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Posted by Lyngbakr 14 hours ago

Oracle shed about 20k roles globally in the last year(www.bbc.com)
102 points | 125 commentspage 2
Cider9986 13 hours ago|
14 hours ago 6 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636590

usrnm 13 hours ago||
Out of 141000, about 15%
Oras 13 hours ago||
still a large percentage.
mrhottakes 13 hours ago||
Yes, that is a large percentage.
Roark66 12 hours ago||
They will be hiring frantically next year.

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?

Twirrim 11 hours ago||
Next year?

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.

red75prime 12 hours ago||
An adjacent comment: "For those curious, this is a report about firings from the last year. Not a new round of layoffs."
strongpigeon 13 hours ago||
What’s crazy is how Oracle’s free cash flows have gone from “money-printing machine” to deep in the red due to their data center investments. My guess is that some of those cuts are to try to balance that?
thorin 11 hours ago||
Oracle is still mostly generating income from an old school model, a bit like IBM and SAP used to. They have huge contracts with mega-corps bringing in millions per year for a license. The have been pivoting to other things like consulting, cloud, AI for years but I still feel most of the income comes from these original db and product licenses. As someone who worked with Oracle since 1998 I'm kind of amazed they've kept at it for so long major Healthcare, Utilities, Banks still locked in and in some cases buying new contracts.
donavanm 1 hour ago||
Youre out of date. The revenue numbers from cloud infrastructure (iaas) are HUGE the past few years. DB licensing etc are mixed in to “ Cloud services & license support” so it is hard to pull out. But youll notice that:

- “iaas” (OCI) is growing 50% yoy and the bulk of the revenue. - “cloud license and on prem license” (new software licensing) is $5B or ~10% of the segment - ERP, peoplesoft etc arent broken out but are also very large in their market categories.

DanielHB 12 hours ago||
Well you have to somehow both indicate that you are not behind in the AI race but also that you are not hemorrhaging money. That means crapping all over your org in order to fund the data center spending.

All in the all-mighty fiduciary duty to your investors of course.

henriquenunez 13 hours ago||
https://youtube.com/watch?v=aooiDA-AsNo

Ah yes, fire to rehire via the model training gig economy

xbmcuser 13 hours ago||
where its sits with the AI bubble I think Oracle is the 1 of the major companies apart from the OpenAI that would go belly up once the AI bubble crashes.
tw04 13 hours ago||
Larry has embedded the company way too deeply into the intelligence and military apparatus to ever go belly up. He’d be first in line for a government handout.
NickC25 10 hours ago||
> He’d be first in line for a government handout.

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.

nosioptar 13 hours ago|||
Nothing would make me happier than to piss on Oracle's grave.
hunterjrj 13 hours ago|||
I think you underestimate just how entrenched Oracle’s database offering is in the enterprise.
DanielHB 12 hours ago|||
I did a project for a big telecom in Brazil where they kept everything in one massive Oracle database that ran out of 2 oracle refrigerators[1]. They kept freaking logs on the database, like normal application level logs.

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

marcyb5st 13 hours ago||||
True, but they also took huge debts to build AI DCs and not sure if the DB part of the company can cushion such a fall. According to [1] their IaaS line of business brings 4.8B USD/quarter (so say 20B/year), but they have ~120B of debt (outstanding + new debt they are trying to find people to pay for).

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...

dofm 13 hours ago|||
That is the one bit of Oracle that can't really be further subdivided. The rest of Oracle could be diced and sliced.
this_user 13 hours ago|||
Oracle has a huge, entrenched enterprise business that will keep them alive almost indefinitely, just as Microsoft does.
AznHisoka 13 hours ago|||
Why? They’re way too big to fail. Tons of corporations rely too much on them
dofm 13 hours ago||
They are not. Maybe they will be treated as such if the bubble bursts while while Trump is in power, because of loyalties.

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.

skerit 13 hours ago|||
Which AI bubble? The stock bubble one or the imagined "one day all the LLMs are going to disappear from the face of the Earth" one?
uberex 13 hours ago|||
The money side is a bubble. The LLM cat is out of the bag.
psychoslave 13 hours ago||||
Dot-com bubble crashing didn’t mean the web disappeared.
soundwave106 12 hours ago||
Some of the shakier dot com companies did, though.

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.

dude250711 13 hours ago|||
The classic autocomplete survived previous bubbles.

So the predictive autocomplete will survive those too.

sjsdaiuasgdia 10 hours ago|||
There's a tiny chance that this whole mess leads to a situation where Larry Ellison dies broke. That would be amazing!
benatkin 13 hours ago|||
I think perhaps they'll crash more than others because they aren't AI enough. It's more of an AI financing bubble than an AI bubble.
sl-1 13 hours ago||
Don't threaten me with good time!
Lucasoato 13 hours ago||
Have they layoff their lawyers or engineers?
lenerdenator 12 hours ago||
I'm trying to remember which Marvel capeslop movie it was where the kid gets a bunch of Oracle professional-grade computer hardware or something as a gift. Larry makes a cameo, of course. Maybe it was Iron Man 2?

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.

tibbydudeza 10 hours ago|
CA will buy the scraps.
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