Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

Just the Facts

The facts seem to be straight-forward:

  • Oracle started extremely late to the cloud. Later than all the other cloud players.

  • Oracle was made up primarily of employees who know absolutely nothing about web development and cloud applications.

  • Oracle spent less money on cloud development and expansion than every other cloud player.

  • Oracle development outside of the database area was poor to start with, due to years of an acquisition strategy that caused good developers to flee the company and caused internal struggles between acquired company camps.

  • TKs org has severely deteriorated, due to a top-down management style that does not allow issues to be raised and dealt with. It is an organization filled with incompetent yes-men managers who expect the developers at the bottom to keep their mouths shut and be yes-men too. The result is an unbelievably incompetent and corrupt development organization that cannot create even on-prem software, let alone cloud software. Good developers FLEE organizations like this.

  • Because of the incompetence and corruption in development, cloud applications were poor.

  • Instead of dealing with actual problems, multiple cloud platforms were created, wasting resources.

  • The "cloud" apps were poor and full of bugs. They were not integrated with each other since they were developed by different groups working against each other to grab their own territory. Each group working to make sure the other groups fail, to insure their own jobs.

  • Salespeople were forced to try to sell the "cloud".

  • Customers did not want to buy because of the problems with the cloud software (above).

  • Pressure and incompetence at the top of the company caused salespeople to use tactics to pressure customers to purchase software. These tactics included underhanded audits of customers to extract millions of dollars from them.

  • Since the customers were not interested in Oracle's cloud, the management came up with a strategy of trying to force the customers to use it by giving them cloud credits in place of paying millions of dollars to Oracle for audit violations.

  • The customers were not interested in using the cloud credits.

  • The customer success group was created to force customers to use their cloud credits.

  • That didn't work, so some of the CSMs logged in AS customers and faked the use of the cloud credits.

  • The upper level management sat there and watched this all happen, as they saw the cloud revenue die to the point where they could not publish the numbers openly.

  • Somewhere along the way, MH had a "great" idea, that the problem had something to do with the expensive sales force. Since he was too stupid to know anything about how the software was created and the fact that it was complete crap, he decided to decimate the sales force and replace them with cheap inexperienced kids who have no idea what they are doing.

  • Since the software is complete crap and the customers are really pissed off, removing sales people will not help, it will simply cause sales to come to a complete standstill.

  • The reality is that the problem is development, primarily with the development management who all cover for each other. Layers and layers of expensive clueless people who's only "job" is to say "yes" to the incompetent manager above them.

Anyone in Oracle management who wants to know what happened should read this layoff site. All of these problems have been explained here.

But, that would involve the top-level management listening to input from people below them who know what is going on. They can't do that, that would show weakness, and an admission that they actually need information about what is going on to make decisions. Instead they prefer to pretend they know what they are doing.

Consequently, there will be no recovery for Oracle any time soon, possibly never.

Nothing is going to magically change, the problems are too ingrained in Oracle culture.

Ship is going down, get out now while you still can maintain some kind of dignity.

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| 2767 views | | 18 replies (last ) | Reply
Post ID: @OP+TL6OCBJ

18 replies (most recent on top)

I was sure the "Fake New Guy" would post "fake news" here.... but no Fake News? Where are you?

On vacation with the family?

Laid off yourself and don't give a sh-- anymore?

Seen the light yourself?

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Post ID: @6mpa+TL6OCBJ

ALL the so called main line tech companies are jettisoning older emps. IBM, Oracle, Dell.....they don’t even hide it anymore bc no one holds them to account. The newer companies advertise for “recent grads” and “digital natives” bc they don’t want older emps either. So obvious but no one holds them accountable either. Meanwhile jobs go begging and employers whine about a skills shortage.

Eat a d--k, tech sector!

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Post ID: @2pkv+TL6OCBJ

Highly unlikely you'll make to retirement age at Oracle.

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Post ID: @2qys+TL6OCBJ

It feels like a place to wait until retirement

You may find that is changing. They are getting rid of the older people, just like IBM. You may not make it to retirement.

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Post ID: @2vrt+TL6OCBJ

Thanks @TL6OCBJ-1zij

And let me thank all the people who have posted on this site over the last couple of years. There's a lot of good info here. Thanks to everyone for posting.

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Post ID: @1lqo+TL6OCBJ

Love this phrase:

playing 'hide the salami' with its finances

LOL

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Post ID: @1opa+TL6OCBJ

For the riff’d and about to be riff’d: If you have been working with mostly old Oracle products with their outdated technologies, find a way to update your skills. Find a company that will help you do that...not all will but the ones who will help are the ones that will ensure you are kept up to date.

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Post ID: @1fem+TL6OCBJ

This OP needs a 5 star rating.

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Post ID: @1zij+TL6OCBJ

People shouldnt fret about leaving Oracle. As far as RIF's are concerned, you really cant be surprised if they happen to you now, the situation is pretty clear to even the most dyed in the wool Oracle person that the show has changed at Oracle from being a market leader to a struggling legacy software vendor. AWS will double in size in this fiscal year, while Oracle's management prattles around playing 'hide the salami' with its finances, shedding institutional investors along the way.

Oracle is spending more on stock buyback plans than building new data centers, which tells you everything you need to know about how they plan to compete in the cloud marketplace( they dont, but they wont say that because, that would be 'bad').

Oracle was once a great software company but that was before executive management at Oracle mishandled the move to cloud. For those at Oracle still thinking that some day soon Oracle will overcome AWS, you need to understand that its not 2009, the cloud market has matured and youre not catching up because the major cloud vendors ( of which Oracle is not one of ) have moved on from Cloud to the next architectural advance - Serverless.

Oracle is getting into the cloud at the precise time that its competition has already moved on to the next big thing. In software and comedy, its all about timing and for the past decade, Oracle has not had any timing at all. For those getting RIF'ed, its not funny at all.

The good news for the RIF'ed and the soon-to-be-RIFF'ed is that the economy is about as good as its been in years, so finding another job is not going to be as hard as it might have been previously. In many ways, leaving Oracle is a blessing, not a curse.

My advice to anyone getting RIF'ed is to remember that it had nothing to do with you, it had everything to do with the horrid executive management and their decisions over the past 10 years. You did the best you could but when youre working for leadership that allowed Jeff Bezos to work for nearly a decade before you decided to compete with him, well, like I said, you can be upset but you cant be surprised.

So basically, if youre still at Oracle, you have to ask yourself "Why?" and if youre not, you already know that the world has better options for you than you had at Oracle.

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Post ID: @1ncx+TL6OCBJ

I think the good developpets feeing really depends of the organisation they are in. Some VP and managers are better than others. Oracle is just too big, static with hardly any collaboration between the different parts. It feels like a place to wait until retirement.

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Post ID: @1ymv+TL6OCBJ

Agree, it's a sad place to be.

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Post ID: @1hjx+TL6OCBJ

It’s a sad place to be in when the acquired products are out performing the oracle developed platforms.

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Post ID: @1tbj+TL6OCBJ

I was in TK org and can confirm all this. Even as this cloud shift was going on in the market, our massively out of touch "product managers" continued to see everything the old way. The trouble is, to massively scale the way cloud requires means changes to the way things are built all the way down, in the apps, utilities, and the DB itself. And the antagonistic relationship between different development managers made this impossible. So various hacks would get layered on top of what already existed.

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Post ID: @qal+TL6OCBJ

Such a waste. Comedy of errors, one bad decision after another.

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Post ID: @wux+TL6OCBJ

Excellent summary. It's really happening. Oracle is going down for real and quite evidently. Have the board of directors ever thought that even after firing so many employees, re-orging, paying people crazy amounts for OCI, things are not working so maybe, just maybe, the problem is right at the top ?

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Post ID: @geq+TL6OCBJ

Fire the 3+1 stooges, NOW!

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Post ID: @nse+TL6OCBJ

Great summary. O needs to hit the reset button. The current Cloud dev management team just won't make it.

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Post ID: @jtk+TL6OCBJ

Good summary. Looks like the 3 clowns have been caught out by the market today in trying to use yet another accounting smoke and mirrors change to hide the real results of the cloud business.

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Post ID: @btu+TL6OCBJ

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