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I think this sucks for the people being laid off but what exactly should they be held accountable for?

It's not like over-hiring or laying people off is a crime. The employees presumably knew the deal going in (that they could be laid off). They got compensated for the time they worked.

No one owed them a job at Oracle in the first place. (Again, not to diminish how bad it feels / shocking it can be to be laid off!)

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If I am bad at my job, I get fired. For better or worse, this is what happens.

If a CEO is bad at his or her job (e.g. wasting billions of dollars on employees that they don't need), apparently he or she can fire 20% of the company and give himself a bonus for making such a tough decision.

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> what exactly should they be held accountable for?

Bad leadership. Costing the company a ton of money and goodwill. Need I go on?

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The wasted cashed is only part of the story.

Just think of the wasted man hours spent on integrating 30K new employees that supposedly the company didn't need. The time spent in meetings about restructuring departments, new points of contacts, reassignment of duties, figuring out who to promote, training the new hires, etc.

Now the company gets to it all again in reverse with much lower moral and excitement. The amount of hours & employee focus wasted on the bureaucracy of the hiring and firing over 30K employees instead of spending that time on improving the business should get you fired from leadership.

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> Just think of the wasted man hours...

That's all money.

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I view the opportunely cost, moral reduction, corporate politics, etc. differently then just money. I wanted to emphasize the long term effects of hiring then firing 30K has on businesses beyond what people typically focus on like payroll.
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> but what exactly should they be held accountable for?

For over hiring 30K people.

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Labor is a commodity. You don’t apologize to the commodity for changing your spending habits and walking past it in the store.
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making wrong decisions at work has no consequences for you? where do you work?
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Tech shareholders want executives to take risks building new products. Of course they’d prefer the products be successful but if the options are “hire 30k people 50% chance we have to lay them all off” or “don’t build new products” most tech shareholders want option 1.
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where do you pull 50 percent number for oracle?
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Even if the number is 10% they want the company to take risks. Big tech shareholders number one goal is not becoming IBM
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anyone can get any random shower thought funded by this logic. Thats not how investing works.
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Then why dont executives got punished by investors when they take risks and fail? The answer clearly is that investors want the risks to be taken and understand the downside that comes from taking risks.
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> Then why dont executives got punished by investors when they take risks and fail?

they do?

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Politics.
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If you follow the “stock price is the golden indicator of company’s well being attitude”, then over-hiring at that point was a great decision. And cutting the headcount is also a great decision right now. So they did nothing wrong.

I personally don’t agree with this, but it’s easy to say “overhiring was bad”, when at that point, it might’ve been a great business decision. Things just have changed now.

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