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I don't think that's it. Every corporation thinks of its employees in a dollars and cents kind of way. The operative problem here seems to be that Oracle doe
by lsc 16y ago
I don't think that's it. Every corporation thinks of its employees in a dollars and cents kind of way.
The operative problem here seems to be that Oracle doesn't value senior technical resources as much as some other companies might, or as much as those resources are used to being valued (and really, few people react well to a cut in autonomy, pay or respect.) They aren't willing to invest what is required, probably in the non-monetary sense as much as the monetary sense, to keep the top talent that came with the Sun acquisition. Personally, I agree that this sounds like a mistake, but this sort of attitude is not new for Oracle, and eh, they've done okay so far, so what do I know?
- nailer 16y agoI agree re: your second point, but when I worked at IBM it was explicitly discouraged to use the term 'resources' to refer to people. Personally I find the people that use this outdated term stop doing so when continually referred to as 'Outlook resources'.
- hopeless 16y agoReally? IBM refers to layoffs/redundancies as "Resource Actions", which is surely one of the most mealy-mouthed corporate expressions
- nailer 16y agoYes, really. PMs would publicly mock new-to-IBM PMs who used mid-90s business speak. When I was there they also referred to layoffs as 'getting rid of people'. It was a pretty good environment - honest and respectful. Perhaps your office was different.
- gruseom 16y agoThat's extraordinary and not at all what I would have expected from IBM. I wish there were more places where people ditched corporate doublespeak. Especially that vile phrase "human resources". Soylent Green is human resources.
- iuyfgtrghjk 16y agoAny place that has any kind of "employee valuation policy" doesn't value their employees.
- rbanffy 16y ago> Personally I find the people that use this outdated term stop doing so when continually referred to as 'Outlook resources'. I use to call them "Powerpoint resources", but I think I'll adopt your designation.
- gaius 16y agoI think you're being unfair - some of them are "Visio resources". Tho' they call themselves "architects".
- robin_reala 16y agoEvery corporation thinks of its employees in a dollars and cents kind of way. Reminds me of my brother’s old company ( http://www.freud.com/ http://www.freud.com/ ). Their website says: We employ humans, not resources. Job opportunities, contact the HR manager.
- gizmomagico 16y agoWas the fun part that they suggested contacting the Human Resources manager?
- robin_reala 16y agoWell yes, that was the point I was making :)
- hga 16y agoBased on what James Gosling has said, as a Sun Fellow Jeff Bonwick would have experienced a significant compensation cut and loss of autonomy (near total of the latter for Gosling). Which most people will interpret as a lack of respect. As many others have wondered in this set of comments and others, just what is Oracle's cunning plan to make their purchase of Sun worth the investment???
- Goladus 16y agoCharging more for Solaris support and providing less of it, for starters.
- rbanffy 16y agoAnd thus making it compete with a product that's freely available. I don't think that will work. It would work if Solaris was something people really desired. Right now, it's not. People are very happy with Linux and need some incentive to move to Solaris. Paying more is not a good one.
- hga 16y agoAnd don't forget that no-longer-OpenSolaris is still freely available ... and might even become something now that it's free of the dead hand of Sun (at least for it being a truly "open" project). I for one am not happy with Linux and would love to run Open/whateverSolaris ... if it has serious driver support. That's been the Achilles heal of x86 Solaris for more than a decade (e.g. something I directly experienced in 1999) and fixing that will likely be a determining factor in its future success. Unfortunately that's very painful hard work and lots of it, I wouldn't predict success on general principles. But one can hope.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Goladus 16y agoThere are existing businesses who bet on Solaris and have it widely deployed. Moving to Linux may not be trivial. That is, it may not be beyond the FYO point. [1] The IBM AS400 isn't something that people really desire, but there are a lot of businesses that rely on it and IBM still gets paid to support mainframes. [1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-software/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft...