Sun Deal Complete, Oracle Says 'We're Hiring' (Datamation) [LWN.net]

Datamation reports on Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's plans for Sun. ""The truth is, we're hiring two thousand people over the next few months to beef up the Sun sales and engineering base. That's twice as many as we're letting go," [Ellison] added. Staffers in the lobby, Sun and Oracle alike, wore red buttons that said "We're hiring!""

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Sun Deal Complete, Oracle Says 'We're Hiring' (Datamation)

Posted Jan 30, 2010 11:05 UTC (Sat) by nikanth (guest, #50093) [Link] (6 responses)

Why not hire only 1000 people without letting anyone go?

Sun Deal Complete, Oracle Says 'We're Hiring' (Datamation)

Posted Jan 30, 2010 11:14 UTC (Sat) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (1 responses)

Because many of the people they're letting go might not be overly useful for
the work necessary on the Sun side of things? Perhaps an overseas office is
being shutdown and work transitioned to a new area, so the old employees
need to be let go and new employees in the new area hired? Maybe the new
employees will just be paid less?

It's not at all illogical to fire a ton of people and then hire in a bunch
more. It might not be the brightest idea, as hiring in a bunch of cheaper
devs pretty much always results in loss of quality, given that generally one
guy actually worth $200k is far better than 5 guys worth $40k. But there
are plenty of great reasons to let go of people and hire new ones, too,
including just having a bunch of $40k guys on salary that aren't doing much
of anything useful.

I'd imagine it's mostly relocation, though.

politics

Posted Jan 30, 2010 21:49 UTC (Sat) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

Also, from a corporate politics POV, you need to break up any coherent potential power bases in the acquired company. Yes, kind of Machiavellian, but Ransom Love at Caldera was too much of a nice guy to do it, and look where it got him.

See also Danese Cooper on the "plan to subjugate Sun culture".

Sun Deal Complete, Oracle Says 'We're Hiring' (Datamation)

Posted Jan 31, 2010 2:11 UTC (Sun) by JoeF (guest, #4486) [Link] (2 responses)

Because the people they are firing may not have the qualifications needed for the new positions.
Firing and hiring isn't a null-sum game. You can't put a hardware engineer on a software development position, for example.

Sun Deal Complete, Oracle Says 'We're Hiring' (Datamation)

Posted Jan 31, 2010 7:45 UTC (Sun) by xbobx (subscriber, #51363) [Link] (1 responses)

In addition, after merging two companies you'll probably have lots of duplication. You may not need two Vice Presidents of Human Resources (for example). So it seems natural to shed a bit of the excess fat in some places and hire in others where think your new company needs to invest.

Sun Deal Complete, Oracle Says 'We're Hiring' (Datamation)

Posted Feb 1, 2010 21:03 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

Most of the people being fired are going to be the kind of people easily replaced. Human Resources, Sales and other non-tech positions. In any merger the first people out the door are the ones easily replaced and the company doing the purchasing already has. As a rule technical positions are almost always excluded unless it's a merger of equals in the same field.

Sun Deal Complete, Oracle Says 'We're Hiring' (Datamation)

Posted Feb 1, 2010 14:30 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> Why not hire only 1000 people without letting anyone go?

Because it allows you to compete against the people that were just let go?