Business Big Tech Layoffs Megathread - Techbros... we got too cocky...

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Since my previous thread kinda-sorta turned into a soft megathread, and the tech layoffs will continue until morale improves, I think it's better to group them all together.

For those who want a QRD:


Just this week we've had these going on:

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But it's not just Big Tech, the vidya industry is also cleaning house bigly:

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All in all, rough seas ahead for the techbros.
 
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Tanner Glass said:
They poured millions upon millions into this in such a way that made players just hate them even more.
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And the entire way, even up to and including now, they simply assumed "If we have the game, the players will come here to buy it". When the first wave of exclusives resulted in fuck and all in long term retention, they considered that the games might be the problem as opposed to their plan itself, and fished around with any old exclusive they could dig up. Even went so far as to get Alan Wake 2 into permanent exclusivity status, to see if that was the problem. Now Remedy is on the rocks after Alan Wake 2 took literal years to finally sell enough copies for them to start receiving a cut of the revenue, which realistically is basically a net loss for them considering the debts they'd have taken on to keep the lights on in that excessive gap.

Players would rather just not buy a game than buy it on EGS. Hell, players would rather buy the game on Steam rather than get it free on EGS, as we saw with one of the christmas giveaway games, who's steam sales spiked after EGS started giving their game out for free - A free handout that EGS paid the developer to do, so double the cash in his pocket.

EGS really is likely to be a future case study in how to not break into a market. They tried to do the startup blitz scaling against an entrenched competitor, and just completely failed. But I'd also imagine that ten years from now, we'll be getting video essays on how EGS could have saved the games industry from the great crash its under. Its going to outlive its own market and use, that much is for certain.
 
Ahriman said:
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https://www.cio.com/article/4125103...ata-center-expansion-as-us-banks-retreat.html
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As rumored.

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https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/31/oracle-layoffs-ai-spending.html

Oracle has started telling employees that it’s cutting thousands of jobs, CNBC has confirmed, as the software maker deals with a plummeting stock price tied to hefty capital commitments for building out AI infrastructure.

While Oracle’s core business is on the receiving end of market panic about competitive risk from generative artificial intelligence models, the company is also facing pressure from investors about the amount of debt it’s raising for AI investments and its dwindling cash flow.



Business Insider reported on the latest cuts earlier on Tuesday. CNBC confirmed the cuts with two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the announcement hasn’t been made public.

Oracle, which employed 162,000 people as of May 2025, declined to comment. The company’s stock price is down 25% this year, dropping more than all of tech’s megacaps.

Oracle continues to sell its flagship database for storing and serving up corporate information. In recent years, alongside cloud rivals such as Amazon, the company has ratcheted up capital expenditures as it builds data center infrastructure that can handle AI workloads. But Oracle is smaller than its cloud peers.

Oracle has been leaning on the debt market to fund its buildout. In January, Oracle announced plans to raise $50 billion in debt and equity. During earnings last month, executives said there were no more plans to raise debt in 2026.

​

In September, Oracle disclosed that its remaining performance obligations, a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized, jumped 359% to $455 billion following an agreement with OpenAI worth over $300 billion. Weeks later, Oracle picked executives Mike Sicilia and Clay Magouyrk to replace Safra Catz as CEO.



Cutting 20,000 to 30,000 employees could lead to $8 billion to $10 billion in incremental free cash flow, TD Cowen analysts wrote in a January note.

Executives have said its AI investment will pay off, over time.

“Demand for AI infrastructure, both GPU and CPU, continues to exceed supply,” Magouyrk said on an earnings call earlier this month. “This is directly visible in our $553 billion remaining performance obligations.
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Tanner Glass said:
Instead of buying a studios and then making games (aka Sony and Microsoft, who are reviled for it) they decided to pay huge money to existing developers with popular games (Fall Guys, Rocket League) and then delisted those titles on Steam - which made people really angry. They also paid gigantic money for timed exclusivity deals just to try and fuck with Steam users, culminating with a hilarious overspend of ~$150,000,000 dollars for 6-months of exclusivity for the smash hit Borderlands 3 (which was garbage), but also tens of millions for various other titles also. They poured millions upon millions into this in such a way that made players just hate them even more.
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There's actually an even more retarded example. Metro: Last Light Metro: Exodus. Originally billed as a Steam release, Retard Sweeney thought he was making a big dick move by buying exclusivity to the game from Deep Silver, then forcing the game to be delisted from Steam, after months of advertising that it would be sold on Steam. Of course everyone was angry at how callous and cynical it was. Even more so than Borderlands 3, I believe this stunt was what truly killed EGS as a serious competitor and killed Metro as a franchise as collateral.

The true irony? After M:LL ran into launch issues at release in EGS, the old Steam forums were one of the few ways users could complain and seek help, despite the game being delisted.

E: I was retarded and mixed up Last Light with Exodus.
 
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Kane Lives said:
Just how bad is that codebase that increasing the it by 500 lines is considered a good thing?
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Ehh if the vast majority of that is testing it's arguably a wash. These modals are too verbose in their results half the time, but if the additional lines are contained in testing few outside of really autistic senior engineers are going to care too much. As long as the tests accurately cover the core functionality and business logic how efficiently they do it is secondary for most devs.

Would be more concerning and a red flag is it's coming from brownfield maintenance work and/or refactors, but it also is net new feature work so that can see fairly chunky code additions with every PR.
 
Kane Lives said:
There's actually an even more retarded example. Metro: Last Light Metro: Exodus. Originally billed as a Steam release, Retard Sweeney thought he was making a big dick move by buying exclusivity to the game from Deep Silver, then forcing the game to be delisted from Steam, after months of advertising that it would be sold on Steam. Of course everyone was angry at how callous and cynical it was. Even more so than Borderlands 3, I believe this stunt was what truly killed EGS as a serious competitor and killed Metro as a franchise as collateral.

The true irony? After M:LL ran into launch issues at release in EGS, the old Steam forums were one of the few ways users could complain and seek help, despite the game being delisted.

E: I was retarded and mixed up Last Light with Exodus.
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Un-launching Metro: Exodus would've been astoundingly retarded regardless, but that was also the very first thing that anyone ever heard about EGS and then the next piece of news was "holy FUCK the user experience is somehow even worse than fucking GFWL". Their reputation was nearly unsalvageable right from the get go and since Timmy Tencent was physically incapable of the necessary humility to scrape some consumer goodwill together, the entire project was basically shot dead right from the start and its corpse was so radioactive that a very significant portion of the intended userbase never even bothered with the free games.
 
Jesus, so Oracle WAS that bad for money. Ed Zitron posited that Oracle would be the first. What is going to be really interesting is when the effects of the Iran war are felt; that's when the investors will revolt against the companies. You know Altman is going to say something ultra retarded about fuel usage and how it is better with AI using it.
 
Kuritan Deplorable said:
EGS really is likely to be a future case study in how to not break into a market. They tried to do the startup blitz scaling against an entrenched competitor, and just completely failed. But I'd also imagine that ten years from now, we'll be getting video essays on how EGS could have saved the games industry from the great crash its under. Its going to outlive its own market and use, that much is for certain.
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It could have worked if they'd simply paired it with developing EGS to be a viable competitor to Steam, as in build in the developer, modding, social, overlay etc. features that would bring it closer to parity to Steam. But nope, it's about as far behing Steam today as it was a decade or more ago, still very much 'install only when that one game you're playing right now needs it, then delete'.

I have absolutely no idea why they continue to burn cash on the game giveaways, when the games in question are absolute slop and for anything singleplayer (most of them) it's infinitely simpler to pirate it. For a little while some years back I was adding every freebie to my library then I had a moment of clarity that it was utterly pointless to do so.
 
22 Rimfire said:
It could have worked if they'd simply paired it with developing EGS to be a viable competitor to Steam, as in build in the developer, modding, social, overlay etc. features that would bring it closer to parity to Steam. But nope, it's about as far behing Steam today as it was a decade or more ago, still very much 'install only when that one game you're playing right now needs it, then delete'.
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They could've actually leveraged the minimalism angle as well, Steam is notorious for being very resource hungry and there's definitely an enthusiast niche for a super lean stripped back client that just does the game thing, even if it is a small one. Instead it managed to combine the utter lack of features with truly humongous amounts of sheer bloat to achieve absolutely nothing of value, there's absolutely no conceivable reason for EGS to require more resources than Steam but they somehow managed to do it anyway.
 
Seymour Duncan said:
They could've actually leveraged the minimalism angle as well, Steam is notorious for being very resource hungry and there's definitely an enthusiast niche for a super lean stripped back client that just does the game thing, even if it is a small one. Instead it managed to combine the utter lack of features with truly humongous amounts of sheer bloat to achieve absolutely nothing of value, there's absolutely no conceivable reason for EGS to require more resources than Steam but they somehow managed to do it anyway.
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In some ways, they did this.

They took 3 years to even add a Shopping Cart to the store.
 
blargenheimer said:
As rumored.

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https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/31/oracle-layoffs-ai-spending.html
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Tony Martin's Force Ghost said:
Jesus, so Oracle WAS that bad for money. Ed Zitron posited that Oracle would be the first. What is going to be really interesting is when the effects of the Iran war are felt; that's when the investors will revolt against the companies. You know Altman is going to say something ultra retarded about fuel usage and how it is better with AI using it.
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quaawaa said:
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Didn't hear this from me, but....

I actually did an interview for a data center position with Oracle last month. The interview was total dog shit, the interviewer told me I was out of the running from the beginning because my resume didn't include all jobs I had previously worked, even if they were unrelated to the position.

While interviewing, she dropped a nice detail that Oracle was in deep shit as they were hiring North Korean spies and people listed on the Terrorist Watch List. Oracle had the retarded hiring requirement thanks to these factors as they needed a full background check.

I wonder how much their previous hiring lead to this outcome. It was pretty bold of the recruiter to just lay it out for me, but it does make for a funny bit of information to add to this discussion.
 
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