So far 50 have been fired in Mexico, 50 in New Hampshire, 100 in India, at least that many in Silicon Valley. It appears that Oracle wants thousands gone and it is rumoured that ten per cent of its staff is the target.
Oracle’s global headcount, which in 2018 was around 137,000. Cuts will be made in three phases this year with around 5000 employees cut in this first phase.
The database maker slashed 1000 jobs in Silicon Valley from its SPARC and Solaris teams a while back. But this current layoff operation came as a surprise to employees and observers. The lack of transparency and abruptness has people worried.
An email from Oracle executive vice president Don Johnson with the subject line “Organizational Restructuring” arrived in employee inboxes telling them that from now on everything in the company would revolve around the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) operation.
“OCI’s business is stronger than ever, and this team’s future is bright.” —Oracle Executive Vice President Don Johnson, in an email to employees. It is just everyone else who is in trouble.
“Today’s changes within OCI will better align with Larry's vision of the business. It will streamline our products and services, focus investments on our most strategic priorities, and help us to more effectively and rapidly deliver the full promise and reach of Oracle's Gen 2 Cloud.”
Five hours after that email, the layoffs began—and according to anecdotal reports included significant cuts within at least part of that stronger-than-ever, bright-future cloud business. Those affected were given 30 minutes to turn in company assets and leave the building and were told Friday was their last official day.
Entire teams being herded into conference rooms as groups and told that they no longer had jobs. This employee indicated that technical teams, particularly those involved in product development and focused on software development, data science, and engineering, seemed to take the biggest hit.
An Oracle manager posted on a recruiting site how he was notified the day before of an employee on the list—and then forced by HR to read the most heartless script to him in a notification meeting.
“I heard of other managers not even being notified that their employees were laid off. They found out after their employee contacted them. And even worse, managers who had to give the notifications and then an hour later got laid-off too. Yesterday was a complete blood bath for certain departments, and Oracle handled it in the most disrespectful way.”
Oracle seems unrepentant. It said in a statement that as its cloud business grows, we will continually balance our resources and restructure our development group “to help ensure we have the right people delivering the best cloud products to our customers around the world.”