Layoffs are nothing new for Oracle; in 2017 the company slashed nearly 1000 jobs in Silicon Valley, mostly from its SPARC and Solaris teams. But the sudden and secretive nature of this layoff operation came as a surprise to employees and observers. The lack of transparency and abruptness of the operation was reminiscent of IBM's waves of layoffs in the past. Oracle's layoff day started at 5 a.m. Pacific Time, when an email from Oracle executive vice president Don Johnson with the subject line "Organizational Restructuring" arrived in employee inboxes. The email informed staff members that, going forward, everything in the company would revolve around the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) operation. "Today's changes within OCI will better align with Larry's vision of the business," Johnson wrote. "It will streamline our products and services, focus investments on our most strategic priorities, and help us to more effectively and rapidly deliver the full promise and reach of Oracle's Gen 2 Cloud." Then the email continued with a perky sentence that made some employees furious: "OCI's business is stronger than ever, and this team's future is bright." At approximately 10 a.m., I am told, just five hours after that email, the layoffs began and according to anecdotal reports, this included significant cuts within a part of that "stronger-than-ever," "bright-future" cloud business. Those affected were given 30 minutes to return company assets and leave the building, and they were told that Friday (today) would be their last official day. "The morning felt like a slaughter," one Oracle employee told me. "One person after another. People who have shaped me, who've been instrumental in my own success, who are good, smart, capable, wonderful. It's been a terrible day. A company's most valuable asset is the people it employs. Today's cuts leave me to wonder if Oracle will ever realize the mistake it has made in letting these people go." The same employee also said, the layoff process was handled very badly, with entire teams being ushered into conference rooms as groups and told that they no longer had jobs. This employee indicated that technical teams, particularly those involved in product development and focused on software development, data science, and engineering, seemed to take the biggest hit. Other employees also saw this week's layoff process as particularly brutal. For example, an anonymous employee posted to the Layoff.com web site, "Just got a call from a friend, he just got axed. What bothered him the most was that the news was delivered by an exec who is not even in his reporting chain, and who he has never previously spoken to." An Oracle manager also posted: "I was notified the day before of an employee on the list - and then forced by HR to read the most heartless script to him in a notification meeting. I heard of other managers not even being notified that their employees were laid off. They found out after their employee contacted them. Even worse, managers who had to give the notifications and then an hour later got laid- off too! Yesterday was a complete blood bath for certain departments and Oracle handled it in the most disrespectful way."
