One of the reasons I left GE was because there was no notion of a senior engineer in the software field (there are senior science positions in the research divisions). To go beyond "Software Engineer" you had to step into a managerial role and away from doing any software engineering. This burned out several people (including myself). You can only wait for the implementation of "Technical Career Path" for so long.
I don't get why technical people who don't want to go in management sign on as permanent employees. Why deal with all that career review nonsense, etc. when as a technical person you have no track anyway?
Job security, 401k, health care benefits, etc. Same reasons anyone signs up as a permanent employee anywhere.
For real, "That bent Gosling’s resolve like a wishbone in the hands of two eager siblings in mid-pull after Thanksgiving dinner, but even that didn’t break it."
Yeah, I bet Franklin W. Dixon could write better copy ;-)
I can kind of see this for GE, because it isn't a software company. But Oracle does nothing but make software -- programmers are the absolute most important people on their projects. Oh yeah, I forgot. Oracle is a marketing company. If you want a nice database, use Postgres. If you want a database that sponsors a sailboat, buy Oracle.
I can kind of see this for GE, because it isn't a software company. Every large company is a software company, whether they know it or not. Failure to provide a career path for software engineering professionals on the technical side of the fence is a poor strategy, period.
Not just software-engineering, either; a lot of large engineering companies don't provide much of an engineering career path that doesn't involve being promoted into management. For almost the entire time my dad was at Amoco (later bought by BP), for a few decades, they were discussing implementing a technical career path with some sort of high-level engineering rank, but it somehow never happened. So the top engineers either languished at "senior engineer" (a reasonably high rank, but basically a ~15 years of experience rank, not equivalent to something like IBM Fellow), or else jumped to management, or left to do consulting. One predictable result was a lot of middle managers who were neither good at nor particularly excited about management, and a lack of senior engineers, in particular engineers in the 3rd phase of a project who had actually worked on the 1st and 2nd phases.
I don't know much about this sector, but how does Oracle compare to its direct competitors? E.g. is SAP friendlier with the developer/technical community?
Other than the aforementioned DB2, the only other competitor out there for Oracle is SQL Server. That has some big customers -- a large part of Disney's online infrastructure relies on SQL Server, for example.
Oracle the database isn't really Oracle's main product. They're real product is a bunch of industry specific applications and middleware (and related consulting services) that happens to need a Oracle database to run. So as such they're not really directly competing with SQL server (or postgres or whatever)
A lot of big software companies seem to put significant effort into maintaining a good relationship with the developer/technical community, presumably in large part to keep the recruitment pipeline (especially of top people) flowing along. Oracle, by contrast, doesn't seem to give a shit and gets away with it[1]. Why? [1] http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...
It probably doesn't matter much to Oracle to stay on good terms w/ the technical community since technical people aren't their customers. The people who have the budgetary authority to buy Oracle's very expensive products very likely haven't been doing anything technical for many years, if they ever did. Programmers in organizations that use Oracle aren't asked if they want to use Oracle, they're told they're going t…
Not arguing with the rest of your post, but what would you write a large-scale DBMS with, these days? Surely not jpython?
One of the reasons I left GE was because there was no notion of a senior engineer in the software field (there are senior science positions in the research divisions). To go beyond "Software Engineer" you had to step into a managerial role and away from doing any software engineering. This burned out several people (including myself). You can only wait for the implementation of "Technical Career Path" for so long.
I don't get why technical people who don't want to go in management sign on as permanent employees. Why deal with all that career review nonsense, etc. when as a technical person you have no track anyway?
This isn't always evident from the outside, and it may not even be evident from the inside, until you realize you should be advancing along that non-existent career path.
Other than the aforementioned DB2, the only other competitor out there for Oracle is SQL Server. That has some big customers -- a large part of Disney's online infrastructure relies on SQL Server, for example.
Oracle the database isn't really Oracle's main product. They're real product is a bunch of industry specific applications and middleware (and related consulting services) that happens to need a Oracle database to run. So as such they're not really directly competing with SQL server (or postgres or whatever)
That's a good point. I suppose I should have specifically labelled DB2 and SQL Server as competitors to Oracle 10x or whatever their current DBMS version is. :)
It probably doesn't matter much to Oracle to stay on good terms w/ the technical community since technical people aren't their customers. The people who have the budgetary authority to buy Oracle's very expensive products very likely haven't been doing anything technical for many years, if they ever did. Programmers in organizations that use Oracle aren't asked if they want to use Oracle, they're told they're going t…
Not arguing with the rest of your post, but what would you write a large-scale DBMS with, these days? Surely not jpython?
Fair point. I didn't intend to diss C, and if one were to write Oracle from scratch today, C is (sadly?) still probably the best option given its performance and portability constraints.
What I had in mind was that for anyone who is technically capable of maintaining the core Oracle DB code base, there are more interesting and rewarding things they could be doing instead.
Oracle has brilliant opportunities at the moment: they own a great processor (Sparc) that they could closely integrate with their database, application software and even Java... and (finally!) give IBM a run for their money. They have the cool and fast technology of both Sun's JVM and BEA's JVM (JRockit). They have acquired other brilliant technologies, and have in practice endless resources to acquire more: http://e…
" they own a great processor (Sparc)" I'm not so sure about that. For years x86 has been chewing up the market for Sparc processors, and one of the reasons that Sun had such poor finances is that it was selling x86-based servers more than Sparc based servers (they cost considerably less, and perform better). Fujutsu's Sparc implementation significantly outperforms Sun's. Contemporary Xeons outperform both these days.…
For those who don't get the chickens vs. bulls reference:
"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use?... Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?"
One of the reasons I left GE was because there was no notion of a senior engineer in the software field (there are senior science positions in the research divisions). To go beyond "Software Engineer" you had to step into a managerial role and away from doing any software engineering. This burned out several people (including myself). You can only wait for the implementation of "Technical Career Path" for so long.
I don't get why technical people who don't want to go in management sign on as permanent employees. Why deal with all that career review nonsense, etc. when as a technical person you have no track anyway?
Some companies actually do have career paths of technical people, and most companies will claim to have them. It's hard to tell from bottom rung exactly what track you may or may not have a few steps up.