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James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

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Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#101

Post by ghjklkjh »

CamperBob wrote: post #37
jrockway wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Worse here in the frozen North.

I can't be a senior engineer because developers can't be engineers at all - and only engineers are allowed to supervise staff.

So Gosling's boss would be a 21 engineer-in-training.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#102

Post by scorpion032 »

rbanffy wrote: post #63
scorpion032 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working for Oracle as a programmer _most often means_ working for innumerable number of ERP and middleware solutions they offer, not the database itself.

I don't think that has too much appeal either. Quite frankly, I would prefer the 80's C to that.

I don't disagree. :) That was why I quit it, in the first place.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#103

Post by hga »

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.…

When I learned about their "no service unless you sign this NDA" policy plus their attempts to blame their customers ("your machine room's environment isn't good enough") for this problem of their own making (see my other comment in this thread: they cut costs by omitting parity/ECC) I knew they were never going to make it in Big Iron. Sun's predecessors had defined an informal SLA or social contract that Sun just didn't recognize or was able to implement.

When I learned that their internal sales force total focus on big contracts made it literally impossible for most startups to buy medium levels of Sun kit (by and large no more than could be put on credit cards (Sun's "VARs" were supposed to handle this business but few did, clearly Joyent found an exception)) and that people were buying less desirable Dell servers simply because Dell would actually sell and deliver them (HP's sales function was also totally screwed up at this time) it became clear that no small company that was going to become big was going to do it on Sun hardware (SPARC or x86).

At that point it became crystal clear Sun was doomed; final straws included Sun cost cutting or otherwise screwing up their servers (details on request, but e.g. Joyent stopped buying Sun hardware while they continue to use Solaris).

If I want to get nasty, I'd have to wonder about how much Sun's recent (post Java 6) stewardship of Java made Oracle want retain Gosling and his peers.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#104

Post by hga »

jbarham wrote: post #49
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.…

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?" - Seymour Cray There are a lot of other great Cray quotes.

And its a great metaphor for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law, which was one of the "secrets" to the success of the Cray 1: even when you couldn't use the vector hardware it was blindly fast (80 MHz in the mid-70s).

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#105

Post by hga »

adharmad wrote: post #75

From the article: "All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone." It need not have come to that if they had used their "ability to decide" in managing Sun properly. You cannot hang your hat for very long on "we made good software but were unable to sell it".

And then there's the interminable delay in Java 7. In this case, "made", as in the past tense of "make" is the operative word. As I noted elsewhere, I'm not sure Oracle wanted to give Gosling and his peers decision making authority (let alone retain them) based on their recent preformance.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#106

Post by hga »

strait wrote: post #82

I'm wondering what happened to the real mastermind, Guy Steele.

Heh.

Nah, he was brought in after Java was going to help write the language definition document, given his fantastic demonstrated ability to do this: Scheme, co-author of the best one for C, Common Lisp.

He's now working on Fortress, a HPC language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_%28programming_languag...). As far as I know, people doing research are still happy (enough), employed, etc., e.g. that project is still going with the most recent release a month and a half ago and the Maxine JVM in Java was fine as of the time Oracle sued Google, when I stopped paying attention to it.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#107

Post by docgnome »

tamersalama wrote: post #81
docgnome wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obvious that a small group of great programmers beats a large group of bad ones. This is pointed out constantly on HN and in other programming communities. I'm curious though if anyone has any hard data to support this, beyond anecdotal evidence. (I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment, I agree completely. I'm just interested in seeing any studies done on the subject. I imagine this applies to many other fields…

Data are hard to come by in the industry (compared to, say, manufacturing where science branches were spawned based on analysis, observations). From where I stand, the cost of poor quality software goes beyond the production. It's more in maintenance, licensing, lost opportunities, and poor adaptability to changing business needs.

Right. Which is why we need a long term study. To follow a product from conception to production to end of life.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#108

Post by TheCondor »

davidw wrote: post #3

Some quotes: > Oracle did not have a notion of a senior engineer or at least one equivalent to Gosling’s grade at Sun, where he was a fellow. “In my job offer, they had me at a fairly significant grade level down,” he said. Says something about how they value technical people. > The word came down that Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. So she forced the thing to be cancelled. But they didn’t save any m…

> Says something about how they value technical people.

I don't know much about Oracle but I have heard, FWIW, that they are one of the few remaining companies that really does and did whatever they could to not lay droves of folks off during the slow down. It's kind of hard to get a job there but they'll keep you forever if you do. I'm not sure how true that is or isn't.

Maybe not the sexiest titles but if that's true it shows that they do value employees.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#109

Post by ghjklkjh »

TheCondor wrote: post #108
davidw wrote: post #3

Some quotes: > Oracle did not have a notion of a senior engineer or at least one equivalent to Gosling’s grade at Sun, where he was a fellow. “In my job offer, they had me at a fairly significant grade level down,” he said. Says something about how they value technical people. > The word came down that Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. So she forced the thing to be cancelled. But they didn’t save any m…

> Says something about how they value technical people. I don't know much about Oracle but I have heard, FWIW, that they are one of the few remaining companies that really does and did whatever they could to not lay droves of folks off during the slow down. It's kind of hard to get a job there but they'll keep you forever if you do. I'm not sure how true that is or isn't. Maybe not the sexiest titles but if that's tr…

They value head count.

It's typical of non-technical middle managers that their value is proportional to the number of people they supervise - so they all fight to keep the size of 'their' people. It doesn't mean that conditions there are any good.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#110

Post by va_coder »

tsotha wrote: post #94
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 c…

I agree. I also think managers with discipline and ok intelligence are better than managers that are really intelligent with little discipline.

The disciplined managers focus on what needs to get done and do it. (The don't spend part of their day reading HN ;)

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