Early in my career, I was given a great piece of advice. Advice that I’ve recently lost track of following, unfortunately.

You can be as loyal as you want to a company, they will never be loyal back.

I think it goes without saying in today’s environment, but I think it’s important to reiterate again.

Today, Oracle laid off 30,000 employees, many of whom have been there 30 or more years!

It’s the biggest tech layoff in the last 12 months, and it’s absolutely sad to see what appears to be an arbitrary algorithm that selected the employees to be cut.

What makes this particularly galling, too, is that last year, Oracle posted a 95% increase in net income!

An additional claimed reason for this layoff is that this action will free up more cash for data center build out.

For AI, of course.

This LinkedIn blog post stated some of the above, but chose to take the route of comparing Oracle with IKEA, a business that they feel is weathering the current storm very differently.

This all gives me pause.

I’ve been where I’ve been for a long time, at least a long time for “big tech”. I’ve seen a few layoffs already and while I’ve been lucky to not get caught up in any of them, I feel like just because I’m here does not mean I need to stay out of a sake of “loyalty”.

Companies will cut you without a second thought, whether you’ve been there 3 years or 33 years, so do not expect anything less from them.

That is all for today.