'Everyone’s a Line On a Spreadsheet:' Inside Oracle’s Mass Layoffs and the Workers Fighting Back
On March 31, a longtime Oracle employee named Jill drove to the hospital for a very overdue back surgery when she received a call from her manager. Jill had worked at Oracle as a technical writer and instructor across three decades, teaching customers around the world about the company’s products. Last year, Oracle had asked her and others on her team to document some of their workflows in order to train the company’s AI systems.
Now, her manager told her over the phone, she had been laid off. The sudden firing imperiled not only her ability to pay for post-surgery prescriptions, but her entire retirement plan. For years, she had received high performance scores from her managers and was rewarded with restricted stock (RSUs) in lieu of bonuses. But those RSUs were tied to a vesting schedule, meaning when she was fired, $300,000 worth vanished overnight.
“It really makes you feel used and abused,” says Jill, who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of retaliation. “They’re having you do something, it’s recorded, and then they’re going to replace you with whatever you just built.”
Jill is one of up to 30,000 workers who were laid off by Oracle in the last month as the company pivots toward AI, both internally and in the booming business of building AI data centers. Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison believes that AI’s current infrastructure builders will be huge victors in tomorrow’s economy, so Oracle is raising and borrowing billions of dollars to spend on data center projects. The company will be cash flow negative until at least 2030, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Some of the first victims of the company’s aggressive strategy are its now-former employees. (The company had about 162,000 employees globally as of the end of May 2025.) Over the past month, they have been sharing stories in private message threads and on social media: many of them felt they had been told to train AI systems to replace them, laid off by a single email after decades of service, left facing deportation after losing work-dependent visa, and stripped of thousands of dollars in unvested stock bonuses.
On April 17, more than 600 Oracle employees signed a letter to company management asking for increased severance, extended health care, and other benefits. Oracle responded by saying that it will only address concerns individually.
The layoffs at Oracle—which has a market cap of over $400 billion and just reported its best growth quarter in 15 years—serve as a warning for workers across the economy. While AI leaders insist that their tools will empower and augment workers instead of displacing them, several companies, especially those in tech, have initiated mass layoffs and are prioritizing spending on AI above workers.
TIME spoke with eight former employees about their experiences working for, and getting laid off by, Oracle. “This is a job that I was so dedicated to for 19 years and gave everything to—and none of it matters,” says Cynthia Sloan, a former senior director of technical writing at Oracle. “It makes me feel like I don’t want to go back to another tech job. I want to work somewhere where I'm treated as a human again and not as a line on a spreadsheet or a work machine.”
A representative for Oracle declined to comment.
Training AI To Replace Them
Oracle built its fortune on database software and enterprise applications. But in the last couple years, it has pivoted hard to AI. Ellison stood next to Donald Trump, Sam Altman, and Masayoshi Son in January 2025 as they announced the $500 billion Stargate infrastructure project, aimed at hypercharging the building of American AI to beat China in an arms race. In September, Oracle announced a landmark deal to provide OpenAI $300 billion worth of cloud capacity. Ellison briefly became the richest man in the world that month.
Last month at Oracle’s development conference, Ellison bragged onstage that the company’s programmers were no longer writing code. “The code that Oracle is writing, Oracle isn’t writing. Our AI models are writing,” he said.
But several former employees say they had a very different experience; that the AI tools Oracle forced them to use had a mixed or harmful impact on their work. One laid-off senior manager of software development, who asked to remain anonymous, told TIME that the company’s AI mandates often resulted in junior engineers using AI to write a lot of faulty code, which then required senior engineers to spend their time fixing it. “They’re spending so much time trying to reverse-engineer the code that AI generated,” he said.
Jill, the technical writer, says that the AI tools she was mandated to use were Oracle’s internal chatbots (as opposed to ChatGPT or Claude), which would “create slop,” she says. “Our team was pretty frustrated daily that we were being told to use it, and it wasn't saving any time, and was only eating up productivity.”
Another employee, who worked for healthcare tech company Cerner before Oracle acquired it in 2022, says that her team was encouraged to use AI following a round of layoffs in September. But she says that while AI was helpful to her job, Oracle’s productivity expectations increased even further, forcing her to work harder than she had ever before, leading to 60 to 80 hour workweeks.
During this time, she was also instructed to train AI systems on her work. While she was scared about the outcome of this training, she felt trapped in a catch-22. “We were training AI to replace us, but the AI is the only way we can get through our workload,” she says. “You’re behind on all your deadlines, and your hand is forced.”
The software manager believed that the goal of using AI for management was not to make employee’s lives easier. “‘Easier’ was a euphemism for less people doing more work,” he says. “It’s not that we are trying to let people go home and relax.”
Layoffs
On March 31, as Oracle’s stock slumped, the company announced another wave of massive layoffs. TD Cowen analysts estimated in January that Oracle shaving 20,000 to 30,000 employees could free up $8 to $10 billion in incremental free cash flow for data center projects.
Many of those workers, like Jill, were longtime employees. A written survey of 272 laid-off employees, organized by ex-employees and the worker advocacy center What We Will and shared exclusively with TIME, found that 62% of respondents were over 40 years old, and that 22% worked at the company for more than 15 years. (The survey may not be representative of all laid-off Oracle workers.)
Many respondents believed—though Oracle has not confirmed—that older, higher-paid workers were targeted, because they earned more and had more unvested RSUs that could be clawed back. 27% of respondents reported they had RSUs due to vest within 90 days. The former software manager, for example, told TIME that 70% of his compensation was tied up in RSUs—and that he was four months away from $1 million in stock options vesting. “Given how the compensation was lopsided, it seems like I was working for free,” he says.
Other ex-employees were in the U.S. on H1-B visas, and now have just a 60-day grace period to find a new employer or leave the country. Sixty days is a narrow window in an industry where hiring processes routinely take months. One visa holder wrote in her survey response about the stressors of being given 10-day notice with a 7-month-old infant. Another wrote about the possibility of having to leave their home and fiancée. “Because I am on an H-1B visa, this is not just a job loss; it is the end of my life in the U.S.,” they wrote. “Everything I have built over nearly a decade will be shattered in a matter of weeks.”
Faith Wilkins El, a software engineer, was laid off while on medical leave for mental health reasons that she says partially stemmed from work stressors. “I am definitely worried about my ability to keep going to mental health doctors and affording the treatment,” she says. “The way they handled it was heartless.”
Ex-employees are now asking the company for increased severance to help mitigate their tough situations, especially because the company’s offer falls well below industry standards. The company is offering four weeks of base salary to start—one quarter of Google and Meta’s recent offers—plus an additional week per year of tenure, which is half of Google and Meta’s offers. Microsoft, in greater contrast, offered to buy out about 7% of its workforce.
600 Oracle workers signed a letter on April 17 asking for better severance, H-1B visa support, stock acceleration, and extended healthcare coverage, especially for affected employees that included cancer patients, pregnant women, and veterans. “I cannot understand how a tech company that has record profits can stop medical benefits for laid off employees mid-month,” wrote one survey respondent.
A Rise in Worker Consciousness
Because the group’s members aren’t unionized and have already been laid off, their leverage over the company is limited. Oracle responded to the letter by writing that it would not negotiate with them as a group. The company has since been rejecting many individual requests for better severance, sometimes responding with cookie-cutter language that has nothing to do with the individual’s circumstances, multiple ex-employees told TIME.
Still, organizers hope that the campaign will pressure Oracle into certain concessions and spark a larger movement among tech workers. “You cannot go into a group like this with just your selfish interest,” the software manager says. “It might not impact you. But we are in it for the overall good, and maybe it’ll impact future decisions Oracle is making.”
Labor organizing has been rare across the history of Silicon Valley white-collar workers, who are often individualistic high earners. But tech companies have been among the first to initiate mass layoffs related to AI, spurring a new wave of labor consciousness. Employees have also been unhappy with their company’s forays into the defense industry, penning letters to their executives calling for them to prevent AI systems from being used in autonomous weaponry or for mass surveillance.
Read More: The People vs AI
Kaitlin Cort, the founder of What We Will and an organizer at the Tech Workers Coalition, says that the number of tech workers expressing interest in joining organizing efforts has swelled in recent months. “A lot of it is people who are very concerned about layoffs; people who are feeling anxious about AI and the mandates to use AI in their workplace, and what the implications might be for them as workers,” she says. “People are already talking about unionizing before we even have our first conversation with them, because they're thinking about the precarious situation they're in.”
Former Oracle employees fear they are among the first casualties of a broader transformation. “The way these layoffs have been handled, it feels like a clear signal that humans are treated like another asset,” says the former Cerner employee. “Just like data center assets that can be disposed of if they’re not the most profitable option.”