Oracle is cutting thousands of jobs as the US technology company seeks to reassure investors that its bet on AI infrastructure will pay off.
The $420bn (£315bn) company, which is headquartered in Austin, Texas, started making employees redundant on Tuesday, with thousands of its 162,000-strong workforce expected to leave.
About 10,000 people have lost their jobs so far, the BBC reported, citing an unnamed employee at the company, which is chaired by Larry Ellison, the billionaire ally of Donald Trump. Ellison is worth $189bn and is the world’s sixth richest person, Forbes estimates.
Michael Shepherd, a senior manager at Oracle, who was not affected by the cuts, posted on the social media site LinkedIn that there had been a “significant reduction in force” at the business.
Shepherd said the decision had affected “senior engineers, architects, operations leaders, program managers, and technical specialists with deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, government and sovereign cloud environments, and enterprise-scale systems”.
That’s just what we need. More senior tech workers out of work in Austin. Thank god we now have a fresh supply!
I was seeing a whole bunch of Oracle people I know suddenly “open to work” on LinkedIn, posting about how they were all “ready for my next opportunity” or “excited to discover my next project” and immediately correctly guessed what had happened.
I really fucking wish we could stop using this corporate bullshit. I haven’t been “excited” about a new position since roughly 2003. Layoffs do not engender excitement unless we get really pedantic about the multiple definitions of the word.