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James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

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Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#21

Post by 10ren »

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/acquisitions/index.html

But... although it's simple to appreciate the advantages of combining technologies, it's very very hard to actually do. For example, the IBM 360 project, of a series of machines of increasing power (and price), that were all compatible, so customers could upgrade, is a simple idea. But implementing this was a bet-the-company project, it was celebrated as an incredible, miraculous achievement, and the lessons learnt from it remain popular to this day (The Mythical Man Month, by the leader of the 360 project, Fred Brooks.)

To pull off these technical feats, you need the public superstar developers, but also the hidden superstar developers (the x100 coders; the people who, after working closely with them for a while, you observe, oh that guy's a genius); and then the x10 coders, who want to hang out with the geniuses and learn from them. It's places like HP used to be, where Woz wanted to work, at almost all costs (Woz himself being a x100 guy.)

If you only have x5 or x7 coders; and if you don't support them (with infrastructure, secretarial etc - not just compensation, adequate decision-making power, and some kind of recognition.), then, well, you can't do these technical feats. You may seek but not find; ask but it shall not be given; knock but it shall not be opened. Though this is not a disruptive issue, the same factors occur of the difficulty for an established successful company to change its culture and business architecture. And Oracle doesn't want to change anyway.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#22

Post by Tamerlin »

yellowbkpk wrote: post #9
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…

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.

That was one of the things that destroyed NCR after AT&T bought it. AT&T had no technical career path, and effectively cut its own head off.

As a result, AT&T bought NCR for something like $9 billion, and ended up spinning it off for something close to $3 million. My mother was at the time an IBM exec (since retired), and she was ecstatic -- IBM was much bigger in the US, but until AT&T bought it, NCR dominated the international big iron market. AT&T effectively killed off IBM's biggest competitor, and a major part of that was the fact that the entire company culture was optimized around funneling talent into management or out the door.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#23

Post by protomyth »

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…

I was under the impression that Ellison pays for the sponsorship out of his pockets but puts the Oracle logo on the sailboat. Also, it is the BMW Oracle team and the total amount spent was "reported" to be around $200 million.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#24

Post by jonknee »

jacquesm wrote: post #6
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…

> Oracle sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million That's just Larry's favorite toy, I'd imagine the IRS to be interested in that as a deferred payment rather than Oracles shareholders, whatever floats Larry's boat (pun intended) is fine with them, as long as he delivers.

IIRC Oracle doesn't pay anything, they're name is just on the boat because Ellison wants it to be. He's the one paying for it. But I'm sure the boat is actually owned by a corporation that gets its own write offs.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#25

Post by Tamerlin »

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.

Besides, Sun has had a long history of massive screwups -- and they put "don't tell anyone we screwed up" clauses in their support contracts. One company just gave up when they got their UltraSPARC3 rig, found that not only was it not nearly performant enough to meet expectations, but also in order for it to function reliably, they had to disable the 2nd level cache on every CPU, or else a cache glitch would bring down the entire server (32 procs).

It's not a great processor. It hasn't been for a long time. Sun has been the "flock of chickens" vs the POWER "bull" as a result.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#26

Post by jbjohns »

yellowbkpk wrote: post #9
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…

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?

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#28

Post by Tamerlin »

_delirium wrote: post #10
paulbaumgart wrote: post #7

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&...

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.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#29

Post by Tamerlin »

yellowbkpk wrote: post #9
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…

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 forgot to mention in my AT&T diatribe... when they ended my contract there, in customer support (where believe it or not, our phones did not work), the person that they brought in to replace me was internal. Internal transfer displaced contractors, and since we were getting many calls (which the phones not working, that wasn't a surprise), rather than expanding staff, they cut the contracts.

Shortly after I'd been informed but before my last day, my replacement showed me two screw drivers and asked me which one was the FLAT head. At least I could have understood if she'd asked which was the Philips head (is Philips the flat one?), but no.

Re: James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

#30

Post by Tamerlin »

jacquesm wrote: post #12
mseebach wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the implied trade-off is between "IBM axes former SUN-division Foo, 5000 fired" and "Stuck in an unpleasant, but decently paid, job with benefits and no particular obligation not to just pack up and leave when a better opportunity comes along."

Oracle has already fired close to 7,000 people of the original 27,000 that were part of the merger, in June they announced a further 1,000 people to be thrown out but at the same time said they would hire 2,000 new ones mostly for the sales division. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6536G820100604 I don't see how IBM could have done much worse, and I think that Java would have fared a lot better under IBM, which…

IBM's done worse before. In the late 90's my father was part of a first round of IBM layoffs -- in which they cut 6000 jobs... in Dutchess County, New York.

That was the first round of layoffs. Another few thousand got cut a year so later.

And I don't know how many they cut outside of Dutchess County...

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