- overpricing the database led to a predictable exodus and new players with often times better performance.
- acquisition of MySQL led to a predictable exodus and new players like maria with often times better performance.
- Oracle cloud arrived late to spectacular skepticism and low user turnout from customers who had been burned by high cost and users burned from decisions like the death of opensolaris. it exists on federal life support these days by the grace of the prevailing administration.
- more than 80 products, with hundreds of thousands of patches and updates, yet no coherent or meaningful reform of the build for more than forty years. DB 19c still ships broken for redhat 9 as a means of driving users to oracle linux, and patching the installer is a 1970s experience in itself. DB 23's greatest improvement has been to tack the letters "AI" onto it to chum what shallow AI waters Oracle deigns to tread outside of an investment portfolio.
- dumping cash into oracle enterprise linux despite it only having around 2500 active corporate users.
this is nearly 20% of the company being laid off.
Yeah, from small interactions over the past two decades, I have no idea how they could have been so bad while employing so many people. What on earth were those 30k people doing?! Their solutions were crap for ages.
There is a significant correlation between how many people you employ and how much nothing you accomplish. It means you've gotten big enough to survive long bouts of doing something and achieving nothing with large amounts of people.
It seems there's literally no correlation between people and what is accomplished.
Could be lawyers.
Would we be sad if they were lawyers?
Look at their employee numbers over the years:
(ai generated):
Oracle Corporation Employee Count (2010 - 2025)
Legend: Each '' represents approximately 4,000 employees.
Year | Employees
------------------------------------------------------------------
2010 | (105,000)
2011 | (108,000)
2012 | (115,000)
2013 | (120,000)
2014 | (122,000)
2015 | (132,000)
2016 | (136,000)
2017 | (138,000)
2018 | (137,000)
2019 | (136,000)
2020 | (135,000)
2021 | (132,000)
2022 | (143,000)
2023 | (164,000)
2024 | (159,000)
2025 | (162,000)
They clearly did something crazy at corona and undoing this as a lot of companies did before already.
here's a link to an actual source for people who also don't trust ai generated stuff
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/number...
edit: this source also includes data/graphs on stock price and bunch of other metrics, rather than just one number over time.
with an adblocker ... there is one ad on the page just above the graph about "Unlock Macrotrends Premium" which takes up 1.5/2cm of the page, while the graph underneath it takes up like 15cm. Then there's a bunch of other information on the page, none of which are ads. yes, there's a "you only get 5 page visits free" whole page pop-up thing, but there's an easy and well-known way round that for individuals who understand basic internet browser usage.
maybe start using an ad-blocker? pretty much everyone else does these days.
> the data was most likely parsed out of Oracle's earning reports by some janky regexp.
which is probably what the ai would do... or more likely it's just stealing it from the source i linked, since the numbers are exactly the same...
also, probably not because see (1b) below.
> I don’t know why you would trust this more than AI.
because (1a)
> Fundamental data from Zacks Investment Research, Inc.
> Built on Zacks Investment Research — trusted by institutional investors, academics, and financial professionals for over 45 years. [0]
I'd take people who have been doing this stuff for 45 years over some new-fangled toy that's well known to hallucinate and get things wrong in ways that appear authoritative.
also, on that (1b)
> Zacks employs a rigorous quality control process to make sure all data points are recorded accurately. For each company, a trained analyst enters the data from SEC filings, which is then double checked by a senior analyst. Once the data is entered, a senior analyst signs off on final completion after reviewing all the data. In addition, the data is subjected to a battery of automated checks to verify balancing relationships and correct errors. All data items are reviewed by multiple sets of trained eyes as well as automated computer checks. [1]
and (2) because that site provides other contextual information that is helpful, like the fact that Oracle's stock price has been trending downwards, which is possibly a reason why they felt the need to make cuts now. [2]
ai gives you the answer you want -- not the answers you might actually need.
[1]: https://zacksdata.com/static/docs/Zacks_Fundamental_Data_Ove...
[2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/stock-...
edit1: apparently you're not using an adblocker, wtf dude, it's 2026. use an adblocker.
edit2: added (1b)
---
> Yes — the universal fallback is `full-time employees`. That phrase appears in the employee-count disclosure across Oracle's filings in this run. ([Securities and Exchange Commission][1]) > > If you want the exact string to paste into `Cmd-F`, use these: > > * FY2010: `As of May 31, 2010, we employed approximately 105,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][1]) > * FY2011: `As of May 31, 2011, we employed approximately 108,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][2]) > * FY2012: `As of May 31, 2012, we employed approximately 115,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][3]) > * FY2013: `As of May 31, 2013, we employed approximately 120,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][4]) > * FY2014: `As of May 31, 2014, we employed approximately 122,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][5]) > * FY2015: `As of May 31, 2015, we employed approximately 132,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][6]) > * FY2016: `As of May 31, 2016, we employed approximately 136,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][7]) > * FY2017: `As of May 31, 2017, we employed approximately 138,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][8]) > * FY2018: `As of May 31, 2018, we employed approximately 137,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][9]) > * FY2019: `As of May 31, 2019, we employed approximately 136,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][10]) > * FY2020: `As of May 31, 2020, we employed approximately 135,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][11]) > * FY2021: `As of May 31, 2021, we employed approximately 132,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][12]) > * FY2022: `As of May 31, 2022, we employed approximately 143,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][13]) > * FY2023: `As of May 31, 2023, we employed approximately 164,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][14]) > * FY2024: `As of May 31, 2024, we employed approximately 159,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][15]) > * FY2025: `As of May 31, 2025, we employed approximately 162,000 full-time employees` ([Securities and Exchange Commission][16]) > > If the browser/PDF viewer is annoying, use this order: `full-time employees` → `As of May 31, 20XX` → `Employees`. The first one is usually the fastest. > > [1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312510... > [2]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312511... > [3]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312512... > [4]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312513... > [5]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312514... > [6]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312515... > [7]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312516... > [8]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312517... > [9]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000119312518... > [10]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000156459019... > [11]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000156459020... > [12]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000156459021... > [13]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000156459022... > [14]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000095017023... > [15]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000095017024... > [16]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1341439/000095017025... ```
After the layoffs, they'll apparently now have grown by 1.0% annually since 2020.
So yes, from 2021 to 2023, they had a huge spike, but overall, it's a net slowdown in growth relative to the 2010-2020 period.
If this was about reversion to the old pattern they'd have done a smaller set of layoffs or simply wait for a few years of zero growth.
It's tricky to pick an end-of-decade year also - recessions tend to happen +/- 2 years of the end of each decade in the USA, or at least have done since records began in the 19th century. For example 2010 was recovery over 2008/2009's bust. It's not like comparing March to Ma4ch for a crude seasonal adjustment.
You can see linear growth from 2010-2017. Then slow decline or at best a flatline from 2018-2021. Then they went crazy in 2022-2025.
Now if we just do 162k - 30k we are back to 132k, basically same ballpark as pre-COVID.
They acquired Cerner, which had ~30k employees.
Saw someone had a license plate say MPAGES ha
2. They're the primary maintainer of one of the largest programming languages.
3. They do tons of HR/ERP type software.
4. They have a supply chain division (my company is a direct competitor, and we have 2000 employees--it's a drop in the bucket, but a few thousand here, a few thousand there and it starts to add up. Afaik, their supply chain org is bigger than ours).
5. Other things I probably don't know about.
Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency, which swells the number of workers by a lot.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not remotely a fan, I like to quote Bryan Cantrill's rant. However, they do a lot of things.
I have some anecdotal evidence for this. I worked at a medium sized family owned business. They were going through a massive ERP upgrade/replacement. One of the bids was from Oracle. The company was able to essentially test drive each company they were reviewing to see if the software was going to be a good fit.
Oracle's sales team was like a having a football on site. They sent over no less than about 20 people to swarm our pretty small office, barge into the dev spaces and generally annoy the fuck out of everybody for several months. The other vendors? They sent one, maybe two people to work alongside us as we test drove their software.
It was funny being in those meetings listening to people talk about the Oracle people. Nobody even remembered how good or bad their software was. Every single comment was about how overbearing and pushy their sales people were.
Needless to say, we went with a different company.
They mis-aligned but for someone like Boeing or United, they'd go gaga over the footy-crowd.
And all the supporting legal team of course.
So I suspect the answer is: they need _at least_ 10x as many engineers to get things done as you would expect. Maybe more like 50x
And the last comment by 'oraguy' - I hope he just picked up another id because "never work for Oracle again" ...
Clearly shows that either no one understands the whole picture anymore or that it became so diverse custom, that this is the only way of handling this now.
I think though that these companies are more business companies than tech companies and move themselves into this nightmare.
Sure, 100,000 people is a lot, but Oracle also does a lot.
In the real world, there are a lot of things you need to run a business: HR, ERP, Financing, Cloud, Compliance, CRM, etc. There is really only one company who can sell them all to you on one piece of paper, and that's Oracle.
Last F50 I was at did a PeopleSoft migration. We probably had 400 Oracle employees pass through the doors over 2 years helping to get it off the ground.
Most Enterprises don't just buy software and that's it. They buy software + support to implement it for their business.
This is extremely customizable software that is designed to pretty much run your entire business and touched by over 40k employees. It requires a ton of care and feeding. There is plenty of people who dedicate themselves to PeopleSoft. Zip Recruiter is showing 5 jobs near me for "PeopleSoft Administrator"
Soon, it will be table stakes to put scattered internal communications, notes, documents into an AI’s knowledge base, where the information can no longer hide.
When that fails, the AI can read the code itself, so that the settings and how to change them are easily explained in simple terms. Actually, this is possibly even better than letting the scattered internal information serve as an intermediate layer.
If they do cut back to their size before the acquisition, while continuing to try and support the EMR, they will be doing a lot more with fewer employees.
The acquisition has already had a lot of bad consequences: https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-cerner-health-larry-e...
If you want to use AI to find information like this, tell it to grab you a source and post that.
(EDIT: or 2021)
I have friends there who have described how bare-bones things were. This is only going to make it worse.
I would not patronize a hospital system that intended on staying on Cerner Millennium EMRs for the foreseeable future. If things were bad before, they'll only be worse now.
I only wanted to point out that number of jobs in context of the company growth. I found 160k already a huge/gigantic number though.
This round of layoffs was telegraphed at a month or so ago. It's all related to banks getting spooked and pulling funding for their massive data center project and the OpenAI deal being on the rocks.
So, I don't think it's really about their product being good enough, it's more that they've bet the company on data centers and it's starting to look like they just don't have the skills to execute on it.
You jest, but that's pretty much South Korea if this video (and my interpretation of it) is to be believed: https://youtu.be/pjjhrwVYPE8
For those not interested in watching 30 mins of this, long story short, it doesn't bode well. They do have some other circumstances going on in addition though.
This, but unironically. Companies that make money without hiring anyone provide the most "value".
Simultaneously we should stop calling business owners "job creators". They're actually "job minimizers". They only hire people when there's no other choice.
The tribes usually treat the members as a family. While kicking someone from a tribe can happen, it's considered to be a harsh punishment.
In a tribe, when hard times come, people usually redistribute. That's a normal, human way of dealing with that situation. Not a layoff.
The other aspect is the economic crises. When a central bank decides to increase interest rates, it decreases lending to new investments in favor of lower inflation. This can lead to layoffs, instead of having inflation inflicted on everyone (especially the rich with huge savings). So that decision is essentially some random guys get kicked out of economic (and societal) participation in order to prevent more redistribution of existing wealth.
If you think about it, yes layoffs are deeply immoral. But we can understand, why they happen in capitalism, as a sort of big tragedy of the commons.
The role an employer plays in societies varies from culture to culture, but note that in many cultures, it is "just a job".
Like when a traumatised kid never loved by the parents concludes that life is harsh and love doesn't exist, so better be tough.
That's a lot of stuff you're saying. Not what I'm saying.
Drama is just in the head of people melted in the ambient narrative, sure.
At least this is in the case in the US. What you are saying might be true in other cultures.
Most people's reactions to large-scale movements like this seem to imply that we feel there should be something more than a simple "money duty" between employer and employee, and we seem to also have respect for companies that act that way (e.g, some Japanese companies perhaps, or baseball teams keeping a sick player on the payroll so they get healthcare even though they never play another game).
Attempting to realize that duty and at the same time abscond it to the state or the family may be an aspect of the failing.
It's no more immoral than you deciding to buy from Safeway, even though you'd been buying from Fred Meyer before.
Also, employees can quit anytime, no notice required. Nobody is obliged to work.
Irrelevant to the topic at hand. Don’t give me a sob story about mom and pop shop, we’re talking about a trillion dollar company.
> Also, employees can quit anytime, no notice required. Nobody is obliged to work.
Okay? What’s your point?
The grocery stores were run by national chains. Starbucks is global.
> What’s your point?
It's symmetric. Companies employ at will, and workers work at will.
So you’re confirming my point that billion dollar companies (like Starbucks killing mom and pop shop) have disproportionately more power over individuals or what are you saying?
> It's symmetric. Companies employ at will, and workers work at will.
Workers don’t work at will. Last time I checked UBI is not there, so workers work to pay the bills and put food on the table.
Back in the Great Depression, my great grandmother got sick and was hospitalized, and they took care of her until she passed. My grandfather did not have enough to pay the bill. The hospital told him not to worry, just pay what he could. It took him a while, but he paid the bill in full.
Why not civil war?
> It took him a while, but he paid the bill in full.
How long was “a while” specifically? And how much did it affect your grandfathers life?
Markets are a chaotic system and the needs of a business must constantly adapt - or they go out of business.
Well that's a new take I haven't heard before. That the AI is actually a far right nationalist takeover.... That's an interesting perspective.
Look at the known uses of AI by governments these days. Targeting of immigrants in Minnesota and selection of targets in Gaza and Iran to blow up. And look at the companies contributing to them. Some of the usual suspects are all present and contributing models, data centers and intel inputs.
Is it possible that some of the richest people are collaborating to subdue the rest of the population for their benefit? Does this sound like a conspiracy theory to you? Good! This sounds too fantastic and alarmist even to me. Skepticism is warranted. But the evidences are not mere speculations or leaps of faith. Many are well known facts reported by mainstream media. Besides, this isn't the first time that the greedy and egomaniacal individuals have banded together to consolidate wealth. You already know what they mean when they talk about 'absolute free speech', 'free market capitalism', etc. You've also seen their birth defect of missing empathy in action. And it doesn't help that many of them have an unhealthy obsession with apocalyptic prophecies of several religions (meanwhile, they never seem to notice the nice parts - ever). So a nightmare scenario isn't entirely inconceivable.
Why hasn't the AI bubble burst yet? Why do high profile men engage in cringy public bromance, followed by a messy divorce and then get back together again discretely? What are all their Mein Kampf style fantasy books and outrageous opinions about? Why did doge vacuum up highly sensitive demographic data that seems irrelevant to them? What's with all those shady and convoluted business deals and money transactions that look as if they're scheming a coup? And why the hell are all of them so obsessed with building fortified bunkers under their backyards?
Forget all that. Trump publicly announced yesterday that the military is building a 'massive complex' under that gaudy monstrosity that he calls the ballroom. Apparently, that hideous structure is only a lid for what's underneath. But I wasn't surprised a bit! The reason? A very smart lady had argued the exact same assertion two months ago! She took the details of the 'private donors' of the ballroom, the construction partners and their spending and purchase manifests, to convincingly argue that they're building a massive AI datacenter underground for the military. The costs were too high for the ballroom and many purchases were unconventional, to say the least. She said the exact same thing back then - that the ballroom is just a lid for an underground facility! I mean, if you are a military with a lethal strategic AI, you certainly wouldn't expose it like a traditional datacenter.
I feel like I'm paranoid just saying all these. But the world we live in today was unthinkable more than a decade ago. I don't want to spread confusion and paranoia. But it's also getting too late to ignore the developments. Just keep an eye for what's happening in this area. It's safer to be an unpopular prepper in this political climate, than be caught by surprise if it comes down to that.
According to the article as well as blind, the main teams hit were associated with Cerner (EHR) and NetSuite (ERP).
Oracle's AI spend is part of Oracle Cloud.
That said, I guess it can be argued that Cerner and NetSuite being on the chopping block can be attributed to AI because now procurement has the choice to either build in-house via an Anthropic or OpenAI SI like Accenture or TCS or they can negotiate better purchasing terms from a best-in-breed product in HRM and ERP like SAP instead.
I also find it interesting how American and European HNers are much more negative about AI compared to their Chinese, Indian, and Israeli peers even though they have a significant amount to lose as well.
Both Cerner (EHR) and NetSuite (ERP) were laggards in their market segments for years.
If I'm the Director of Enterprise Applications and have a budget allocated to procurement, I have no reason to purchase a laggard product like Cerner or NetSuite even with the Oracle bundle when SAP is giving significant discounts because OpenAI, Anthropic, and GCP are offering partnerships with systems integrations like Accenture or Deloitte to fully build out and manage your own hyperspecific ERP or EHR.
There's no reason to keep investing in products in a market that was already past it's growth stage pre-AI with a clear market winner, especially now that there is downstream pressure that makes build much more attractive than buying an inferior product.
Based on your response, I doubt you even cared to read my entire post.
Edit: can't reply
> I didn't read it because it didn't exist yet, you added it in an edit
It did when I posted. The only edit I made after you posted was fixing HRM to EHR.
> You're not even disagreeing with my response, merely elaborating the mechanism behind it. This is bad faith posting.
I strongly disagree. My entire thesis is that Cerner and NetSuite were bad businesses. If a business is bad you kill the business.
No need to gaslight me and delete your response.
The value is in the “system” itself. The tooling, plugins, knowledge that your staff has the familiarity and skills so as to not require retraining, the interoperability of data with other systems and vendors.
The idea that AI is going to enable a variety of bespoke competitors is truly laughable!
I didn't read it because it didn't exist yet, you added it in an edit.
You're not even disagreeing with my response, merely elaborating the mechanism behind it. This is bad faith posting.
Cerner isn't an EHR, it's an EMR. EHR == Electronic Health Record. Your FitBit data is an Electronic Health Record. EMR == Electronic Medical Record. Your doctor's records, how much blood thinner that nurse is supposed to give grandpa, and whether or not he's a fall risk are things you'd put in an EMR.
You can't just vibecode your way to replacing an EMR. Cerner Millennium has a shrinking, but substantial, footprint at healthcare systems across the country and around the globe. There are 25+ years of bugfixes, caveats, architecture, and other pieces of knowledge to be tracked and accounted for, and you must do so, because if you don't, people under the care of doctors could die.
It's also worth noting that the DoD uses Millennium for active service members, and I think they also use it for TriCare. American taxpayers are on the hook for dealing with the problems that Oracle's cost cuts will produce.
I agree on other points.
Absolutely, but you can now demand a market leader like Epic to give you a significantly better discount (eg. 20-30% over the 10% you may have previously been offered).
And that is the crux of the "SaaSpocalypse" and why you are seeing targeted layoffs in Oracle specifically for their ERP and EHR products.
> It's also worth noting that the DoD uses Millennium for active service members, and I think they also use it for TriCare. American taxpayers are on the hook for dealing with the problems that Oracle's cost cuts will produce
Absolutely, but they were already on the hook for that before Cerner became a part of Oracle.
Is this on the grounds that you can do it yourself?
Replacing jobs is a bit of a misnomer, but it's certainly allowing us to build out more features in shorter amounts of time.