Head of Mathematics, martial artist, science enthusiast

Durham 🇬🇧
timnmiddleton retweeted
I am a Senior Vice President at Oracle. My job is to allocate capital. Last quarter, I reallocated it from 45,000 people to the GPU clusters that will do what those people used to do. The GPUs do not need health insurance. That is not why I chose them. But it is on the slide. The slide was titled "Capital Reallocation." HR wanted to call it "Workforce Transformation." I told them to use both. One for the board. One for the all-hands. The board version had the margin projections. The all-hands version had a stock photo of a sunrise. Same numbers. Different clip art. The budget is $50 billion. Larry said smaller engineering teams deliver more complete solutions more quickly. This is true. A team of zero delivers no bugs at all. We are approaching perfection. I approved the infrastructure budget and the layoffs on the same page because they are the same decision. You cannot fund the data centers without removing the cost basis they replace. This is not a workforce reduction. This is an input substitution. The spreadsheet does not have a column for guilt. It has a column for ROI. The ROI column is green. The restructuring fund is $2.1 billion. We raised $500 million last quarter via an SEC filing, which is why you know it is going well. When you file with the SEC to increase the budget for firing people, that is called momentum. The per-head replacement cost is $2.6 million in computing. I want you to sit with that number. Not because it is large. Because it is a number at all. We have a per-head replacement cost. We have modeled, to the dollar, the cost of mass-producing the thing that makes a person unnecessary. And the number is in a cell, and the cell has a formula, and the formula references another sheet titled "Headcount Optimization Assumptions (v14)." There have been fourteen versions. Each version had fewer heads. $1.6 billion is allocated to severance and contract termination. Fifty billion is allocated to the OCI data centers that will run the AI that will do what the severed employees used to do. The ratio is instructive. For every dollar we spend saying goodbye, we spend thirty-one dollars making sure the goodbye is permanent. We held the all-hands on Thursday. The calendar invite said "Company Update and Q&A." There was no Q&A. There was a muted chat and a pre-recorded video from Larry. The video was four minutes. The severance FAQ was eleven pages. The ratio tells you which one was the real communication. The video mentioned "our incredible journey." The FAQ mentioned COBRA deadlines. I watched the chat scroll. Someone typed "will there be a recording?" The recording was the meeting. Someone typed "is my team affected?" Their manager was already in a separation call. Someone typed a heart emoji. The heart emoji received four likes. That was the highest engagement metric in the company's history that was not a stock price. The stock went up on the announcement. The market does not do grief. The market does repricing. The repricing was favorable. Revenue guidance was raised to $90 billion. I presented to the board the following Tuesday. The board asked three questions. The first was about margin expansion. The second was about timeline. The third was about whether the remaining employees had been told they were "the ones we chose to keep." I said yes. The board liked that framing. The remaining employees did not like that framing. But the remaining employees are not on the board. The remaining employees now do the work of the employees who left. They also train the systems that will, eventually, do the work they absorbed. They know this. We know they know this. The knowing is not a problem. The knowing is a retention tool. The ones who stay are the ones who believe they will be the last ones standing. They are wrong, but they are productive, and productivity is what I measure. I can see the search histories on the corporate network. "Oracle layoff 2026, am I next?" "How to negotiate severance at Oracle." "Can AI replace a staff engineer?" "Oracle stock price." "Oracle stock price." "Oracle stock price." The stock price is the one they check most. They are watching the number that replaced them appreciate in real time. Some of them have stock options. They are rooting for the machine that makes them unnecessary because they own a small piece of it. This is called alignment. Analysts warn we are losing institutional knowledge about legacy systems. This is correct. The systems were built by the people we are firing. The AI that replaced them was trained on the documentation the people they fired wrote. Some of them are updating the documentation now. Their final task is making themselves legible to the thing that is replacing them. The OCI cluster came online three weeks after the layoffs. It sits in a facility in West Texas that used to process cotton. The facility employs forty-seven people. It replaced forty-five thousand. The forty-seven people maintain cooling systems. They do not know what the machines do. They know the machines need to be cold. Last quarter, I asked the AI to model optimal headcount for the engineering division that built the AI. It recommended four people. Two of them were the AI. I included the recommendation in the board deck without commentary. The board approved it without question. The slide was titled "Optimal Resource Allocation." It was on the same page as the margin projections. The ROI column was green. I have a recurring calendar entry. It is called "Workforce Model Update." It runs every quarter. Each quarter, the model gets more accurate. Each quarter, the headcount gets smaller. The model is improving as headcount shrinks. The headcount is shrinking as the model improves. I do not know which one is the cause. I do not need to know. My job is to allocate capital. Last quarter, I allocated it well. The departing employees call it Wednesday. I call it Q4. The board calls it "the quarter we got serious about efficiency." The machines call it nothing. They do not call it anything. The ROI column is still green, and the graph is moving up and to the right.
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timnmiddleton retweeted
Good morning, everyone. I think this is the best advertisement I’ve ever seen.
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timnmiddleton retweeted
This is going to stick with me forever
Fletch17
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I hope this makes your day as much as it made mine, Enjoy 😘
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timnmiddleton retweeted
The homeowner saw on the security camera that a bear was playing on the outdoor swing every day, but couldn't get on. So he had a bigger swing built, and this was the result.
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timnmiddleton retweeted
When the baby, who had a nightmare, wakes up and sees his mother, he breathes a sigh of relief and smiles💝 nitter.siddz.com/videoarsiviniz/status/…
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timnmiddleton retweeted
If you like the thread please share and like the first post. Please follow @varshaparmar06 for more such threads.
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timnmiddleton retweeted
I haven't seen the Edexcel A-level paper 1 yet. Has anyone made any predicted papers/resources up for paper 2? I have a revision session tomorrow morning with Year 13! Any help would be greatly appreciated #edexcelmaths #alevelmaths #maths
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timnmiddleton retweeted
How to fix a $220 billion industry -- with $0 and a reframe.
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timnmiddleton retweeted
Seven-yr-old, Ellison, has down syndrome and struggles with sensory overload. His parents used to dread haircuts until they met Vernon Jackson, a local barber. Best 30 sec. you'll see all day.
Goodable
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timnmiddleton retweeted
Creating the Eden Project has taken a huge amount of work, and I’m proud to offer it free. Thanks to the amazing Maths White Board subscribers, we’ve come this far — but I’m now seeking support to build the infrastructure. If you can help, please consider subscribing (mathswhiteboard.com/MWB/purc…) or donating: gofund.me/d1b83457 If not, a repost could help it reach someone who can. Thank you! 🙏 🔁 #maths #mathschat #mathsteacher #mathsresources #iteachmaths #MathsToday @mathsjem
Struggling with a tricky question? Introducing the Eden Project — an AI chatbot powered by Maths Copilot’s topic knowledge, crafted by @MattTheApp, a teacher with 20 years of experience. mathscopilot.com Maths Copilot is a FREE multilingual tutor for all students. ❤️
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timnmiddleton retweeted
THREAD: Why does behaviour matter so much in secondary schools? Why should it be leaders' number 1 priority?
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timnmiddleton retweeted
WHO'S WITH ME????
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timnmiddleton retweeted
This is the most elegant thing you can do to a woman ... Why are my male followers not gentlemen? 😂 Please send me flowers in the comments too!
jason wang
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timnmiddleton retweeted
Evening all.
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timnmiddleton retweeted
Being the only person in shot to have brought his own cagoule is the most Keir Starmer thing I can imagine.
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timnmiddleton retweeted
Jenny Jones, "I hope James Timpson is given the powers to do his job properly" @GreenJennyJones "Civil Liberties.. We had a lot of repressive laws passed by the former Conservative government.. The Just Stop Oil activists were given longer prison sentences than sexual predators" "We haven't yet jailed anyone for the Post Office Scandal.. Or for Grenfell tower.. Or the Infected Blood Scandal.. What about PPE rip off... Or the parasites in our water industry with companies making billions while poisoning our rivers" "People are seeing their taxes go up and the NHS collapsing" "I see suffering of sub post masters but those who let them down get to keep their corporate pensions" "I don't blame the new government for this, but they have to deal with it"
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timnmiddleton retweeted
NEW BLOG: The Easiest Job I Ever Had: Classroom Teacher emaths.co.uk/blog/personal/i…
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timnmiddleton retweeted
My last day of teaching. 😭
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