> Why do you think Oracle has a chance at cloud? Honest question. Because Oracle still has an extremely large customer base, and an exceptionally good and extensive sales organisation that's really good at selling stuff to people. The enterprise market is still not that well tapped by existing cloud providers. Look at the kinds of sales figures enterprise serving companies pull in, and consider that only a smaller fr…
I feel so old because to me OCI means Oracle Call Interface, their DB client C API. I guess nobody cares that it may confuse people like me.
The VP also mentioned they were thinking about the plan in Jan. So why the hell did you hire me then? I joined at the end of Jan.
Hey friend, don't take it personally. A layoff indicates a failure (of planning, of budgeting, or whatever) at a much higher level of the organization than you Your position may have been opened before the layoff decision was made, so they decided to leave it open so as not to raise suspicions (managers will rightfully get upset if headcount is taken away from them with no explanation). They might've know the number…
>>Hey friend, don't take it personally. A layoff indicates a failure (of planning, of budgeting, or whatever) at a much higher level of the organization than you
And yet it is always the low-level folks who get fucked, while the executives who make the lay-off decisions often are rewarded with promotions and bonuses at the end of the year.
I was one of the people being let go in this round. I moved to Seattle and joined OCI as a Senior Engineer at the end of Jan 2019. Yesterday when I came to the office and was doing my work at 9:00 AM, the whole team about 20 people were called by VP to have a meeting at 10:00 AM. He said the whole team got terminated. We had to turn in the computer by 12:00 PM and leave the office by 3:00 PM. There was no buffer time…
I’m hiring Sr developers right across the street at Expedia. Shoot me a note: joholland at expedia.com
Do companies like expedia look to hire people moving from the GDS? I'm not sure I want to stay in the travel industry, but I really like the challenging problems. Just not sure I want to stay with the current company I'm at.
> Why do you think Oracle has a chance at cloud? Honest question. Because Oracle still has an extremely large customer base, and an exceptionally good and extensive sales organisation that's really good at selling stuff to people. The enterprise market is still not that well tapped by existing cloud providers. Look at the kinds of sales figures enterprise serving companies pull in, and consider that only a smaller fr…
I feel so old because to me OCI means Oracle Call Interface, their DB client C API. I guess nobody cares that it may confuse people like me.
Yeah, that's one that keeps popping up over and over again, especially in google searches.
What you're describing is general corporate culture after a company has experienced its hayday. Usually all the passionate people including original founders have cashed out, exited the company, and there is nobody left that actually cares about the company. There is a lot of room for mistakes and not delivering results because money grows on trees. People end up skating by and milking their one-hit-wonder cashcow pr…
Oracle's something special in this regard though. It's not like Sun was top of the world when they acquired StorageTek, but having worked in the tape library industry in CO at the time, Oracle seems to be a special section of hell.
Many, many, people who worked on Java and Solaris would agree with you.
A close family member of mine worked for Oracle as a mechanical engineer for 6 years. He had survived many rounds of layoffs at Sun before it was acquired by Oracle and at StorageTek before it was acquired by Sun. He described a depressing corporate culture at Oracle with a seemingly infinite number of middle managers. One of his co-workers spent most of his time in the office managing his real estate business. Larry…
> Oracle will only give interviews to people with a degree from their small list of Ivy-tier universities. That's only for new grads with no work experience. It's a stupid policy, but in my corner of the company we generally made good hiring decisions. I disagree that the company has a lot of useless academics. IME, engineering and product management are full of very smart, capable, hard working people, some of them…
What honestly confuses me is why people of that caliber continue to work for Oracle when everybody has read umpteen stories like the OP and lots of us even know people who can attest to the toxicity of the company first hand. The usual counterbalance to a company treating employees like crap is that it tarnishes the company's reputation, making it harder to find talent. Oracle's reputation has been below rock bottom for my entire career, so why are all these great people you speak of still taking jobs there? As far as I can tell the compensation there is pretty standard, so it doesn't seem like they're just buying people off. Maybe you can shed some light on this for me.
Check your employment paperwork. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. To make you pay it back after just hiring is a jerk move, but not all executives are kind.
Why would anyone sign a contract that makes them liable for the relocation expenses (that could be easily ~50K for intercontinental moves) based on a risk that is outside their control?
Because they really want the job and "that isn't going to happen, I will be a good employee". I'm shocked at your lack of imagination. The real question is who would actually give the money back, I'd take 5 days in court and a lien to get it out of me.
It is entirely plausible that they hired you so that they won't have to lay off someone they actually care about.
Well they laid off the entire team, so that's unlikely. These are typically product pivots, not financial downsizings when it's entire teams.
Why would you lay off an entire team for a product pivot? Unless all of the company's other products are fully staffed... how often does that ever happen?