pjeOracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email
https://rollingout.com/2026/03/31/oracle-slashes-30000-jobs-with-a-cold-6/
More victims of AI.
Not actually of "AI is replacing jobs", more "oh shit we are spending too much and the product isn't good enough for us to ever make a return on our absurd over-investment".
I don't think its that easy.
Look at their employee numbers over the years:
(ai generated):
Oracle Corporation Employee Count (2010 - 2025)
Legend: Each '' represents approximately 4,000 employees.
Year | Employees
------------------------------------------------------------------
2010 | (105,000)
2011 | (108,000)
2012 | (115,000)
2013 | (120,000)
2014 | (122,000)
2015 | (132,000)
2016 | (136,000)
2017 | (138,000)
2018 | (137,000)
2019 | (136,000)
2020 | (135,000)
2021 | (132,000)
2022 | (143,000)
2023 | (164,000)
2024 | (159,000)
2025 | (162,000)
Note: Oracle's fiscal reporting for the full year 2025 ended on May 31, 2025.
They clearly did something crazy at corona and undoing this as a lot of companies did before already.
Even at 100k employees I’m still dumbfounded by that number. What do all these people do all day?
Oracle sells alot of software that is accompanied by hordes of consultants to set it up.
Last F50 I was at did a PeopleSoft migration. We probably had 400 Oracle employees pass through the doors over 2 years helping to get it off the ground.
Most Enterprises don't just buy software and that's it. They buy software + support to implement it for their business.
Sure but what did those guys do all day? 400 people is a lot of people
Write code to connect this system with that system. Teach people what setting does what. Integrate with Entra ID. Create custom reports that hordes of Executive on our side want. Scale out the system from undersized nodes we originally gave it. That's all I picked up by just listening to them. I wasn't involved in the project, just sat nearby listening to it.
This is extremely customizable software that is designed to pretty much run your entire business and touched by over 40k employees. It requires a ton of care and feeding. There is plenty of people who dedicate themselves to PeopleSoft. Zip Recruiter is showing 5 jobs near me for "PeopleSoft Administrator"
The need to teach people what setting does what is a sort of consulting moat that AI dismantles when it can access the right context.
The training team and what's called 'Change Management' for an F50 company that's spread across the globe implementing a new application like an ERP could be 100 people by itself. It's extremely complex and hard to do those kinds of projects which is why many ERP migrations take a decade to complete if not fail entirely.
plus yearly support maintenance
I remember reading this post years ago, and it has stuck in my brain ever since: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
So I suspect the answer is: they need _at least_ 10x as many engineers to get things done as you would expect. Maybe more like 50x
That is really wild
That was a highlights grade comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights )
And the last comment by 'oraguy' - I hope he just picked up another id because "never work for Oracle again" ...
Almost certainly a large amount of support staff, so management/HR/IT etc... Then you've got your customer account managers, sales, lawyers/finance etc.... Given they do an insane amount of B2B and government sales I can see this being easy to reach tbh. Governement contract processes require an insane amount of bureacracy and negotations.
1. They maintain and sell one of the largest relational databases.
2. They're the primary maintainer of one of the largest programming languages.
3. They do tons of HR/ERP type software.
4. They have a supply chain division (my company is a direct competitor, and we have 2000 employees--it's a drop in the bucket, but a few thousand here, a few thousand there and it starts to add up. Afaik, their supply chain org is bigger than ours).
5. Other things I probably don't know about.
Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency, which swells the number of workers by a lot.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not remotely a fan, I like to quote Bryan Cantrill's rant. However, they do a lot of things.
"The first thing we do, let's AI all the lawyers" ?
Also their cloud
And all the supporting legal team of course.
>> Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency,
I have some anecdotal evidence for this. I worked at a medium sized family owned business. They were going through a massive ERP upgrade/replacement. One of the bids was from Oracle. The company was able to essentially test drive each company they were reviewing to see if the software was going to be a good fit.
Oracle's sales team was like a having a football on site. They sent over no less than about 20 people to swarm our pretty small office, barge into the dev spaces and generally annoy the fuck out of everybody for several months. The other vendors? They sent one, maybe two people to work alongside us as we test drove their software.
It was funny being in those meetings listening to people talk about the Oracle people. Nobody even remembered how good or bad their software was. Every single comment was about how overbearing and pushy their sales people were.
Needless to say, we went with a different company.
Unless you have worked with Oracle or other big enterprises, you may not realize the scale of how these companies operate and the breadth of what they actually do. Just by looking at their product page[0] you can see they offer software, hardware, cloud, consulting, support, and even financing solutions. In addition to the technology and product people (of which there are many), you also need HR, sales, marketing, accounting, support, etc for the entire global organization.
Sure, 100,000 people is a lot, but Oracle also does a lot.
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.
You did the Python right but the analysis wrong. Looking at it on a graph you can see that interpreting a single growth rate for the entire period (even if you stop pre-covid) doesn’t make sense.
You can see linear growth from 2010-2017. Then slow decline or at best a flatline from 2018-2021. Then they went crazy in 2022-2025.
Now if we just do 162k - 30k we are back to 132k, basically same ballpark as pre-COVID.
That's not how stocks are measured on wall street. They picked the dumb metric.
Or a pickup from 2015 - 2021 which was 0% growth.
It's tricky to pick an end-of-decade year also - recessions tend to happen +/- 2 years of the end of each decade in the USA, or at least have done since records began in the 19th century. For example 2010 was recovery over 2008/2009's bust. It's not like comparing March to Ma4ch for a crude seasonal adjustment.
> They clearly did something crazy at corona
They acquired Cerner, which had ~30k employees.
> (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.
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...
Blame it on whatever you like. oracle has been a rudderless leech for nearly 30 years now.
- overpricing the database led to a predictable exodus and new players with often times better performance.
- acquisition of MySQL led to a predictable exodus and new players like maria with often times better performance.
- Oracle cloud arrived late to spectacular skepticism and low user turnout from customers who had been burned by high cost and users burned from decisions like the death of opensolaris. it exists on federal life support these days by the grace of the prevailing administration.
- more than 80 products, with hundreds of thousands of patches and updates, yet no coherent or meaningful reform of the build for more than forty years. DB 19c still ships broken for redhat 9 as a means of driving users to oracle linux, and patching the installer is a 1970s experience in itself. DB 23's greatest improvement has been to tack the letters "AI" onto it to chum what shallow AI waters Oracle deigns to tread outside of an investment portfolio.
- dumping cash into oracle enterprise linux despite it only having around 2500 active corporate users.
this is nearly 20% of the company being laid off.
I don't understand this sentiment. I'm absolutely significantly more productive with AI; so much moreso that I now have freetime and we haven't needed to replace an engineer who left. On the flip side my coworkers who think they're above AI are drowning. I think there is an endemic problem of senior engineers who think they're above learning AI and agents who don't want to use them, and these cuts are about forcing them to get with the times or drown in work.
Replacing jobs is a bit of a misnomer, but it's certainly allowing us to build out more features in shorter amounts of time.
Are you paid significantly more for your newfound productivity?