The Oracle's Choice
Oracle means more than just the database company; it also means seer, prophet. In The Matrix, the Oracle who sees all cannot predict Neo’s future. Remember when Neo first meets the Oracle? She doesn’t tell him whether he is the One. Instead she hands him a difficult choice: Morpheus believes you are the One, so he will risk his life and sacrifice himself to save you. Only one of you—you or Morpheus—can survive. How will you choose?
In The Matrix Reloaded, Neo meets the Oracle again, and she says with certainty: you’re not here to make the choice—you’ve already made it. You’re here to understand why you made it.
Guided by the Oracle time and again, Neo makes choice after choice. Those choices ultimately lead him, step by step, to become the One. And so, when Neo overcomes every obstacle and meets the Architect, the truth dawns on him: choice—the problem is choice!
Choice seems unavoidable in our lives. From the moment we open our eyes each day, we are ceaselessly confronted with choices and making them. Some are easy (where to eat), some are hard (should I change jobs), and some consume an entire lifetime (choosing a partner, deciding how many children to have, and so on).
My elder daughter is exceptionally bright, yet she often agonizes over how to choose. We deliberately train her, in all sorts of ways, to make her own choices. For example: her mother buys her a bag as a gift—same style, different colors. The color she likes costs ten yuan more than the one she doesn’t much care for. If she picks the cheaper one, Mom pays for it in full; otherwise, she has to cover the extra ten yuan herself—which means her small debt keeps piling up. The little girl wails piteously in the shopping mall, and it’s hard to bear, but we know this is a golden opportunity for her to grow. She has to learn that you can’t have your cake and eat it too—just as Cooper, at the critical moment of escaping the black hole in Interstellar, can’t resist quipping: Newton’s third law. You got to leave something behind.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can say this: the onetime “seer” Oracle, as the age of cloud computing arrived—as internet companies rushed to de-IOE (drop IBM / Oracle / EMC), as Amazon furiously staked out territory with DynamoDB, Aurora, and Redshift—dithered over its gains and losses and failed to choose correctly. If you look at Microsoft’s resolve in reinventing Windows and its decisiveness in embracing cloud computing, you can’t help but lament Oracle’s timidity and its vacillation, hedging its bets on both licensing and the cloud.
Sharing its affliction are the thousands of Oracle China engineers about to be laid off. Word of the layoffs had leaked to the media a month earlier; even someone like me, who doesn’t much care for the spotlight, chimed in: Oracle layoffs—rather than wallow in self-pity, better to let go. But those on the inside still cling to hope, and even more, to resentment: If I leave voluntarily, what if Oracle China then announces layoffs and I miss out on severance? And when the storm finally breaks, when the generous severance package (reportedly N+6—N per labor law, plus six months of actual salary) is laid on the table, the same people are still dissatisfied: Why isn’t N a multiple of my actual salary? What about my options and RSUs that are about to vest? I’ll never find benefits this good again—what do I do?
The world is often this cruel, but making choices amid that cruelty is the only road to growth:
Looking back on his life, Ray Dalio said:
Looking back on my own journey, I now see that time is like a river that carries us forward into encounters with reality that require us to make decisions. We can’t stop our movement down this river, and we can’t avoid the encounters. We can only approach them in the best possible way.
In fact, look at the paltry compensation and heartless methods Oracle inflicted in the US:
I spent 20 years with Sun/Oracle. When the hammer came down they called all engineering staff into the board room and we were told at 9:05 am. “Your jobs as you know them no longer exist.” We were then given our paperwork. Told to be at an HR appointment with someone we didn’t know and told of our payout. Most of us had spent 20+++ years there and were just about to enter retirement. I’m 60. Oh and they hired 4 people in India to replace every one of us at a fraction of the cost.
Oracle China can already be considered conscientious—though, of course, from the laid-off employee’s standpoint, no amount of conscience redeems what is, at bottom, utterly heartless.
No matter how big the severance or how good the package, it can tide you over for a time—but can it tide you over for a lifetime? Amid disappointment, shock, and anger, it really is time to think hard about how to choose your next step. After all, in your thirties, life has only just begun its first third.
When Po is lost and doesn’t know whether to stay or go, Master Oogway says: Quit. Don’t quit. Noodles. Don’t noodles. You’re too concerned with what was and what would be. There’s a saying—yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.
Time to turn the page. Life is not defined by a single crisis. During the last big Adobe layoffs, the comment threads were full of sympathy for those holding protest banners; now, it’s a flood of condemnation.
