A friend met with Oracle salesdroids (his company has spent a few million with them in the last few years).
They told him everything is oriented towards AI, to the point that otherwise profitable software is not being updated and development has stopped on anything new.
Oracle has a lot of niche solutions and the one my friend’s corporation uses is profitable but not on the AI path, so it is being put into maintenance mode.
None of this is due to AI. That’s just the cover story that stops the stock crashing. The reality is the market is contracting and it’s doing that because the extraction and monthly financial models are hurting other businesses which are also contracting because of lower customer demand.
Businesses are incentivized to say it’s because of AI because it makes them look better. So not saying that when actually asked by a government entity is meaningful.
> The reality is the market is contracting and it’s doing that because the extraction and monthly financial models are hurting other businesses which are also contracting because of lower customer demand.
I’ve just been thinking about this and would like to ask those of you with more experience in the industry: do you prepare yourselves in any way for crises? Do you have any techniques for dealing with uncertainty?
Let’s say someone is entering the IT job market today. How should they prepare for the responsibilities of adulthood, starting a family, buying (perhaps on a mortgage?) their first flat, and planning for a family? I’m not writing solely in the context of AI layoffs but broader. Over the last 10 years that I’ve been in the IT industry from EU/US perspective, I’ve perceived the market as economic cycles, the sine wave of which has narrowed significantly (more often markets demands changes and instability) and accelerated in the past years.
The only sure thing is to live significantly below your means as often as possible. Becoming accustomed to life as a peasant when you could live like a king is what makes you economically bulletproof.
I can go for a decade without another dime coming in the door. If I started using DoorDash and Amazon Prime every day, I'd last maybe 18-24 months. Just barely treading water is actually a great position to be in. It keeps you honest and any amount of work you do find on top of that feels like a windfall. An extra $500/m is a lot if you can make it happen consistently.
Nope, you just get up every day and do your best. If the ghouls at the top decide to axe you, then that's their loss. Humans have existing far longer than capitalism, we can survive without a boss.
For those curious, this is a report about firings from the last year. Not a new round of layoffs:
> Oracle shed about 21,000 roles globally in the last year as the US technology giant reshapes its business around artificial intelligence (AI), the firm's latest annual report shows.
Now is precisely not the time to cut jobs, but to invest in people's usage of AI. You have domain expertise, and you are going to burn tokens trying to replace people's jobs, but the AI revolution is not at all about people replacement, its about a change of paradigm. Watch them closely rehire thousands of new employees (who won't have the domain expertise) once they see that you actually need people to operate their company :)
Oracle overcommitted on behalf of OpenAI, taking on debt to meet their obligations. Not that healthy companies are not also doing ridiculous layoffs, but in this case, Oracle does have to do some drastic things to get out of this tailspin.
Depends on which jobs; at a big enough scale you have people who are so deep in the hierarchy that their real connection to the domain is low.
Seems possible to flatten out a company, in a way the domain knowledge is kept.
That being said, I haven't seen many layoffs that actually seem directly AI related, because the main effects are not hiring junior Devs, and not outsourcing to low cost/skill areas.
What I don't get is why these companies are in all the rush to replace people with AI tools. Stuff is changing so fast that capital investment right now will just need to be reworked on after a few years when things settle down a little.
And that is not even considering how much it costs to run AI right now at scale AND retraining people to use the new tools AND possible disruption in existing workflows.
If I was running a large org I would actively try to slow down AI adoption in most areas until there are clear established solutions.
It's because these are public companies. Public companies are not in the business of developing good products and selling them to customers and having a sustainable long-term vision, they are in the business of selling their stock. Right now, thanks to a very effective marketing campaign driven by people who are invested in AI companies, the stock market wants to see stories about employees being replaced with AI, so that's what these companies are selling.
I easily do more than x 5 the workload I did in 2020. Replacing an employee with domain knowledge (only thing valuable now), with someone with zero domain knowledge is corporate suicide in 2026.
However, if you are oracle sending out consultants with zero domain knowledge around to help.... I would rather just use claude.
You can’t read the headlines, they’re marketing like anything else. Companies are free to spin them however they want and journalists are happy to write them however they will scare you the most. Those are the only truths.
A few years back I heard (via a friend who knows a CEO, so take it with appropriate pinch of salt given not a direct experience), that Gartner was asking the CEOs in its group meetings how many of them were laying off people due to AI, with the question presented in a very leading fashion that implied anyone not was behind the curve and failing their business or whatever.
Maybe because the models keep getting better and the tools are slowly getting good enough to replace people? Keep in mind we’re talking about oracle here, it’s not like we’re talking about humanity’s best and brightest.
The correlation between job cuts and ai growth is real. But it's related more to ai cost than ai performance. Especially in Oracle's highly leveraged case.
When talking about bullshit jobs like, say, taking a bill received by paper and manually extracting data from it (company name, invoice number, bank account details) to enter into an accounting program, AI is already good enough according to the pareto principle.
Maybe. But they weren't there 2+ years ago. And to cite just one example, in February 2024 Grammarly laid off over 20% of its employees, citing AI. So you'll have to forgive me if I am extremely skeptical of CEOs citing that as the reason today.
It's a very convenient excuse, especially given the apparent lack of public backlash to it, compared to, say, "the business isn't profitable and we need to save money."
I think a lot of them have drank the kool-aid. They go to conferences and then some talking head from one of the AI companies gets on stage and tells them things like they don't need developers and how AI is already good enough to revolutionize the world. They buy it hook, line, and sinker and then do stuff like this.
They are hiring. I've seen one role listed for more than a year, and it's because of their hiring process. Here's a random job, by way of example: https://canonical.com/careers/3433732/application Search for "how did you perform", and be baffled at their recruitment strategy.
What's stopping anyone else from using AI and eat into Oracle's market? Maybe know how specific for the market but at least 20K people with know how on this business are available at this moment.
I'm inclined to believe that its no longer the case of employees being replaced by AI but simply those businesses being replaced by AI and the current businesses who were able to benefit from AI are reaping the momentum they have but eventually this will end.
> What's stopping anyone else from using AI and eat into Oracle's market?
Open source databases have already been doing this for decades. You can’t just clone its products and expect to eliminate it. Oracle is driven by a strong sales culture and ruthless business strategy.
And why AI can't do all that? Apparently it can be a doctor, engineer, musician etc. but when it comes to do the jobs of certain class of people suddenly can't do that. It doesn't add up, maybe sales isn't as impossible to learn and do?
LLMs can certainly make sales faster and more efficient by automating things like updating CRM, prospecting, finding contacts, drafting emails, etc. There's a whole niche industry building AI sales tools now and some of them work extremely well. But in the end you still need human salespeople (often with lawyers backing them up) to close major enterprise deals.
These companies seem to be led by mind bogglingly short sighted people. Maybe they should be replaced by AI. It can't possibly get any worse than now, right?
I'm trying to remember which Marvel capeslop movie it was where the kid gets a bunch of Oracle professional-grade computer hardware or something as a gift. Larry makes a cameo, of course. Maybe it was Iron Man 2?
Like, mate, if you want to be a superhero in real life, stop laying off thousands of people and working the remaining people ragged. That's all you gotta do.
What’s crazy is how Oracle’s free cash flows have gone from “money-printing machine” to deep in the red due to their data center investments. My guess is that some of those cuts are to try to balance that?
Oracle is still mostly generating income from an old school model, a bit like IBM and SAP used to. They have huge contracts with mega-corps bringing in millions per year for a license. The have been pivoting to other things like consulting, cloud, AI for years but I still feel most of the income comes from these original db and product licenses. As someone who worked with Oracle since 1998 I'm kind of amazed they've kept at it for so long major Healthcare, Utilities, Banks still locked in and in some cases buying new contracts.
Well you have to somehow both indicate that you are not behind in the AI race but also that you are not hemorrhaging money. That means crapping all over your org in order to fund the data center spending.
All in the all-mighty fiduciary duty to your investors of course.
where its sits with the AI bubble I think Oracle is the 1 of the major companies apart from the OpenAI that would go belly up once the AI bubble crashes.
Larry has embedded the company way too deeply into the intelligence and military apparatus to ever go belly up. He’d be first in line for a government handout.
I did a project for a big telecom in Brazil where they kept everything in one massive Oracle database that ran out of 2 oracle refrigerators[1]. They kept freaking logs on the database, like normal application level logs.
DBA would go around screaming if you were logging too much stuff. I assumed they had some sort of periodic cleanup because I couldn't see that stuff being practical long term.
Technically it was 2 databases, one was a read replica for longer running data analysis of course.
That telecom has at least 100 million paying customers (maybe much more). I don't see they ever moving away from Oracle, they are more likely to go bankrupt than ever leaving.
True, but they also took huge debts to build AI DCs and not sure if the DB part of the company can cushion such a fall. According to [1] their IaaS line of business brings 4.8B USD/quarter (so say 20B/year), but they have ~120B of debt (outstanding + new debt they are trying to find people to pay for).
They are justifying that on commitments (500+B USD), but 300B of those are tied to OpenAI. So, if OpenAI goes belly up or at least doesn't follow their crazy growth projections, they would have to find the same amount of consumption quickly to repay the interest on said debt and eventually the principal.
It is a lot of money for a company the size of Oracle (~500B market cap).
They are not. Maybe they will be treated as such if the bubble bursts while while Trump is in power, because of loyalties.
But Oracle could relatively easily be broken up and sold off. Essentially all of the global consulting business units could sell to competitors in the various niches, the hardware business and the cloud hosting business could be separated, etc.
Plenty of companies worldwide would be up for buying pieces of Oracle at a bargain price.
"Too big to fail" only really applies in extreme circumstances (which might happen, admittedly) and with essentially monolithic businesses (or banking).
I don't think even Microsoft is too big to fail.
And I don't think people should casually entertain the idea that really any tech industry company is too big to fail, because tech corporations that cannot die point the way to a Rollerball future.
Some of the shakier dot com companies did, though.
And the dot com bubble collapse of Nortel and Worldcom shows that even well-established companies with significant non-bubble investments are vulnerable if the companies make poor economic decisions (in both of those cases, the collapse was driven by excessively aggressive acquisitions).
Likewise, LLM's won't disappear completely with a stock market crash. But the weaker players might.
They told him everything is oriented towards AI, to the point that otherwise profitable software is not being updated and development has stopped on anything new.
Oracle has a lot of niche solutions and the one my friend’s corporation uses is profitable but not on the AI path, so it is being put into maintenance mode.
[1] https://www.hrgrapevine.com/us/content/article/2026-02-11-ai...
Can you explain what you mean?
>I made it up. It was invented by a writer.
Let’s say someone is entering the IT job market today. How should they prepare for the responsibilities of adulthood, starting a family, buying (perhaps on a mortgage?) their first flat, and planning for a family? I’m not writing solely in the context of AI layoffs but broader. Over the last 10 years that I’ve been in the IT industry from EU/US perspective, I’ve perceived the market as economic cycles, the sine wave of which has narrowed significantly (more often markets demands changes and instability) and accelerated in the past years.
I can go for a decade without another dime coming in the door. If I started using DoorDash and Amazon Prime every day, I'd last maybe 18-24 months. Just barely treading water is actually a great position to be in. It keeps you honest and any amount of work you do find on top of that feels like a windfall. An extra $500/m is a lot if you can make it happen consistently.
(Source: I'm one of the 21,000, let go via a 6am email after 15 years with the company in engineering and management roles.)
You save a good deal of cash for emergencies, live below your means, keep your skill set up to date and face the world.
> Oracle shed about 21,000 roles globally in the last year as the US technology giant reshapes its business around artificial intelligence (AI), the firm's latest annual report shows.
Seems possible to flatten out a company, in a way the domain knowledge is kept.
That being said, I haven't seen many layoffs that actually seem directly AI related, because the main effects are not hiring junior Devs, and not outsourcing to low cost/skill areas.
And that is not even considering how much it costs to run AI right now at scale AND retraining people to use the new tools AND possible disruption in existing workflows.
If I was running a large org I would actively try to slow down AI adoption in most areas until there are clear established solutions.
However, if you are oracle sending out consultants with zero domain knowledge around to help.... I would rather just use claude.
I am not sure we are there yet.
In my experience even the SoTA models are faaaaar away from replacing humans, maybe making them a bit faster.
When talking about bullshit jobs like, say, taking a bill received by paper and manually extracting data from it (company name, invoice number, bank account details) to enter into an accounting program, AI is already good enough according to the pareto principle.
It's a very convenient excuse, especially given the apparent lack of public backlash to it, compared to, say, "the business isn't profitable and we need to save money."
But we are talking about a corporation that is one of the most sociopathic in modern business history.
They're going to flip us all like burger patties eventually - we're done on this side.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636590
I'm inclined to believe that its no longer the case of employees being replaced by AI but simply those businesses being replaced by AI and the current businesses who were able to benefit from AI are reaping the momentum they have but eventually this will end.
Open source databases have already been doing this for decades. You can’t just clone its products and expect to eliminate it. Oracle is driven by a strong sales culture and ruthless business strategy.
These companies seem to be led by mind bogglingly short sighted people. Maybe they should be replaced by AI. It can't possibly get any worse than now, right?
There's a whole bunch of open roles at Oracle right now. https://careers.oracle.com/en/sites/jobsearch/jobs?keyword=E... 700 of them within engineering.
Like, mate, if you want to be a superhero in real life, stop laying off thousands of people and working the remaining people ragged. That's all you gotta do.
Ah yes, fire to rehire via the model training gig economy
All in the all-mighty fiduciary duty to your investors of course.
DBA would go around screaming if you were logging too much stuff. I assumed they had some sort of periodic cleanup because I couldn't see that stuff being practical long term.
Technically it was 2 databases, one was a read replica for longer running data analysis of course.
That telecom has at least 100 million paying customers (maybe much more). I don't see they ever moving away from Oracle, they are more likely to go bankrupt than ever leaving.
[1]: Oracle RAC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_RAC
They are justifying that on commitments (500+B USD), but 300B of those are tied to OpenAI. So, if OpenAI goes belly up or at least doesn't follow their crazy growth projections, they would have to find the same amount of consumption quickly to repay the interest on said debt and eventually the principal.
It is a lot of money for a company the size of Oracle (~500B market cap).
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/oracle-500...
But Oracle could relatively easily be broken up and sold off. Essentially all of the global consulting business units could sell to competitors in the various niches, the hardware business and the cloud hosting business could be separated, etc.
Plenty of companies worldwide would be up for buying pieces of Oracle at a bargain price.
"Too big to fail" only really applies in extreme circumstances (which might happen, admittedly) and with essentially monolithic businesses (or banking).
I don't think even Microsoft is too big to fail.
And I don't think people should casually entertain the idea that really any tech industry company is too big to fail, because tech corporations that cannot die point the way to a Rollerball future.
And the dot com bubble collapse of Nortel and Worldcom shows that even well-established companies with significant non-bubble investments are vulnerable if the companies make poor economic decisions (in both of those cases, the collapse was driven by excessively aggressive acquisitions).
Likewise, LLM's won't disappear completely with a stock market crash. But the weaker players might.
So the predictive autocomplete will survive those too.