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I love the smell of [layoff emails] in the morning.

Makes me wonder why they're shedding so much and if Zitron was a little right after all.

>The company has not disclosed how many workers were affected by the latest cuts

One of the first things that "progressive" politicians should do if they take power is require large companies to disclose the exact number of firings before people are notified.

That's already the law in the US, the WARN act. It requires 60 days notice before any mass layoffs. The way companies "get around" this is by not actually laying you off, but giving you 60 days notice that you will be laid off and then removing all your access during those 60 days, at the same time they report the 60 days notice of layoffs. It's essentially 60 days severance (plus reporting to the government), which IMO is better than everyone walking wondering who will actually be laid off in 60 days. You can even see that in the email they sent, "today is your last working day" but there will be an email with "details on your [...] termination date". It's unclear to me if this layoff doesn't qualify as a mass layoff (so no warning period needed) or if they just haven't filed it yet, but I'm guessing they'll file it soon enough.
Thats how they usually happen ? They are always "cold"
This appears to be a UK new site*, and it's definitely not how they usually happen there. In fact, it's not even how they legally happen.

> 100 or more redundancies - the consultation must start at least 45 days before any dismissals take effect

https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/consultation

If you want to have similar laws, you need to lobby your representatives, and get them to follow California's example, which introduced the Cal-WARN act:

> “an employer may not order a mass layoff, relocation, or termination at a covered establishment unless, 60 days before the order takes effect, the employer gives written notice of the order”

From https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Cal-WARNAct.html

But as others have said, it's not as strong as the UK laws, so it just becomes a de-facto notice period instead. It's still progress though.

* Although not one I've ever heard of, which is a little suspicious.

There’s a federal WARN act too. Neither the state nor federal versions gives the employees any legal right to try to change the business’s mind.
even in the UK they still get announced as layoffs, employees get their access revoked, and they're in some sort of limbo while the consultations / process takes place.
At least people get paid during the gardening leave.
How would that work, you'd have to revoke access for entire departments, not just those being made redundant, because consultation has to be legitimate, it can't be decided prior to consultation who will be made redundant.
It seems to be a British article.

For European standards, it's not only cold but would be absurdly illegal.

I doubt it was cold as in no prior information cold but more like "cold sounding". If the layoffs affected > 50 employees then it would have triggered the CALWarn act which is the California additions to the federal warn act. So the oracle employees got 60 days notice and have known the email was coming today for 2 months. If they didn't then Oracle owes them 60 days of pay and benefits.
Oracle's credit rating has been downgraded to a notch above "junk" status [1].

That means they can't borrow cheaply anymore. The only way to raise cash now is to cut payroll, and that's what they are doing. And what are they doing with the cash? Buying Nvidia hardware to rent out to OpenAI [2].

All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in. This is a commodity business, Oracle has no IP in this. To fund it they are making deep cuts to their software development business which does have proprietary IP.

That may have made sense when it was originally announced because AI hype was at its peak at the time. Indeed, Oracle's stock shot up when Stargate was announced. However, since then the AI hype has evaporated, and hyperscalers are no longer being rewarded with a higher stock price. Oracle stock has dropped more than 50%, and companies not investing 100s of billions in AI hardware are now being rewarded, such as Apple.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/magazine/takeaways-larry-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_LLC

>However, since then the AI hype has evaporated

What? Nvidia stock, for instance has been moving largely sideways for the past 4 months. Maybe it's not as jubilant as before, but it hasn't exactly "evaporated".

I think the parent is overselling it when they say "AI hype has evaporated". Nvidia is still trading high because they're still selling shovels in the gold rush, and the frontier labs are still trading high as well. What is collapsing are the infra providers who are just selling commodities: even if the bubble doesn't crash they will get chewed up, because there is nothing preventing them from being forced to sell at COGS: they have no moat and eventually their margins will be driven to zero.
NVDA P/E is 26. That's hardly overhyped. For comparison AAPL P/E is 38.
PE is forward looking. Apple has the business model where people will continue to buy their newer phones and devices and use their paid services at the same or higher prices for the foreseeable future.

Do you think GPUs will continue to be bought at the same rate as during the ai data center buildout gold rush era, at the same ultra high up prices?

For CPUs, Moore's law lasted more than 50 years. We don't know how long it will last for GPUs. I think Nvidia will keep improving performance, lowering power consumption and reducing heat generation for many years to come.
It hasn't entirely evaporated, but it has certainly calmed a bit, and Oracle was maybe the most incautious large company with this stuff.
Oracle going out of business would at least be one thing to celebrate in 2026.
If Sam and Dario manage to kill Oracle, this whole era of software will have been worth it.
I hope whoever buys their parents, they relicense ZFS
I strongly suspect that broad enthusiasm for copy-on-write filesystems is largely past. Btrfs is out there and is the default for some Fedora editions. While I have no direct connections to that storage world any longer, I'm not convinced that relicensing ZFS would affect the landscape in a major way among the more significant distributions.
It seems that btrfs is being phased out of fedora. It looks like Fedora will be moving to stratis storage over the next year or two. Btrfs is nice but it's raid5/6 support still seems shaky and there's odd corner cases that apply to all btrfs setups (getting stuck when free space is low is mostly resolved but can still occur).
I'm not super-plugged into Fedora these days. Red Hat has long been pretty comfortable with a more conventional file system (think it's still XFS out of SGI by default) plus volume management for RHEL. ZFS was a non-starter for licensing reasons and Oracle; btrfs just wasn't there. I suspect things could have played out differently had Oracle relicensed ZFS once upon a time but that ship has likely sailed in a variety of ways.
XFS is a default filesystem in a production system? Really?

XFS was dead to me 20 years ago. The only time I ever actually verifiably lost data to a system crash was on XFS. I had actual zero length files with XFS after a crash. Lost actual data. But the file system was in totally happy consistent metadata state. Never ever would I ever consider that filesystem ever again.

The ominous "reisserfs" everyone complained about? Never lost a single byte of data to it even when I pulled the plug in the middle of a write operation to test it. No issues with ext4, no experience with btrfs.

The main problem with ReiserFS is Reiser killed his wife so it is unmaintained.
There is that. I think ReiserSF used to be the default that SUSE used. These days, it seems to be btrfs for root and XFS for everything else.
Stratis does not support data integrity checksums. There is dm-integrity hack but it slows down the write speed by halve.
I no longer have the direct relationships with storage folks at Red Hat that I once did and that stuff may all be over on the IBM side anyway. Stratis (which I wasn't familiar with) does seem to be designed with the intention of bringing a lot of pooling etc. on top of a conventional file system but haven't really looked at or talked to anyone in the storage groups recently. Conventional LVM was pretty old and really designed for a different time.
Is it? I thought the contrary, the immutable distros are possible specifically because of them?.

Relicensing it would probably make it into kernel within months and I am absolutely sure adoption would happen quickly. Mind you, ZFS is more important to servers than desktop.

I expect that there is enough history around ZFS that getting it into the kernel would be a pretty big move.
zfs is more mature and has a better feature set. It's also about the best file system for a NAS, since you can detect and repair single bad blocks if you run zfs's version of RAID5/6.

btrfs is lighter on memory use and a bit easier to administer (until it eats your data). But if zfs licensing becomes cleared up and it becomes a normal part of the linux kernel that would be a lot more attractive than btrfs to me

As someone who's used btrfs and zfs, btrfs today is still a pale imitation of what zfs was at launch. btrfs feels like people wanted to make a filesystem which had all the 'pretty neat' features of ZFS but without the tightly coupled management and benefits of ZFS (like volume management + RAID + encryption + compression all being managed through one tool).

btrfs ended up being basically a consumer version of a few of ZFS's most visible features - transparent compression, subvolumes, and copy-on-write - which then farms out the other most useful features - RAID + volume management + encryption - to the existing tooling. Makes sense for a smaller-scale project, no shade, but it definitely misses the mark if you've spent time on ZFS systems taking advantage of what ZFS has to offer (like recursive snapshots or vdevs).

If it happens in 2026, they will likely be bailed out.
Larry Ellison's son had to scale down his media and TV empire ambitions when Oracle stock crashed. That's one thing to celebrate, because we don't want CNN to be controlled by the Ellisons.
CNN is mostly a lost cause, though I do agree with your statement.

The real problem with that one, though, is it would utterly destroy the American movie industry, which is a crucial part of our economy and culture.

last time I found CNN appealing was in the early 90's...if that tells you anything about it.
Bourdain worked for them after that
Larry is also the reason why all new Star Trek series have been cancelled:

https://www.cbr.com/paramount-dismantling-star-trek-9-year-s...

Well, that's a blessing at least. It was painful watching the butchering of Star Trek over the last decade.
Picard was great! Romulans, Borg, Q, Data!! What more could you ask for?!
I consider Picard Season 2 the worst season of TV ever made.
Being at least average and not shit
To be honest, I'm not sure to what degree my reaction to increasingly random dips into recent Trek has been around them just not being that good as a whole vs. just being tired of the franchise after many decades at this point.
I could ask for them not to show graphic torture onscreen, yuck. Decided to skip Picard once I heard about that.
Noooo Strange New Worlds was the best thing that ever happened to trek
Lower Decks is so good too.
The current season has been rather divisive, to say the least. I mean some of these episodes currently have IMDB ratings in the mid 4's to mid 5's range out of 10: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12327578/episodes/?season=4

Personally I didn't hate the gimmick episodes, but enjoying them sort of requires no longer taking the show seriously at all.

Eh, I mean TNG, which is probably the best-regarded series, had its fair share of duds, and not just in the not-very-good first season. In particular, I am thinking of the episode where Data's cat turned into a lizard.

> A transporter malfunction turns most of the crew into puppets while Spock fights to reclaim the ship.

The difference is the sheer number of gimmick episodes: so far half the episodes this season fall into that category. Did you actually watch that puppet episode you're quoting? Gimmick aside, it had one of the dumbest endings of any Star Trek episode I can think of.
I assumed the reason was Starfleet Academy was complete slop
Meh. The last Star Trek worth watching was TOS.
[dead]
TOS was what it was. Some episodes were better (and aged better) than others. After a pretty week start, TNG was pretty solid. DS9 was good too far more often than not. While other series had their strong points, I'm not going to go to the mat to defend any of them.
No love for VOY? :)

I know it's been a long time...

There were definitely some good episodes and it probably got better over time. I'd probably give it a mild thumbs up overall with reservations.
Oh thank god. It hurt my soul watching the horror that is the new ST. Starfleet Academy was almost unspeakably terrible
I do love how the software world has the caricature of a comic book villain in Larry Ellison
"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.

You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle."

— Bryan Cantrill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s

Maybe some in this thread won’t celebrate CNN staying out of the clutches of the Ellisons.

But think of it this way. If Ellison’s acquisition of Warner Bros falls through Ellison must pay Warner Bros a $7 Billion breakup fee. That’s on top of the $2.8 Billion they paid Netflix to abandon its pursuit of Warner Bros.

So Ellison would have wasted $9.8 Billion and years of his life for absolutely nothing. And I think we can all agree that the world would be better off.

And will be still worth a quarter trillion dollars.

Years of his life, perhaps, though a large part of that will be banks and lawyers, not him grinding it out.

He won't even notice the money being gone, not even close.

I’m worried your cynicism is overwhelming your capacity for rational thought.

Years of his life and 5-10% of his net worth. That’s the kind of thing people notice.

It's definitely not 10%, more like 3%. His net worth is currently listed as $248B. If he has to pay out the full penalty on both acquisitions, his net worth will still be $240B. There's nothing articulable about the difference in his life as a result.

I will give you the time though, or the motivations (however appalling they are) for his exertion of energy on these.

I lol'ed in the theater when I watched Top Gun Maverick as a double-feature with the original and the first thing you see is PRODUCED BY DAVID ELLISON — very “ecrof ria eht nioj”
They still maintain Java and Graal VM. That is more that the BS coming out of Misanthropic and ClosedAI.
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Not for the employees, obvs. I'm not going to celebrate misery, especially if that misery makes an already-tough job market that much worse.
They are still making billions from highly sticky enterprise customers, which is more than enough to survive. Otherwise, Microsoft would have gone out of business years ago.
> They are still making billions from highly sticky enterprise customers

That's true. This lets Oracle coast for a while. But if they coast for too long SAP will overtake them.

Sure, but then they're out of the "growth" stock category they so badly wanted to be in, with its higher valuation multipliers, then in the stodgy "keep the lights on" niche. If a company makes $10B this year, and you had a way of knowing it was going to make $10B every year from now on, there's not much incentive to invest in it.

Note that this doesn't make for a bad company! You can run a $0-profit company indefinitely and give employees nice jobs for providing nice services to your customers. There's nothing wrong with that. It's great! But you don't get the same multiples for that arrangment as you do for a company that's growing quickly. Lower multiples = stock drops = One Medium Wealthy Asshole Called Larry Ellison, and that's something I simply do not think he could tolerate.

Microsoft has _nothing_ like the debt load that Oracle does.
Putting a big X on the Ellison photo in the rogue's gallery of tech elites will be satisfying. In an industry chock full of despicable men, Ellison is a real standout.
I wonder which shitty company will become the new Oracle. Oracle wasn't the first Oracle.
Who was the first Oracle? Did IBM transition into it before Oracle did?
IBM has always been better than Oracle. It makes giant expensive software and hardware that require arcane knowledge to keep them running. But they also run reliably once you insert enough money.

Oracle's stuff JustDoesn'tWork(tm) once you move past its core database offering. And even that (see: RAC) is sometimes problematic.

IBM buying Oracle for pennies on a dollar would be great outcome.
Broadcom would buy up all of Oracle's useful IP and patents and continue the grift.
Happen to agree. But to the comment above, yes, it's rack and stack but I suspect Oracle's legion of lawyers can put some sort of spin on this.
> All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in. This is a commodity business

But it's not if you can jump to the front of the GPU allocation line like Musk has done.

What else does Oracle have? Mostly just a bunch of IP that a sufficiently strong AI will be able to recreate for a fraction of each customers bill. Oracle is very aware.

Where is the value coming from when all knowledge work (and later manual work) is 10-100-10000x cheaper done by AIs? You probably don’t want to build models, too easy to move to another provider when one is better, open models eat your lunch etc. But there are still means of production to be owned but it’s just GPUs

ORCL down more than 50% in the past 12mo.
is it true that the companies investing 100s of billions into AI, have taken up a lot of debt in hope of AI making them trillions in revenue?
I'm very hopeful to see Larry loose everything, and Oracle stripped for parts. Karma that is well overdue.
> All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in.

1. Any cloud business essentially is "unpacking servers and plugging them in." Yet the cloud business has been exploding quarter-over-quarter ever since AWS came online. To the tune of double-digit billions cash flow every quarter for each of the hyperscalers, even before the AI boom.

2. Nvidia servers are at the moment even less commodity than typical cloud servers and are currently THE hottest hardware resource in the world. Everyone is scrambling desperately to procure them, and the US and China are battling geopolitically over access to these things, and they are actively being smuggled to bypass these restrictions.

> However, since then the AI hype has evaporated, and hyperscalers are no longer being rewarded with a higher stock price.

This is a misreading of what has been happening with hyperscaler stock prices. They have consistently been punished despite record estimate-beating earnings pretty much every quarter for the past multiple quarters, precisely because they keep incinerating all that money and more on the same CapEx that Oracle is.

At this point it is pretty clear that the biggest moat in the whole AI boom is access to compute, for which the demand has just kept exploding. (See: Anthropic paying its competitors through its nose to keep Claude up.)

I've little love for Oracle, so I fear they will actually make out like bandits with these moves.

> 1. Any cloud business essentially is "unpacking servers and plugging them in." Yet the cloud business has been exploding quarter-over-quarter ever since AWS came online. To the tune of double-digit billions cash flow every quarter for each of the hyperscalers, even before the AI boom.

No, major cloud providers are mainly a software business. They provide unique manage cloud offerings, which provides value add over raw hardware as well as lock in. People on AWS cannot just move to GCP, let alone DO. Hence amazon can charge a substantial premium over the price of the hardware, which is why they make so much money. If all you are doing is pluging in GPUs, you don't provide that value add and are going to have very slim profits.

They can raise cash by selling off the stock they have spent a decade buying back.
I'm confused... Did you expect anything different from Oracle?
As someone also freshly laid off (not Oracle though), let me solemnly acknowledge my new cohorts. Best of luck to everyone, it's tough out there. Stay sharp and focused, hoping for the best.

Oracle is in a spiral it seems. Is Stargate still plugging along?

While I feel sorry for the people involved, Oracle as a company richly deserves this, for reasons far too familiar to everyone here. This is a come-uppance that has been waiting to happen for decades.
I'm not sure this is really the come-uppance you've been waiting for. Oracle is still worth more than it was all those decades you were waiting -- it's market cap is larger than it has been at any point in history except the last ~2 years.
I wonder how this holds up in the age of AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

If you run sub-par agents on large codebase that's kinda what they do. Every task ends with duplication, added flags bifurcating the code and everything else described in that comment haha
I remember that comment and thinking that the author is complaining about a kind of success.

Oracle RDBMS is a critical component of huge and important application platforms from banking to infrastructure.

Millions of tests are good! I would be concerned if it wasn’t a “test heavy” development process.

A slow and measured pace with every consequence thought out is also good. Otherwise the product rots away in all but the most common combination of configurations.

Etc…

The only valid complaint is that the test farm is under-scaled. Increasing its capacity would direly increase development velocity.

I agree somewhat, but it took me a bit to articulate to myself. It is nuanced.

Testing is what held everything together. They seem to have been taking it seriously and that alone was enough to keep a product of that scale (barely?) afloat. A success!?

But it sounds like every other good practice went out of the window. They are drowning in unimaginable amount of technical debt, ossified over decades. That, and the complaint about testing infra indicates to me that even their tests are a pile of sh*. He wasn't running them locally, so they were integration tests. Meaning that had there been a foundation of unit tests - they wouldn't need that many slow integration tests.

It sounds like they just brute forced all their problems with test farms. I'm almost sure they double down on AI - why make your code base better if AI can figure out how 100 flags can interact with each other.

> unimaginable amount of technical debt

"That's life" in the RDBMS space. All of the major vendors are drowning in tech debt and there's (almost) nothing they can do about it because of backward compatibility limitations.

For example, Microsoft SQL Server 2025 will create new databases with default settings that are unchanged from SQL 7 -- from the previous century!

I think agents have the capability to multiply this problem times 10. It doesn't have to be that way though. I think a skilled person will create great software regardless of the tools they use.
Interesting that the immediate reply to that comment is about how ASML code is equally shitty
Stop cheering. Oracle still offers a free arm 4x6GB kubernetes cluster and 2 free amd cpu‘s.

It‘s the best free platform for learners and small scale operations.

[delayed]
In paygo mode I still get 4. Their cost calculator also calculates with 4 free ones.
[delayed]
As opposed to google AI/gemini key catastrophes and aws billing adventures?
They can keep the free tier VPS, my problems with Oracle over the years go a bit deeper than that.
No it's not, every time I try to sign up they just tell me no. Doesn't matter how much personal info I give them.
Banks threatened Larry with a margin call for his $80B loans with stock collateral?
Off-topic, but I hate the use of the word "photo" in the caption under the AI-gen'd image:

> (PHOTO: GEMINI AI)

Yells at cloud

My employer has somehow managed to avoid the constant layoffs since 2022 trend, shockingly, and I think this is a big reason we have relatively low churn despite not having many promotions, refreshers, etc (on top of some relatively uncommon benefits for a large tech company). I was recently interviewing a few engineers from FAANG+ companies who are desperate to get out of the squid games and quarterly layoff fears. I wish more companies would realize what a selling point this is, and I wish my CEO would publicly brag about how is he is competent enough to not need to churn through 10+% of his workforce a year AND have great stock price growth over the last 6 years.
You could publicly brag about your company by naming it here :)
Too bad they weren't unionized--I assume that would have helped.

The workers who built the company and created its worth (obviously not evenly distributed) now get a "thank you very much goodbye" e-mail. I think they deserve ownership and to take part in these decisions.

> We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made during your time with us.

Why do companies bother with this horse excrement? Does a sentence like this make anyone feel better?

Most times, I wish they'd just send the honest truth. "Hey, we screwed up. We over-hired and ran out of funds so we had to let you go to make payroll" or "Our M&A strategists overpaid for an over-leveraged company and now we have to figure out how to pay down the debt. Your position was cut as a result."

Obviously corporations owe nothing to nobody (apparently) but I'd love it if the patronizing language stopped.

And open themselves up for liability and getting sued by admitting mistakes? In your dreams.
[delayed]
Why single out communist leaders? Seems more related to authoritarian leaders, of which communist leaders were just a small subset.

Heck our current admin can’t do any wrong in their own eyes, every thing is perfect and winning including the morass in the Middle East that was arbitrarily started on whim and resulted in economic chaos. Or the trade war with Canada.

Or Biden, he couldn’t do any wrong in his own eyes and that led to the current situation.

> We over-hired

They didn't. Look at their headcount from 2010 until today.

oracle could've cruised nicely but nope greed and Larry Ellison's ego (add his son's too) - they bit off more than they can chew.