A few days ago I went on a rant about Oracle having layoffs and that some of my friends would probably be losing their jobs. Well the rumor that Oracle Support in Orlando and Colorado Springs would be cutting employees is true. Here's the headcount so far based on my sources inside Oracle.

Oracle Layoff Tally
Fixed Assets, Orlando: 2
Accounts Receivable, Orlando: 1
Accounts Receivable, Colorado Springs: 1
Oracle Hosted Support, Orlando: 1

Additionally there are rumored to be 3 - 4 more gone from Inventory. General Ledger (GL) and Project Accounting have not been touched, yet. However, General Ledger is running 3 people down anyway so there was no room to cut from that department.

One of the people laid off today was a woman who lost her husband 2 years earlier and has been at Oracle over 5 years. I'm sure Oracle will site reasons like poor performance and chronicle illnesses but I'm sure age was a large factor as well. She was one of the oldest people in Oracle Financials Support. She was part of the Oracle Hosted Solutions (OHS) support team and was the "HUB". Three of the employees laid off today were older in tenure and in age and were women ranging in age from their 40's to late 50's. Could tenure and age be factors Oracle used in determining who got the axe?

Word has it that OHS is getting hit hard because it's a "big failure". Inside sources cite the way OHS was structured as the reason it failed. Here's how it works. Oracle hosts a customer's financial application and database. Oracle maintains them and fully supports them via OHS support. The customer just uses the apps. This alleviates the need for a huge staff of IT for the Oracle's customer.

OHS Support Process

1. The customer logs their issue with the HUB.
2. The HUB engineer logs an SR (service request) with the GRID (normal apps team).
3. Internally the GRID works the issues with the HUB engineer.
4. Then the HUB engineer logs another service request with the dba's.
5. There can be 4 - 5 other SR's being worked via the hub so it requires a lot of coordination.

Prior to Oracle Support implementing the OHS system all OHS customers logged a ticket with the normal apps team and there was only one request per issue. With OHS there can be several requests per issue and obviously with more requests come more complication and customer satisfaction goes down the drain. Word has it that the translations support system is a big mess too because Oracle Support in Orlando got rid of the Latin American Division in an effort to cut costs.

This just goes to show you that the media is Oracle's preferred method of bringing layoff news. Way to go Larry! You accomplished the impossible, you drove employee morale lower than your customer satisfaction levels.

Not sure what to think about this one but I guess a couple has decided to name their baby Yahoo. I don't think they're using the "!" so it shouldn't be a trademark infringement :)

Here's the skinny from TheRegister.

A newborn baby boy has been named "Yahoo" by a Romanian couple - cos they met over the net.

Mum and Dad - Cornelia and Nonu Dragoman - courted online for three months before finally tying the knot, reports a local paper by way of Reuters. Lucian Yahoo Dragoman was born last month.

"We named him Lucian Yahoo after my father and the net, the main beacon of my life," said mum Cornelia.

Isn't Lucian another name for Satan? So his real name is Satan Yahoo Dragoman. Which translated means. Satan loves Yahoo! even though most of his disciples don't believe Yahoo! to be an evil corporation.

This is awesome. Google has released a search appliance geared towards small businesses.

"The Web search leader aims to extend its reach with the Mini, which has fewer bells and whistles and sells for just under $5,000. For example, it can search 50,000 documents compared with the 15 million that can be handled by Google's top-end Search Appliance."

Sure it's going to index a lot fewer documents but most companies don't need to search 15,000,000 documents anyway. I wonder if its going to included a crawler though. Meaning, will the appliance only search a specific domain and database or will it index and search anything you point it at. I'd love to see the licensing agreement on this one.

I mean imagine if you wanted to create a mini-vertical search engine and wanted to provide quality results to your users. All you have to do is find the best sites and give those urls to the Google Mini Search Appliance and now you've got a highly relevant search engine based on the best search platform in the world. And it only cost you $5k. Forget getting venture capital, put that on the old credit card.

Update: Google's Answer to Crawling External Sites
I should've consulted their faq's to begin with, they've always got the answer.

" You may only crawl content that is located on servers that are owned and operated by you."

Usually I don't post stuff that's off topic but this calls for it. For those of you that don't know, Oracle is merging with PeopleSoft and there are going to be massive layoffs on Friday. I use to work at Oracle in Orlando Florida. It was my first job out of college and I worked in the Fixed Assets ERP Support team. Since my degree is in accounting it made a lot of sense for me to get my feet wet in the technology arena at a company that allowed me to leverage my accounting background. So Oracle was the best fit at the time.

During my first 2 months there I was in what we called "boot camp". A rigorous training program all new hires went through to get us up to speed on Oracle's financial systems and everything required to install, setup, run and support those systems. It was pretty intense but I loved every minute of it. Plus, how many times do you start a job and get to go to 2 months of training and get paid to boot? In addition, it allowed us newbies to form packs. These weren't deliberate but after bootcamp we all kind of checked up on each other to share horror stories and give moral support.

Little did I know, after the bootcamp process was over we were going to be thrown to the wolves. Basically we were paired with a mentor that didn't have enough time to handle the TARs (technical assistance requests) they had in their own queue, much less teach a newbie how to do their job. Needless to say, there were many a time when all of us newbies were extremely frustrated and felt like quitting, usually multiple times a day. Then we'd pull it together and go back into our queues of TARs and do what we could. Knowing that if we had problems and went to one of the senior folks on the team we would be humiliated in front of our coworkers for not knowing how to do our job. This humiliation seemed joyful for some of the senior technical analysts.

I remember one individual vividly to this day. He loved working on the most difficult problems because he knew he could solve them if he had enough time, and he usually did have enough time since his family wasn't in the country. But if I would try to get his assistance with a difficult issue or if I needed the answer to a question he would explode. These explosions almost always happened when I asked him to get on the phone with me to calm down an escalated client. Sometimes during these explosions I thought he was going to physically attack me or one of my coworkers. There were several senior technical people who had great attitudes and did as much as they possibly could to help everyone in their teams but they seemed few and far between. It was like they had the attitude of...

I've been here for 2 years and paid my dues and now I don't have to take crap from any of you dirtbags. If you have a client that's pissed off then you can deal with it just like I did. Didn't your mother teach you life's not fair. Now quit your crying and go fix the problem.

Usually after a verbal lashing like this I'd go back to my cublicle feeling humiliated and utterly helpless. I'd reflect on what just happened knowing that I should have never gone to this team lead but my "manager" said he was a "resource" we were suppose to use and not following the "chain of command" is frowned upon. That line was usually followed up by this one... "the chain of command is in place for a reason and stepping outside of that chain of command is frowned upon."

It was after hundreds of these episodes and conversations that I began to hate all the corporate bs. The corporate-ese slang, the gratuitous butt kissing, the slaving away for the MAN knowing I'd never see anything in return. I knew that after a little over 2 years of it I had to get out. If I didn't then something bad was going to happen and I didn't want to stick around for that.

Since leaving I've kept in contact with many of my coworkers and they've told me about bonuses being replaced with stock options that were worthless, no raises, getting replaced by cheaper labor in India, and countless rounds of layoffs. Usually there was some sort of warning in the months before the layoffs but then this happened.

I get an IM from a former coworker of mine who's still at Oracle and he points me to a press release Oracle put out about 6,000 layoffs hitting Friday. Now Oracle is using the press to tell employees they're going to be laid off. He said management said they "know nothing", typical bs answer as usual and nobody has seen any internal memos about the press release either.

I asked 4 former coworkers if they'd heard anything about the layoff and 1 of the 4 said they had but he's a manager. He said his director was up front with them about the layoff but hasn't said who's being impacted. Plus, he's in development and the other 3 are in support. Basically, support is getting the short end of the stick because they're the easiest to replace. One of the folks in support has been told by mgmt. they think they're safe since they're already short in headcount but doesn't know anything for sure. Word on the street is that support issues will only increase as a result of the merger and the ones being affected most will probably be those in sales and consulting.

For all of you guys still in support, I hope everything works out. You're busting your butts day in and day out and deserve more than silence. Especially when your jobs are on the line. Keep on rockin in the free world!