You got it all wrong man. Oracle only has 205 engineers, so this is devestating to their workforce.

Everyone else at Oracle is either in legal or a proctologist.

> Everyone else at Oracle is either in legal or a proctologist.

Lmao. Man you don't know how much I needed to laugh that hard after the last few weeks I had. Thank you.

I know, right? When Oracle bought Sun they forced all the engineers to choose between legal and proctology; I chose the latter. After ten years I’m starting to regret my decision. At least Sun wasn’t bought by IBM. (That was actually in play before the Oracle deal.) At IBM they force the engineers to go into Sales. That would have been far, far worse.

I’ll buy you a beer at the next JVMLS for each proctology joke you can smuggle into a non draft JEP. :-)

Dying here. Is this a meme I’ve missed?

Well not a meme per se, but I can also tell you've never had Oracle come and perform an audit of your site usage.

I actually worked at a company, acquired by oracle in mid 2010s.

I ended up leaving seeing how it took 5 proctologists, 37 lawyers, and 3 engineers to meet and make decisions when it only needed the 3 engs to begin with.

The stats of the M&A were usually only 1/3 of the acquired company’s staff would stay on w/Oracle. While this layoff probably doesn’t map geographically with the Cerner M&A, not surprised with some minor team restructuring.

I feel this in my bones. Worked at a smallco acquired by market leading bigco. The average meeting size was 15 people and decisions that previously required 5 minutes took weeks.

I didn’t even last 6 months.

> The article says “201” - yes, technically more than 200.

I don't really see the problem with this. You usually want the estimate to be close to the true value. If the headline was "Oracle lays off more than 200 workers", when Oracle had laid off 437 workers, everyone would slam the headline writer for getting it wrong. Because "more than 200" is not an appropriate way to describe 437 unless the category "numbers that are more than 200" is already relevant for some other reason.

You could also literally say 201 which is shorter than “more than 200”

Yeah, but it sounds weird. It make it seems like they wanted to fire 200 due to budget restraints, but seeing as they already need to do the paper work, might as well fire that one guy who just annoying. Can't very well come out and say: We're firing 200 people from various departments, oh and Travis. He's gone as well.

It raise all sorts of weird questions. Was it three departments that was just shutdown, and that happens to be 201 people? Did they have a target salary cut, which just fit nicely with these exact people?

In reality it will always be some odd number of people getting laid off. It's just that when numbers get to specific it sounds like there's a point. Try telling someone that you want to lose 23,5kg. People will ask why 23,5?. Say you want to lose around 20kg, much fewer questions.

Or even "approximately" 200, roughly 200, near 200, anything that tells you it's pretty darn close to 200 exactly.

"More than 200" already fills that purpose.

what if they lay off another person, does the article need to be update then? There's some advantage in using approximate numbers.

I'd have phrased it as "two hundo"

201. So, technically a success?

....and it's just a gesture by Oracle (like the other tech companies) to make the remaining employees feel lucky to have a job (to quell attrition and tamp down salaries). They didn't need to lay anyone off. That notion is ridiculous.