Midlife MavericksMy first thought when I read about Oracle wasn’t the 30,000 jobs. It was Julie.
I grabbed my phone and WhatsApped her before I’d finished the article. “Are you okay?” She was. She still has her job. But those few minutes before her reply landed were enough to remind me what this actually feels like when job security stops being theoretical.
The story, in case you missed it: on 31 March, Oracle sent termination emails at 6am. No manager call. No warning. No HR on the line. Just an email from something called “Oracle Leadership” telling employees today was their last working day, and asking for a personal email address to send the severance to. Computer access revoked immediately.
TD Cowen estimates between 20,000 and 30,000 people. Roughly 18% of Oracle’s global workforce.
Oracle’s revenue was up 22%.
Quote of the Week
“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The 6am Email You Haven’t Got Yet
I never got a 6am email. I got a 7am phone call.
My baby was three weeks old. I had an infection. I couldn’t drive. I could barely move.
My first thought, sitting there with the phone in my hand, wasn’t about the job. It was about the fact that I was not physically capable of going to an interview. I couldn’t get myself to HR, let alone perform competence at a meeting. I was three weeks postpartum and I could not get out of my house unassisted, and somewhere in the background a process was starting that assumed I could.
That’s what financial exposure actually feels like. Not a spreadsheet problem. A body problem. A timing problem. The moment when the system that’s supposed to support you reveals that it was never really designed with you in mind.
Most of you haven’t had that call. And the women I’m most worried about aren’t the ones who already have. They’re the ones who are certain they won’t.
I have a friend who’s a few months off 50. We were having dinner recently and she told me that in her company, most people are “retired” by 50. Not their choice. Managed out. Restructured. Made redundant through the slow, polite language of annual reviews and org chart changes, until eventually there’s no chair left with their name on it. Someone 15 years younger does a version of the same job for considerably less. The company calls it evolution. She calls it what it is.
We spent the rest of dinner talking about how she positions herself for the next five years. She’s not panicking. She’s planning. But she’s starting later than she should have.
What Oracle Actually Did
Oracle wasn’t in trouble. Revenue was up 22% and results exceeded expectations. This wasn’t a failing company cutting costs to survive.
It was a profitable company that decided certain humans were no longer part of its plan. TD Cowen estimates the cuts free up eight to ten billion dollars. The money goes to AI data centres. The roles eliminated are specifically those Oracle believes AI will replace.
That’s a different kind of story to a business going under. And it’s not just Oracle.
Amazon cut 16,000 corporate roles in January 2026. Meta, Google, Dell, Salesforce, Atlassian. The first six weeks of 2026 alone saw 30,700 tech sector layoffs. Profitable companies, cutting to fund AI infrastructure. Over 100 companies have already filed legally mandated notices of further cuts to come.
The Numbers Nobody Reads Until It’s Personal
My friend at 50 is one of the lucky ones. She’s asking the question while she still has time to act on the answer.
Most women don’t. They read the statistics about older workers taking 35% longer to find re-employment, or earning 20 to 30% less when they do, and file them under “other people’s problems.” Until the 6am email arrives, or the dinner conversation gets uncomfortably close to home, or someone they know WhatsApps to ask if they’re okay.
Between January and August 2025, over 455,000 women exited the US workforce. 42% through layoffs. The rest through burnout, caregiving, and a straightforward absence of progression. Only 37% of women in remote roles were promoted in the past two years, compared to 49% of men doing equivalent work.
The DEI programmes that offered some structural cover are being rolled back. Nobody is replacing them with anything.
I’m not telling you this to frighten you. I’m telling you because pretending the numbers don’t apply to you isn’t the same as being safe.
One Salary Is One Point of Failure
A few months ago I wrote about why women with good salaries still feel financially precarious. You Make Good Money but You’re Broke The argument was about financial literacy: knowing where your money is, what it’s actually doing, and what you’d do if the salary stopped.
The Oracle story is the same argument from a different direction.
If your entire financial architecture sits on one salary from one employer, you have a single point of failure. One 6am email and the whole thing shakes.
Building other income streams is an act of financial architecture, not lifestyle design. Last week I published the first piece in a series on portfolio careers. What Is a Portfolio Career? If you haven’t read it, start there.
OWN IT
Nobody who checked their email at 6am on 31 March thought it would be them.
You don’t have to panic. You don’t have to quit. But treating your salary as a permanent fixture rather than one asset in what should be a larger picture is a bet you’re making every single day, whether you’ve thought about it that way or not.
Your move this week: If you have one source of income, identify one thing — one skill, one relationship, one existing piece of work — that could become a second. You don’t have to build it this week. Name it.
Reply to this email and tell me: what would you build if you knew your job was ending in 12 months?
See you next Wednesday, C.
P.S. The next article in the portfolio career series — how to build while you’re still employed, without tipping your hand — drops next week. I’ll link it here when it’s live.
