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Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe

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141–150 of 185 posts

Re: Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hiring at oracle is weird. when i worked there my offer had to be approved by larry.

If Larry is approving hires it's just as a rubber stamp. There's no way anyone at the head of a company that size could think about anything at the employee level.

At Google, hires had to be approved by the founders as of 2013. This was when the company was hiring a few hundred people per week, so the founders got a spreadsheet with links or something like that. And apparently they did sometimes say no to some people.

It seems like a bonkers practice to me. I understand that it is important to hire good people. But this could be delegated several levels down, at least for entry-level hires. I suppose the top dogs could worry about promotions and hirings starting at the level of the junior managers, if they wanted to.

Re: Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe

#143
Maybe Postgres plays a part in this?? I used to have a business that sold Microsoft Dynamics ERP/CRM which required Enterprise version SQL licences, at truly insane prices per core ie $100k+ per server. At that time Oracle was even more expensive. When I started a business based on Postgres, I found it incredible that we could get a (much better dev platform for our needs) completely free! Recently Postgres has added many Enterprise features inc parallel query, logical replication etc Enterprise db offer Oracle compatibility. This must be taking significant business away from Oracle.

Re: Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe

#144
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think Oracle has a chance at cloud? Honest question. Their competition at the low end is Google, which doesn’t bode great on quality, and with AWS and Azure they’re fighting on quality and against strong enterprise groups. Not sure who would predict that would go well, but it’s a big market and I suppose they have to try. I’ve seen Oracle cloud jobs and admittedly balked, no bone to pick with them but don’…

> 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…

So you are saying there were CIOs in 2017 that had no idea what cloud is?

Re: Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe

#146
post #39

Who is actually spending money on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure? Is it just organisations who are too deep into the Oracle ecosystem to go anywhere else?

Mostly those. I have worked with organizations who are so deep in the Oracle quagmire that migration is next to impossible. Everything is Oracle in these firms.

Re: Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe

#147

As a programmer, I'm no fan of Oracle. I think customers feel badly about a lot of things the company does, too. Obviously employees are going to think badly of Oracle as well. But they are sharp in business dealings. If I had to pick one company to own for just pure business efficiency, Oracle would be high on the list.

Really? Oregon vs. Oracle doesn't inspire much trust. https://www.marklogic.com/blog/oracle-oregon-lawsuit

That is quite damning. Had no idea of this incident.

Re: Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe

#148
post #47

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…

[deleted]

Re: Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I work for Oracle. The freedom I get there to pursue what I'm interested in is I think almost unheard of in the rest of the industry. All my work is open source and on GitHub. Oracle gives me two weeks extra leave a year for community service. When I was in HQ I got a private soundproof locking office with a mountain view. Now I work from home. I go as many conferences as I think I should. These are all things people here usually say they'd kill for!

Re: Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe

#150

I worked (mercifully briefly) as a sales engineer for the cloud platform. I left because it seemed my job was primarily built around lying to customers about what the product could do and most of what we were selling was half baked and frankly broken. Like "massive java monolith with buried buried buried menus to get anything done, and then it still breaks" broken. If you're still using Oracle products in 2019 you're…

They are, unfortunately, entrenched in certain enterprise products. The major ERP products that run the Higher Education industry, for example. They mostly use Oracle on the back end. And it doesn't help that one those (lesser used) ERP systems is a customized version of people soft. Cloud options are chipping away at the edges of this. For example, Admissions offices have largely ditched portion of these ERP systems…

We use Oracle EBS at work. It's a horrible, counter-intuitive, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink nightmare. Manufacturing, operations, employee self-serve, order entry, and many other functions all rolled into one hot mess complete with a disinterested non-communicative support guy in India.

Part of it is a shitty html-based interface and part is a nearly unusable suite of java applets with inscrutable UI that would have been considered poor even in the late 90's.

I got hand it Oracle engineers, though. What magic to they use to induce C-levels to buy this stuff? They must have mastered the art of inducement with steak, strippers, martinis and lies.

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