AI bet goes awry: Oracle fires 21,000 employees
3 months ago by sanitation to c/technology
I mean that’s one of the big draws of capitalism right? Much of the state’s power is derived from its elite oligarchy and their industrial contributions, in exchange for basically having a blind eye turned to anything they want.
When you allow structure of such importance to exist as a business, you balance your house on toothpicks.
Therefore, you can allow them to snap and tumble your whole home down a cliff; or you can treat them as part of the state (but, only when they need it. To keep up appearances.)
lol you think either party wouldn't bail them out? They all own stock in these companies, party line means fuck all when it comes to their net worth. Both parties will link arms sing kumbaya and rip us off yet again...
While I agree with the anti Oracle sentiment, that’s 21,000 employees that didn’t say they wanted AI BS. The suits and ceos that do this aren’t the ones that pay the price. It’s always the ordinary people like you and I.
There should be a law that if more than x% of the workforce is laid off, the entire C-suite has to go too.
I don't think employees can really be separated from the company mission. They might not be the ones who benefit the most, but they still receive some benefit in exchange for producing the outcome.
People resign from roles on ideological grounds all the time.
We’re still throwing out morality platitudes on tech workers as we’ve watched since COVID as the tech sector at all levels has bled jobs, senior staff looking for positions for 2-3 years in some cases.
It’s impossible out there. I have moral objections to the way my company operates too but if I quit now my family will lose everything. I mean thankfully I’m not exactly crushing orphans in the orphan crushing machine but in a sane market I would look for something a little more aligned with my personal ideals. However just like buying a stick of RAM for a reasonable price, it just ain’t happening right now.
I've resigned on ideological grounds twice. It's hard to do, especially if you don't have a safety net or savings to tide you over until your next job. That being said, I think that executive pay should be reduced to compensate for job losses (as a payout to all the people who got fired) anytime shit like this happens. Make the C suite take accountability for their gambles.
I have too, and paid dearly for it. I’m of mixed mind. Most people are trapped.
I 100% agree if we're talking about employees with the capacity to earn more than a living wage.
You can't tie people to the actions of the company they're working for if they're living paycheck to paycheck.
Employees in the tech sector can absolutely afford to not work at Oracle or Flock or any one of the other antihuman shitholes like them. For a lot of these people all it took for them to sell their morality was a chance to make six figures.
Yeah no they’re 100% gonna get bailed out. All they have to do is kiss the ring and they’re golden.
But fuck all of us, I guess.
Butt* fuck?
Ftfy
If they try to bail them out, we all stop working and mobilize. Don’t spread defeatism for them.
I've worked in IT for close to 30 years and I've never met anyone with a good word to say about Oracle. I remember them being notorious for auditing their customers and nailing them to wall for even the slightest perceived infraction of their convoluted license agreements. I don't understand how they still exist.
JDK is the greatest scam ever.
When something needs JDK, most people usually just download the first one they find without much thought, just like with any dependency, which is Oracle's, instead of OpenJDK.
Oracle will go after companies where their employees unknowlingly installed their JDK for some minor thing, and hit them with multimillion fine for breaking their license after a while. Or at least I remember hearing they used to.
Blocking anything Oracle company-wide, especially JDK, is the first thing an IT admin should do.
A prior company I worked at had a compliance division whose work was about 80% Oracle. As in, their attention over preventing Oracle JRE installs in favour of Azul Java was 4× higher than ensuring anything Microsoft - or anything else under the sun, actually - was properly licensed.
Yes but on top their software is clunky and lacks basic usability?
There's relatively little information given how prominent these companies are. But the CIA was the first customer of both companies, and were most likely involved in their founding. Here's a article to get you started on Oracle: https://www.sfgate.com/...
John McAfee claimed he never used McAfee VirusScan. He never said why but while on the run in Belize he said no one should use VirusScan. My wild guess is that it might be because it scans for lots of stuff that aren't in your interest as a user, and probably provides a convenient backdoor into your computer for certain people.
If you want the weird stuff on Oracle there's a crazy woman who's obsessed with Larry Ellison that writes all kinds of things about him on a place called the Drey Dossier.
I got my first computer at 15, in 2005, and even then they were very clearly bad just from my newbie experience and seeing forums posts. The word itself is so tainted for me because of them. One of the companies that "enshittified" way ahead of the curve.
Their sales and especially enterprise sales team are good at convincing people that they really need MySQL. Once their pitch works, then come the lawyers and the nailing part
Once you start using their software you cannot stop
It is really performant for the job it is required to do, they sell haxadata server which have really high performances
Yet they keep working for an evil company. They could have not done that. Had a little integrity. But no, so…
Oh hey I’m from the future where you get judged harshly for where you choose to work.
They've sponsored some really cool sailboats
I interviewed with them a few years ago and the dev I talked to said it was the best job he ever had.
That was the only time I ever heard anything positive about Oracle.
I used to work for Oracle and this pleases me. Nobody should have to work for Oracle.
I worked with Oracle software, and ... basically the same statement.
Some Oracle hr droid tried to hire me fresh out of university. It's been "some" years, and I've never heard anybody saying that I was a fool for turning it down.
How are you feeling now?
Morally I feel I made the right decision, financially probably not but I’ll choose morals over cash any day.
Won’t know if I’ll stay in IT yet for a few months at this new job, or if I need to pivot harder
Chinese open-source models are becoming the norm. You don't need the latest model from ChatGPT (e.g., a Ferrari) to complete your task. A simple Honda will suffice (open-source models), and it uses a lot less energy since it runs on your home or company's infrastructure.
Because of that, I predict that we're going to see a lot of financial hardship among AI companies.
Open-weight not open source mostly. And they're not keeping them open weight forever. Once they've truly surpassed the west, their future models will likely be closed down too so they could charge Anthropic level pricing and turn a profit.
I don’t know how much they’re actually doing to surpass the West tbh. A lot of the success relies on distilling closed models, and running the models cheaper with almost comparable effectiveness. If the Chinese are showing that such profit/investment strategies in closed models are weak and can be easily decimated by a competitor, what motivation would they have to adopt one?
If their models truly are reaching parity with new western models as many claim, then it can't be from distillation alone, they must be gathering their own datasets too. It takes months to train a new model.
Also distillation only really saves you the data collection and preparation (categorization). Training is still expensive, as is inference. It's likely architectural changes that are making their inference cheaper (MoE vs dense models for one), not sure if they've gotten any good methods for making training cheaper.
There is zero proof of distillation. Minimax 2.7 development was surrounded by moderate use of Claude. M3 is their latest generation, and pretty solid, but its performance cannot be attributed solely (or even 5%) to distillation, and that is only lab that has been accused of significant API use. These claims are all 3-4 months old by now, and Anthropic blocked China access after publishing the accusations. Repeated BS is BS from losers trying to lobby for support.
Deepseek v4 flash as it is now is perfectly fine for the basic agent stuff I use it for which is basically remote controlling my computer from a distance without using remote desktop. Not sure id be effected significantly if they blocked off their future models.
it uses a lot less energy since it runs on your home or company's infrastructure.
A CPU-cycle requires energy no matter where it is. The open source models may be more efficient, or you may distribute the power usage over a greater geographical area. But you're not using less energy because you're running the model at home.
Because of that, I predict that we're going to see a lot of financial hardship among AI companies.
I do like the idea that open source will kill tech giants.
You are correct. OpenAI etc. valuations are based on the difference between revenue and cost. The key part is that open source breaks the monopoly. It stops excessive rent being charged (now or in the future) to use Ai models.
Tech giants will still exist, but closed model advantages won't.
i thought tech valuations were based off of vibes and social currency
Initially maybe. Long term, money has to be returned.
Current marginal cost is certainly negative.
The expectation is that development costs will get cheaper (model design solidifies), Training costs will get cheaper (no need to retrain the whole model) and running costs will get cheaper (datacenter economies of scale).
All this is still true.
OpenAI, anthropic, Google etc. will generate excessive by being able to charge more than cost because their models are vastly superior.
Is likely to be false.
companies thought they were saving money by purchasing subscriptions from LLMs.
Jesus. This puts workers at, what, 150-200k laid off this year? Awful.
But I do like that part about mandatory power grid guarantees. If we lived in a reasonable country that would be a federal regulation.
Yeah. Wisconsin sticking up for itself.
And Oracle's only angle was, "You'll regret this. People will go elsewhere!"
Seriously, I don't see what data centres give their hosts. They barely require a workforce after setup, they rip through resources, they fuck with the environment, they offer no municipal services, and they're eyesores. At best they're a form of property tax revenue and I guess rates revenue.
But you might get your response half a millisecond faster? OMG, the benefits!
let's just say $100k if there's the random custodial engineer in the mix. That $2.1 billion in salary. They reduced headcount 13% in 2025 and this would bea 15% from that. Probably cash strapped and about to go bust. Good.
it's ruining the industry right now. when the bubble bursts and the datacenters crater it will be a new golden era for farming!
I know plenty of devs who just want to farm, or hunt, or build shit.
I can't wait for the farming industry to be disrupted when 100,000 seasoned engineers descend upon companies like john deere. they'll be like a plague of locusts that will blot out the sun forever.
I've been of the opinion that Silicon Valley and tech in the US has effectively drawn in the very best of several countries and collectively robbed so many industries of some of the smartest people around.
These people retraining or going back home and into other industries could be an economic boom in the making.
What are: 3 technologies I stopped using 20 years ago?
Last week we received the CPU (Critical Patch Update) for Oracle products, which is a list of strongly recommended patches. They issue 4 per year (end of January, April, July and October). ALL patches were late.
It’s a trend. Years ago there were no patches finished after the main document. Then, it started appearing, to the point that they created a section warning about late patches. It was ok, because probably 99% of their clients must be on top of Linux x86-64. So, these patches were always available in time. This time, not even this patch was available. It was delivered a day later. Others, are scheduled for a week later, and sometimes, they reschedule.
I don’t have inside information. I only see the trend.
Years ago, patching a database was a big task, basically having to rebuild the dictionary. Then, they automated and changed stuff and things got super simple. Suddenly everything went downhill, to the point that last time I had to patch the patch.
I thought they were doing this on purpose to push us to their cloud service, but layoffs are a much simpler explanation. Occam’s Razor.
And this was after they fired about 30,000 employees.
So now they HAVE to double down and fund this AI infrastructure, because sunk costs dictate that they can’t admit to a bad decision and hire back the terminated employees.
Just because it’s costly doesn’t mean they aren’t going to push forward with all their might, unfortunately
Anyone with sense still locked in to Oracle products needs to find their nearest exit strategy.
I know it won't be easy, but the alternative is going to be a lot messier when they completely go to shit and you lose everything.
Ellison: job creator destroyer.
People shouldn’t be working for super villains.
People stand around wondering why the fuck these companies are able to do what they do and these billionaires the same. WELL BECAUSE YOU WORK FOR THEM CHAD. IT’S LITERALLY YOUR FAULT!
In a shitty job market, a job for the supervillain is better than starving and being homeless.
This rhetoric comes from a place of privilege.
Lmao, they are quite literally saying it is the suffering peoples fault. Evil supervillains literally find and abuse any leverage they can get to make people work for them, depriving them of any other option. That's why they're supervillains to begin with.
The /s was implied there, to me at least
It's not shitty enough to completely leave your ethics at the door. You might need to take a little less pay, or work on something less interesting (although we're talking about Oracle here).
Somebody who landed a job at Oracle had options. That is until today. Now they have 21,000 other people to compete with.
It's the people somewhere like Nvidia I have some empathy for. They thought they were building gaming tech and they've ended up building the apocalypse.
Lol, I will admit, Oracle is like working for Palintir, you know what you're signing up for.
DO NOT ANTHROMORPHISE LARRY ELISION
Why does Larry Ellison give me such crazy uncanny valley vibes?! Is his head too long? Moustache too narrow? Generally too smooth? It has fucked me up all day scrolling past this image.
First time I saw him I thoughr he looked like John McAfee.
I think his gotee and hair just look like absolute shit. Further proof nobody cares about him.
He looks like an older Vincent Price.
No matter how much I try, all I see in this picture is Mel Brooks as President Skroob sniffing Air out of a can.
I told you not to call me on this wall. This is an unlisted wall.
Fucking wild to read the article. Oracle got pissy because regulations said you can't just shove datacenter electricity costs on people.
To fund the rapid expansion, Oracle took aggressive efficiency measures and enacted a sweeping wave of layoffs. By the end of fiscal year 2026, the company's workforce was slashed by about 21,000 employees, a decline of roughly 13%, from 162,000 to 141,000 workers. The deep cuts followed an operational restructuring driven in part by the internal adoption of AI technologies.
If I read this new article right, they're just talking about the layoffs from ORCL's March/April 2026, which was their last fiscal year, which ended May 31 2026. I think this is just repeating old news. Anyone else read it that way?
As a result, Oracle is now required to provide cash collateral or a letter of credit in the astronomical sum of over $7 billion just to connect the building to the power grid, a setup whose ongoing maintenance will cost the company more than $100 million annually.
That seems to be what this article really has for news and that's really funny, IMO. Go get 'em, Wisconsin.
It is burying old news in headline. The consequences/pitfalls of their "strategic shift" are fairly new. The layoffs were explicitly justified for pivot to datacenters that OpenAI will "surely" be able to rent. The new extra problems in that strategic shift just makes them look worse for going all in on the bubble.
I wonder if it's related at all to this ongoing trend ( How Money Works on YouTube). Tech Bros got sore about the post-epidemic culture at their companies: People wanted to work from home, and knew that their talent was important so they got bold asking for pay raises and benefits.
And the tech bros took this personally. So first came the RTO mandates (which got rid of some techs, specifically the best and brightest) and then came later layoffs, some of which were blamed on AI automation.
AI automation was never actually that much further along.
Anyway, they laid off too many people, to the point that the remaining workforce didn't know how to run the business and the tech. So they had to hire back some of the greybeards, and are still replacing lost positions with rookies fresh out of college.
are they replacing? seems like the layoffs has gotten worst, and people arnt finding jobs in tech like they did, i saw a correlation an uptick in posts on many subs lining up with the layoffs. especially without how employers are using AI/ATS system to screen people out of a job.
i suspect as much for the medical field, they practically want a skeleton crew for alot of places, thats why they dont hire alot of technicians, despite there being shortages in different positions.(making jobs somewhat competitive). rad tech, CLS, are the 2 with artificial shortages, CLS being more gatekept than the first one.
I'm personally only reporting what was discussed in HMW, that Facebook and Google are having to pull back some of their layoffs, either because departments are short staffed, or because they got rid of irreplaceable positions and no one else knows how to do that job.
I think this layout is 100% about S&P downgrading Oracle's credit rating to one step above junk. They're on the hook for the WB acquisition and the data centre build out for OpenAI, both of which look hugely negative. Wisconsin (data centre location) just sent the a bill for $7B because they don't trust oracle to pay the future costs to the state the development would incur.
With no credit rating, and not much liquid cash all they can do is cut costs. Hence layoff.
You say that like it wasn't the goal
Imagine failing this hard at your job and keeping it.
And I know his job is to keep the stock price high.. but 28 percent growth over the last five years in tech is still failing at your job.
Besides the usual CEO shenanigans, they really want AI to succeed, to replace usually leftist intellectuals with a far-right AI.
I want cold fusion, cancer to be cured for 1 dollar, and flying ponies. But I know I'm not getting those.
They aren't going to get true AI either.
Fire Larry and sell his stock and his yachts and you'll be in the black again.
I too see it coming.
email/call your reps pre-emptively and say no bailouts
Oracle Virtual box - yeah company i used to work for got sued by oracle for using virtualbox. well extensions for it. fyi guys oracle tracks ips of everyone downloading it and their legal team will contact your company and shakedown the money .
I really want one or more of these AI companies to fail hard. I think their only strategy is literally to burn through billions hoping it'll be another company that goes to the wall first and they'll somehow reap the rewards by hanging on longer.
They've made it so they will all fail together. They're bound. This way they can ensure a bailout, because if they don't get a bailout, they will have a significant effect on the us economy on their way down.
I think I'm surprised they had that many employees
When your KPI and bonus is based on how many people you can recruit what did they think was going to happen
Good. Let em burn
Sane regulation. You like to see it.
$7 billion required collateral. , $100 million annually, $15 billion
Oracle's argument of "this investment is worth $15 billion" is not only entirely besides the point, which the regulating government office rightfully refuses, but "'worth' in your state or city is entirely pointless if it incurs not that amount of local public gain but only public cost. It's a stupid, misleading argument.
I'm really interested in what that 21k employee loss mean in practice. In a hype-craze it's probably not sane restructuring and letting go of unneeded personal and inefficiencies, I assume.
"The global race for dominance in artificial intelligence is turning into one of the most expensive and turbulent corporate competitions in history.
Tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta are expected to spend about $600 billion on AI infrastructure during 2026."
...
GODDAMMIT. I just realized they're speedrunning the creation of AM.
@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
go to feed...
@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
go to feed...
Couldn't happen to a better group of companies. Let them all beg for bailouts and be denied.
save