In the US there is no notice period. In every state (with the exception of Montana), employees are "At Will" only. There is no notice period, or severance pay required by law. Health insurance goes with your job, too, as do any other benefits (something called COBRA lets you pay to continue your health insurance coverage for a few months with the expectation you'll have found a new job and/or coverage)

In the US, one day you can have a job, the next none and you'd better hope you've got enough money saved up to cover rent/mortgage, food etc.

That was by far the biggest culture shock when I moved to the states, and really acted as the big "Oh shit, it really is a government by the businesses, for the businesses".

I have to be honest that I'm confused by the comment, too. Including the edit about how being out of work would be traumatic, as if losing a job was unique to the United States.

> After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change.

That is being laid off, not being fired - big difference. Being fired means being let go for poor performance / bad behaviour. No severance or grace period is necessary there (will be written in the contract). Being made redundant, particularly a redundancy of this size is quite well protected in EU. Typically negotiations between HR and representatives of the laid off group are required, you will continue to work (officially at least) until negotiations are over, as you are not officially out yet. This usually takes a few weeks.

I can tell you this from personal experience...

No they don't? You keep working for 2-10 months until you can leave whatever your contact says

The way this email is worded this would more likely be classified as a Redundancy as opposed to a Firing. So different laws/rules would apply

Both California and federal law require 60 days notice for mass layoffs. The CA WARN Act has more protections for workers than the federal WARN Act, i.e., it also applies to part-time workers.

In California, it is illegal to require a terminated employee to sign an NDA to receive severance paid to waive the required WARN notice. A company attempting to enforce such an NDA would key face judicial sanction in court (including paying the former employee's legal fees) and likely pay fines to the CA Labor Dept as well.

The California WARN act effectively requires 2 months severance for large layoffs at large companies (or 2 months notice, but companies almost always prefer severance).

Yeah, the "just how it is" part was the part I wasn't aware of. Sibling comment has pointed out that apparently the US is the only country in the world where this is the case. And totally agree on the latter point.

250k/year. I'm not an arch. But that was the absolute high end for IC5. (Unobtainable)

Oracle is not a high payer of salaries.

I disagree that its a "signal that they overhired". Laying off people means:

1. They didn't plan well enough

2. Their business wasn't attractive enough to customers

3. Their business people aren't good enough to support the people who are developing their product.

If anything, it should be a red flag to investors that they're working with someone they can't trust to give money.

Not employees are hired though, a fair amount are added through acquisitions. Reducing staff could be just streamlining redundancies . Not the case here [1], but it not always bad planning.

Even without acquisitions, business conditions can change rapidly things like tariffs, interest rates , war or competition due to newer tools etc , as an investor you can would want leadership to move fast and course correct, rather than be held by the sunk cost fallacy.

All else being equal, the way investors would see a change like this - is now the company is no longer wasting 7.5B/yr in the future and their current cost was already priced in.

However all else is rarely the same, there could be other factors, like slowing sales growth projections which can bring down the multiples .

Oracle is still trading at 28x P/E historically they typically traded at 15x, given the growth and risk profile a more realistic number .

Since 2022 (ignoring 2020 spikes) the number has been going up are basis the expectation that their cloud business will really benefit from AI significantly.

If the market no longer has the confidence —- it has already cooled a bit since October then stock will keep dropping, layoffs will only slow it down a bit .

The timing is critical, because leverage/sale of Oracle stock is how the Warner Bros Discover acquisition is being funded .

The increasing doubts about that financial viability is why that stock risk premium is increasing on Warner .- Currently trading at 27 although acquisition price is 31 and it was trading at 29 a month back . Also senior executives like Zaslav are selling now at 27 which they less likely to if they believed deal will close at 31 soon.

TLDR; this 30k layoff is an attempt to strengthen/save the other acquisition Oracle is indirectly financing.

[1] although the Cerner acquisition added 30k employees to Oracle 3 years back. This doesn’t seem related to that. Oracle did not have a strong overlapping BU, there were/are some redundancies as in any acquisition but certainly not 30k

I did not know they got severance. In any case, I'm still not sure I'd prefer that scenario --- coming into your work to suddenly find you've been terminated and subsequently sitting on your ass for a couple months while looking for another job seems pretty emotionally damaging to me, but to each their own.

I completely agree, and apparently in California this is already the case --- I had no idea. In most contexts, though, I'd argue governments fall down on this task completely and people are, unfortunately, still very dependent on their employer. Same-day termination seems very socially risky in those cases.

The US government doesn't exactly go out of its way to support people either.