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I have worked in Oracle for 2 years and I have worked at other Fortune 500 companies. Oracle, by far, is the most soulless and lethargic company among all of th

I have worked in Oracle for 2 years and I have worked at other Fortune 500 companies. Oracle, by far, is the most soulless and lethargic company among all of them.

pjmlp 9y ago
Sure, not all of them are the same. However those with heavy use of external consulting and off-shoring, seem to come pretty close.
- sacheendra 9y ago
  I don't understand the negativity towards using consultants and off-shoring. Using consultants is a business decision which helps the company hire people for the short term of the project and also offload risk. Not all companies have the capability to handle all kinds of risk. For example, software companies don't specialise in financial models and investing. So they don't take on financial risks by investing in derivatives and other instruments to make profit. Whenever possible, risk outside core competencies is outsourced. This is good for the company as then it can focus on the core business and make money. Off-shoring is bad in the sense that jobs are lost in the local economy. But, this is again similar to having a factory in China as opposed to San Francisco. It brings in more expertise at a reduced cost. Off-shoring helps make things cheaper in the end. For example, as your insurance company uses off-shore consultants to make their software, it is cheaper directly translating to lower insurance premiums. the same for many other products. While I understand that software is a different beast to build unlike toys or other products. Once built, the normal theories of economics still apply.
  - Retric 9y ago
    They both reduce institutional knowlage. This tends to be extremely detrimental in the long term. Outsourcing software is like burning all the design documentation for hardware your having someone else build. Even something as well known as injection molding tends to work vastly better if you have experienced staff as part of the design process. And software is worse than that because the design process is part of development, so outsourcing means you don't even understand the problem space.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - specialist 9y ago
      Ya. If I wouldn't pay the consultants in the office across the street to work on my core IT (outsourcing), why would I pay someone separated by oceans, timezones, language, culture... (offshoring)? While working in healthcare, our corporate overlords repeatedly rammed the "blended shore" model down our throats. Which never worked. (Got to know some nice people, though. So there's that.) The easiest part of our job was the coding. Requirements gathering, analysis, project management, customer relations, QA/Test, etc. Working shoulder to shoulder with our clients, it was hard enough. No way our work could be further delegated while still delivering something useful. Preaching to the choir, I know, apologies.
      - paulddraper 9y ago
        Exactly. It's a good short-term, bad long-term strategy. Just like any other short-term strategy, could be appropriate sometimes, but very rarely is.
    - sacheendra 9y ago
      I agree with your point. Its just that not all consulting or outsourcing is bad. A decade ago, at least in my experience, Chinese products were synonymous with bad quality and were not considered reliable. Nowadays, while those kinds of products do exist there also exist very good products designed and made in China (eg: DJI, OnePlus, etc.). I reckon its still early days for software and going forward, we will learn how to build higher quality standard stuff and even high quality novel products. Generating this stigma against against consulting and off-shoring before we have had time to properly analyse the cost-benefit tradeoff doesn't help anyone. They might be and are probably bad in many cases, and cases where they did not work should be publicised and studied. But making broad statements and correlating them with bad work environment is not helpful.
      - Retric 9y ago
        I think there is plenty of data to start drawing conclusions. In the short term it can often work really well. Somewhat more rarely it can also work long term. The trick IMO is to be hands on. Apple's approach to manufacturing is to be aware of what's going on even if they are not actually doing it.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I happen to do enterprise consulting, so I get to live through "us vs them" situations within companies with cultures similar to Oracle quite often, hence my example.
mbesto 9y ago
Having worked for and worked with the major licensed software vendors (Oracle, SAP, MS, etc), I echo that Oracle is by far the worst of the bunch.
ci5er 9y ago
Lethargic? How so? How did they become so - because they live off of the support portion of the Enterprise Oracle licenses?
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  It's the lethargic "itis" a tick or mosquito or lamprey feels after sucking your blood. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=the%20Itis http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=the%20Itis
- samoright 9y ago
  Oracle is lethargic from the perspective of its employees because the company is extraordinarily sluggish and apathetic. The pace at which Oracle develops software, the flagship Oracle Database for example, is ridiculously slow. The Database team takes about 3 months to 6 months to develop tiny changes (say 10 to 20 lines of code). In other Fortune 500 companies I have worked for, I have seen such changes taking about a few days (5 days max!). I am not kidding! What takes say 3 days to develop in a normal software company may take about 3 months to develop in Oracle. And mind you, Oracle Database is one of the premier departments of Oracle; other departments are even worse! Oracle is also remarkably apathetic to its employees. The link[1] shared by foo101, i.e. has a few anecdotes that highlights this apathy. In fact, when I read James Gosling's account of Oracle in that link, I thought, "Wow! This is so accurate. Even someone of the name and fame as James Gosling had to face the same lowly problems at Oracles that relatively unknown developers in Oracle face." Disclaimer: I worked for Oracle for 2 years. [1]: http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-why-i-quit-oracle http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-...
- jklowden 9y ago
  Oracle lives in a market protected by high barriers to entry and low customer expectations. Protecting corporate databases from corruption and unauthorized access is crucial to any IT department. Incentive to change the DBMS vendor is nil compared to the expense and risks of converting. And no one, from CTO to DBA, makes any demand to substantially improve the product, such as by rectifying theoretical problems with SQL that have been recognized for decades. It's no different with SQL Server or DB2. Each vendor has its captured market, with very little power to enlarge its share and commensurately little need to innovate. Customer demands amount to operational window dressing. Why spend money on engineering when customer and vendor are both satisfied?

I have worked in Oracle for 2 years and I have worked at other Fortune 500 companies. Oracle, by far, is the most soulless and lethargic company among all of them.

pjmlp 9y ago

Sure, not all of them are the same. However those with heavy use of external consulting and off-shoring, seem to come pretty close.

sacheendra 9y ago
I don't understand the negativity towards using consultants and off-shoring. Using consultants is a business decision which helps the company hire people for the short term of the project and also offload risk. Not all companies have the capability to handle all kinds of risk. For example, software companies don't specialise in financial models and investing. So they don't take on financial risks by investing in derivatives and other instruments to make profit. Whenever possible, risk outside core competencies is outsourced. This is good for the company as then it can focus on the core business and make money. Off-shoring is bad in the sense that jobs are lost in the local economy. But, this is again similar to having a factory in China as opposed to San Francisco. It brings in more expertise at a reduced cost. Off-shoring helps make things cheaper in the end. For example, as your insurance company uses off-shore consultants to make their software, it is cheaper directly translating to lower insurance premiums. the same for many other products. While I understand that software is a different beast to build unlike toys or other products. Once built, the normal theories of economics still apply.
- Retric 9y ago
  They both reduce institutional knowlage. This tends to be extremely detrimental in the long term. Outsourcing software is like burning all the design documentation for hardware your having someone else build. Even something as well known as injection molding tends to work vastly better if you have experienced staff as part of the design process. And software is worse than that because the design process is part of development, so outsourcing means you don't even understand the problem space.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - specialist 9y ago
    Ya. If I wouldn't pay the consultants in the office across the street to work on my core IT (outsourcing), why would I pay someone separated by oceans, timezones, language, culture... (offshoring)? While working in healthcare, our corporate overlords repeatedly rammed the "blended shore" model down our throats. Which never worked. (Got to know some nice people, though. So there's that.) The easiest part of our job was the coding. Requirements gathering, analysis, project management, customer relations, QA/Test, etc. Working shoulder to shoulder with our clients, it was hard enough. No way our work could be further delegated while still delivering something useful. Preaching to the choir, I know, apologies.
    - paulddraper 9y ago
      Exactly. It's a good short-term, bad long-term strategy. Just like any other short-term strategy, could be appropriate sometimes, but very rarely is.
  - sacheendra 9y ago
    I agree with your point. Its just that not all consulting or outsourcing is bad. A decade ago, at least in my experience, Chinese products were synonymous with bad quality and were not considered reliable. Nowadays, while those kinds of products do exist there also exist very good products designed and made in China (eg: DJI, OnePlus, etc.). I reckon its still early days for software and going forward, we will learn how to build higher quality standard stuff and even high quality novel products. Generating this stigma against against consulting and off-shoring before we have had time to properly analyse the cost-benefit tradeoff doesn't help anyone. They might be and are probably bad in many cases, and cases where they did not work should be publicised and studied. But making broad statements and correlating them with bad work environment is not helpful.
    - Retric 9y ago
      I think there is plenty of data to start drawing conclusions. In the short term it can often work really well. Somewhat more rarely it can also work long term. The trick IMO is to be hands on. Apple's approach to manufacturing is to be aware of what's going on even if they are not actually doing it.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I happen to do enterprise consulting, so I get to live through "us vs them" situations within companies with cultures similar to Oracle quite often, hence my example.

mbesto 9y ago

Having worked for and worked with the major licensed software vendors (Oracle, SAP, MS, etc), I echo that Oracle is by far the worst of the bunch.

ci5er 9y ago

Lethargic? How so? How did they become so - because they live off of the support portion of the Enterprise Oracle licenses?

DonHopkins 9y ago
It's the lethargic "itis" a tick or mosquito or lamprey feels after sucking your blood. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=the%20Itis http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=the%20Itis
samoright 9y ago
Oracle is lethargic from the perspective of its employees because the company is extraordinarily sluggish and apathetic. The pace at which Oracle develops software, the flagship Oracle Database for example, is ridiculously slow. The Database team takes about 3 months to 6 months to develop tiny changes (say 10 to 20 lines of code). In other Fortune 500 companies I have worked for, I have seen such changes taking about a few days (5 days max!). I am not kidding! What takes say 3 days to develop in a normal software company may take about 3 months to develop in Oracle. And mind you, Oracle Database is one of the premier departments of Oracle; other departments are even worse! Oracle is also remarkably apathetic to its employees. The link[1] shared by foo101, i.e. has a few anecdotes that highlights this apathy. In fact, when I read James Gosling's account of Oracle in that link, I thought, "Wow! This is so accurate. Even someone of the name and fame as James Gosling had to face the same lowly problems at Oracles that relatively unknown developers in Oracle face." Disclaimer: I worked for Oracle for 2 years. [1]: http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-why-i-quit-oracle http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-...
jklowden 9y ago
Oracle lives in a market protected by high barriers to entry and low customer expectations. Protecting corporate databases from corruption and unauthorized access is crucial to any IT department. Incentive to change the DBMS vendor is nil compared to the expense and risks of converting. And no one, from CTO to DBA, makes any demand to substantially improve the product, such as by rectifying theoretical problems with SQL that have been recognized for decades. It's no different with SQL Server or DB2. Each vendor has its captured market, with very little power to enlarge its share and commensurately little need to innovate. Customer demands amount to operational window dressing. Why spend money on engineering when customer and vendor are both satisfied?