Oracle is cutting thousands of jobs as the US technology company seeks to reassure investors that its bet on AI infrastructure will pay off.
The $420bn (£315bn) company, which is headquartered in Austin, Texas, started making employees redundant on Tuesday, with thousands of its 162,000-strong workforce expected to leave.
About 10,000 people have lost their jobs so far, the BBC reported, citing an unnamed employee at the company, which is chaired by Larry Ellison, the billionaire ally of Donald Trump. Ellison is worth $189bn and is the world’s sixth richest person, Forbes estimates.
Michael Shepherd, a senior manager at Oracle, who was not affected by the cuts, posted on the social media site LinkedIn that there had been a “significant reduction in force” at the business.
Shepherd said the decision had affected “senior engineers, architects, operations leaders, program managers, and technical specialists with deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, government and sovereign cloud environments, and enterprise-scale systems”.
That’s just what we need. More senior tech workers out of work in Austin. Thank god we now have a fresh supply!
I was seeing a whole bunch of Oracle people I know suddenly “open to work” on LinkedIn, posting about how they were all “ready for my next opportunity” or “excited to discover my next project” and immediately correctly guessed what had happened.
I really fucking wish we could stop using this corporate bullshit. I haven’t been “excited” about a new position since roughly 2003. Layoffs do not engender excitement unless we get really pedantic about the multiple definitions of the word.
I despise LinkedIn for encouraging such shitty verbal veneer to gloss over a rotten corporate foundation.
That’s just what we need. More senior tech workers out of work in Austin.
Hey, we have a ton of those here in Washington too! Maybe if someone finds a way for AI to actually be a productivity booster, they can hire all the tech workers and turn them into money printers with the insane output they’re supposed to produce with it.
Honestly, my main concern is the pipeline of junior devs who were actually mentored will dry up, and these quarterly results are all they care about. When no one knows anything in a decade, and the business is dying, AI is not going to swoop in to fix it.
Or Oracle will start stealth hiring in other countries like Poland and India to use that staff as their junior devs in a more sink or swim environment.
AI is the favorite excuse to lay people off. Don’t like someone? AI replaced them. Someone asked for a raise? AI replaced them. Someone got pregnant? Surprisingly, AI also replaced them.
No one knows more about pregnancy than AI. It’s the personal lived experience that really gives them a leg up.
“It’s here right now and definitely working and producing productivity and revenue, but also we need to cut costs so we can keep spending money on it. Hmmm? Why not use the revenue it’s generating to pay for it, well, you see, we’re just scailing so fast it’s not enough. Oh, why not fund it with credit? The banks won’t let us put up the nvidia chips as collateral to buy more nvidia chips anymore.”
Larry’s yacht (ship) costs a lot to run…
Hopefully he can dock in the UAE and use AI to repair the crater that was a data center.
