[niek_pas]

> As a result, today is your last working day.

As a European, I never realized that this is allowed under US labor law. That is absolutely insane.

EDIT: some commentors have pointed out that the workers collect severance and unemployment --- I was not aware this is law in California, and that changes matters. I would, though, still find being suddenly out of a job fairly traumatic.

[ahtihn]

As a European, this seems normal?

When someone is fired, they generally stop working immediately while getting paid through the notice period.

[Twirrim]

In the US there is no notice period. In every state (with the exception of Montana), employees are "At Will" only. There is no notice period, or severance pay required by law. Health insurance goes with your job, too, as do any other benefits (something called COBRA lets you pay to continue your health insurance coverage for a few months with the expectation you'll have found a new job and/or coverage)

In the US, one day you can have a job, the next none and you'd better hope you've got enough money saved up to cover rent/mortgage, food etc.

That was by far the biggest culture shock when I moved to the states, and really acted as the big "Oh shit, it really is a government by the businesses, for the businesses".

[gamblor956]

The U.S. has a 60-day notice requirement for mass layoffs, per the federal WARN Act. However, the required notice period can be waived by paying (at least) 60 days salary/wages.

Many states copied the statute.

There are some exceptions, like a company going out of business or natural disasters, but those don't apply here.

[Aurornis]

I have to be honest that I'm confused by the comment, too. Including the edit about how being out of work would be traumatic, as if losing a job was unique to the United States.

[niek_pas]

My point was that going from (let's say) 'employed, productive member of the workforce, with social relationships at work' to 'sitting at home collecting unemployment' with no transition, no coaching, in the scope of 5 minutes seems like a traumatic rupture.

(I'm not saying I _know_ better, just how I think I would _experience_ such a thing.)

Losing a job happens everywhere, but there are different ways to handle it, I guess.

[Aurornis]

I've been laid off. It's not fun and there a lot of emotions to process at first.

Let me tell you, though. All of the gestures that come from the company doing the layoff like coaching services or transition resources felt pretty useless. They were actually trying, but everything in it seemed more like it was to soothe their conscience than to help me out.

When other people get laid off I recommend they try not to put a lot of expectations into any transition services provided by their ex-employer because your time is better invested in your own job search.

[bombcar]

The best "layoff" support I've received has been early notice (e.g., you're laid off at the end of next month, but we give fuck-all cares if you even bother coming in anymore, feel free to) and personal support from managers/those remaining behind.

Anything an employer can do at scale can be reduced to cash, and cash is king.

[Shocka1]

Generally losing your well paying tech job in the US is terrible and it is definitely traumatic for people. I've fortunately never been part of one, but at my first real career job at a well known tech company I watched co-workers eliminated like this. Not only was it traumatic for them, it was traumatic for our team as well. They received very nice severance packages, but they still had to find another job within 6 months so they could keep the lights on in their homes. It was a great learning lesson for me. All my career moves after that have been preemptive and from the standpoint that I'm on offense at all times. Never feeling stagnant in a position, keeping options open, etc...

[simsla]

Where I live, your employer basically has to give you notice (weeks to months, depending where you live). It's common for that notice period to turn into "garden leave" though, i.e. get paid but don't show up.

Mass layoffs, or RIFs, operate under slightly different rules, but I still saw a stark difference between US and EU employees when I went through one at a different corp.

US accounts were deactivated same day. EU employees were given until end of week to look over the proposed terms etc.

[sweezyjeezy]

> After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change.

That is being laid off, not being fired - big difference. Being fired means being let go for poor performance / bad behaviour. No severance or grace period is necessary there (will be written in the contract). Being made redundant, particularly a redundancy of this size is quite well protected in EU. Typically negotiations between HR and representatives of the laid off group are required, you will continue to work (officially at least) until negotiations are over, as you are not officially out yet. This usually takes a few weeks.

I can tell you this from personal experience...

[on_the_train]

No they don't? You keep working for 2-10 months until you can leave whatever your contact says

[macki0]

The way this email is worded this would more likely be classified as a Redundancy as opposed to a Firing. So different laws/rules would apply

[tomjakubowski]

> collect severance and unemployment --- I was not aware this is law in California,

Unemployment benefits in California are capped at $450/week, and you only get 26 weeks of it. It's helpful, but doesn't even cover housing costs for many individuals, let alone for families.

I don't think there's a state law requiring severance. It's often offered by the employer if the terminated employee agrees to sign an NDA.

[gamblor956]

Both California and federal law require 60 days notice for mass layoffs. The CA WARN Act has more protections for workers than the federal WARN Act, i.e., it also applies to part-time workers.

In California, it is illegal to require a terminated employee to sign an NDA to receive severance paid to waive the required WARN notice. A company attempting to enforce such an NDA would key face judicial sanction in court (including paying the former employee's legal fees) and likely pay fines to the CA Labor Dept as well.

[drmath]

The California WARN act effectively requires 2 months severance for large layoffs at large companies (or 2 months notice, but companies almost always prefer severance).

[tombert]

The at-will firing is just how it is in the US, but I do find it odd how accepting we've become with these corporations massively overhiring.

If they have to fire twenty percent of the company, shouldn't that be a signal to investors that the people in charge are morons for overhiring thirty thousand people in the first place? Software engineers aren't cheap; assuming an average compensation of $250,000/year (which I think is pretty conservative if you count total comp like insurance and stock) then that's 7.5 billion dollars of investor money they're wasting per year.

[niek_pas]

Yeah, the "just how it is" part was the part I wasn't aware of. Sibling comment has pointed out that apparently the US is the only country in the world where this is the case. And totally agree on the latter point.

[Aurornis]

> apparently the US is the only country in the world where this is the case.

The US law isn't translated directly to other countries, but every country allows companies to do layoffs. They just have different requirements for including someone in a layoff.

In some countries the requirements are as minimal as saying that there's not enough work for the person to do. It's basically the same thing with extra steps.

The real difference is requirements for notice periods or severance. Note that in tech companies like Oracle they're giving severance as well.

The other side of this debate is that companies in the United States are much less resistant to hiring people when they know it's easy to scale back later. In our European offices we had to be much more cautious about hiring because the managers in our various European offices were afraid of getting stuck with a bad hire for a long or costly notice period. They also had a lot of games with "trial period" work that I don't fully remember, but I can think of several trial period employees who were dismissed because they were borderline and their managers didn't want to take the risk of having them past the period where letting them go was easy.

[tombert]

I'm not an economist, but I have heard that there's an argument to be made the easy firing also makes it so that it's easier to hire too, so it creates more jobs.

That's one of those things that sounds like bullshit, so I don't know that I believe it, but that's what I've heard anyway.

[Izkata]

The other part is that at-will goes both ways: you can just walk out of a bad job with no legal repercussions. Not always the best idea due for social/professional ones, though.

[oblio]

That argument is definitely BS, though.

What do you think happens in the most restrictive labor market in Europe? We're not slaves. There is a short notice period, usually 1 month or even shorter (notice periods for companies are longer, usually double or longer).

And if it's a bad job people just phone it in, take medical leave, etc during their notice period.

Hardly the end of the world to last 1 month.

[monksy]

250k/year. I'm not an arch. But that was the absolute high end for IC5. (Unobtainable)

Oracle is not a high payer of salaries.

I disagree that its a "signal that they overhired". Laying off people means:

1. They didn't plan well enough

2. Their business wasn't attractive enough to customers

3. Their business people aren't good enough to support the people who are developing their product.

If anything, it should be a red flag to investors that they're working with someone they can't trust to give money.

[tombert]

I mentioned 250k for total comp, like health insurance and bonuses and stock and PTO and the like.

All three of those points, to me, would still indicate that the CEO and executives are very bad at their jobs.

[manquer]

Not employees are hired though, a fair amount are added through acquisitions. Reducing staff could be just streamlining redundancies . Not the case here [1], but it not always bad planning.

Even without acquisitions, business conditions can change rapidly things like tariffs, interest rates , war or competition due to newer tools etc , as an investor you can would want leadership to move fast and course correct, rather than be held by the sunk cost fallacy.

All else being equal, the way investors would see a change like this - is now the company is no longer wasting 7.5B/yr in the future and their current cost was already priced in.

However all else is rarely the same, there could be other factors, like slowing sales growth projections which can bring down the multiples .

Oracle is still trading at 28x P/E historically they typically traded at 15x, given the growth and risk profile a more realistic number .

Since 2022 (ignoring 2020 spikes) the number has been going up are basis the expectation that their cloud business will really benefit from AI significantly.

If the market no longer has the confidence —- it has already cooled a bit since October then stock will keep dropping, layoffs will only slow it down a bit .

The timing is critical, because leverage/sale of Oracle stock is how the Warner Bros Discover acquisition is being funded .

The increasing doubts about that financial viability is why that stock risk premium is increasing on Warner .- Currently trading at 27 although acquisition price is 31 and it was trading at 29 a month back . Also senior executives like Zaslav are selling now at 27 which they less likely to if they believed deal will close at 31 soon.

TLDR; this 30k layoff is an attempt to strengthen/save the other acquisition Oracle is indirectly financing.

[1] although the Cerner acquisition added 30k employees to Oracle 3 years back. This doesn’t seem related to that. Oracle did not have a strong overlapping BU, there were/are some redundancies as in any acquisition but certainly not 30k

[monksy]

Severence is not required by law but its usually a protective measure by the company to avoid being sued for misdeeds they put people through before and during the layoffs.

Unemployment is not enough for people to live on. In some cases, it barely covers health insurance which can be 800$/month for a single person. (You can get cheaper plans but they start you back on your deducible)

[IncreasePosts]

Why? They get a severance which is going to be multiple months salary, as well as approximately $2000/mo unemployment from the state (assuming in California).

Personally, I'd rather just get the money and not have to work, rather than be forced to come into the office knowing I was getting canned in 3 months or whatever

[niek_pas]

I did not know they got severance. In any case, I'm still not sure I'd prefer that scenario --- coming into your work to suddenly find you've been terminated and subsequently sitting on your ass for a couple months while looking for another job seems pretty emotionally damaging to me, but to each their own.

[jakeydus]

I got laid off at a previous job and they asked me to stay on six months to train my replacement(s) and finish my project(s). In return I'd get my normal severance and a significant bonus for staying the whole time. I did so and worked hard for the entire time. A few months later I got lunch with my former manager and they informed me they would have absolutely coasted the entire time. In hindsight, I'm not sure why I put the effort in. Live and learn, I guess.

[Aurornis]

They are done working but will collect severance pay, typically scaled by years of service.

Oracle software engineering compensation for mid-level software engineers is in the $200-300K range. The top of their scale extends into the $400K to $1 million range.

From what I've seen, laid off employees will receive a minimum of 1 month of their compensation with 1 week of pay for every year worked, plus any remaining unused vacation time. So a mid-level employee who has worked their a few years and hasn't drawn their vacation balance to 0.0 could receive $30-50K or more beyond this date.

[Rapzid]

All the extra notice in the world wouldn't make me want to trade our tech jobs market and salaries for that of Europe's.

[tomjen3]

Dane here. I have had more than one coworker get that treatment.

Sure the company still has to payout salary, as per the contract, but plenty of companies do not want laid of people around.

[not_your_vase]

Such termination happens very much in Europe also. I have lived in Europe my whole life, half of my working life inside the EU, half of it outside. And I have seen this happening bot in- and outside:

on the head-roll day HR sends a friendly message asking you to pay a visit in their office. While you do that, security folks clear your desk, and a few minutes later you are outside the building with the signed paperwork in your hands. And suddenly another guy gets a friendly message from HR...

Of course the severance is paid according to the law - but such sudden (mass)termination does happen here too.

[sowbug]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

[gwbas1c]

In general, the reason why US companies often are abrupt / surprise is because they fear retaliation.

I once was given about 6 weeks notice in the US, with a promise that if I completed a project I would be given severance. Given the situation I was in, where the product would be "done", it was a good situation to be in.

[lotsofpulp]

It's insane to force businesses to take on the government's responsibilities (providing food/shelter/income/energy security).

A buyer and seller should be free to start and stop buying and selling whenever they want, absent contracts stating otherwise.

The government should be there to directly support all of the people, not to police and cajole businesses to support some of the people that happened to be hired by a business.

[niek_pas]

I completely agree, and apparently in California this is already the case --- I had no idea. In most contexts, though, I'd argue governments fall down on this task completely and people are, unfortunately, still very dependent on their employer. Same-day termination seems very socially risky in those cases.

[rwmj]

The US government doesn't exactly go out of its way to support people either.