Laid-off Oracle worker says workers were blindsided. Will uncertainty in tech make some leave the industry entirely?

As Haley Daigle neared graduation from St. Edward’s University and continued interning at Oracle, the company grew to be her top choice for a job post-grad.

She succeeded and became a full-time employee in an Austin-based marketing position where she had the flexibility to work remotely. Then, on Monday, she got a phone call that she was part of the layoffs at the Austin-based software giant.

“I think a lot of people were blindsided. I don't think that the VPs even knew what was going on, necessarily,” Daigle said. “I think it was just kind of a crazy shift that no one realized that there were gonna be this many people laid off on Monday.”

Oracle is the latest development in a recent wave of layoffs and hiring freezes at tech companies amid worries of a recession. Daigle said when she was let go, the message was “today's your last day. Your position has been eliminated due to reorganization of the marketing department.”

Other tech layoffs include those with an Austin presence like Tesla, which has reportedly laid off more than 200 employees. Meta reduced its initial plan for hiring 10,000 new engineers down to 6,000-7,000. Google has also told employees it plans to slow the pace of hiring. And Apple is expected to take similar measures with CEO Tim Cook telling the Wall Street Journal the company will hire employees in a more “deliberate way.”

On the worker end, gearing up for a recession is also top of mind. Just 9% of tech workers feel confident in their job security, notes a June survey from professional networking site Blind. For Daigle, Monday’s news set her on a path to snatch a new job swiftly.

“I'm a person who likes to plan way in advance and I thought being at Oracle, I was safe. Obviously, that's not the case,” Daigle said. “So right now for me, it's just getting a job that I'm interested in, but also as quickly as possible, because if there is a recession coming, I don't want to go into it with nothing.”

This all comes after Austin upped its profile as a tech hub in recent years, and Oracle had played a role in that shift. Just a couple of years before the company announced in 2020 that it’d be moving its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, it opened a 560,000-square-foot campus by Lady Bird Lake.

But as the tech industry’s rapid growth in Central Texas slows, workers could turn their talents to other industries. Even Daigle, who had an eye out for tech jobs and had been offered a position at Dell before ultimately choosing Oracle is now taking a less narrow approach to her job search.

She says she’s not dead set on tech even as she leaves room in the job hunt for other Austin-based roles.

“I know there's talk of bigger layoffs coming in the future, just all across the board for every company,” Daigle said. “So I think moving into my job search, I'm focused less on the tech side of things and more on just something that's appealing to me.”