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/
Unless you're being offered a very good package, any firing email is cold. Let's be honest
There's no real way to sugar-coat losing your job. I think an email is as good as anything. Ensures everyone gets the same message at the same time.
Whatever you do, do not ever book a 1:1 meeting on a Friday afternoon for Monday morning titled, "The Future."
I had to let an employee go because he didn't do any work, took forever to respond to chats (in a remote position), and was always late for meetings. I scheduled the 4pm Friday meeting to let him go. He was 15 minutes late.
Sounds like me on site, ADHD is a bitch, people probably think I don’t anything too.
I've found that there can be a chasm between "what people think I do" and "what I actually do." But also, there can be a chasm between "what I think I do" and "what I actually do."
If the system in which you operate does not attempt to measure this, I think it's worth it for anyone to measure it themselves. We can so easily be overconfident or underconfident. Collect the data and see the kinds of things you've actually been accomplishing over a year.
I'll feel like I'm getting nothing done, and then I look at the year's changelogs and realize I'm actually doing just fine for where I want to be.
I think its very impolite to not do it face-to-face.
What time is a good time for everyone to show up for a face-to-face layoff meeting for a global company?
If you don't do it simultaneously, you're going to hear by rumor rather than by official email, which is IMHO worse.
If you do it simultaneously, everyone will know something is up, because there's never simultaneous global meetings.
the practicalities of the issue don't stop it from being impolite.
There is no perfect or right way to do this. Every approach will have criticism (and not every approach is equal), and different people will appreciate different things about the trade-offs.
Is it polite to let people stew for hours, or days, as virtual meetings spread across the company to convey the news in person? It is polite to schedule those meetings all at once with the implications clear - how is that any different than just confirming it an email? Is that better or worse than scheduling such calls with short notice, so that every employee must wonder for days (maybe weeks, depending on staffing and leverage model) whether they still have a job, when that information could have been communicated immediately to allow for immediate preparations?
You and I as senior managers might both apply the golden rule in this situation, but that could lead to different decisions.
You're just making excuses for them. The approach they chose was rude and cowardly. Even within this cowardice, further cowardice shows, with the email being sent from no specific individual but simply an amorphous "Oracle Leadership".
Oracle as a company are cowardly and rude and the practicalities are simply an excuse. There's clearly one "better way" which is to put a name at the end of the email, for perhaps Larry himself to take responsibility as he should.
If anything the practicalities show how arbitrary the decision was. Checking the Oracle subreddit we got people with "exceeds expectations" as their average still getting culled. It would appear how they decided upon the cuts reflects on how they have performed them. With all the sophistication of a child in a candy shop trying to buy more candy than their piggy bank can afford and then just dropping the excess on the floor, walking away and trying to forget that it ever happened.
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.
Which I would definitely prefer. A couple of years ago, two weeks before Thanksgiving, management announced there would be layoffs. No timeline on when the cuts would be shared or number impacted. People had to sit around for weeks, wondering if they had a job. Should I buy Xmas presents? Who knows!
At-will employment is hard. Honestly, if you aren't planning to lose your job tomorrow when your at-will, you're not being honest with yourself. I wish it were different, but outside a union contract or some other fairly well-combed over business contract, you should not assume you will get paid tomorrow.
The best strategy is to save up at least 6 months of runway.
The problem with advance warning is the employee who decides to sabotage in revenge.
For example, a company I knew in the 80s had a wholly owned subsidiary. It was losing money, so it was decided to close the subsidiary. Management decided that they'd be nice guys, and notified the subsidiary that it would be closed in 90 days and then everyone would be laid off.
90 days later, management arrived to close the facility. It was empty, stripped clean of everything. Not a lick of work was done in the 90 days, and nobody was there. There were reports that trucks had come to the loading dock, and took everything they could carry.
The cost of that led to the collapse of the company.
I find it hard to blame the workers in this story... it's a poor indictment of the management if they only checked in 3 months later and got this surprise - no wonder the company collapsed!
And traceability.
In a 1:1 meeting you could fire me and say a gazillion things and I'd forget 99.9% of them.
Or, with emotions flaring, could say something that becomes grounds for a wrongful termination or discrimination claim.
Even if you're being offered a very good package, being fired, regardless of how, is cold.
What is the alternative? Have 30,000 meetings? How long will that take?
Why would you give someone 6 months notice? What good is that for the employee? Especially if the severance is generous.
“Hey, we’re going to fire you in 6 months. Just a heads up.”
Nah. Give me the year of salary and send me home today. Better for the employee and for the company than pointlessly dragging it out. Again, this is assuming generous severance.
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.