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James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

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Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#91

Post by gaius »

Tamerlin wrote: post #25
10ren wrote: post #21

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.…

There is Solaris x86 (x64) now, but it was always the red-headed stepchild, badly supported, minimal HCL, no work done on the compiler to optimize for that architecture, lagged behind for patches, both from Sun and from vendors like Oracle.

A world in which you could have Solaris on your Intel boxes and your SPARC boxes and compile fat binaries a la NeXTSTEP that would "just work" all the way from the desktop to the datacentre is a compelling one. But Sun lacked the courage to invest in Solaris on Intel until it was too late.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#92

Post by tsotha »

earl wrote: post #86
CamperBob wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it's necessarily a career path, or lack thereof, but the companies' perspective on software: I left biotech because the companies I worked for, and it seemed to be an industry problem, viewed software not as their differentiator or edge or product, but rather purely as a cost center to be minimized. From that distinction, everything flows.

I had the same problem at a mutual fund company, which is funny when you think about it. What is financial services company but a group of people that manages information?

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#93

Post by tsotha »

strlen wrote: post #67
jbjohns wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Most companies do have technical career path. Being a permanent employee not only gives you the benefits (others have listed them), but also lets you work on much more interesting projects (contractors typically work on isolated projects rather than on core systems and algorithms; I know, of course, of exceptions to that but they're rare). It also frees you up of the overhead of finding the next contract. I know many…

The contracting money isn't what is was. When I started contracting in 2000 you could write your own ticket - obscene wages and all the hours you want. Now I'm an employee at the same company, and the contractors make less than I do if you add the bonus. These guys are making about 40% less than I made ten years ago.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#94

Post by tsotha »

va_coder wrote: post #53

I sympathize with all the great Sun engineers that got a bad deal, but didn't Sun do poorly from an investor perspective? And isn't that important? As much as I really hate Oracle (I'm a programmer and don't like their products), they do really well for investors. They make fat profits each quarter. I don't really understand why - why people buy their overpriced, complex products - but they do.

The sales organization gets priority in Oracle. They're never going to start a project by asking "what would be cool?", but rather "what do our customers want?". Not the path to the most technically satisfying jobs, but companies like that stand a better chance of making money.

I've worked at a few (smaller) software companies, and from what I can tell the ones that go out of business do so because they make really cool products that either 1) don't get connected to the right customers or 2) are missing some critical feature customers need because developers didn't understand the business space. Both problems are the result of a poor or unsupported sales organization.

As a technical guy I get irritated by the sales people as much as anyone else, especially when they try to promise away my nights or weekends. But a software company won't survive without them. Based on my own experience I'd say the most successful companies could better be described as sales organizations that do software instead of software companies that do sales.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#95

Post by dagw »

va_coder wrote: post #53

I sympathize with all the great Sun engineers that got a bad deal, but didn't Sun do poorly from an investor perspective? And isn't that important? As much as I really hate Oracle (I'm a programmer and don't like their products), they do really well for investors. They make fat profits each quarter. I don't really understand why - why people buy their overpriced, complex products - but they do.

Oracle is very good if you're the sort of company that wants to make one phone call and buy a turnkey system to do something very boring, but important, that isn't really core to your company. You simply place one call and say "Hi I need a payroll system for my company with a few 100K employees spread around the world", then Oracle takes care of providing everything from hardware and OS right up to support and training, with each component bearing the Oracle brand. Very few companies can offer that.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#96

Post by lzw »

va_coder wrote: post #53

I sympathize with all the great Sun engineers that got a bad deal, but didn't Sun do poorly from an investor perspective? And isn't that important? As much as I really hate Oracle (I'm a programmer and don't like their products), they do really well for investors. They make fat profits each quarter. I don't really understand why - why people buy their overpriced, complex products - but they do.

Oracle is marketing and support organization, notba software company. I wouldn't want to work for them, and don't like their products, but I respect that they deliver real value to their customers.

It seems kinda odd to me that gosling isn't going out and getting a great job at a hot startup.... He could write his own ticket.

It really isn't oracles job to retain him, they dont really need him it seems.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#97

Post by rbanffy »

davidw wrote: post #87
rbanffy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would use something like typed racket or haskell for all the critical parts to increase safety I am not sure about Haskell, but, from my limited experience, Erlang runs at levels very close to C (my C, at least)

In terms of speed? Erlang's not even in the ballpark that C is in. I'm pretty sure Haskell significantly outperforms Erlang as well. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...

Well... At least my C is regarded as very readable ;-)

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#98

Post by rwmj »

gaius wrote: post #85
strlen wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most companies do have technical career path. Being a permanent employee not only gives you the benefits (others have listed them), but also lets you work on much more interesting projects (contractors typically work on isolated projects rather than on core systems and algorithms; I know, of course, of exceptions to that but they're rare). It also frees you up of the overhead of finding the next contract. I know many…

Most companies do have technical career path Genuine question - who? The technical career path at almost every organization ends after about 10 years, then it's management or plateau. Remember - companies are run by people who fundamentally don't, or can't, understand why everyone doesn't aspire to management...

Red Hat has a good technical career path. No need to go into management if you don't want to, and plenty of people on my team in their 40s and 50s still working happily on the "codeface".

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#99

Post by gaius »

rbanffy wrote: post #64
varjag wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not arguing with the rest of your post, but what would you write a large-scale DBMS with, these days? Surely not jpython?

Perhaps with 2010 style C ;-) But maybe, just maybe, I would first connect Oracle's prodigious moneyduct into a team writing a kick-ass Lisp compiler and then writing the best RDBMS using Lisp. One can dream...

If you have an Oracle to hand, have a look at TNSNAMES.ORA and LISTENER.ORA. Greenspun's law applies...

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#100

Post by hga »

brisance wrote: post #71
Tamerlin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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.…

Gosling also wrote about being at the mercy of suppliers impacting SPARC and it probably contributed to the problems. http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/at_the_mercy_of_suppl...

Do some Googling and mroe reading and you'll find their problem was that they cut costs by assuming the memory supplied was perfect and that they didn't need to include parity checking or error detection and correction. This is the UltraSPARC3 problem that Tamerlin is talking about.
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