Here's the bit that irks me...

I'm a long service employee and have seen a few RIFs in my time - in fact someone from HR told me that the most common reason for leaving Oracle is being laid off. So we know it comes with the territory.

Sadly we also know that there are people queueing up to join Oracle - it is a good thing to have on your resume. Or at least it was.

Reading a lot of the recent posts, it's indiscriminate - teams across the whole company. People who have had great performance reviews (for what they're worth IMHO). I've seen some really great people get laid off in the past, just because they happened to be in the wrong area at that point in time - although this time it feels like pretty much any area of the company could be the "wrong area"

But the bit that I can't fathom is what the expectation is going forward for our customers. Again, a lot of people have stated how they're committed to delivering quality support to our customers - someone even got laid off and was unable to join a scheduled support call with a customer as they lost their access immediately upon being informed. What message does that give?

I'll tell you what it says - the leadership and shareholders don't give a cr-p about the customer experience (even less about the employee experience). They're after the next big buck - which this time around is AI.

With the pipeline deals recently announced surely there is funding for both the required AI footprint AND continue to offer quality support to our customers.

It's a theme - when Oracle buys a company (e.g. Cerner) yes their product suite is nice to own , but it's the customer base that's the prize. And we always lay off the technical experts from those companies 2-3 years in. Always

Many times I've seen people with no product knowledge trying to support a customer with an issue. Might as well ask someone on he street.

To sum up, quality support isn't a priority - they'll probably claim that AI/chatbots can provide that support. Personally I don't think they can and a lot of support issues can get quite complicated.

Clearly as long as we're delivering stellar results the customer experience doesn't matter at all

#Layoffs #Leadership #Morale #Culture

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@eb being an ex-support person, customers are mad enough now, this will push them over the edge. I am sure the big shots will love the cust sat reports.

@eb At least some months back that AI support at OCI was utter garbage. It could not even find the correct technical documentation and sent me something completely irrelevant and sometime spouted some hallucination nonsense. I was actually annoyed at having to click buttons for a while before getting to making a ticket.

When I contact support it is not because I cannot read documentation, but because something is genuinely wrong. Maybe I am the exception though? Although lately, I feel like EVERY company is giving me the AI runaround of "have you tried turning it off" etc for 15 minutes before they let me access real support.

Their new support interface is heavily AI. Employees using it were expected to provide feedback and train it. Then it replaced those people.

The way it's starting to look, when a customer calls in wants the engineer or duty manager, they're going to get the AI Runaround. Duty Manager will not be at all accessible to the customer if they still have duty managers. AI will answer the call and do God knows what with the customer's issue. Wait till customer starts insisting the SR owner to join a zoom. Going to be interesting.

This is the best post I have seen!

I hate to tell you, but it’s like that at every other major IT with respect to support after the sale. They pump it up for the customers, potential customers and recruiting, oh we care about you and customers soooo much. But in reality, support contracts are a golden goose. Any dollar they can shave off the customer and support employee experience is profit. No raises, no reqs, no equipment, no upgrades, you get NOTHING, and like it.

Oracle is just among the worse of the worse at this. Ellison is the richest person on the planet. These things are related.

After a lot of great people were laid off in my LOB a lot of other good people are now openly discussing applying for jobs with colleagues, and some of them even getting offers already. And these are people that are not laid off.

That story you have about quality support: one respected person got laid off like that too, and this is a person working with very important business customers of our product. Actually, it seems like they laid off most of our support people, which is still mind boggling to me? We make a lot of money offering this service. Is this simply because it is not related to the "AI" product we offer?

And I feel like this is a bigger shift than in previous layoffs. People genuinely feel like their job safety is completely gone now and wonder "will I be next?" since the people being laid off are based on seemingly no criteria and no matter how important you are.

@OP Quite how they expect to motivate those who remain is a mystery.

Especially that it's been established that your performance rating doesn't matter for layoffs.

I guess they will just rely on stating "you're lucky you have a job".

Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

Here's the bit that irks me...

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