Oracle laid off thousands of employees yesterday. Numbers vary, with some reports saying up to 30,000 employees. Regardless, they conducted the mass termination via email. Employees received notification early Tuesday morning, and many of them were not happy.
Writing at the subreddit, r/employeesofOracle, one former employee wrote:
“I was with Oracle for 26 years, and got the email at 6am. That they didn’t bother to do a phone call is disgusting, cowardly, and just plain ugly.”
It does seem disgusting, cowardly, and just plain ugly to not even have the compassion to tell employees face-to-face that their livelihood was being yanked out from underneath them. It removes human interaction at a time that is emotionally and financially devastating. But terminations at this scale are a logistics problem just as much as they are a human problem. These technical and coordination issues change what good looks like.
To keep reading, click here: Oracle Laid Off Thousands by Email—and That May Have Been the Right Call
Using “logistics” as an excuse to treat people as expendable is disgusting, cowardly, and demonstrates a total lack of empathy on the part of the executives and managers in this company. It may be the right call for the shareholders to treat humans like expendable machine components, but it IS NOT the right call for a company.
What companies–and, since you support this asinine move, you–have forgotten is that a business relationship, including employment, is a relationship. For the employee, this relationship is only surpassed in significance by their romantic partner, parents, and children. By ending these relationships in the most calloused manner possible Oracle has told ALL of their employees–and potential future employees–that Outlook expects this to be a one-sided relationship. They expect to take, and they cannot be bothered to treat their employees as humans.
Bear in mind that this is not in isolation. Companies are increasingly invading personal lives, expecting their employees to constantly be on-call. It’s so bad that countries are starting to make laws against it. And pay isn’t keeping up with inflation–meaning that the one thing companies DO give these days is worth less and less each time your “raise” fails to match inflation. How many of these teams were chronically under-staffed before they were terminated?
Let’s be clear: NO company would EVER treat machines this way–running them in the red, running them well beyond their recommended specs, ignoring basic maintenance, requiring the machine to do things it’s not designed to do. By this cowardly action Oracle has demonstrated that they value the people that work for them less than they value the chairs in the office.
Tell me again how “logistics” compensates for this.