The top reasons good people get laid off from the Gaping Red Orifice:
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you make too much money, i.e. your salary stuck out in some spreadsheet or analysis.
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you cost them too much money in some way. Medical? Disability? FMLA?
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pure and simple age-ism
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even if you don't make a lot, it is still cheaper to hire young dumb people and people overseas.
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you failed to keep your metrics within the green areas on all those idiotic dashboards they love
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you were part of an acquisition and your team is being integrated with others or dismantled
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they decided that the remote offices they setup in Europe, China, ME or S. America or whereever weren't working out/they found a cheaper place, so they canned you and your team.
My first question after I got the news was: Am I eligible for re-hire? That is important in case 1.) you end up in a company that gets purchased by Oracle 2.) you intend to list your Oracle job on your resume (companies do pretty deep background checks these days) and you don't want any indications you were at fault in any way.
Of COURSE it would be better to re-purpose people who already know how to get around in the Oracle culture and deal with all the tools (still using Beehive? what a pile of dung!). That is what companies did before corporate culture became all about the next quarter's results and CEO mega-bonuses. Ask anyone who was at IBM when they prided themselves on never having a layoff. That was over 30 years ago, and this is the new normal.
The good news is that, if you are in the US, the job market is picking up, and so are salaries