A new report alleges that Oracle is less focused on hiring technology professionals in major tech hubs such as Silicon Valley and New York City.
According to Business Insider, executives and hiring managers are targeting candidates “in regions in the US and abroad where salary expectations and costs of living are lower.” The publication also suggests Oracle is trying to enact roughly $1 billion in costs via hiring freezes, layoffs, and other means. (In August, reports in The Information and SiliconANGLE suggested Oracle was laying off an unknown number of employees in the U.S., Canada, India, and Europe.)
Oracle executive Ken Glueck told Insider: “We hire the best people wherever we can get them. It has nothing to do with any particular geography.” However, he didn’t clarify whether the tech giant had deprioritized hiring candidates in ultra-expensive tech hubs.
Like other tech giants, Oracle faces a good deal of macroeconomic uncertainty. On top of that, the company is trying to claw a larger chunk of the cloud-services market away from aggressive competitors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. After decades of a strategy centered around on-premises installations and software, Oracle is spending billions to build out a cloud-datacenter foundation (recent wins include TikTok as a cloud client, along with a handful of other companies). In the plus column, Oracle already has brand recognition and a sizable technology footprint within many thousands of companies; however, as indicated by the most recent Stack Overflow Developer Survey, technologists greatly prefer rival cloud platforms to Oracle’s offerings.
If Oracle wants to make even more headway in the cloud, it will need to hire and retain technology specialists—many of whom live and work in major tech hubs such as Silicon Valley, New York City, and Seattle. According to crowdsourced data from levels.fyi, Oracle currently matches enterprise-centric rivals such as SAP when it comes to salary, bonuses, and stock payouts. But can the company remain competitive if it slows hiring in big tech hubs and continues to cut costs?
