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Why I Quit Oracle (2010)

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Re: Why I Quit Oracle (2010)

#11

Post by bluedino »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #10

Pretty much all you need to know about working at Oracle: Making his point about the "creepiness," not only with Ellison but with Oracle's power structure, Gosling said he sparked a notion to try to improve morale amongst the Sun faithful who endured the Oracle acquisition. He said the company decided to rent out the Great America amusement park in Santa Clara, Calif., and allow the Sun folks to have a day of fun. Sc…

Wasn't McNealy on the Sun company ice hockey team back in the old days? It sounded like an incredible place to work back then

Re: Why I Quit Oracle (2010)

#13

Post by saghm »

smegel wrote: post #9
quuquuquu wrote: post #3

I worked at Oracle until very recently. They are a rent-seeking, lawsuit-heavy cancer upon this Earth. Oracle routinely sues its own employees. Oracle routinely moves to stamp out innovation. Oracle's stock price has increased over the past decade, but only from acquisition and price-gouging large corporations and agencies. It is a racket. Working at Oracle is the antithesis of creating fun and useful software for ev…

> Oracle routinely sues its own employees. For what?

For winning arbitration (the company-mandated way to solve disputes) against them, for instance:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/oracle_sues_employe...

Re: Why I Quit Oracle (2010)

#14

Post by bitL »

bluedino wrote: post #11
bitmapbrother wrote: post #10

Pretty much all you need to know about working at Oracle: Making his point about the "creepiness," not only with Ellison but with Oracle's power structure, Gosling said he sparked a notion to try to improve morale amongst the Sun faithful who endured the Oracle acquisition. He said the company decided to rent out the Great America amusement park in Santa Clara, Calif., and allow the Sun folks to have a day of fun. Sc…

Wasn't McNealy on the Sun company ice hockey team back in the old days? It sounded like an incredible place to work back then

Yeah, SUN was cool back in the day before it moved to the "cursed" Santa Clara building. Interestingly, their original office is now occupied by Facebook (1 Hacker Way) and there is still sign of SUN in front of Facebook - unofficially to remind Facebook it shouldn't stop innovating.

Re: Why I Quit Oracle (2010)

#15

Post by bitL »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #10

Pretty much all you need to know about working at Oracle: Making his point about the "creepiness," not only with Ellison but with Oracle's power structure, Gosling said he sparked a notion to try to improve morale amongst the Sun faithful who endured the Oracle acquisition. He said the company decided to rent out the Great America amusement park in Santa Clara, Calif., and allow the Sun folks to have a day of fun. Sc…

Another interesting tidbit about Oracle - if you leave as a peon and return back after a few years, you are given exactly the same conditions as you had when you left, regardless of what you did in the years in-between. Oracle doesn't care if you progressed in the meantime.

Re: Why I Quit Oracle (2010)

#16

Post by m00s3 »

It makes me sad that organizations like the BC Gov't bend and over and take whatever crap Oracle decides to throw at them. The amount of money and developer effort that is spent on Oracle is staggering. All because 'no one gets fired for choosing Oracle'. They are blight on the industry.

Re: Why I Quit Oracle (2010)

#17

Post by hota_mazi »

gleenn wrote: post #2

I got the chance to talk to Gosling at a discussion about adding closures to Java a while back. You could tell immediately that he was an amazing and incredibly friendly guy. I have a ton of respect for him. That being said, this is a really boring article. If there was anything meaty, he said he couldn't really say. The rest of it is that Oracle didn't pay him well and effectively demoted him. I feel like that is re…

While it's pretty clear that Oracle acquired Sun in the hope of suing Google, it's also obvious to anyone who's been following the industry that Oracle has been doing an excellent job with Java.

When Oracle acquired Sun, Java had been stagnating without seeing any major version for five years.

In the four years following the acquisition, Oracle released two major versions of Java, including some very long awaited (and tricky to implement) features.

Re: Why I Quit Oracle (2010)

#18

Post by jessaustin »

smegel wrote: post #9
quuquuquu wrote: post #3

I worked at Oracle until very recently. They are a rent-seeking, lawsuit-heavy cancer upon this Earth. Oracle routinely sues its own employees. Oracle routinely moves to stamp out innovation. Oracle's stock price has increased over the past decade, but only from acquisition and price-gouging large corporations and agencies. It is a racket. Working at Oracle is the antithesis of creating fun and useful software for ev…

> Oracle routinely sues its own employees. For what?

For posting the dirty laundry anonymously on HN?

Re: Why I Quit Oracle (2010)

#19

Post by toyg »

Alright, let's have the periodic bout of Oracle bashing, we all know it is well-deserved.

But allow me a bit of devil's advocate playacting.

There are some incontrovertible facts: as fun as it could have been for employees to work there, Sun wasn't making enough money, so it died; and as shit as Oracle can be for employees (and boy do I know that as an ex-O), they are still there squeezing out cash for Larry (and for Wall Street) on command.

Oracle is the ugly side of the market, but you'll never have a market without an ugly side. It takes skills to walk the tightrope between hard realities and "being fun geeks", and sometimes there is a lot of hypocrisy involved. Oracle just don't care, they are out for the dollar and they don't really hide it. At least with them you know where you stand from day 1.

Re: Why I Quit Oracle (2010)

#20

Post by canremember »

As another Oracle anecdote, a family member worked for IBM (this was about 15 years ago) as a software engineer and then as (what is now called) a sales engineer/technical consultant, where he'd travel to client sites and demo IBM products, answer technical questions, etc.

He said Oracle was without a doubt the most unethical competitor they ever had. IBM had internal guidelines on acceptable limits for gifts, meals etc you could give to clients, but Oracle sales people had no such qualms and would sometimes essentially bribe VPs/whoever had the power to make the purchasing decision.

IBM was certainly no saint (this family member ended up leaving a few years later), but he was astounded by how ethically untethered Oracle as a company was.

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