Not actually of "AI is replacing jobs", more "oh shit we are spending too much and the product isn't good enough for us to ever make a return on our absurd over-investment".
Blame it on whatever you like. oracle has been a rudderless leech for nearly 30 years now.
- overpricing the database led to a predictable exodus and new players with often times better performance.
- acquisition of MySQL led to a predictable exodus and new players like maria with often times better performance.
- Oracle cloud arrived late to spectacular skepticism and low user turnout from customers who had been burned by high cost and users burned from decisions like the death of opensolaris. it exists on federal life support these days by the grace of the prevailing administration.
- more than 80 products, with hundreds of thousands of patches and updates, yet no coherent or meaningful reform of the build for more than forty years. DB 19c still ships broken for redhat 9 as a means of driving users to oracle linux, and patching the installer is a 1970s experience in itself. DB 23's greatest improvement has been to tack the letters "AI" onto it to chum what shallow AI waters Oracle deigns to tread outside of an investment portfolio.
- dumping cash into oracle enterprise linux despite it only having around 2500 active corporate users.
Yeah, from small interactions over the past two decades, I have no idea how they could have been so bad while employing so many people. What on earth were those 30k people doing?! Their solutions were crap for ages.
>I have no idea how they could have been so bad while employing so many people
There is a significant correlation between how many people you employ and how much nothing you accomplish. It means you've gotten big enough to survive long bouts of doing something and achieving nothing with large amounts of people.
The graph in your Macrotrends link shows the exact same numbers as the AI source, but is harder to read and the page is half ads. It's not an authoritative source -- the data was most likely parsed out of Oracle's earning reports by some janky regexp. I don’t know why you would trust this more than AI.
with an adblocker ... there is one ad on the page just above the graph about "Unlock Macrotrends Premium" which takes up 1.5/2cm of the page, while the graph underneath it takes up like 15cm. Then there's a bunch of other information on the page, none of which are ads. yes, there's a "you only get 5 page visits free" whole page pop-up thing, but there's an easy and well-known way round that for individuals who understand basic internet browser usage.
maybe start using an ad-blocker? pretty much everyone else does these days.
> the data was most likely parsed out of Oracle's earning reports by some janky regexp.
which is probably what the ai would do... or more likely it's just stealing it from the source i linked, since the numbers are exactly the same...
also, probably not because see (1b) below.
> I don’t know why you would trust this more than AI.
because (1a)
> Fundamental data from Zacks Investment Research, Inc.
> Built on Zacks Investment Research — trusted by institutional investors, academics, and financial professionals for over 45 years. [0]
I'd take people who have been doing this stuff for 45 years over some new-fangled toy that's well known to hallucinate and get things wrong in ways that appear authoritative.
also, on that (1b)
> Zacks employs a rigorous quality control process to make sure all data points are recorded accurately. For each company, a trained analyst enters the data from SEC filings, which is then double checked by a senior analyst. Once the data is entered, a senior analyst signs off on final completion after reviewing all the data. In addition, the data is subjected to a battery of automated checks to verify balancing relationships and correct errors. All data items are reviewed by multiple sets of trained eyes as well as automated computer checks. [1]
and (2) because that site provides other contextual information that is helpful, like the fact that Oracle's stock price has been trending downwards, which is possibly a reason why they felt the need to make cuts now. [2]
ai gives you the answer you want -- not the answers you might actually need.
To be fair, the stats are more trustworthy with a source link. Especially if you admit to using AI to generate the text in your comment (which is now actually against the guidelines, but I suspect most will forgive it if it's not too egregious, even after such an admission; in this case, it's nice formatting for being inline with the comments on this page), it would help to disclose where the actual data is coming from. I'd just include the link to where you verified the numbers, otherwise the comment is fine. (I mean, that's just my opinion, but there you have it.)
It's tricky to pick an end-of-decade year also - recessions tend to happen +/- 2 years of the end of each decade in the USA, or at least have done since records began in the 19th century. For example 2010 was recovery over 2008/2009's bust. It's not like comparing March to Ma4ch for a crude seasonal adjustment.
You did the Python right but the analysis wrong. Looking at it on a graph you can see that interpreting a single growth rate for the entire period (even if you stop pre-covid) doesn’t make sense.
You can see linear growth from 2010-2017. Then slow decline or at best a flatline from 2018-2021. Then they went crazy in 2022-2025.
Now if we just do 162k - 30k we are back to 132k, basically same ballpark as pre-COVID.
1. They maintain and sell one of the largest relational databases.
2. They're the primary maintainer of one of the largest programming languages.
3. They do tons of HR/ERP type software.
4. They have a supply chain division (my company is a direct competitor, and we have 2000 employees--it's a drop in the bucket, but a few thousand here, a few thousand there and it starts to add up. Afaik, their supply chain org is bigger than ours).
5. Other things I probably don't know about.
Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency, which swells the number of workers by a lot.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not remotely a fan, I like to quote Bryan Cantrill's rant. However, they do a lot of things.
>> Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency,
I have some anecdotal evidence for this. I worked at a medium sized family owned business. They were going through a massive ERP upgrade/replacement. One of the bids was from Oracle. The company was able to essentially test drive each company they were reviewing to see if the software was going to be a good fit.
Oracle's sales team was like a having a football on site. They sent over no less than about 20 people to swarm our pretty small office, barge into the dev spaces and generally annoy the fuck out of everybody for several months. The other vendors? They sent one, maybe two people to work alongside us as we test drove their software.
It was funny being in those meetings listening to people talk about the Oracle people. Nobody even remembered how good or bad their software was. Every single comment was about how overbearing and pushy their sales people were.
Needless to say, we went with a different company.
They also own multiple other huge companies that had tens of thousands of their own employees working in completely different areas (Netsuite, Cerner, Acme, etc)
It's even more wild when you realize that other similar-sized enterprise companies don't have all that and either leave bugs to sit around for decades, or randomly break shit trying to fix them.
Clearly shows that either no one understands the whole picture anymore or that it became so diverse custom, that this is the only way of handling this now.
I think though that these companies are more business companies than tech companies and move themselves into this nightmare.
Unless you have worked with Oracle or other big enterprises, you may not realize the scale of how these companies operate and the breadth of what they actually do. Just by looking at their product page[0] you can see they offer software, hardware, cloud, consulting, support, and even financing solutions. In addition to the technology and product people (of which there are many), you also need HR, sales, marketing, accounting, support, etc for the entire global organization.
Sure, 100,000 people is a lot, but Oracle also does a lot.
In the real world, there are a lot of things you need to run a business: HR, ERP, Financing, Cloud, Compliance, CRM, etc. There is really only one company who can sell them all to you on one piece of paper, and that's Oracle.
Oracle sells alot of software that is accompanied by hordes of consultants to set it up.
Last F50 I was at did a PeopleSoft migration. We probably had 400 Oracle employees pass through the doors over 2 years helping to get it off the ground.
Most Enterprises don't just buy software and that's it. They buy software + support to implement it for their business.
Write code to connect this system with that system. Teach people what setting does what. Integrate with Entra ID. Create custom reports that hordes of Executive on our side want. Scale out the system from undersized nodes we originally gave it. That's all I picked up by just listening to them. I wasn't involved in the project, just sat nearby listening to it.
This is extremely customizable software that is designed to pretty much run your entire business and touched by over 40k employees. It requires a ton of care and feeding. There is plenty of people who dedicate themselves to PeopleSoft. Zip Recruiter is showing 5 jobs near me for "PeopleSoft Administrator"
Soon, it will be table stakes to put scattered internal communications, notes, documents into an AI’s knowledge base, where the information can no longer hide.
When that fails, the AI can read the code itself, so that the settings and how to change them are easily explained in simple terms. Actually, this is possibly even better than letting the scattered internal information serve as an intermediate layer.
That works for small customers who actually want to spend time customizing things themselves. Big customers love having to sign support contracts, because it gives them someone to blame when something goes wrong. Nobody else gets to touch any of the settings or knobs to avoid breaking anything.
The training team and what's called 'Change Management' for an F50 company that's spread across the globe implementing a new application like an ERP could be 100 people by itself. It's extremely complex and hard to do those kinds of projects which is why many ERP migrations take a decade to complete if not fail entirely.
"Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?!"
Almost certainly a large amount of support staff, so management/HR/IT etc... Then you've got your customer account managers, sales, lawyers/finance etc.... Given they do an insane amount of B2B and government sales I can see this being easy to reach tbh. Governement contract processes require an insane amount of bureacracy and negotations.
In June 2022 the Oracle acquisition of Cerner (a EMR now billed as Oracle Health) closed, so that would be after the 2022 date and before the 2023 date. Cerner was 28,000 employees.
If they do cut back to their size before the acquisition, while continuing to try and support the EMR, they will be doing a lot more with fewer employees.
What's the point of posting statistics if they're not fact-checked and come from no verifiable source? At best they're right but we don't know until someone else fact-checked it for you, and at worst you're just spreading misinformation and we don't know until, again, someone else fact-checked it for you.
If you want to use AI to find information like this, tell it to grab you a source and post that.
The "Something crazy at corona" would likely be, in part, their purchase of Cerner Corporation in 2021-2022. I want to say there were 10k-ish employees? Maybe more?
I have friends there who have described how bare-bones things were. This is only going to make it worse.
I would not patronize a hospital system that intended on staying on Cerner Millennium EMRs for the foreseeable future. If things were bad before, they'll only be worse now.
This round of layoffs was telegraphed at a month or so ago. It's all related to banks getting spooked and pulling funding for their massive data center project and the OpenAI deal being on the rocks.
So, I don't think it's really about their product being good enough, it's more that they've bet the company on data centers and it's starting to look like they just don't have the skills to execute on it.
"Oracle leadership" sounds like nobody wants to take responsibility but they do like the share price to go up so say good bye to [auto generated name in header]'s job.
Are you not aware of the techno-authoritarian ambitions of the silicon valley tech bros? It isn't much of a secret these days, after they published a few books detailing their aspirations, a bit like Project 2025. There are even public videos where they express their disdain for competition and democracy. A few prominent individuals in this cabal are publicly known. Mr. Lawn Mower here is at the forefront of it and it also includes the owners of many AI and surveillance companies. And they're all actively associated with extreme right wing governments.
Look at the known uses of AI by governments these days. Targeting of immigrants in Minnesota and selection of targets in Gaza and Iran to blow up. And look at the companies contributing to them. Some of the usual suspects are all present and contributing models, data centers and intel inputs.
Is it possible that some of the richest people are collaborating to subdue the rest of the population for their benefit? Does this sound like a conspiracy theory to you? Good! This sounds too fantastic and alarmist even to me. Skepticism is warranted. But the evidences are not mere speculations or leaps of faith. Many are well known facts reported by mainstream media. Besides, this isn't the first time that the greedy and egomaniacal individuals have banded together to consolidate wealth. You already know what they mean when they talk about 'absolute free speech', 'free market capitalism', etc. You've also seen their birth defect of missing empathy in action. And it doesn't help that many of them have an unhealthy obsession with apocalyptic prophecies of several religions (meanwhile, they never seem to notice the nice parts - ever). So a nightmare scenario isn't entirely inconceivable.
Why hasn't the AI bubble burst yet? Why do high profile men engage in cringy public bromance, followed by a messy divorce and then get back together again discretely? What are all their Mein Kampf style fantasy books and outrageous opinions about? Why did doge vacuum up highly sensitive demographic data that seems irrelevant to them? What's with all those shady and convoluted business deals and money transactions that look as if they're scheming a coup? And why the hell are all of them so obsessed with building fortified bunkers under their backyards?
Forget all that. Trump publicly announced yesterday that the military is building a 'massive complex' under that gaudy monstrosity that he calls the ballroom. Apparently, that hideous structure is only a lid for what's underneath. But I wasn't surprised a bit! The reason? A very smart lady had argued the exact same assertion two months ago! She took the details of the 'private donors' of the ballroom, the construction partners and their spending and purchase manifests, to convincingly argue that they're building a massive AI datacenter underground for the military. The costs were too high for the ballroom and many purchases were unconventional, to say the least. She said the exact same thing back then - that the ballroom is just a lid for an underground facility! I mean, if you are a military with a lethal strategic AI, you certainly wouldn't expose it like a traditional datacenter.
I feel like I'm paranoid just saying all these. But the world we live in today was unthinkable more than a decade ago. I don't want to spread confusion and paranoia. But it's also getting too late to ignore the developments. Just keep an eye for what's happening in this area. It's safer to be an unpopular prepper in this political climate, than be caught by surprise if it comes down to that.
According to the article as well as blind, the main teams hit were associated with Cerner (EHR) and NetSuite (ERP).
Oracle's AI spend is part of Oracle Cloud.
That said, I guess it can be argued that Cerner and NetSuite being on the chopping block can be attributed to AI because now procurement has the choice to either build in-house via an Anthropic or OpenAI SI like Accenture or TCS or they can negotiate better purchasing terms from a best-in-breed product in HRM and ERP like SAP instead.
I also find it interesting how American and European HNers are much more negative about AI compared to their Chinese, Indian, and Israeli peers even though they have a significant amount to lose as well.
Both Cerner (EHR) and NetSuite (ERP) were laggards in their market segments for years.
If I'm the Director of Enterprise Applications and have a budget allocated to procurement, I have no reason to purchase a laggard product like Cerner or NetSuite even with the Oracle bundle when SAP is giving significant discounts because OpenAI, Anthropic, and GCP are offering partnerships with systems integrations like Accenture or Deloitte to fully build out and manage your own hyperspecific ERP or EHR.
There's no reason to keep investing in products in a market that was already past it's growth stage pre-AI with a clear market winner, especially now that there is downstream pressure that makes build much more attractive than buying an inferior product.
Based on your response, I doubt you even cared to read my entire post.
Edit: can't reply
> I didn't read it because it didn't exist yet, you added it in an edit
It did when I posted. The only edit I made after you posted was fixing HRM to EHR.
> You're not even disagreeing with my response, merely elaborating the mechanism behind it. This is bad faith posting.
I strongly disagree. My entire thesis is that Cerner and NetSuite were bad businesses. If a business is bad you kill the business.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with EHR systems will know that nobody wants to build their own. I once worked for a large hospital system that abandoned a decades old institutionally built and maintained system for Epic. The choice was celebrated by almost everyone who worked there.
The value is in the “system” itself. The tooling, plugins, knowledge that your staff has the familiarity and skills so as to not require retraining, the interoperability of data with other systems and vendors.
The idea that AI is going to enable a variety of bespoke competitors is truly laughable!
> That said, I guess it can be argued that Cerner and NetSuite being on the chopping block can be attributed to AI because now procurement has the choice to either build in-house via an Anthropic or OpenAI SI like Accenture or TCS or they can negotiate better purchasing terms from a best-in-breed product in HRM and ERP like SAP instead.
Cerner isn't an EHR, it's an EMR. EHR == Electronic Health Record. Your FitBit data is an Electronic Health Record. EMR == Electronic Medical Record. Your doctor's records, how much blood thinner that nurse is supposed to give grandpa, and whether or not he's a fall risk are things you'd put in an EMR.
You can't just vibecode your way to replacing an EMR. Cerner Millennium has a shrinking, but substantial, footprint at healthcare systems across the country and around the globe. There are 25+ years of bugfixes, caveats, architecture, and other pieces of knowledge to be tracked and accounted for, and you must do so, because if you don't, people under the care of doctors could die.
It's also worth noting that the DoD uses Millennium for active service members, and I think they also use it for TriCare. American taxpayers are on the hook for dealing with the problems that Oracle's cost cuts will produce.
There was an interesting scandal in Sweden where Oracle managed to sell the Millenium system to a regions hospitals even though they did not fulfill the requirements, and then when it inevitably crashed and burned they had to do an emergency rollback to the previous system after just a few days.
> You can't just vibecode your way to replacing an (sic) EMR
Absolutely, but you can now demand a market leader like Epic to give you a significantly better discount (eg. 20-30% over the 10% you may have previously been offered).
And that is the crux of the "SaaSpocalypse" and why you are seeing targeted layoffs in Oracle specifically for their ERP and EHR products.
> It's also worth noting that the DoD uses Millennium for active service members, and I think they also use it for TriCare. American taxpayers are on the hook for dealing with the problems that Oracle's cost cuts will produce
Absolutely, but they were already on the hook for that before Cerner became a part of Oracle.
> Absolutely, but you can now demand a market leader like Epic to give you a significantly better discount (eg. 20-30% over the 10% you may have previously been offered).
Is this on the grounds that you can do it yourself?
What larger procurement teams are saying is "we would rather pay Accenture+Anthropic $50M for 2 years and if they fail, sign a $75M contract with Epic in 3 years instead of spending $150M for 5 years".
Even at the lower ends of the funnel, companies are now extracting significant discounts from market leaders as well as their incumbent vendors becuase they are quote shopping.
Oracle isn't in a position to push back because it isn't a market leader in the segments that NetSuite and Cerner compete in, which makes discount even more critical, which means margins management also becomes significantly more critical.
From what I remember, EMRs - particularly parts that do things like manage blood banks and medication dispensers - aren't just something you can have a team of consultants from Accenture vibecode, or even plancode. In several countries, they fall under the same regulations as medical devices and are subject to the same scrutiny.
I wouldn't want to be the hospital executive sitting for a deposition on a medical malpractice suit, explaining how instead of using Epic or Cerner or whomever, they decided to let AI and a bunch of recent college grads from the lowest bidder consulting firm replace a known system. Sounds like a good way to wipe out whatever you saved in costs with court judgments.
Also, switching EMRs is a huge pain in the ass. When I was a fresh-faced employee at an EMR company they sent me and other employees out to help deploy a new system in a client's hospitals in another city. This took a small army of employees, contractors, travel nurses, and consultants to do. Your ass was up at 3 AM, back at your hotel room at 8 PM. Nurses didn't care about what your program did, they wanted it a certain way and they wanted it fixed now. You're hopefully not going to have the hospital leadership saying, "Yeah, you can try this and if you fail, we'll switch again in three years". I can't imagine many healthcare systems doing that, particularly if the physicians are a major component of management.
All of what you are saying is absolutely true, but frankly doesn't matter at the executive level.
If it is a board priority to extract favorable terms from vendors (and it absolutely is right now), we will get it done consequences be damned. If you can't do it, we'll fire you and replace you with someone else. You saw this with enterprises making 12-18 month roadmaps to completely tear out VMware ESXi and migrate to Nutanix.
Unlike Broadcom which has a much more diversified business and purchased actual market leaders which allows them to be so vicious, Oracle's SaaS products have a much weaker hand as the headline of churn is much more destabilizing for a market laggard like Cerner or NetSuite than choosing to drop from 90% gross margins to 40% gross for strategic customers - and purchasers know that.
As such, as a business who is not in a position to protect against strongarming purchaser you need to preemptively build additional margins slack where possible, and it is in this vein that the NetSuite and Cerner layoffs happened today.
No one has, but every buyer is using this line across vast swathes of Enterprise SaaS to extract the most competitive quote available from either the dominant player or their existing vendor.
It doesn't matter if the customer is serious because the general sentiment across the board amongst procurement teams is that existing quotes are too high, and that they want to maximize discounting where possible.
If you are a non-dominant player in a market segment as Oracle is in ERP and EHR, you lack leeway to better manage margins pressures and win in a price war.
It is in this vein that mass layoffs like the one Oracle announced occur.
Why pay a premium for a tier 2 product when I can buy the tier 1 product on a discount?
One of the ideal things that companies can do is not hire people. A company that never hires someone will never let anyone go and consequently is the only ethical company. The worst thing that a company could do is pay someone to do a job for a while. In fact, one thing we could do is make sure that all jobs should be perpetual. If someone hires you, they can't stop paying you until they die or declare bankruptcy. This is sure to be good for workers.
> In fact, one thing we could do is make sure that all jobs should be perpetual. If someone hires you, they can't stop paying you until they die or declare bankruptcy. This is sure to be good for workers
You jest, but that's pretty much South Korea if this video (and my interpretation of it) is to be believed: https://youtu.be/pjjhrwVYPE8
For those not interested in watching 30 mins of this, long story short, it doesn't bode well. They do have some other circumstances going on in addition though.
My only problem with this is: Some of my best people are those that "I gave them a chance." I'd only hire perfect people from my tribe if I had to have them forever.
> One of the ideal things that companies can do is not hire people
This, but unironically. Companies that make money without hiring anyone provide the most "value".
Simultaneously we should stop calling business owners "job creators". They're actually "job minimizers". They only hire people when there's no other choice.
It's a failure of hiring, planning, and management. It's an off the books opportunity cost. It's an off the books cost of hiring a replacement. And if over hiring was done willfully, then yes it's straight up unethical.
Actually, it is. You have been blinded by capitalism to consider it ethical.
The tribes usually treat the members as a family. While kicking someone from a tribe can happen, it's considered to be a harsh punishment.
In a tribe, when hard times come, people usually redistribute. That's a normal, human way of dealing with that situation. Not a layoff.
The other aspect is the economic crises. When a central bank decides to increase interest rates, it decreases lending to new investments in favor of lower inflation. This can lead to layoffs, instead of having inflation inflicted on everyone (especially the rich with huge savings). So that decision is essentially some random guys get kicked out of economic (and societal) participation in order to prevent more redistribution of existing wealth.
If you think about it, yes layoffs are deeply immoral. But we can understand, why they happen in capitalism, as a sort of big tragedy of the commons.
My employer is not my “tribe”. That is crazy. We have a contract saying I do X units of work and they pay me Y in return. Either of us end it at any time.
At least this is in the case in the US. What you are saying might be true in other cultures.
What we have in the USA is not necessarily the final and best form of all interactions, as much as it pains me to say it.
Most people's reactions to large-scale movements like this seem to imply that we feel there should be something more than a simple "money duty" between employer and employee, and we seem to also have respect for companies that act that way (e.g, some Japanese companies perhaps, or baseball teams keeping a sick player on the payroll so they get healthcare even though they never play another game).
Attempting to realize that duty and at the same time abscond it to the state or the family may be an aspect of the failing.
No, that's another sort of misconception, also expressed in another comment by WalterBright, which conveniently ignores the reality of most jobs.
It glosses over the fact that employers exercise control over the social relations required for production (of anything larger that can be built by a self-employed person). This happens by virtue of owning all the crucial means of production involved. And that point, where you need to coordinate work of several people, it ceases to be a system of contractors who freely determine their working conditions, and becomes a collective that has a common goal.
So no, it's not case in the U.S., in no economy of the world is majority of production organized into everyone being a little independent contractor who brings (or rents) their own equipment. That would be horribly inefficient (not to mention that people don't want it either, by and large).
There is a clear rebut to this, how can employer own the social relations (required for production), like managerial relationships, when they ostensibly only own the factory equipment? Well, it's like when you own an appartment, you technically only own the four walls, but practically you also enjoy the privacy that comes with it. In a similar way, capitalists owning a factory don't just rent equipment to a bunch workers, but can dictate the whole social superstructure of production, including the redistribution of earnings.
And yet, employers love to use the "we're a family", "we're a team", and other such messaging, especially in the tech industry. They elide the transactional nature of the entire relationship.
Yes, that's what people tell themselves to deal with it psychologically. That it's just a job, not a community, and you better not make friends in the workplace (despite spending majority of your life there). And that when you're unemployed, life just goes on, as if it doesn't mean much.
Like when a traumatised kid never loved by the parents concludes that life is harsh and love doesn't exist, so better be tough.
> Yes, that's what people tell themselves to deal with it psychologically. That it's just a job, not a community, and you better not make friends in the workplace (despite spending majority of your life there). And that when you're unemployed, life just goes on, as if it doesn't mean much.
That's a lot of stuff you're saying. Not what I'm saying.
Sure. Also the profitability of a company is just a number, and shareholders dividend is just fiduciary fictions, and company hierarchy is just arbitrary title attaching this or that person to this or that loosely defined role.
Drama is just in the head of people melted in the ambient narrative, sure.
Actually they kinda do, for example worker cooperatives. Not common, have some issues (different than those claimed by propaganda), but they do exist. (If we understand "marxist" as somewhat in favor of worker emancipation instead of alienation. Marx was an eclectic guy and can be interpreted in different ways.)
Safeway won’t starve and die if I decide to buy from Fred Meyer. You really don’t see that an individual is not on equal footing with multibillion company? It is absolutely immoral. And I’m not even talking about charity, those people were hired and did actual job for the fucking trillion dollar company.
Several grocery stores in Seattle have closed recently. The same with local Starbucks outlets. Locations that don't make money get closed, even if the rest of the company is doing well.
Also, employees can quit anytime, no notice required. Nobody is obliged to work.
> Several grocery stores in Seattle have closed recently. The same with local Starbucks outlets. Locations that don't make money get closed, even if the rest of the company is doing well.
Irrelevant to the topic at hand. Don’t give me a sob story about mom and pop shop, we’re talking about a trillion dollar company.
> Also, employees can quit anytime, no notice required. Nobody is obliged to work.
> The grocery stores were run by national chains. Starbucks is global.
So you’re confirming my point that billion dollar companies (like Starbucks killing mom and pop shop) have disproportionately more power over individuals or what are you saying?
> It's symmetric. Companies employ at will, and workers work at will.
Workers don’t work at will. Last time I checked UBI is not there, so workers work to pay the bills and put food on the table.
> billion dollar companies (like Starbucks killing mom and pop shop) have disproportionately more power over individuals or what are you saying?
They have zero power over individuals. They cannot make you work. They cannot prevent you from working for someone else. They cannot arrest you. They cannot confiscate things from you. They cannot tell you were to live. They cannot shoot your dog. They cannot evict you. They cannot fine you. They cannot tell you what to do after hours. You can quit at any time for any reason. Your rights are completely intact.
> Workers don’t work at will.
"at will" has a legal meaning, meaning they can work or quit or change jobs at any time. No law or company rule can prevent that.
Ah, there's your fallacy - you seem to think that when someone has a legal right to exercise some right, that also means they have a freedom (in the practical sense) to exercise that right.
I've known people who chained themselves to their desk by spending 110% of their income. They built a financial house of cards which could not withstand any interruption in their pay.
It was chains of their own making, the company was not even aware of it.
They weren't poor people, either. They had a McMansion, nice furniture, snazzy clothes and his&hers new cars.
A friend of mine, much lower on the pay scale, came to me once for some financial advice. He was married, and lived in a modest apartment. He could not pay the bills. The problem was he had his+hers new cars with stiff payments. I advised him to sell the cars, and buy ones he could afford. I was surprised that he followed my advice, and got his finances back on their feet.
A reasonable goal is to save/invest 20% of your income.
P.S. You can cut spending dramatically by getting a roommate. I had roommates for years.
> Safeway won’t starve and die if I decide to buy from Fred Meyer.
Ironically, you (along with a significant number of others) deciding to buy from a competitor will eventually lead to financial trouble for Safeway and thus to layoffs and losses for their investors (pension funds among them).
So, do you find your decision to buy from Fred Meyer "absolutely immoral"?!
I don’t think there’s any point in having a conversation with you if you don’t see any difference between employment, community, civic duty and market. If you treat people as a market product, then we have even less to discuss.
It is unethical, if there was nothing wrong with their performance and the company never tried to find a replacement position within the company. Stop licking boots, I heard they don’t even taste that good.
When done for profit maximizing reasons it's not any worse than capitalism itself, but then this degrades into whether capitalism is ethical which is off topic
There’s weirdly-weak evidence that the layoff-happy strategy is actually better for long term company health than trying to retain workers through down periods. Like, it’s kinda just something you do now because it’s “how things are done” but it wasn’t always that way, and it might not even be the right call for profit-maximizing.
Ironically, you picked two systems that are heavily interfered with by the government.
Back in the Great Depression, my great grandmother got sick and was hospitalized, and they took care of her until she passed. My grandfather did not have enough to pay the bill. The hospital told him not to worry, just pay what he could. It took him a while, but he paid the bill in full.
How? The government runs it, and/or heavily regulates it, and shifts costs.
> and they're better off for it
In the US, the cost of medical care rose in step with inflation until 1968. After that, it rose at a much steeper rate, and has not slowed down. 1968 was when the government got involved with health care.
Countries with a heavily-interfered health care system are poorer as a result.
My great grandmother's brother, Frank Taylor, fought in the Union Army. He later became a bodyguard for Buffalo Bill. And that's all I know about him, and the personal side of the Civil War.
Keep in mind that doctoring was pretty primitive in those days. A doctor could set your broken bones and sew up wounds, and that's about it. You got better or you died. Doctors were called "sawbones" in those days.
> How long was “a while” specifically?
If I recall correctly, it took him 3 years. I don't know much about his finances.
I do know that his first job was shoveling coal in a steamship, which is a filthy, rotten job.
ah yes, the high standard of living inlcuding checks notes world-leading medical bankruptcies, collapsing life expectancy despite insane healthcare spending, crippling student debt, unaffordable housing that requires a trust fund just to rent, and wages that stagnated decades ago while corporate profits and CEO pay skyrocketed.
i spent $57 on a regular size pack of paper towels and toilet paper in the bay area yesterday
Interestingly, you mentioned the trifecta of industries most interfered with by the government - healthcare, education, and housing.
The government puts its foot on the scale there.
In contrast, look at the software industry. No regulations, yet highly sophisticated software where the price went to zero. I just reinstalled Ubuntu on my (now fixed!) computer, and every bit of the software was 100% free. And I give away the software I write for it!
Oracle has record revenue and has for many years in a row. Laying people off is a result of mismanagement and not because they can't afford to keep them. In an ideal world I believe we'd have human centered employment instead of profit centered, and while I know that's unlikely to happen, it doesn't mean we can't criticize profit centered
I don't understand this sentiment. I'm absolutely significantly more productive with AI; so much moreso that I now have freetime and we haven't needed to replace an engineer who left. On the flip side my coworkers who think they're above AI are drowning. I think there is an endemic problem of senior engineers who think they're above learning AI and agents who don't want to use them, and these cuts are about forcing them to get with the times or drown in work.
Replacing jobs is a bit of a misnomer, but it's certainly allowing us to build out more features in shorter amounts of time.
he mentions being paid more in terms of time, "I now have freetime". I can relate, in the right use cases it is nice to do some work estimated for 12 hrs in 2.
There is good, useful content in this article, but it is seriously overshadowed by the LLM-isms indicating that a nontrivial part of it is AI generated.
I'm obviously channeling my inner boomer here, but as soon as I start seeing the tells of AI authoring, I just give up on the article altogether. To the author, please consider that I and many others want to see your thought process, warts and all, there is no need to hide behind the facade of the LLM screed.
Maybe I'm getting worse at recognizing it, but I didn't notice anything that made me think it was AI-authored. What were the telltale signs you noticed?
> I'm obviously channeling my inner boomer here, but as soon as I start seeing the tells of AI authoring, I just give up on the article altogether.
Given that both my daughters - teen and tween - as well as I myself - gen X - have the same impulse I don't consider this a 'boomer' thing but a 'human' one. As long as genAI- produced text reads like empty marketroid drivel that impulse will remain.
Yeah, people who genuinely believe that don't have any problem with smart contracts getting exploited. Of course there are people who _say_ that because it's financially expedient at the time, then change their tune. But both groups exist and this is not really a gotcha.
That's fine. I just see it as heuristics at different levels. In the wider context, generally, markets work well, so people should be 'allowed' to do all of this. After all, you can choose not to use ETH if you think the foundation sucks. Whether ETH or the foundation sucks is a technical question given your goals, I suppose, rather than a moral one.
In a western legal framework you might argue promissory estoppel if the foundation made certain statements about it, but if you take the libertarian code-is-law stance and you want to be consistent then you probably should have researched exactly what was possible at that level before investing.
The contract code said, "if you have a valid (off-chain) private key, you can mint tokens." The hacker gained access to their AWS account and ultimately their keys.
While I am happy to celebrate dumb crypto stuff, this isn't a situation where someone's code was "exploited." Their code was stupid, relying only on an off-chain private key to allow the minting of tokens. Their security was just also bad.
Yeah, the concept of "nemawashi" (根回し) is very important there, this idea that all the groundwork and decision making is agreed upon before the meeting happens.
The term literally comes from the concept of "preparing the roots", that is, the process of softening the ground and trimming around the roots of a tree (often a bonsai) in preparation for moving it safely.
Sure, if the memory error is an immediately crashing one like a null per deref, but if is (for example) a memory corruption (e.g. an out of bounds write or a write-after-free) then this would be super helpful in exposing where those are happening at the source.
Not actually of "AI is replacing jobs", more "oh shit we are spending too much and the product isn't good enough for us to ever make a return on our absurd over-investment".
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