Oracle Cuts 21,000 Jobs As It Embraces AI
- Reference: 0184047462
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/06/23/0548201/oracle-cuts-21000-jobs-as-it-embraces-ai
- Source link:
> The software and cloud computing firm says it had around 141,000 full-time employees as of May 31, 2026, down from about 162,000 workers at the same time last year. The "deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce," the report says. The cuts, which amount to about 13% of Oracle's workforce, are part of a wider trend among tech firms as they spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building AI infrastructure like data centers.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gy0x0j5deo
Re: (Score:3)
There are plenty of free SQL databases available... why is anybody still paying Oracle's outrageous fees?
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We use Oracle DB. Yes, there are many free databases, and several commercial ones that are cheaper. But the richness of Oracle's feature set is unmatched by all of them. Plus we develop our many web applications using Oracle's Application express (APEX) platform. It makes DB web app development extremely quick and easy.
We do get their academic discount though, so are not being robbed quite as much as a company might be.
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Because of Vendor Lock in, and: they are decades ahead in implementing high performance DBs on "big iron".
A hobby project SQL database is not 100 billion transactions a day DB, as much as you wish it would be.
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Years ago, I worked on a project where they were thinking of replacing an Oracle DB. We looked at a few open source databases, both SQL and NoSQL. Although it took longer to initialize, Oracle was much faster. We were disappointed, because NoSQL DBs were much faster for tests with 1000 accesses to the DB, but when you increased it to 1,000,000 accesses, Oracle was always faster.
This was more than 10 years ago, so YMMV
Not the greatest loss of talent (Score:3)
I had a support ticket open for over a year, where the support analyst was unable to debug a 4 line Perl script - and I had broken it down line by line and told him where the problem was. It was like he only knew Windows and was totally lost with Perl and Linux.
In the end, I closed the ticket in disgust. I already had a workaround in place. I told him that he was a waste of space and he should be ashamed of his lack of knowledge.
My guess is he was replaced by AI, as now Oracle promote their AI support portal, and it's difficult to get an actual person.
So, I think they got rid of a lot of dead wood.
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To be fair, properly written Perl is still indistinguishable from modem noise...
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Behind your back, the time he spent on the open ticket was billed to your company.
No way the replace a cash cow like that.
Yepp. Even the Oracle racket ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... won't be spared. I'm down 20k from my last salary and with AI my productivity has risen 5x. On to of that, the processes I was supposed to automate with code are getting replaced by AI themselves.
Prepare for incoming.
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> ... productivity has risen 5x ...
LOL :D
Is this from a PR firm's "AI Strategy on Social Media Handbook" or something?
Larry Ellison is a terrible person (Score:2)
It's incredible Oracle is still operating given its terrible leadership.
AI is just the excuse du jour for being an asshole and caring more about money than people.
Re: Larry Ellison is a terrible person (Score:2)
Two words: Government contracts.
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Didn't DOGE cancel those?
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The Ellison family are friends of the administration, hence the Paramount/Skydance merger being allowed through when it's clearly anticompetitive. Oracle gov deals getting trimmed in any meaningful sense was never in the cards.
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Just goes to show that you might think you're one of the good ones but you can never appease a tyrant.
Oracle could still shed about 30/40% of it's org (Score:4, Informative)
Oracle is extremely over-staffed.
I left when it was at ~120K employees (after Sun's acquisition), and the amount of people that did essentially nothing other than posturing was staggering (at least in the middleware division).
With proper organization and tooling it could have done the same or more with about half of the engineers, and that's *before* AI tooling.
The talent pools are bimodal, you have a small pool of extremely talented people that carry the weight of the org, and enormous swaths of seat warmers. There's a lot of politics, and headcount can be a source of power. Incentives were set so managers tried to hold as much headcount as possible to increase their leverage in the org.
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> Oracle is extremely over-staffed.
You know that it's not true! They're extremely understaffed in their legal department, they don't have enough lawyers to sue their customers for license violations.
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> The talent pools are bimodal, you have a small pool of extremely talented people that carry the weight of the org, and enormous swaths of seat warmers.
To be fair, that may just be Pareto's Rule: 20% of the people do 80% of the work.
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Oracle had a lot of under-utilized engineering capacity. Their management never managed to direct most of it to any useful purpose, so it was ultimately wasted. Some people started just showing up to collect a paycheck, others found more interesting places to work.
Good luck (Score:2)
Then perhaps 21,000 workers can use AI at your competitors.
Oracle is full of shit (Score:3)
I love how nowadays whenever you want to " right size " an organization, you can just say the cuts were due to AI, and usually the stock price doesn't react too negatively. Eventually the market sees the true story.
[1]Oracle's stock is now down 14% in the last year as the S&P is 25% higher [yahoo.com]. Same article, free cash flow is -$1.87B, having burned $23.7B USD in the last year. They have $43B in debt and equity and are desperate for more - potentially raising just as much in the next year.
So why the layoffs, really? Beyond " AI layoffs are good and generally don't make the stock decline. "
[2]Oracle is heavily overextended in the debt for building the datacenters AI companies use [wsj.com]. Their credit rating is a triple B (still investment grade, but only two steps above junk status). If the AI boom crashes, Oracle is fucked. They're left holding the bag on all the datacenter debt while the AI companies purchase less. Meanwhile, they're already financially strained. So taking the layoffs now creates a major free cash flow. The $1.84B severance payment is peanuts compared to the $8B-$10B in free cash flow it frees up. Of course, the $8B-$10B is not going to cover the huge amounts of debt they have taken on and will continue to take on... and reports I've heard are the layoffs were so wide and blind Oracle is having to hire some of them back.
Expect it to get worse at Oracle, unless somehow instead of LLMs getting progressively barely better for way more spend they magically achieve AGI and humans are displaced from most white collar jobs (not going to happen anytime soon).
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/did-oracle-fire-21-000-140144781.html
[2] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/oracle-ai-demand-debt-04977749
Now cut all of the rest (Score:2)
No one needs this company. Anyone using Oracle products at this point, when there are so many better alternatives, is a fool.
Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
If you've ever gotten a quote from Oracle for literally anything in the last 20 years, you might suspect as much as I do that there may be some inefficiencies at that dinosaur of a company. I'm sure they'll take this reduction in overhead and use it to lower their prices. They'd never just replace human support with inferior AI to make their overpriced support contracts even shittier then pocket the savings to make the quarterlies look good so stupid Wall Street dinosaurs who don't know how technology works continues to fork over money without seeing past the veil of what's really going on. That's never how big tech works ever.
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Every project I've worked on for the last decade that involved Oracle, the purpose of the project was to replace Oracle.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
My Oracle manager pulled down a $40,000 quarterly bonus by billing customers for work that hadn't been done, then I got fired for complaining about getting blamed for the project not being finished when they didn't even tell me about the project until after it was overdue.
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Where do you think they got the AI training data?