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We were building a payments system in the early 2000s and got a diktat to not use Oracle. The amount of things we had to build to satisfy the availability and durability requirements were so huge it consumed the first few years of work. We didn’t get to the business side of things until much later. Funny thing is we ended up giving up on MySQL and went back to oracle after all that work. The whole thing was scraped after a couple of years.

To get to the level of scale that oracle can handle we had to build sharding and cluster replication from scratch. It still didn’t get to even 1/10th of a single oracle node. Obviously we made a lot of poor architecture decisions as well - in hindsight, of course.

There was also DB2. DB2 was (still is) an excellent database that IBM has completely fumbled.

"At the time, MySQL existed ..."

You had to be careful with MySQL back then as constraints were syntactic sugar but not enforced. PostgreSQL was indeed much tougher to manage but more full-featured.

What's about DB2? I have no experience with it but I guess IBM specifically designed it for enterprise-scale transaction processing workloads...

I disagree as I was running clustered sql server 6.5 and 7 in 1998 for hundreds of concurrent users doing millions of reads per hour on NT basically commodity boxes. Replaced it with Oracle for 100x cost and lost performance.

I think even back then you were usually better off with distributed databases running mysql or postgres over Oracle. Although people liked to think a giant Oracle db was better.

Just curious, how was SQL Server perceived at the time compared to Sybase and Oracle? I know it originated as a port of Sybase.

Java and VirtualBox. But both are free.

> A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2 databases that worked for use cases where you needed high availability and vertical scalability

... and both of them were Postgres.

I used it in the late 90s for the backend for websites written in PHP3, but everyone said this was ridiculous and silly and don't you know that everyone's using the MySQL thing.

So I used this MySQL thing, but by about 2005 I'd gone back to powering my lawnmower with a 500bhp Scania V8 because I just preferred having that level of ridiculous overkill in an engine.

Nowadays? Key/Value store in RAM is probably fine for testing -> Sqlite is often Good Enough -> Ah sod it, fire Postgres into a docker container and warn the neighbours, we're going down the Scanny V8 route yet again.

I was around back then and I call Bullshit on everything you claim. There were more database options in 2000 than there were in 1996. Even before that there was FoxPro… c’mon man. Oracle’s only value was they built a NO EXIT clause into their contracts…

Your phone calls and SMS messages that touch the phone network, likely touch Oracle. Yes, nearly all of them.

For a tech-adjacent example of an acquisition of an entrenched supplier, look at Tekelec, a telecom hardware and software vendor which Oracle purchased in 2013[1].

Tekelec had a number of products but Oracle really cared about one: the EAGLE family, which is a suite of hardware and software for handling network signaling and routing over SS7. For any customer, EAGLE sits at the core of their networks and it is why your calls actually get connected and billed correctly.

EAGLE had a customer base that included nearly all of the important global telecom carriers. From the press release:

> Tekelec’s technology enables service providers to deliver, control and monetize innovative and personalized communications services and is utilized by more than 300 service providers in over 100 countries.

Verizon[2][3] runs EAGLE STP in their core, as does AT&T[4] (f/k/a SBC). Old business win press releases from Tekelec mean Bell Canada and Rogers still likely do. Based on job postings, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile use EAGLE STP for exchanging SS7 messages to/from roaming partners. And from public RFPs, the US Department of Defense[5] runs their own private phone networks, with EAGLE STP at the core.

Given how prevalent EAGLE deployments were in the early 2000s, how SS7 is needed to make the phone network functional, and how STPs are fixtures that do NOT get swapped out often, I feel very confident in saying that Oracle has had a supporting hand in most, if not all, of the phone calls and text messages you've placed since 2013.

1: https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oracle-buys-te...

2: https://www.verizon.com/about/sites/default/files/2025-03-07...

3: https://www.verizon.com/business/content/dam/business-market...

4: https://www.lightreading.com/business-management/tekelec-win...

5: https://sam.gov/opp/2227eac9a05f7c33f25b19a6ed5ab634/view

It sounds like you don't use Oracle, Oracle uses you.

My employer is actively hiring java engineers and we don't "take pictures of things from far away".

There are vibrant java user's groups all around the world. There are many java community conferences. The most recent redmonk language rankings[0] show java at #3.

The world is big :) .

0: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2...

> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

We all have different circles. I work for a bank and the bulk of the LOB code here is Java (or something that runs under a JVM). There are no Oracle databases as far as I know, but my visibility is limited.

Also, Oracle Applications for things like HR.

We use Java.

We have Oracle blocked at the router (!) to prevent anyone downloading the Oracle JDK and incurring the wrath of Oracle licensing.

Apple used Java in a ton of backend stuff. At least the entire backend for iTunes (Jingle) was written in Java and very very small amount of Clojure.

The financial market infrastructure heavily relies on Java. Transactions at commercial banks across North America are mostly executed on Java codebases.

There are probably millions of corporate projects written in Java. One of the reasons Oracle bought Sun Microsystems (who invented Java) was because Oracle itself had written so much middleware crap in Java.

Both Java and C#/.NET are super-popular in Enterprise land, with the choice between them mainly being if the enterprise is a Microsoft shop or not.

Everything SAP touches is written in Java too, and it's boring old payroll stuff. There's the entire Android user interface with millions of Java-only app developers.

Oracle may well be in bed with the spooks, but it's not a Java-specific thing.

Interesting, the _majority_ of developers I know write in JVM languages - mostly Kotlin for new stuff at this point.

Typically I see folks using the Amazon Corretto java distribution.

Java is not uncommon. Off the top of my head, a certain rainforest company and a lot of banks and EMR providers use it.

> The only developers I know who write Java

It sounds like your personal anecdote is particularly uninformative then.

> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

This can’t be a serious comment. I’d say probably half the world‘s B2B and enterprise runs on Java. Especially in Europe.

Look at who is making OpenJDK distributions besides Oracle: Amazon, Microsoft, Red Hat, IBM, Eclipse, SAP, … It’s being used everywhere.

> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

Huh??? Google, the search engine part, is written in Java as far as I know. Yandex uses Java extensively. Odnoklassniki, once second most popular Russian social network, is written in Java. Banks like Java. Android apps are written in Java (and Kotlin, which I consider an abstraction over Java).

And that's only what I can remember right away. A sizable chunk of the world runs on Java.

There are literally millions of us that write Java and don't work for the CIA. It's like still in the top 3 of all languages.

Amazon is predominantly a java shop as is a lot of big enterprise

it's not purely gov work—lots of legacy software (especially outside of the US) is java-based

and if you hire an offshore outsourcing company, odds are that they will insist on something java (spring) based, as that's where their experience is

What? What kind of ridiculous bubble are you in? Isn't Java one of the main languages at Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc?

That is a silly take. The absolute majority of Java devs in the world does not work in spy agencies (sounds like it’s more about your personal network being close to that world)

The question then becomes, does Java warrant the valuation Oracle has when the language itself is mostly FLOSS?

I think that overstates, there is a lot of java in the enterprise still, it's lose share to golang and typescript and in certain cases rust, but it's still around and doing just fine (to my annoyance).

They have not pulled the pin on the ZFS grenade yet, but I expect at some point it happens.

> Why would go $58B in debt to support a new feature that no one will want after alienating everyone above?

Short term shareholder equity gains during an over exuberant hype cycle you do not know when might repeat.

"As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." -- Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince (symbolizing Wall Street's reckless persistence in risky lending despite signs of a market downturn)

The Overvaluation Trap - https://hbr.org/2015/12/the-overvaluation-trap - December 2015

> The trap is an almost inevitable consequence of what many managers might regard as a blessing, because it occurs when the capital markets overvalue a company’s equity—and especially when stock overvaluation is common in a particular sector. In the following pages, we’ll describe the trap, show how it has played out in various industries, and suggest where it may be playing out once again.

"If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Paul Newman

Edit: tsunamifury wrote a prescient comment a decade ago, referencing the same hrb piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10851527

on this point the netsuite ecosystem is huge and there are not that many options for SME's that are too big/complex for inacct or quicken (even campfire/rillet etc) but don't want to get anywhere near SAP, Infor, IFS, oracle (not netsuite).

Yeah, many of these comments are extremely misinformed. Oracle has been an application software vendor for a long time.

For example, Oracle sell Opera. Opera manages hotels, both individual and chains. And integrates with their amusement park management software.

People complain about them, but software like that is much closer to an sdk than a finished product. It is generally customized for each buyer for their needs. And the quality of the customization is more on the buyer than on Oracle.

Oracle have a giant suite of these products for POS, guest experiences, amusement parks, hospitality, marketing (b2b and b2c), etc. And companies buy from Oracle because they're not good at making software and because you do leverage some economies of scale.

> Every company I've worked for has avoided Oracle software of any kind.

Lucky you. Sadly, not all companies are new enough to be able to do that. Some embarked on Java when it was Sun, and Oracle when the only alternative would have been SQL Server (or DB2 on AIX, AS/400, or MVS).

A past company I worked for made SaaS and On-prem and we supported Oracle with the on-prem. The simple act of supporting and testing that option was enormous for our company, but the customers we had that needed it were highly lucrative.

I worked for one company that used it. Everybody on the ground hated it but the costs of migrating away were enormous because every system they relied upon was tightly coupled to every other system. It would have been a multiyear project to get off it.

Their software wasn't just more expensive than using open source equivalents it was worse, too. It's just very, very sticky.

At the same time the sales team wine and dine key decision makers and try to strike the fear of god in to them so they don't rock the boat.

It’s a common ‘large enterprise’ dependency often due to some internal CRN/Accounting/Compliance software, so I suspect you are right.

Non-tech companies have bigger fish to fry in cost optimization than IT infrastructure.

For example, nobody buying, insuring and operating supertankers will care that much about Oracle licensing or even renewing a mainframe contract.

And, their product have worked correctly for decades.

So if you have a lot of money and don't want to take any risk you go the oracle route. It's not the best product today, but you won't have any surprise, except cost, that you can justify because it's oracle.

Which is the same as using a tank to go grocery shopping because you're afraid of an accident on the way. You need everything in house to support a thank, special garage, specifically trained crew, specific fuel...

And it's way harder to drive than a civic.

Precisely this. They prey on outsource-happy big orgs that have 1 million different SaaS all tied together by scotch tape (because their IT dept. is also outsourced)

I have a theory that being cash-rich creates an atmosphere of technological cluelessness, or more specifically weaponized incompetence. A cash-rich company attracts sociopathic executives, who are focused on the prestige of working at a top company. These executives display a unified front outwardly, but internally they are all stabbing each other in the back constantly. And any executive who champions in-house software is just giving other executives ammunition whenever said software has the smallest bug.

I'm actually impressed by the amount of abuse our Oracle instances are able take from our developers.

Massive amounts of parallel single reads and writes with millisecond responses mixed with mega-joins of incorrectly indexed tables that works flawlessly "on their machine" that limp on well enough to sneak past performance testing with just the planner silently writhing in agony.

A while ago we were looking at migrating ERP - netsuite was a not a good price proposition and candidly feels a bit dated - but when you mapped features it was pretty impressive and for a lot of business that have some complexity (multi-entity, multi-currency, multi site mfg or inventory), there is not a whole lot of good alternatives because you can't use quicken but you definitely don't want SAP

Until you become addicted, and then plan for the price to spike.

> Oracle bought Sun for Java, not for Sun

My recollection is that they also qanted Sun's storage hardware products, to sell alongside their existing DB software.

Indeed. Oracle runs on z/OS as well.

I use it only for the free(for now) tier. I always thought AWS console was about the worst UI/UX could get.

Not to be outdone, Oracle came along and said 'hold my beer.'

I posted a response from Gemini where I asked Gemini, "Do you have citations proving or disproving whether Oracle Cloud is still attracting cloud customers away from Azure, AWS and GCP?" and it seems it disagrees with your "nobody wants their terrible cloud" view.

Truth. I don't know of a better plug and play option than Netsuite for middle to big companies.

> a rudderless leech for nearly 30 years now.

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.

I hadn’t realized their stock price has been cut in half over the past year.

> (ai generated)

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.

If I do my python right, from 2010-2020 they grew by 2.5% annually, from 2020 to 2025, they grew headcount by 3.7% annually.

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.

> They clearly did something crazy at corona

They acquired Cerner, which had ~30k employees.

Even at 100k employees I’m still dumbfounded by that number. What do all these people do all day?

In June 2022 the Oracle acquisition of Cerner (a EMR now billed as Oracle Health) closed, so that would be after the 2022 date and before the 2023 date. Cerner was 28,000 employees.

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...

But the up curve at the end very clearly tracks with AI adoption and not Corona?

You need to pair hc with revenue, otherwise this data tells only one story, hc growth.

What's the point of posting statistics if they're not fact-checked and come from no verifiable source? At best they're right but we don't know until someone else fact-checked it for you, and at worst you're just spreading misinformation and we don't know until, again, someone else fact-checked it for you.

If you want to use AI to find information like this, tell it to grab you a source and post that.

So they are returning to 2015 headcount.

(EDIT: or 2021)

More employees to release less stuff.... Smell like consultancy.

The "Something crazy at corona" would likely be, in part, their purchase of Cerner Corporation in 2021-2022. I want to say there were 10k-ish employees? Maybe more?

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.

Where's the annual revenue for context? Those numbers are almost useless alone.

Their profit doubled from 2010 to 2025 though, no?

Stock barely moved after this news. Would be surprised if it isn't below 100 by H2.

-

> 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.

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.

> In fact, one thing we could do is make sure that all jobs should be perpetual. If someone hires you, they can't stop paying you until they die or declare bankruptcy. This is sure to be good for workers

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.

> One of the ideal things that companies can do is not hire people

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.

It’s not unethical to lay someone off

My only problem with this is: Some of my best people are those that "I gave them a chance." I'd only hire perfect people from my tribe if I had to have them forever.

Mandated perpetual employment is bad for workers because the company will be extremely reluctant to hire and take on such an open-ended liability.

Oracle has record revenue and has for many years in a row. Laying people off is a result of mismanagement and not because they can't afford to keep them. In an ideal world I believe we'd have human centered employment instead of profit centered, and while I know that's unlikely to happen, it doesn't mean we can't criticize profit centered

Termination will take on a while different meaning of this turns out to come true on some Black Mirror future.

Are you paid significantly more for your newfound productivity?

> collect severance and unemployment --- I was not aware this is law in California,

Unemployment benefits in California are capped at $450/week, and you only get 26 weeks of it. It's helpful, but doesn't even cover housing costs for many individuals, let alone for families.

I don't think there's a state law requiring severance. It's often offered by the employer if the terminated employee agrees to sign an NDA.

As a European, this seems normal?

When someone is fired, they generally stop working immediately while getting paid through the notice period.

They are done working but will collect severance pay, typically scaled by years of service.

Oracle software engineering compensation for mid-level software engineers is in the $200-300K range. The top of their scale extends into the $400K to $1 million range.

From what I've seen, laid off employees will receive a minimum of 1 month of their compensation with 1 week of pay for every year worked, plus any remaining unused vacation time. So a mid-level employee who has worked their a few years and hasn't drawn their vacation balance to 0.0 could receive $30-50K or more beyond this date.

The at-will firing is just how it is in the US, but I do find it odd how accepting we've become with these corporations massively overhiring.

If they have to fire twenty percent of the company, shouldn't that be a signal to investors that the people in charge are morons for overhiring thirty thousand people in the first place? Software engineers aren't cheap; assuming an average compensation of $250,000/year (which I think is pretty conservative if you count total comp like insurance and stock) then that's 7.5 billion dollars of investor money they're wasting per year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

Why? They get a severance which is going to be multiple months salary, as well as approximately $2000/mo unemployment from the state (assuming in California).

Personally, I'd rather just get the money and not have to work, rather than be forced to come into the office knowing I was getting canned in 3 months or whatever

Dane here. I have had more than one coworker get that treatment.

Sure the company still has to payout salary, as per the contract, but plenty of companies do not want laid of people around.

It's insane to force businesses to take on the government's responsibilities (providing food/shelter/income/energy security).

A buyer and seller should be free to start and stop buying and selling whenever they want, absent contracts stating otherwise.

The government should be there to directly support all of the people, not to police and cajole businesses to support some of the people that happened to be hired by a business.

Crazy society they built over the pond.

They really have some of the best & beautiful land on earth, never been bombed in modern times, plenty population, the best schools in the world.

Yet they made a hellscape of cars and asphalt and same day termination. Just sad.

When i was first laid off during the dot com bust I was working on a sales floor. All open no cubes. We didn't know layoffs were coming. Manager walks in and taps this one guy on the shoulder, says grab your personal things and come with me. Manager came back in did the same to a few others. Then it was me. Talk about embarrassing! Also, was 2 weeks before quarter ended. If you were not working for the company at the end of the Q, no bonus. 2 weeks! I'll never forget that. That was my first taste of how nasty a company can be. Not the layoffs, hey things happen. But the timing. Feels diabolical.

One of my past employers tried to give laid off employees a dignified send offs including not immediately revoking their access.

The number of people who snap and make rash decisions to try to exfiltrate data, plant backdoor logins for themselves, or sabotage company work in those hours was a much larger number than I would have guessed prior to seeing it.

They understand, but they are more concerned about you exfiltrating data and suing them.

But you're right, the survivors don't even get a list. They have to find out when something they're waiting for never shows up because that person doesn't work there anymore.

Do not say “companies”. They are managers who do this. It is them who are to blame.

Yes in my (somewhat tinfoil) opinion the point is to have an emotional impact on the workforce overall (or at least, one of the points is). Tech workers had a really good 20 years in the US, and kind of forgot that they were ultimately still wage workers. I think the culture circa 2018 took for granted a basic level of respect and cooperation from upper executives, and were beginning to exercise their power to achieve political goals, which was annoying to the tech ownership class. I think one of the major strategic turns of last 4ish years is the usage of precarity and high turnover to corrode worker solidarity in fields which used to be ironclad and respectable white-collar work. By simultaneously narrowing the hiring window ('junior devs are replaceable with AI') and also expanding the opportunities to be culled ('we are axing this division to cover our moonshot outlays') capital cultivates a desperate and compliant workforce. Bottom-up culture is woke, in the 2020's the folks in power want top-down directives that are followed unquestioningly; similar approach to how the executive branch was brought to heel by DOGE.

Some employees in the company might understand the emotional impact, but companies themselves would only look for certainty in protecting what belongs to them, which will hardly align with fairness or emotions towards employees in a situation like this.

This is largely the world we've created with litigation practices.

Corpo is very careful to show empathy that can be perceived in some way as accepting blame in a way that would open them to litigation.

* in the USA

Here we get 1-3 month notice.

But it goes both ways, if I want to leave I have to work the mandated period.

https://www.unionen.se/in-english/notice-to-termination

Contrary to what people may think, the most humane way is a fast clean cut. Drawing it out in anyway doesnt help anyone. This does assume communication is clear about employee next steps for HR related tasks.

This is also why in the other direction a fast clean cut works too. I mean if they want two weeks of “work”, i always consider that severance.

The fast clean cut is true in all industries. Drawing it out only makes it more painful. It is similar to breaking up in a relationship.

Honest question, why would they care?

This is American way. There are no people, only resources.

One of the most surreal meetings I've ever been to was a company All Hands after a 20% layoff round. The upper management people who decided who was laid off took turns talking about how upset it made them to have to do it. They showed a diagram of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief and went back and forth talking about what stage of grief they were in having to lay all these people off. Was like something out of the UK version of The Office. It was so tone deaf that it was bleakly comedic at a certain point.

The extra kicker was that there were a bunch of UK people in this meeting who knew they'd be laid off, but it takes longer to do the redundancy process over there, so they had to listen to these people complaining about how sad firing them feels.

Heh thank you. It was a few years ago that this happened, when they were doing the big RTO.

Whenever the lawnmower thing comes up, I try to also mention dtrace. As far as things to be remembered for, they make some strange bedfellows... although it's better than anything I've managed so I guess congrats.

Outside of 90s television, this might be the most universal reference I have in my life.

I think the headline is not the best headline, but what it meant by "cold" is that there was no advance warning. So like cold-calling somebody, but to fire them, and an email instead.

Whatever you do, do not ever book a 1:1 meeting on a Friday afternoon for Monday morning titled, "The Future."

And traceability.

In a 1:1 meeting you could fire me and say a gazillion things and I'd forget 99.9% of them.

I think its very impolite to not do it face-to-face.

Expected, yes, required, not at all.

It is completely legal to just stop showing up one day.

A great alternative would be operating a company correctly so you don't end up in a situation where you need to cut 30k jobs at once with no notice. That's a bizarre thing that's becoming practically normalized in the USA tech industry.

Can you imagine a company spending a long time on meetings?!

6+ months' notice with a severance package equal to at least an annual salary.

Were those people not already having regular 1-on-1 meetings with a manager?

Depends on the circumstances. There are people who are ready to go any the time of a layoff if the terms are right.

> what exactly should they be held accountable for?

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

> but what exactly should they be held accountable for?

For over hiring 30K people.

making wrong decisions at work has no consequences for you? where do you work?

> A job today isn’t (and shouldn’t be) any guarantee of a job tomorrow.

Also relationships, kids and stability. Spend all your life in perpetual anxiety, rent all your life, you will own nothing and be happy! Also, here’s a bowl of insect protein while we’re at it.

They massively over committed to data center deals with debt. Safra leaving is also a big deal. Look at the stock price since she left.

Stock went down 50% in six months. If LE's AI bet is wrong, then they'll have to find some way to pay off the $60B in new debt.

Citations?

Not confident, but that's a good question. :)

When laying people off, better companies will often accelerate vesting so that the departing employees get additional stock. For example, Google does this:

We’ll also offer a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, and accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting.

https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/j...

That's what the contract would typically say. But it's not uncommon to have accelerated vesting either when parting on good terms or with severance.

Since moving to NYC, I'm surprisingly close to cashflow neutral. The cost of living is crazy expensive here.

I'm for sure timing my exit based on the vesting schedule.

Pretty vicious. As an employee I wouldn't consider working at Oracle or any company that's done this when there are plenty of companies which, despite layoffs sucking for everyone involved, at least compensate their employees decently when it happens.

Yes, it's the standard in every legal doc I've ever seen too, but most companies have typically done some accelerated vesting as part of severance. Of course they don't have to, but it's a generally lower cost way of showing some good will.

this is the internet, not a Sunday service at your local mormon temple where swearing is banned. You can call Larry Ellison an asshole. There are few people more deserving of being called in asshole than he is.

> My point is: it's very, very, very hard to do this, especially with my set of interests

It is very, very, very hard because you're making it hard by insisting on finding a strong intersection with your set of interests.

Half the jobs I've had aligned well with my interests. They were also in the lower half of jobs I liked. The best jobs I've had were the boring ones. It turns out, there's a lot more to jobs than just what you work on.

The most important thing is to keep a roof over your head. Next is saving for retirement. And then there are things like work environment, the people you work with, team dynamics, the actual technical work, etc.

I've found that the most intellectually fun/challenging work was usually coupled with the most dysfunctional teams. It's likely just a coincidence, but it was a good lesson that other things matter at least as much.

Yes. I work at boring companies that are not evil instead. Never went to my local magnate (Comcast), left a company when they off/onshored entire teams to HCL slaves, etc.

No i won't make 350K as a dev. Yes i will have a paltry middle class existence while we still have a profession called IT.

The key to not working for evil companies is to have more choice in who you do work for, which involves living way below your means so that you can save inordinate amounts of income and "retire" early - which is just code for "do the work I want to do for those I want to work for".

Sometimes the lesser evil is truly a lesser evil.

Many of the startups I work with. We’re helping save the oceans and land. Purpose and profit are dream scenarios for me. It’s difficult in a capitalist economy but it exists.

Why stick with for-profit companies? But on measure I'd say System76, n8n, Nextcloud, GridX, Odoo, Tuxedo, GitLab, Uplight, Aurora Solar, Bandcamp (maybe), Bitwarden, Canonical (maybe), Scribd, Arcadia, Wikihow. Basically any time you find yourself enjoying a product you're using, see who made it and if they're hiring.

Sure it's an uphill battle. This is late-stage capitalism after all and unless you're comfortable with a role that extracts from people who weren't planning in being extracted from you're not going to make a ton of money. That's what it takes to be on the side of the angels though.

The more people who believe this, the easier it is for me to find a job at a place I respect, so thank you.

Ironically this would just fuel more layoffs.

37signals, vanguard, costco, proton, fastmail, mullvad vpn, framework, automattic, valve, patagonia, lego, linear, hetzner, tarsnap, ...

Costco maybe?

Pine64. ("Successful" doesn't have to mean "a megacorp".)

Just starting with "Not totally abhorrent and aiding the destruction of democracy in the US" would be fine.

Instead of working for Zuck or Google or Larry, you can work for Garmin, Shopify, Visa and Mastercard, most banks (they are soulless but some aren't always evil), grocery chains, pretty much any local business, car companies, non-weapon or surveillance based government work, IDEXX, hell even Apple imo and I dislike Apple, nearly every business that isn't "Tech"

Basically just stop pretending that the industry is only Google, Facebook, AWS, Microsoft, and Oracle. There's something like millions of jobs that aren't in those companies.

"Hire" an unfortunately ironic typo!

> The main teams hit - RHS, SVOS, and NetSuite India - are associated with Cerner and NetSuite, both of which can serve to reduce some fat.

> reduce some fat

Yes, but, well... why do they need to do that at all? I mean, what made them make this decision right now? I think it was mentioned in the article - they're in debt because of their AI data centers projects:

> Oracle has taken on $58 billion in new debt within just two months.

Although...

> All of this is happening even as the company posted a 95% jump in net income — reaching $6.13 billion — last quarter.

Still,

> According to analysis from TD Cowen, the job cuts are expected to free up between $8 billion and $10 billion in cash flow — money the company urgently needs to fund a massive buildout of AI data centers.

And they need a lot of resources to fund that, because:

> Oracle to Invest U.S. $2 Billion in AI and Cloud Infrastructure in Germany (2025) [1]

> Oracle unveils $10B data center expansion plan (plans for 2025) [2]

While they're having some problems now:

> Oracle and OpenAI End Plans to Expand Flagship Data Center (Bloomberg) [3]

It's just a few examples; I'm sure if you will dig deeper you will find more. Some sources suggest that "Oracle plans to invest up to $50 billion in 2026 to expand its AI data center infrastructure", but I'm not sure if it's true and if you can trust them, so I'll leave it there. They're trying to optimize because they're in debt, and still they seem to expand that debt even more.

[1] https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-invests-two-...

[2] https://www.channeldive.com/news/oracle-capex-spike-cloud-ai...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-06/oracle-an...

rollingout.com is a clickbait site. Companies aren't leaking info to them.

Yup, completely confusing Warner Bros and Disney. Thanks for catching that!

Yeah plenty of suckers are trapped by Ellison’s downward facing grass cutting blades.

It’s a sad state of affairs. I mean Postgres is right over there!

Love the confidence. The logic can catch up later.

These are some of the richest and most profitable companies in history but they act like miserly slaves to their share price. We have created such a perverted incentive system.