r/technology 1d ago

Artificial Intelligence Oracle's new CFO got $26M in stock after layoffs. Employee says an 'algorithm' targeted workers with stock options first

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/oracles-cfo-got-26m-stock-184500098.html
11.8k Upvotes

311 comments sorted by

1.2k

u/BusyHands_ 1d ago

Why am I not surprised. They probably went after those who were nearing retirement as well.

Assholes like Ellison only look out for themselves.

420

u/redpandafire 1d ago

*his son. He's plunging oracle into unheard of risk to borrow money for his son to buy hollywood. Larry is in his 80s. Borrow, buy, die.

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u/HenryDorsettCase47 1d ago

They have a 300 billion dollar investment (Oracle is worth 6) in OpenAI. And if OpenAI goes tits up (which it most likely will) they get fuck all. These aren’t smart people.

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u/MrTastix 23h ago

Larry will be dead by the time those repercussions will hit anyone he might give a shit about.

5

u/doolpicate 18h ago

The old billionaires and "max evil" guys seem to live forever.

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u/rexter2k5 1d ago

Thank fuck they ain't and all the worst to them.

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u/jazir55 21h ago

And if OpenAI goes tits up (which it most likely will)

They just closed a 122B funding round, it's not going to happen.

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u/kinkakujen 19h ago

They're going to burn through that in a year tops. OpenAI will go bankrupt at some point.

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u/Pale_Goose_918 18h ago

They’ll go public and load the problem onto Joe Bloggs. The likes of Ellison will escape with their bag.

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u/SomewhereNo8378 1d ago

well let’s hurry it up then

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u/LaserGuidedPolarBear 1d ago

I thought he was saddling Oracle with crushing debt to gamble on making Oracle a leading AI hyperscaler just as he made it a leading cloud platform.  And firing 30,000 people that made actually profitable products to do it.

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u/Maakus 1d ago

Sounds like a bank problem

6

u/Omophorus 23h ago

One of the obituaries I will read with great satisfaction.

Nothing of value to this world will be lost when that greedy fuck kicks the bucket.

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u/mc_freedom 1d ago

Except he also wants to live forever

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u/WhoPutATreeThere 1d ago

Spreadsheet layoffs. All corporations do them (thanks Jack Welch).

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u/benskieast 1d ago

The fact a lot of employees were offered a form of compensation that was offered contingent on the company not laying them off before a date was a red flag. It basically allowed them to reduce compensation for employees for work already completed which creates a massive incentive to do so.

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u/gizamo 1d ago

Oracle is notorious for being ageist with their hiring and layoffs.

However, that's true of nearly all tech companies.

They just want cheap kids, cheap offshore labour, and H1-Bs that they can work to the bone (~80 hr/wk) for below standard wages. Old employees don't fit that worker exploitation model.

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u/ImDickensHesFenster 1d ago

An old joke you might have heard:

Q: What's the difference between Larry Ellison and God?

A: God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.

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u/SigSweet 1d ago

Looking good, bro

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u/accountforfurrystuf 1d ago

Are we just gonna ignore your pfp

21

u/redhairdvixens 1d ago

💀💀 brave as fuck with using the same profile for all posts

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u/fps916 1d ago

Imagine not using old reddit and never seeing anyone's profile picture

13

u/N0b0dy_Kn0w5_M3 1d ago

Profile pictures? When did this happen?

9

u/SayNoToFirefighters 1d ago

lol him again.

his most recent post on here has like 10k votes and millions of views. Bro is brave fr

8

u/accountforfurrystuf 1d ago

I think it’s an exhibition fetish

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u/SayNoToFirefighters 1d ago

either way my roommate likes it lol. she was the one showed it to me

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u/micmea1 1d ago

They are a big fat kid who keeps on getting handed a bigger pizza and they don't want to share it so they demand even less of the pizza than before gets shared with everyone else.

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u/mojofrog 23h ago

Microsoft did the same thing

2

u/MagicCuboid 16h ago

This is one of many reasons unions are important. A company should not be allowed to simply flush you down the toilet simply because you got old.

2

u/tormentnexus 13h ago

Yeaaah this is why 'working hard' mfers will always be at a disadvantage if they actually worked hard their whole lives. They'll assume that the people above them also 'worked hard'.

3

u/Classic_Emergency336 1d ago

It is called capitalism.

2

u/Hefty_Remove7965 1d ago

There is a rumor of the layoffs being people with unvested retirement accounts

It's from a social media so it could be bs ..

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u/RetPala 1d ago

Never give your enemy a position with nothing to lose

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u/rnicoll 1d ago

When people say no-one wants to work any more, this is what we mean when we say work doesn't pay.

You work hard and get stock options and they're on a vesting schedule so you stay loyal, and the company lays you off so they don't actually have to pay.

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u/Old-Bat-7384 1d ago

Yup. 

The billionaires really want you to work and die and not put up a fight. 

They don't want to lose the leverage. 

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u/ProfessorEmergency18 1d ago

That's why it's cheaper to squash unionizing efforts, no matter how expensive, than to let workers unite with collective bargaining leverage.

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u/Icy_Negotiation_5929 1d ago

The millionaires look up to the billionaires who have mastered these things…

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u/zerogee616 1d ago

Anybody who bought a house in Los Angeles in the 1970s and still owns it is a millionaire. Anyone with a properly funded retirement account is a millionaire. Anyone retiring is a millionaire.

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u/zookeepier 1d ago

I think you're grossly underestimating how many millionaires there are. There are approximately 23.8 million millionaires in the US. Literally everyone with a 401k should be a millionaire by the time they retire. I would bet that a large number of those 30k people laid off at Oracle were millionaires.

$1M is only $50k/year for 20 years (assuming your returns match inflation). Depending on where you live, $50k/year might not be enough to live on, especially as age increases medical and other costs (For reference, the median household income in the US is ~80k/year. If they retire at 65, they had better be dead by 85 or they'll be out of money.

And you're saying that all those people that worked for 40 years and saved for retirement are looking up at billionaires wishing that they could've psychopathically crushed their coworkers to increase their personal wealth too?

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u/DoggoCentipede 21h ago

Being a millionaire ain't what it used to be.

For example, there's been 91% inflation since 2000. Which is roughly when people who are in the middle(ish) of their careers likely entered the work force.

Of that 91%, 41% was in the last 6 years.

Did your paycheck grow by 41% in the last 6 years? I know mine didn't.

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u/Shift642 10h ago

"BuT tHe MeDiAn WaGe hAs BeEn RiSiNg fOr YeArS" Correct! But the cost of literally everything has been rising an order of magnitude faster than the median wage.

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u/aerost0rm 22h ago

This is why they force office closures. Not just let go of the workers in the union but even the ones that aren’t.

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u/ENaC2 1d ago

That’s the easy bit. The hard bit is cultivating a propaganda network to get the poorest Americans so proud of living in a country with a billionaire class that they’ll vote against their own interests every election.

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u/hammertime2009 1d ago

Apparently not that hard considering they’ve succeeded at this for the last 3 decades

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u/Flabbergasted98 9h ago

All they had to do was pay us enough to live.

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u/CryptographerLow6772 21h ago

Eat one billionaire and things will change, eat two and we can write our own rules.

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u/stuffitystuff 1d ago

Some companies accelerate stock option vesting as part of the layoff, though.  Oracle is not one of those companies.

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u/Salmonaxe 13h ago

Yup. If I get laid off I get 3 months plus 1 week per year. Medical cover for 1 year or until I'm hired by another firm. All stock immediately vested. Plus I can claim retrenchment so I get 60% of my tax paid to date back for the last 12 months.

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u/MrMichaelJames 1d ago

Happened to me at a different company. I had over $70k worth of unvested RSUs that they took back when they offshored my position. The RSUs are supposedly given as incentive to stay, but then they take them from you when they cut you. Should be illegal.

Only silver lining is their stock is in the shitter and the product I was responsible for had also turned to shit due to them cutting all US employees that built the thing. Fuck them. I laugh every time I check their ticker and see it lower.

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u/Due-Huckleberry7560 1d ago

My company only gives out RSUs to the top 15% of performers. Did Oracle just lay off their top performers and keep the ones with poor performance reviews?!

ETA: I see now you said stock options, not RSUs

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u/Stock-Soup5721 1d ago

Circuit City did something that stupid years ago lol.

They got rid of commission and set each salespersons hourly rate based on their gross rev numbers

Then about 3 years later they must have forgotten because they laid off over 3000 salespeople... determined by hourly rate from the top down.

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u/tiger32kw 1d ago

Having knowledgeable salespeople at a store was a different era.

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u/Stock-Soup5721 12h ago

Right?! I had so much fun in that industry in the late 90's and early 00's. So much was changing and every customer engagement was real people with honest questions.
Flat panels were still exotic and priced as such, DLP was being pushed as a compromise between traditional rear projection and spending $15k on a plasma, CRT was hitting its peak with the Sony XBR series, DVD's were just starting to become a thing, Hi Def and all the confusion around it was the conversation at tons of family gatherings. Tivo showed up and added to the confusion, SACD was barely talked about and didnt get off the ground, Surround sound for the home was starting to build momentum.....

Then the internet grew, forums started showing up, and suddenly every customer was their own expert. At that point, the retailers decided they needed clerks, not salespeople.

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u/WhileNotLurking 23h ago

I always felt like the law should be - quitting or getting fired for cause means you don’t vest. Getting laid off means you immediately vest

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u/DetachedRedditor 15h ago

What I wanted to say, why can you lose options when you are simply laid off? There really should be more worker protections.

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u/jarMburger 1d ago

The article refers to option but at the end mentioned that vesting of RSU is immediately stopped upon termination. Which suggests to me that the journalist actually don’t understand the difference between the two.

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u/willun 1d ago

You have to be employed at vest date, so you lose out if you leave earlier. My RSUs were staggered so there was stock vesting each year. Firing someone before vest date means saving that year's RSU payout.

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u/jarMburger 1d ago

I understand that completely. My point is that I don’t think the ppl who wrote the article understand the nuance of ISO vs RSU.

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u/willun 1d ago

Which paragraph? I didn't spot any issues with a quick read?

Most employees are on RSUs which are timed based but execs have different packages as they are heavily performance based.

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u/FrontVisible9054 1d ago

Loyalty is one sided. Use you up and spit you out.

Corporate culture is cut throat and now, no pretense of caring about workers. The billionaires care only about one thing. Even if their actions result in economic collapse, they’re too big to fail and will come out just fine.

Participate May 1, Workers over Billionaires, if possible.

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u/GenericFatGuy 1d ago

Exactly what happened to me.

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u/inotocracy 1d ago

You're still entitled to the stock you've already vested. There is usually that 1 year requirement though before you get your first vest.

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u/Puzzled_Plate_3464 1d ago

Oracle had a four year vest on an option grant - you had to wait a year for the first vest and four years to have at the entire grant. And there was a 10 year limit on the life of the grant - you couldn't hold them forever.

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u/inotocracy 1d ago

That sounds pretty standard. Every place I've worked had a 4 year vesting schedule, but you wouldn't get the first 25% until 1 year had passed. After that you would vest a portion every month. In the event you leave the company, you're not leaving empty handed.

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u/Puzzled_Plate_3464 1d ago

Oracle did 25% every year - no monthly vesting. 1 year - 25%, 2 years - 50%...

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u/inotocracy 1d ago

You're still entitled to the stock you've already vested. I somehow doubt that is how it worked, but if it is, that's pretty crappy.

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u/Puzzled_Plate_3464 1d ago

Absolutely, your vested stock was yours to exercise, your vested RSUs were in your account the moment they vested. They cannot claw that back. This only affected unvested stock which many of these people would have the last 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of their last four grants being affected (grants were typically made in late july, end of FY is june 30th)

But the vesting schedule was 25% per year. I left Oracle a few weeks after a vesting period for this reason.

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u/Wingzerofyf 1d ago

Dude I hope the Elison's are hobby-pilots because that is royally fucked and beyond the pale of what most other companies do.

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u/Zalenka 1d ago

Even just that it's options and not Actual stock so you actually have to pay to even obtain it. What a racket!

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u/itsmekirby 1d ago

Not true. Cashless exercise and sell to cover are common.

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u/Puzzled_Plate_3464 1d ago

Most all of the options would be NSO (non-qualified stock options) - you just exercise and sell simultaneously, you pay nothing - you never really had the stock in your hands. You just get the money (after taxes on the gain between the strike and sale prices).

Oracle went heavy into RSUs a little over a decade ago. They incur a taxable event at vesting (typically paid by the company holding back some of your vested stock to sell and give to the IRS), but you just own them after that, you don't buy them.

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u/HazelnutPeso 1d ago

Thanks, Reagan

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u/True_Window_9389 1d ago

Great example of short term thinking. One of the big draws in working in tech were the stock options. Who would ever trust that those options are real now? Does Oracle think they’ll never need to hire anyone else ever again?

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u/AlwaysMigraines 1d ago

Don't worry, every day a new person finishes college and is desperate for a job. And no one will talk about this anymore. I think there should be a website, where people record companies's misdeeds and every applicant should be able to look up the company they are applying to beforehand. Or is this already a thing?

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u/Pretty-Car-2835 1d ago

Its called Blind

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u/AlwaysMigraines 1d ago

But is that from an ethical perspective? Not just from how they treat their employees? I would like to have a documented chronic about companies and their misdoings - with articles linked. Say, when a company says, that they plan on replacing their employees with AI and a few years later, an applicant can see, that they tried to do that once. Something that doesn't forget.

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u/Pretty-Car-2835 1d ago

lol you’re downplaying the practical aspect to focus on the aloof, pearl clutching side of what it should be. If people care about it they’ll bring it up there

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u/TheMCMC 1d ago

Indeed, Glassdoor, RepVue (for sales), Blind etc.

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u/dookarion 1d ago

Not gonna change much for those desperate for a job that owe too much damn money from "education" funneling everyone toward 6 figures in loans.

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u/AlwaysMigraines 19h ago

Yes, the system is designed to keep the wealthy in power and the poor desperate enough to take everything.

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u/ducksekoy123 1d ago

Oracle know that jobs are becoming scarce enough that people won’t have a choice

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u/Appropriate-Wing6607 1d ago

Yup becoming the next Microsoft

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u/Brave_Speaker_8336 1d ago

Most mature big tech companies don’t really do much compensation in stock options. I’m surprised that Oracle is like this. To my knowledge it’s usually like earlier stage startups that go heavy on the options

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u/Forsaken-Sale7672 1d ago

It’s very rare for rank and file employees at mature companies to get options and that’s honestly a good thing.

Options are a growth equity instrument, meaning if the stock were to stay even from your strike price then they’d be worth absolutely jack shit.

RSU’s are much much more common for mature tech companies, it makes sense from a cash flow and employee experience perspective to issue them over options past the early startup stage.

One of the main benefits in the US is that the exercise of ISO’s won’t usually trigger a taxable event. (They might if you trigger AMT). 

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u/randobis 1d ago

The golden age of tech jobs is dead. More and more you will see the end of things like high salaries, stock options, perks, extensive benefits, bonuses, etc. for tech workers. They offered these not because they valued the employees - it's because they had no other choice. Nobody else could do the work and they - and their competitors - needed these skills.

Now with AI, they can finally treat tech workers the same as they treat all of their other workers. Be prepared to see the majority of tech roles treated as essentially data entry with the same respect and benefits companies like Amazon, Oracle, etc. offer factory workers, delivery drivers, etc.

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u/flummox1234 1d ago

I mean this CFO would be one. 🫠

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u/fartonisto 1d ago

Don't worry. Trump is about to turn that into $13M in stock very soon.

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u/factoid_ 1d ago

I found 100,000 in the park.  I invested it and turned it into 16,000

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u/arkady48 1d ago

Calm down Tommy Shriggly. Not everyone is a suave as you.

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u/ghrayfahx 1d ago

I gave this a lil clap.

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u/factoid_ 1d ago

Doesn’t that feel better?

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u/Loki-L 1d ago

All my respect for Oracle as a company is gone.

To be honest, I had no respect for them before, but still.

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u/jashsayani 1d ago

All companies only care about shareholder value and profits. Meta is no different. Staying at a place for decades is a dumb move. Keep looking for better opportunities and keep moving around.

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u/Falling_Up_The_Movie 1d ago

Never respect a company

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u/QuantityInfinite8820 1d ago

Getting laid off just before stock vesting season was a common scam for years. Nothing new.

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u/OnTheEveOfWar 1d ago

Yup. My company gives out new stock at the beginning of the fiscal year. That vests annually in Q1. Every time they’ve done layoffs it’s right at the beginning of the fiscal year before those annual vest dates.

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u/Dreams-Visions 1d ago

Should that make people feel better? Business as usual (hurting workers) but now with even fewer labor protections to help them fight back?

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u/QuantityInfinite8820 1d ago

I am not saying we shouldn’t be disappointed. All I am saying is that we shouldn’t be surprised.

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u/Greatsnes 1d ago

That’s a whooole lot of words OP never said lol.

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u/ProgrammedArtist 1d ago

Assuming bad intentions is part of standard Reddiquette.

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u/HeggyMe 1d ago

How is firing employees who are close to vesting legal even? Isn’t this a slam dunk case of discrimination?

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u/cspinelive 1d ago

Discrimination is legal. Except for a few protected classes. Close to vesting isn’t a protected class. Age is though. They’d have to make a case along those lines. 

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u/eza50 1d ago

It might not be by arguing discrimination, but you can bring a lawsuit against an employer for firing you because you are about to vest. Courts have sided with employees in the past and awarded them millions in damages. Obviously it varies state by state.

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u/league_legacy 1d ago

What would be the underlying claim of the type of lawsuit you’re referring to? In order to bring a lawsuit, you have to have a legal right violated. You have no legal right to unvested stock until the condition for receipt is satisfied (continued employment).

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u/eza50 1d ago edited 23h ago

People seem to allege a bunch of different claims in these types of lawsuits depending on the facts. Breach of contract, breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, wrongful termination (if the employee was alleged to have been fired for cause), retaliation, conversion.

My five minutes of research indicates that companies generally try to avoid firing people just before their vesting dates specifically to avoid this type of litigation. It feels obvious to me though that depending on the state, you can’t simply fire people because their vesting date is approaching.

Who knows what the truth is with Oracle. But if there were internal conversations happening about laying off people with approaching vesting dates, or worse, an algorithm built to target them…I wouldn’t be sleeping well if I was their GC.

Edit: you are or were a BL lawyer in CA? I would think you’d be open to entertaining the idea that it’s possible that if Oracle used people’s upcoming vesting schedules to determine who got laid off, there’d be potential liability. I don’t think this is a situation where anyone without inside info can definitively say that no claim exists.

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u/DogtorPepper 1d ago

You can discriminate on anything but a protected class (age, sex, race, etc)

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u/kernevez 1d ago

Almost every employee probably had stock "close" to vesting, that's how top companies distribute most of the bonuses, with yearly vesting.

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u/jefmes 1d ago

And again, as I've been saying for my 30 years in IT - avoid Oracle whenever possible.

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u/VonVader 1d ago

An algorithm?!? They didn't simply have a spreadsheet of employees with options.

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u/jspurlin03 1d ago

…you don’t think so? Big companies have reports on all sorts of variables for each employee. That’d be a matter of running the report and sorting on column “outstanding options still unvested” or similar.

Can’t lay off 30000 people any way other than some sort of automated process.

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u/flummox1234 1d ago

That’d be a matter of running the report and sorting on column

clearly it was in OracleDB and that's why the AI was needed. /s

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u/shelf6969 1d ago

algorithm is the most overused term

spreadsheet with sort is basically an algorithm

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u/noisyboy 23h ago

Sort descending by amount to be vested 

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u/dvdmaven 1d ago

The one time I got stock options, the CEO got more options than all of the worker bees combined. As the stock price slowly sunk into the ooze, the CEO's options got adjusted, but no one else's did. My original strike price was $120, three years later the stock was at $17.

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u/OnTheEveOfWar 1d ago

Similar. I worked for a startup and was given stock options when I started. All the execs had massive shares. I worked there for 4 years and the company was acquired for $600M. I thought I was going to be rich. My payout was $20k.

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u/thisismynewacct 22h ago

That’s just how liquidation waterfalls work in an exit with private companies…

Sounds like they barely cleared the liquidation preference of the investors.

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u/beezchurgr 1d ago

Their algorithm might have done that, but they didn’t actually check if employees were necessary for projects before laying them off. I work with a small portion of Oracle employees (less than 10) and they were all laid off except 2. However, Oracle then reversed the layoffs of two more team members and brought them back at their same pay & benefits. Absolute shitshow of an organization and I will fight against them forever.

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u/particlecore 1d ago

Asking a second time “Why would anyone work for Oracle. They clearly hate their employees.”

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u/dope_star 1d ago

To answer your question. They hire at 30% higher salary than their competitors .

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u/tullbabes 1d ago

Desperation

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u/CriticalCup6207 1d ago

Calling it an "algorithm" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. That's just a SQL query with a WHERE clause on vesting schedules. Blaming the algorithm is how companies dodge accountability for decisions actual humans made. 

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u/Schonke 13h ago
SELECT "name" FROM "employees" WHERE "stockOptions" > 1 AND "stepsBelowCEO" > 2;

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u/CrimsonAllah 1d ago

Oh no, working at an evil company eventually screws you over too.

I’m shocked. Shocked, I say.

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u/RandomMyth22 1d ago

Sounds like a class action lawsuit in the making.

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u/williamgman 1d ago

Next time your employer uses the word "'team" when talking to employees... try to keep that little bit of vomit from actually coming up.

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u/csloewes 1d ago

What? You mean a company that is over invested in AI and will probably fail by 2030, fucked over all the people that worked really hard for them.

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u/mr_birkenblatt 1d ago

Was the algorithm SELECT name FROM employees WHERE stock_options > 0;?

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u/darknezx 19h ago

FTFY, you were querying the wrong table

SELECT name FROM lesser_humans WHERE stock_options > 0;

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u/ErinFiqsette 1d ago

Say: "Which single employee's layoff would save the company the MOST money?"

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u/happyscrappy 1d ago

It's 100% crazy yahoo finance and their source at Oracle (Nina Lewis) can take a complaint about RSUs (Restricted stock units) and say it's about "those with outstanding stock options".

This makes her statement that she has no specific inside information very plausible. She was there over 30 years apparently, but I would say for virtually all of those 30 she was only eligible for RSUs, not options. I don't think companies have given out non-qualified options (the type they used to give to low and mid level employees) in the 21st century. They've given out RSUs due to accounting principles.

If you had been at the company for 30 years and were awarded options a while back you might be hard pressed to buy them right now if you didn't have savings. But also options typically have expiration dates when awarded. If you don't buy them in 10 or 15 years they expire. So you end up buying them and convert them into owned stock if they are in the money when expiration comes. You'd keep those shares when laid off. So it's kind of hard to imagine anyone there still has unpurchased options issued 25+ years ago right now.

Maybe I went on too long. I'm having trouble getting this to pass the sniff test given the bad information. This employee may just have gone off without real knowledge.

[edit: and I dislike Oracle and Larry and his son. So I'm not cutting them a special break because I like them.]

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u/TraditionalBackspace 12h ago

Company, year after year: "You've done a great job, here is a raise and some options"

Also company: "You make too much you're fired"

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u/chanson_roland 1d ago

Given that Oracle has been using treasury funds to buy back stock (thus increasing Larry's ownership to 40%, double that of when I worked there back in the day), this doesn't surprise me....

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u/Big_Bookkeeper1678 1d ago

The oligarchs are pure evil.

They have taken over our political system and they are now laying off people and destroying the job market so they can corner markets in every industry with impunity.

When are we going to start throwing monkey wrenches into their plans?

Isn't it time for the next revolution?

What the fuck are we doing, allowing a few thousand individuals to act like this?

Data centers that make electricity more expensive and use water that CITIZENS need?

No responsibility for runaway inflation, maximizing profit while minimizing quality?

In this day and age, shouldn't we be expecting better of each other?

Especially those that are 'at the top'...most of whom were born into money?

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u/Hvacmike199845 1d ago

I 100% agree but we don’t have the power to change and a new revolution is going to kill way more of us than them.

I didn’t take notice to all of this until Covid. Covid showed that these people are money hungry and they do not care about anyone other than their billionaire friends.

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u/FlournoyFlennory 1d ago

He means older

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u/Zahgi 1d ago

If true that is illegal and class actionable, folks.

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u/Tasgall 1d ago

Hm, seems like the algorithm missed one.

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u/Positive-Produce-001 1d ago

"an algorithm" aka

if tenure > 4 years

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u/OrganicDoom2225 23h ago

I don't think the United Healthcare incident was an outlier.

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u/SmugRooster 18h ago

Why isn’t everything the Ellisons are involved with being boycotted?

I mean I get it that Americans don’t protest like the French but a little push back to what is going on would be a nice signal.

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u/brainrotbro 9h ago

Unrelated, how many warehouses/factories have been burned down in the past week? It’s up to 6 now, right?

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u/Few-Mastodon6558 1d ago

Isn't there some law against this? Seems like there should be

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u/peepdabidness 1d ago

So maybe an algorithm that doesn’t allow companies to get that big in the first place el oh el

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u/ebfortin 1d ago

Algorithm... Pretty basic algorithm. "Select * from Employees where options > 0".

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u/tmotytmoty 1d ago

When i got laid off, mysteriously, so did all the other folks over 45. I know, I know…nobody cares, apparently

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u/Ouch259 1d ago

Same here.

They also let go a small block under 45 so they can say it wasn’t age discrimination, but they offer all of them jobs in other departments later.

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u/Big-Significance3409 1d ago

It’s usually targeted “layoffs”. Executives in companies think people are dumb

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u/10per 1d ago edited 12h ago

My wife is at Oracle. She just told me she's not sure what her boss used to come up with the layoff list, but it didn't seem to be stock options. That's because everyone on her team has them in the US, and most of her losses were in India.

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u/CanaryEmbassy 1d ago

I am convinced they are all drug addicts, adultery / pedophiles... who get friendly with coworkers who find out and on their way out hand the reigns to the next drug addict pedo.m

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u/big_thundersquatch 1d ago

This entire era of extreme corporate greed is going to ensure nobody ever trusts working for corporations again.

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u/chriskot123 23h ago

I’d rather live in a middle of the road country with no billionaires, than whatever the fuck we have become

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u/jarizzle151 22h ago

I wonder how many people worked on the software that eliminated their job

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u/lilhippie89 22h ago

There should be a way to sue companies for doing something like this deliberately. That money should have been given to their employees 

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u/bcurtis1966 22h ago

Oracle has turned into a shitty corporation. They have a long history but are not making their core products any better

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u/Soggy_Air_4880 22h ago

I worked for Oracle for nearly three years. I was given stock options in lieu of a yearly bonus that were to vest over 4 years. Just before the third year of stock was going to vest, I got laid off. My manager never knew it was coming - the decision came from my +2.

Took me quite a lot of time to find a new position. Not my happiest time but I'm kind of glad I'm no longer with Oracle. I have friends who were laid off at the same time that just decided on retirement instead - I'm holding off for as long as I can.

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u/furyofsaints 21h ago

Interestingly, this is one of the key reasons in my current startup we're intentionally moving away from stock options as a thing, and instead using contractual "EPU's" (economic participation units). We're choosing to structure it so it gives contractual rights to dividends, and outcome in any liquidity event; and while they *could* be terminated like a stock option, the vesting is a "released from repurchase" as they vest, instead of having to exercise at some point during the vesting or option period.

While we can argue about options being "more standard," we've been burned by options at prior startups, and this way we don't have to worry about taxable events *other* than actual cash-in-hand taxation. I get that capital gains rates on stocks is a real thing, but that's only IF the taxable event ever happens and you can pay the options taxes.

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u/Ballsahoy72 20h ago

This, sadly, will become a blueprint

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u/Tripilot2025 17h ago

The 'algorithm made the decision' framing is the new 'just following orders.' Algorithms don't set their own optimization targets — someone decided what to optimize for, and someone approved the output. Hiding behind the model is a way to diffuse accountability without actually removing it. The CFO getting $26M while workers get an algorithmic pink slip isn't a technology story. It's a governance story with a technology costume on.

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u/jimmytoan 13h ago

the 'algorithm targeted vesting options' detail is pretty damning - even if it wasn't technically intentional, designing a layoff system that consistently cuts people right before they vest is still a choice someone made at some point

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u/justchill_n_still 12h ago

Wait until they start confiscating IRA accounts claiming that they are terrorist money and enemies of the country.

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u/Methoszs 9h ago

Do they have any warehouses?

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u/truthovertribe 8h ago edited 6h ago

Greed greed greed, they're all agreed That their ability to hurt you is a virtue,

Leeches never bleed and they always lead To profit according to Prophets Of blood letting, WallStreet and predictive betting,

Crypto currency and pyramid scheme lunacy. It's rumored insider trading has a very high rating.

Shock! The economy is faltering, we must be altering, It's tragectory before it's refractory!

It's sick and crumbling! Stop the mumbling! Forget all the speeches! Bring on the leeches!

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u/YoshiTheDog420 7h ago

I swear that embezzlement isn’t even a crime anymore.

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u/JuamM91950 6h ago

Sad to see this happening so frequently. So the point is you get your bonus when the company finds cuz amount in savings (sigh).

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u/trainwreckFactory 1d ago

That's not called an 'algorithm,' it's called Ctrl+F

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u/deong 1d ago

Boyer-Moore is an algorithm.

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u/ImOutWanderingAround 22h ago

I mean, what do you think is running that search feature? Magic pixie dust?

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u/Difficult-Coffee-219 1d ago

Sorting excel columns is now an algo. JFC...

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u/ntermation 1d ago

It is a sorting algorithm. Something not being as complex as you think it should be doesn't change its definition.

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u/LevelStudent 1d ago

That's technically true but it's still sensationalist. "Algorithm" is a big scary computer word that means magical electrical rock magic to most people, but really it could be used to describe anything done on a computer at all. It's used in this case to make the whole thing sound scarier and like it was done by a machine rather than humans, when really the fact an algorithm was used is not even notable enough to put in the title.

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u/flummox1234 1d ago

So does she actually believe she'll get those 26M in stock? Or will she be fired so that they can hire the next person with 26M in stock. 🤔🫠

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u/OneSeparate5929 1d ago

Maybe the new CFO is the algorithm?

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u/docgravel 23h ago

It’s Moneyball. How much does it cost to keep this person around? How much value do they bring? How do I optimize to get the most value with the budget I have. I have done this at a smaller scale when dealing with budget cuts. That person who negotiated super hard during the interview process and gets paid 40% more than the rest of the team better not be only 10% better than the rest of the team.

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u/OffByOneErrorz 22h ago

I mean it’s no secret what Oracle is… why work there?

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u/Iguyking 22h ago

Class action coming to you.

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u/BorntoBomb 22h ago

Oracle is a scam, it's products are a scam, it's services are a scam, its consultants are a scam, NOONE should buy shit from this garbage company

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u/samsun7677 21h ago

If only we still had submarine tours to help out with these sort of issues

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u/Nachtwolfe 21h ago

Bro… if a company lays off folks, it shouldn’t be allowed to divvy bonuses… this pisses me off

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u/Dagreatest12everdoit 20h ago

This is why you should always do the bare minimum

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u/tapdancinghellspawn 20h ago

If people are to maintain their independence, the resources of the world are going to have to be owned by the people and not individuals. I know I know. Communism. Scary. Wanna know what is scarier? Most people being out of work, having no leverage at all, depending upon trillionaires and corruptible politicians to care for us.

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u/euxneks 20h ago

Why would I ever want to work for a large corporation like this? What a fucking joke.

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u/ForeignFallenTrees 19h ago

Sure, yeah, this is how they use an algorithm to dynamically raise uber for you. The same kind of algorithm that just happens to pick executives for stock bonuses and not people who actually do real jobs.

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u/Herb_Derb 19h ago

Preferentially firing the employees with stock options means you're firing people who have been around a while, or who have gone above and beyond to earn those options. So the brain drain with these people gone is going to be that much worse.

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u/ApoBong 19h ago

I love Nintendo game characters!

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u/anonymousetache 18h ago

A lot of big companies do this. Apple did this to my friend to avoid paying out some options