[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