Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

In Premier Support, it seems that anyone over 25 years old is targeted for layoff these days. They only want inexperienced kids (from whatever the currently in-vogue low-cost geo is) working SRs. They are so cheep, they are practically free. They know nothing about the products or how to help our customers, but who cares? We can hire like 10 of them for the price of a single real engineer.

Support at Oracle is great to watch. Prime customer with platinum support foaming at the mouth as Oracle adds addition middle managers as issues go from red to red hot. Poor clueless support engineer in field has customer screaming st him and Oracle management demanding Webex status meeting updates every 15min. While they fiddle-f### it around. Let's add more engineers to the problem. File a support request to have it lost in the system and 6 months later an Indian cancels the bug because he can't reproduce it.....but he never tried. Never contacted support. Never called the customer.....$$$ Platinum.

Pure profit.

The game of throw it over the fence and pray engineer in different time zone might have DB idea is a joke to watch. Really pisses off the customers. And MH wonders why cloud sales s---.

Oracle has terminal cancer, the only question remaining unanswered his how long and painful the journey to death will be

Oracle will not die overnight.

It will be a S-L-O-W painful death propped up with bursts of short lived injections of energy and momentum from aquisitions and regular blood transfusions from their new wunderkind cash cow: oracle data cloud. This will keep them alive for years and months more than it should. The diseased patient, oracle, will outlast its illness, but the disease is still terminal.

The kickoff this year is a mess. Geraffo's keynote tells all.

One only has to study nature to see the harmony needed between male and female, youth, middle age and distinguished seniors to understand that to violate this is to throw out any harmony and Oracle is ruining their harmony for short term greed. Nature, however, works best without human interference such as chemtrails and genetically modified organisms...

Once they start eating the seed corn, you can kiss the entire company goodbye. Ironically, this is what happened to one of their largest acquisitions, Sun Microsystems, making it possible for ORCL to buy them. ORCL pooh-poohed the Cloud in the critical start up period when it mattered. Amazon got ahead. Sun dropped x86 support for Solaris in the critical start up period for Linux. LInux got ahead. I see a pattern

@1xqj

"DR env? What does DR stand for?"

So you must be one of those kids fresh out of college that was hired by Oracle. You've got a lot to learn...

:D :D Sorry, couldn't resist...

No one is blaming fresh uni grads for being inexperienced. By definition, that's what they are. No matter how hard working or smart any of them are, there is simply no way they can do even a fraction of what more experienced people do. The fact that LE/MH/SC/TK don't understand this simple reality is why we are doing do poorly in both in the cloud and now even on-prem. It is why so many customers are choosing our competitors. It is why the customers who do choose us freak out and demand refunds when they realise most of our cloud offerings don't even work. Whether you are talking about developing, supporting, educating, or selling, there is a base core of experienced people that are needed in each organisation to keep things running smoothly.

It is normal for any team in any company to have some junior members who are just learning the ropes, but you can't run a successful company with ONLY junior people. At some point, you need someone who knows what they are doing.

BTW, in case you don't already feel bad enough for at least some of these poor kids:

https://thevwpolocamper.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/why-oracle-is-a-cool-company-and-suxx-at-the-same-time/

In many ways, it's the college kids that I feel the most sorry for. None of this is their fault and I doubt anyone here blames them for any of this. They are simply MH's pawns, thrown en masse into this mess, promised money and security, but often finding neither. They are bright and ambitious and will recover. But it is heartless for them to be treated this way in their first job. MH should feel ashamed, but that would require him to be human first.

In defense of the college kids...I left Oracle in Feb for a 70% boost in take-home pay after watching my annual decline year after year since the Sun acquisition. I trained and worked with lots of those college kids and they are bright, eager, and ignorant of Oracle. Once they red fades from the glasses, they begin to see reality, as such the 3-year turnover rate is incredible in OD; I watched entire territory turnovers in <2 years at OD. I encourage them to learn as much as they can from Oracle, focus on developing relationships with customers (novel concept there), and understand industry trends by means other than the Oracle kool-aid. In other words, plan on a career elsewhere. Not a bad place to start fresh out of college if you don't have a technical degree. To my old Sun colleagues still there, it's time to make money again, breath the fresh air, and sleep well at night again...the market is ripe.

The reality is that Oracle is not going to disappear overnight as It typically takes a LONG time for a corporation that size to shrivel up and die. Oracle has 138,000 employees, pulls in $37B/year and has a 79% profit margin. Especially with that revenue stream and profit, it would take a lot for Oracle to just disappear.

Oracle was late to the Cloud, but that isn't surprising because it is how Oracle has been competing for years. They let other companies establish a market and then use their piles of cash to buy their way into the game through acquisition. The difference this time around is that speed/agility are more a part of the game than ever and they can't just buy Amazon, Microsoft or Google. Oracle is now being forced to figure out a way to compete and its reputation for being difficult to deal and incredibly expensive is hampering its efforts.

The real core issue is profit margin. Oracle's high license cost and hard negotiation/legal approach has earned it one of the highest profit margins around. Shareholders have come to expect high profits, will trash the stock if profit/futures take a downturn all while Oracle executives draw the vast majority of their compensation from stock. Take a look at what the executives are pulling in -- in the past year, LE made $83M from stock, SC $81M, MH $11M and TK $10M. Oracle stock is their personal cash cow and they are going to do whatever they can to keep it going. Revenues have been falling the past couple of years, but profit margin was able to be maintained through tighter cost controls, cuts in perks/benefits, adjusting pay structures, playing around with income streams, etc. Going forward it is only going to get harder because all the major Cloud competitors are content with lower profit margins -- Microsoft (64%), Google (60% ) and IBM (43%). Amazon, the leader in the Cloud space, is a retailer at heart and is thrilled with how its profit margin has grown to 37% which is less than 1/2 of what Oracle is used to. Oracle has a severe problem.

Unfortunately, it is those who have given Oracle years of loyal service that will be impacted first by this situation. However, they shouldn't be too surprised. The culture has reflected LE's narcissism and ruthlessness for decades. It has been a dog eat dog world inside of Oracle forever. The profit margin covered over many, many sins as employees would put up with a lot for a good paycheck. Unfortunately, now those who tolerated so much are being thrown overboard because less expensive and more willing victims have been found in India and in those recently out of college. Cutting costs will buy the executives more time to continue taking home oversized compensation packages and trying to figure out a way to hold on to as many existing revenue streams as possible. Not every experienced, highly paid person in the field will be cut as the executives know that would be suicide. Oracle will likely keep some experienced field framework in place and will focus on their highest revenue customers to keep the revenue flowing. It is just a bandaid though as Oracle's customers will eventually see that competitive options are good enough and more cost effective, so the executives will eventually feel the pain too. It just could take a while though.

It would be nice to see karma visit many areas of Oracle, but it will likely be some time yet before that happens. For those who just were thrown overboard, here is hoping that you will find another company where the culture is a breath of fresh air compared to Oracle. For those who remain, keep your eyes wide open to the risks, take the pay you can, make yourself marketable always and look for those opportunities that are better than what Oracle has to offer.

Dress up the college kids and send 'em on site, higher chances they make a decent living.

Oracle's premium cloud support services are killing it not only cause of their quality, also cause they are free. Free and unlimited garbage. Why do customers even complain? If they keep complaining, charge 'em for the garbage too, show 'em who the boss is.

DR env? What does DR stand for?

Oracle has been calling me for months about a Sales Consulting role. Based on what I'm reading here, I'll continue to ditch the calls.

Wow! It's like... you were in so many of my customer meetings over the last year! Wait. Were you? (Just kidding.)

Likely Kumar doesn't understand that Oracle doesn't actually offer Peoplesoft in the Cloud. It's a complete rewrite. And when the college kid comes back with, "You can do all of your customizations in our PaaS and connect it with SaaS!" and the customer asks how this is done, there will be no answer.

The customer, trying to see how far he can push this conversation until the kid gives up, asks how they connect their other dependent production systems with the systems in Oracle's cloud. The conversation will eventually get around to, "Well sir, you can't actually do that for production, but you should put ALL of your Test, Dev and DR environments on OPC and back everything up to our Cloud!"

"How do you do DR in Oracle's Cloud if you can't fail over to it and run production?" asks the customer. No response.

Finally, the customer says, "We run all of our Oracle in LPARS on AIX." When the kid asks what an LPAR or AIX is, the customer hangs up.

MH loves to say that Oracle salespeople should be able to capture 2/3rds of the Cloud market. Why is that? Because he believes this:

1. Every application has 3 environments: Test/Dev, DR and Production.

2. It's too risky to guarantee SLAs on production systems, so don't worry about production.

3. Let AWS / Azure take the headaches associated with production systems. Oracle needs to focus on capturing all of the Test/Dev and DR. And since it's a 1:1:1 relationship, Oracle can get 2/3rds of the market! And if you can't execute on this, it's because your a bad salesperson and don't know how to sell cloud.

A sinking ship indeed, which is why SC is selling her stock as fast as she can

The rats climb to the top masts as the ship sinks

Oracle is all over with.... after all the layoffs, there will be nothing. Top level management has NO idea what they're doing.... employees are busy in a back-stabbing frenzy... trying to steal whatever territory they can from each other. It's all over with.

Just close the doors!

Probably the most on point post I've read on this site. You obviously are here and now and feeling the same pain. They've hired college kids to do everything and they're not only clueless, they're ruining customer deals and relationships. I am so embarrassed to say I work her. Worst 10 years of my life. Strangely many of the pathetic managers and directors are still hanging around stealing money. Karma is a btch.