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They told him everything is oriented towards AI, to the point that otherwise profitable software is not being updated and development has stopped on anything new.
Oracle has a lot of niche solutions and the one my friend’s corporation uses is profitable but not on the AI path, so it is being put into maintenance mode.
I’m not saying AI is the next internal combustion engine. If Oracle is certain it is, though, then that sounds like a more rational move.
If each dollar you throw at dead-end product lines returns $1.20, that gives you more to spend on R&D for the new hotness. Shutting down the old business doesn't maximize spending on new R&D.
Now it's different when there's a conflict over resources. . However, in retrospect it would seem like bad business to throw resources after dead-end product lines, even if they’re valuable, because each dollar not advancing their automobile R&D was a dollar wasted on legacy stuff. If we need kstrauser to keep the old business running and we also need kstrauser to have effective R&D for the new business, hard choices are ahead. For carriage makers, manufacturing facilities would be the big resource issue; maybe you need to stop production of carriages to start working on horseless carriages because they're built in the same facility and can't share and a second location would be too costly.
I don't think the facility argument applies to Oracle. And probably not the key person argument either; line of business apps and AI are pretty different and I wouldn't expect a top person in one to be a top person in the other (although they might be).
> Oracle shed about 21,000 roles globally in the last year as the US technology giant reshapes its business around artificial intelligence (AI), the firm's latest annual report shows.
[1] https://www.hrgrapevine.com/us/content/article/2026-02-11-ai...
Can you explain what you mean?
>I made it up. It was invented by a writer.
Let’s say someone is entering the IT job market today. How should they prepare for the responsibilities of adulthood, starting a family, buying (perhaps on a mortgage?) their first flat, and planning for a family? I’m not writing solely in the context of AI layoffs but broader. Over the last 10 years that I’ve been in the IT industry from EU/US perspective, I’ve perceived the market as economic cycles, the sine wave of which has narrowed significantly (more often markets demands changes and instability) and accelerated in the past years.
I can go for a decade without another dime coming in the door. If I started using DoorDash and Amazon Prime every day, I'd last maybe 18-24 months. Just barely treading water is actually a great position to be in. It keeps you honest and any amount of work you do find on top of that feels like a windfall. An extra $500/m is a lot if you can make it happen consistently.
(Source: I'm one of the 21,000, let go via a 6am email after 15 years with the company in engineering and management roles.)
You save a good deal of cash for emergencies, live below your means, keep your skill set up to date and face the world.
Seems possible to flatten out a company, in a way the domain knowledge is kept.
That being said, I haven't seen many layoffs that actually seem directly AI related, because the main effects are not hiring junior Devs, and not outsourcing to low cost/skill areas.
This definitely seems possible, but I've rarely seen it work. That being said, the follow on from any layoffs (reduced morale, more switchers) make it hard to be certain here.
And that is not even considering how much it costs to run AI right now at scale AND retraining people to use the new tools AND possible disruption in existing workflows.
If I was running a large org I would actively try to slow down AI adoption in most areas until there are clear established solutions.
However, if you are oracle sending out consultants with zero domain knowledge around to help.... I would rather just use claude.
I am not sure we are there yet.
In my experience even the SoTA models are faaaaar away from replacing humans, maybe making them a bit faster.
It's a very convenient excuse, especially given the apparent lack of public backlash to it, compared to, say, "the business isn't profitable and we need to save money."
But we are talking about a corporation that is one of the most sociopathic in modern business history.
They're going to flip us all like burger patties eventually - we're done on this side.
1. I was in the top 0.01% in my state. (Actually true; who gives a crap; it was a quarter century ago and literally no one other than Canonical cares.)
2. You can’t prove me wrong. I can’t prove me right, because I’m not the kind of loser who has a wall of their high school accomplishments they never moved past.
3. The fact that you’re even asking shows that this is an amateur hour leadership team who cares about utterly irrelevant things.
Anyone who has that stupid of a hiring process deserves to have unfilled roles. I’m hiring for several roles right now, and while I ask a great many things, I promise you that none of it relates to their high school math performance.
I'm inclined to believe that its no longer the case of employees being replaced by AI but simply those businesses being replaced by AI and the current businesses who were able to benefit from AI are reaping the momentum they have but eventually this will end.
Open source databases have already been doing this for decades. You can’t just clone its products and expect to eliminate it. Oracle is driven by a strong sales culture and ruthless business strategy.
Narrator: This was not, in fact, obvious.
Which will probably depress wages of service workers - unless somehow there is a dramatic expansion in service demand, which apart from particular industries (i.e elder care), seems unlikely.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636590
These companies seem to be led by mind bogglingly short sighted people. Maybe they should be replaced by AI. It can't possibly get any worse than now, right?
There's a whole bunch of open roles at Oracle right now. https://careers.oracle.com/en/sites/jobsearch/jobs?keyword=E... 700 of them within engineering.
Ah yes, fire to rehire via the model training gig economy
Like, mate, if you want to be a superhero in real life, stop laying off thousands of people and working the remaining people ragged. That's all you gotta do.
And he'd take a good chunk of that money for himself, and a good amount of that to also "donate" to a foreign, nuclear-armed, hostile country's "defense" force. But don't you dare question him.
DBA would go around screaming if you were logging too much stuff. I assumed they had some sort of periodic cleanup because I couldn't see that stuff being practical long term.
Technically it was 2 databases, one was a read replica for longer running data analysis of course.
That telecom has at least 100 million paying customers (maybe much more). I don't see they ever moving away from Oracle, they are more likely to go bankrupt than ever leaving.
[1]: Oracle RAC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_RAC
They are justifying that on commitments (500+B USD), but 300B of those are tied to OpenAI. So, if OpenAI goes belly up or at least doesn't follow their crazy growth projections, they would have to find the same amount of consumption quickly to repay the interest on said debt and eventually the principal.
It is a lot of money for a company the size of Oracle (~500B market cap).
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/oracle-500...
But Oracle could relatively easily be broken up and sold off. Essentially all of the global consulting business units could sell to competitors in the various niches, the hardware business and the cloud hosting business could be separated, etc.
Plenty of companies worldwide would be up for buying pieces of Oracle at a bargain price.
"Too big to fail" only really applies in extreme circumstances (which might happen, admittedly) and with essentially monolithic businesses (or banking).
I don't think even Microsoft is too big to fail.
And I don't think people should casually entertain the idea that really any tech industry company is too big to fail, because tech corporations that cannot die point the way to a Rollerball future.
And the dot com bubble collapse of Nortel and Worldcom shows that even well-established companies with significant non-bubble investments are vulnerable if the companies make poor economic decisions (in both of those cases, the collapse was driven by excessively aggressive acquisitions).
Likewise, LLM's won't disappear completely with a stock market crash. But the weaker players might.
So the predictive autocomplete will survive those too.
All in the all-mighty fiduciary duty to your investors of course.