off.
Years of his life, perhaps, though a large part of that will be banks and lawyers, not him grinding it out.
He won't even notice the money being gone, not even close.
Years of his life and 5-10% of his net worth. That’s the kind of thing people notice.
People seem to be focusing more on individual reporters, subscribing directly to good journalists who have gone out on their own. We are also seeing a thing that pleases me ver much: Reporters focusing on the subjects they are experts in and not doing a jack of all trades master of none. Its made me accept that I wont get top tier news in every subject so I have to pick what really matters to me(Tech, Food, entertainment, geopolitics of specific regions of the world etc.).
On the low end though its more bleak. TikTok slop, Youtuber "commentators" etc.
The real problem with that one, though, is it would utterly destroy the American movie industry, which is a crucial part of our economy and culture.
I don't understand, if Oracle etc. has financial problems, why would movie-making bits be destroyed as opposed to sold to new owners?
If the American movie industry got "destroyed", what would that look like, and how would it lead to long-term malaise? Offhand, I can't imagine the same kind of supply-chain/infrastructure rot-problem as, say, the "destruction" of the automotive industry.
Consolidation into one company with a huge amount of market power ruins the market, destroys innovation, and destroys infrastructure and capacity within the vertical.
Makes me think of Neil Gaiman's American Gods
I will give you the time though, or the motivations (however appalling they are) for his exertion of energy on these.
Yeah, America is way overdue for some trust-busting.
That resembles, to me, how newspapers used to be - except instead of a small fraction of people being willing to pay for quality news, roughly two thirds were (62 million subscribers out of 92 million American households in 1989 [1]). Like Bloomberg today, their incentives were to provide information for serious people and to cultivate a trustworthy reputation, rather than to enrage people into commenting and sharing articles.
The decline of newspapers is of course too much of a tangent, but I think it's interesting how the math kind of illustrates why most 'news' has to be trash now.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers...
and https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families... (Table HH4)
Personally I didn't hate the gimmick episodes, but enjoying them sort of requires no longer taking the show seriously at all.
As for taking the show seriously, I don't take any of it seriously. It's a telenovela, or maybe we should say Stellanovela. Most episodes build a fairly cohesive story, then break loose, and those old scientists have fun with the Star Trek universe. It's not like they're acting in a Chekhov play.
> A transporter malfunction turns most of the crew into puppets while Spock fights to reclaim the ship.
Fans: "The last series was the worst ever!"
Star Trek producers: "Hold my beer..."
Fans: "You know, the old series weren't so bad in retrospect."
At least the TNG duds attempted some kind of sci fi technobabble explanation for whatever hijinks were occurring. With this season of SNW, we're getting plot devices like "missing resistance leader just happened to look identical to Enterprise's first officer by complete coincidence!" and "spooky derelict ship is haunted, no explanation even attempted!" ... there are worse ones I could reference but they're spoilers. I'm genuinely starting to wonder if an LLM is writing these scripts.