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Time to copy&improve the niche solution.

That's rational. Oracle has bet the farm on AI, if they don't make it work they will fail.

Absolutely unhinged behavior. If orcl goes nuts over chatbots and dies that will make this strange and profoundly icky era in tech all worth it.

You can use AI to eliminate Oracle from your org's dependencies.

IIRC, WARN filings in NYC require to indicate whether lay-offs were due to AI. None of the filings of the past year checked that box [1]

[1] https://www.hrgrapevine.com/us/content/article/2026-02-11-ai...

> 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.

Can you explain what you mean?

It is, but about AI CAPEX.

Source

>I made it up. It was invented by a writer.

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.

Live within your means. Save aggressively. Invest wisely.

(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.)

There's really nothing special about the current situation. Throughout history, jobs have been rarely anything close to guaranteed.

You save a good deal of cash for emergencies, live below your means, keep your skill set up to date and face the world.

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.

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.

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.

It is the latest fad. They blamed other fads for job cuts in the past.

IMO it’s not sudden, the AI excuses have been gradual and ramping up for a couple years now.

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.

Fire and re-hire from a desperate pool of anxious workers who will accept any offer to escape unemployment.

> 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.

A bit premature I think. Right now it is employees making room for AI investments

Yes, that is a large percentage.

still a large percentage.

Next year?

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.

An adjacent comment: "For those curious, this is a report about firings from the last year. Not a new round of layoffs."

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.

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.

Oracle has a huge, entrenched enterprise business that will keep them alive almost indefinitely, just as Microsoft does.

Nothing would make me happier than to piss on Oracle's grave.

I think you underestimate just how entrenched Oracle’s database offering is in the enterprise.

Why? They’re way too big to fail. Tons of corporations rely too much on them

Which AI bubble? The stock bubble one or the imagined "one day all the LLMs are going to disappear from the face of the Earth" one?

I think perhaps they'll crash more than others because they aren't AI enough. It's more of an AI financing bubble than an AI bubble.

Don't threaten me with good time!

If they're not hiring to fill the roll after firing it's kind of both.