Oracle Shatters the Biggest Myth About Tech Layoffs

As we enter April, the tech sector is again in the midst of harsh layoffs. Companies are cutting jobs despite strong revenues and profits, redirecting spending toward AI and operating with leaner teams. 

The numbers tell a stark story. According to TrueUp’s tech layoffs tracker, 2026 has already seen 215 layoff events impacting 90,524 workers—roughly 943 jobs cut per day.

The most shocking among them was Oracle. The veteran database company recently delivered the cold news of eliminating 20,000 to 30,000 positions globally to its employees at 6 am via email. This is roughly 12–18% of its approximately 162,000-strong workforce.

The move was driven by Oracle’s aggressive push into AI infrastructure, including capital expenditure for data centres and cloud capabilities to support massive AI workloads and partnerships. The company, which generated $4.9 billion in non-GAAP net income in 2025, will divert the $8–10 billion freed up in cash flow from the layoffs to fund its $156 billion AI infrastructure buildout, according to analysis from TD Cowen.

“Oracle has gone cash flow negative and needs to reduce its costs, with people being one of the largest expense factors in tech companies,” Holger Mueller, Principal Analyst and VP at Constellation Research, tells AIM.

He adds that the company is unlikely to cut too deeply, given the need to maintain customer satisfaction, describing the layoffs as a broader correction following the pandemic-era hiring surge across the industry. “It is likely a correction of the COVID-19 hiring frenzy,” he observes.

Ghosts of the Past

Other tech analysts echo similar sentiments. 

“The post-pandemic correction was always going to play out. Companies hired aggressively into uncertainty and are now unwinding that,” says Alan Cohen, Analyst at fintech company RationalFX. However, he notes that while a post-pandemic correction was expected, the pace and narrative around these layoffs have taken a different turn.

This year, Meta announced about 1,500 layoffs in January, roughly 10% of its 15,000-strong Reality Labs division, followed by another 700 cuts in late March across the R&D division, recruiting, sales, Facebook, and global operations. In early April, Meta carried out another targeted round of layoffs, cutting roughly 200 roles in Silicon Valley.

With AI infrastructure spending expected to reach $115–135 billion in 2026 and up to $600 billion in data centres by 2028, Meta had to cut costs elsewhere, especially the flailing Metaverse business.

Similarly, Atlassian cut 1,600 roles in March, roughly 10% of its workforce, as CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said the changes would help fund continued investment in AI and enterprise growth.

However, Marc Andreessen dismissed the AI narrative, arguing on The Twenty Minute VC podcast that the cuts are really a correction to COVID-19-era over-hiring. “They all have a silver bullet excuse, it’s AI,” he said.

“The hiring binge companies went on during COVID-19 was wild, driven by near-zero interest rates and a complete loss of discipline as organisations went fully virtual,” Andreesen added. He noted that many large companies are now overstaffed, estimating that excess headcount could range anywhere from 25% to as high as 75%. 

He suggested that AI is being used as a convenient justification. “AI… until December was not actually good enough to do any of the jobs that they’re actually cutting. So it just can’t have been AI.”

Are Middle Managers the Problem?

In January, Amazon announced 16,000 job cuts globally, representing approximately 5% of its corporate workforce, citing a push to “reduce layers, increase ownership, and remove bureaucracy.”

Following that, in late February, Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Block cut over 40% roles, reducing its headcount from more than 10,000 employees to just under 6,000.

Dorsey was unusually blunt about the role of management layers in the cuts and the company’s future. In his essay titled From Hierarchy to Intelligence, he explained that the layoffs were meant to eliminate middle management entirely. AI would now handle coordination, product decisions, internal alignment, and much of the oversight that managers once provided.

Going further, Dorsey said AI would transform or replace the old managerial role with a new model called “player coaches.” He described them as employees who still do deep individual work while also developing talent, essentially combining contributor and light coaching duties without the bureaucratic overhead of traditional bosses.

“A player-coach still writes code or builds models or designs interfaces. They also invest in the growth of the people around them. They don’t spend their days in status meetings, alignment sessions, and priority negotiations,” he wrote.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff thinks the industry has settled on the wrong explanation. As tech layoffs become more widespread, he said Salesforce is still hiring and closing in on $50 billion in revenue, even as others point to AI as the main culprit.

“I don’t think most people really understand what is going on,” Benioff said on The Future Live podcast. “It’s too easy to basically make AI the scapegoat.”

More Jobs Coming 

Conversely, tech hiring has picked up strong momentum in 2026, pushing back against the idea that AI is eliminating engineering jobs. 

As per TrueUp data, there are more than 67,000 open software engineering roles as of April 2026, the highest level in over three years, with listings roughly doubling from their mid-2023 lows.

In India, higher-paying AI roles are the dominant talent attractor. Positions offering ₹50 lakh and above saw a 55% spike in AI and ML hiring, per the Naukri JobSpeak Index.

Hiring closed FY26 on a stronger footing, rising 9% year-on-year in March to 2,858, with full-year white-collar growth rate improving to 8% from 2% in FY25.

Mueller predicts there won’t be a mass reduction in critical software engineering roles. “I think we need more engineers, better but also different engineers. The tech industry has long replaced more senior engineers who were not above-average performers with younger, often cheaper engineers,” he adds.

Andreessen also dismissed concerns about AI-driven job losses, arguing that the narrative is fundamentally flawed. “The ‘AI job loss’ narratives are all fake,” he said in a post on X, adding that rising productivity from AI will drive higher demand and ultimately lead to a surge in jobs.

Six years after the pandemic hiring boom, the tech industry is still unwinding from the excess it built during an era of easy money and inflated demand. AI may be changing how work gets done, but the layoffs sweeping the sector today are less about tech replacing humans and more about companies correcting for a future they didn’t see coming.