14 ms·

Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe

207 points by teklaperry 8y ago

samstave 8y ago
I wouldnt be able to say why anyone would want to be working at oracle these days. What compelling reason does oracle even have to attract talent? (Im not being snide, seeious questions)
- sgwae 8y ago
  If we compare software engineering to retail, not everyone can work for walmart (Google), but have to make do with the random dollar store chain (Oracle). There is only so many decent jobs you know.
  - rongenre 8y ago
    I've done [tech] interviews for engineers out of Oracle and haven't been super impressed.
  - Spearchucker 8y ago
    I despise Oracle. And yet if faced with a choice I'd work for Oracle without hesitation before working for Google or Facebook.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - JohnFen 8y ago
      I'd choose "none of the above".
      - analognoise 8y ago
        Unless you've got a mortgage, young kids, a family member to take care of, or you like to eat consistently. I lot of people talk big about not taking those jobs, but those that actually follow through are extremely rare.
        erinnh 8y ago
        If you have the pick between Oracle, Google and Amazon, youd likely also have an offer at a different company. So its a valid choice.
        scarface74 8y ago
        Raises hand. I can absolutely with all honesty say that I would never work for a large company. I worked for a Fortune 10 (non tech) company for 3 years out of my 20 year career and I said never again. Large companies are too stifling and too regimented for me. Even if I didn’t have to move from my low cost of living area and a I was offered a job at a FAANG, I would say no. Well with one exception, I might be willing to work for AWS as a consultant.
        anyfoo 8y ago
        Sorry, but: This is nonsense. It's not like these are the only options, and you cannot get a comparable offer somewhere else.
        JohnFen 8y ago
        I have all of those things, and I've followed though. I know lots of other quality devs who have done the same. I don't think people like us are as rare as you suppose. It's not like the job market is particularly tight, after all.
    - mancerayder 8y ago
      From an ethical perspective, Oracle is mean to tech (open source, buyouts and so on, mean licensing setups with companies). On the other hand, Google and Facebook seem to contribute more to tech while being absolutely vile to the general public. Cutesy yellow and green bicycles and thumbs up signs don't negate the societal harm these companies have done by vacuuming personal data and selling it at such scale. Then again, what is moral? Finance ? Ad tech? And don't say government, IT there is a wreck and a waste (enter Oracle, IBM contracts to piss taxpayer money to). We're highly paid for a reason unfortunately.
      - ineedasername 8y ago
        Higher Education, colleges and universities, are generally excellent work environments with excellent benefits. Depending on job, salary isn't always competitive with the tech sector though.
        ahi 8y ago
        I work in higher ed. Salaries are nowhere near competitive. However, everyone I work with has opted for good work environment over money. Tends to lead to self-selection of nice people, even if they aren't "rockstars".
        samstave 8y ago
        I knew a couple of people who worked at Stanford in various capacities (admissions, and administration, IIRC) -- and while I didnt understand what they were good at, or what they did per se, they were some of the more genuinely nice and honest than many people I have met. My problem is that I am too naive to sharks and assholes. I have met thousands and thousands of people in may 22 year career in tech. Of which a very very small number I am friends with still - as I find that many people are way more cunning and conniving than I allow myself to admit.
        klipt 8y ago
        Also getting a cushy tenured position takes years of hard work, and the alternative is being a perpetual postdoc which is paid abysmally.
  - xkcd-sucks 8y ago
    Oh that comparison is wonderful. I would suggest Dollar Tree for Oracle because it's reasonably successful at making money
    - jessaustin 8y ago
      Their motto: "Smellier than Dollar General, not as smelly as Family Dollar!"
  - johan_larson 8y ago
    Number 6 on the Forbes list of software companies, with a market cap of 176 billion. Their main product is very heavily used by a heck of a lot of companies. It's just a bit messy and configuration-intensive, so it doesn't get a lot of respect among the techerati. A software engineer looking for work could do a lot worse.
    - bluedino 8y ago
      None of that means they make great products. Have you ever dealt with their support or engineers? Ugh.
      - johan_larson 8y ago
        Not all of us are in a position to work only on great products. My impression of Oracle products is that they are frustrating to work with, feature-rich rather than elegant. They can work well, but take a lot of configuring and tuning. The ex-Oracle folks I've worked with have been a mixed bag. Their reports about working for Oracle have also been mixed, skewing toward the bad. I suspect the company is basically run by sales, not engineering, certainly not customer support.
        scarface74 8y ago
        If you’re a software engineer in the year of 2019, you’re not exactly hurtinv for opportunity.
      - gamblor956 8y ago
        I have seen both a well-implemented Oracle ERP and a poorly/non-implemented Oracle ERP. It is both the best and worse SaaS I have ever used, though my company may be switching to NetSuite ERP soon (technically also now an Oracle product).
  - ineedasername 8y ago
    If Google is Walmart, who is the high-end retail? Exciting startups?
- nate_meurer 8y ago
  Oracle is huge, and the different parts feel like completely different companies in some ways, with different cultures, paces, levels of cooperation, etc. The parts that used be Sun (where I worked) still felt very Sun-y for a decade afterward. I loved my job, never had a bad working relationship in all my experience with 0.1% of the company.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- orathrow 8y ago
  I work for Oracle (and I'm reasonably high-end in my niche - speak at conferences about it and stuff). None of their competitors were willing to consider remote work for the type of stuff I do. Oracle was OK with it. Hence, I work (remotely) at Oracle for the time being. I'd have loved to take a job at a local startup, but of the limited local options for my skillset, none had salaries that would pay the mortgage....
- anti_milestone2 8y ago
  The new cloud infrastructure group is kind of hidden gem. Its very different than the rest of Oracle. It started in Seattle about 4 years ago and is like 40% ex Amazon and 40% ex Microsoft. They also pay very well, because Oracle doesn't have a great reputation. The work is good, with a TON of room for growth and leadership. The goal is ambitious (take on the big players) and well funded. The people are good. Worklife is good. They are also still hiring.
  - sofaofthedamned 8y ago
    I went through the recruitment process for a cloud role in their Bristol, UK office. It was bizarre. I was video interviewed by 3 of their people around Europe, but none seemed to have an idea of what they were trying to do or crucially what they wanted me to do. The people I spoke to were technically proficient, but not driven in the same way you'd imagine a FAANG employee to be. I eventually gave up after the process dragged out too far. You can imagine Amazon / AWS being able to get away with this, but Oracle?
    - tinyhouse 8y ago
      Don't know about Oracle, but in many big companies and especially FAANG, the people interviewing you usually have no idea what you're going to work on or what the team is working on. It's usually only the hiring manager who can give you such info. There are so many people and teams in every organization, and the people who interview you are usually people with the right skills that happen to be available in the time slots you provided. It's usually not the people you will work with.
  - rooam-dev 8y ago
    Is the work enjoyable? I would assume you have to use only Oracle branded solutions/tools which I am not sure is for everyone.
    - volkadav 8y ago
      I work at OCI. It's a pretty good gig, all things considered. Just my two cents. There isn't a super strong push to use The One True Corporate Solution as you mention, by and large we're given a very free hand in terms of tech selection.
- r00fus 8y ago
  > What compelling reason does oracle even have to attract talent? It used to be benefits. Back in 2005 (when I worked for them for a year) they had what I understood to be the 2nd best benefits plan in tech (just after Microsoft).
- gricardo99 8y ago
  I can see why most people would think working for the "fucked by the cloud" companies[1] would be a terrible idea. But as others have said, those companies are huge, and they have pretty cutting edge R&D groups. Some of the business units still put out products with very nice growth and profit margins. 1 - https://www.wired.com/2015/10/meet-walking-dead-hp-cisco-dell-emc-ibm-oracle/ https://www.wired.com/2015/10/meet-walking-dead-hp-cisco-del...
- shereadsthenews 8y ago
  I recently interviewed somebody who's been working at Yahoo since the dawn of time. Some people just value stability.
- bluedino 8y ago
  They’re a bodyshop
- philwelch 8y ago
  According to rumor--lots and lots of cash.
  - chillacy 8y ago
    So much cash, I hear even more than a lot of FAANG offers.
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    I'm aware of at least one person who was a millionaire on Google RSUs in 2014 who got hired away by Oracle.
- ssalazars 8y ago
  I currently work for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure; ex AWS for Commerce Platform and Identity organizations. Let me tell you, OCI has a group of brilliant, industry mature developers and people. I've been working here for 2 years, and I've never been happier before. This org is nothing like Oracle Corp; started by ex-AWS/MSFT people, the environment feels just like those companies + a well funded start-up hype. And the best thing, no assholes and backstabbing like in AWS. :)
  - samstave 8y ago
    Can you expand on the AWS culture of backstabbing? (Serious question: Could that be due to the number of H1-B employees they have?)
- geodel 8y ago
  Just a guess, may be some people need job and Oracle is offering one.
- Karrot 8y ago
  DCO has been poaching anyone they can get from Amazon/Microsoft by offering higher salary. If you come from one of those or you know someone at oracle you're in. I know DCO's that couldnt tell you how to find the ip of an interface that make 85k+/yr
nate_meurer 8y ago
Here's a useless anecdote: I was fired from Oracle a couple years back, and it was done as pleasantly as one could expect. It completely depends on who's running your department. I was in storage testing. My direct manager had mediocre people skills, but the director is a superb manager in all respects, and she was the one who pulled the trigger in a face-to-face meeting with me. She made it as clean and honest as it gets. I'm not a huge fan of the company, but I wouldn't hesitate to work for her again. Obviously the experience of a singe drone has little bearing on anyone else. I feel bad for everyone getting pushed out of the boat this month.
- nine_k 8y ago
  > I'm not a huge fan of the company, but I wouldn't hesitate to work for her again. This. I always find myself loyal not to the company but to my (extended) team.
- toyg 8y ago
  I left when the writing was on the wall; it took another 4 years for them to pull the plug on the rest of the (UK) group, because the slow-erosion strategy wasn't working quickly enough; but they were given a pretty fair treatment, by all accounts. Oracle is a massive company, even with trade unions here in Europe. They will not screw you over, as long as you agree that their first and foremost priority is their bank account and act accordingly.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    Could you describe the slow-erosion strategy?
    - nate_meurer 8y ago
      In its most honest form, it's just letting attrition work naturally. Slimy companies do things to undermine morale and make work untenable for established employees, especially the expensive senior ones. Good example is IBM abruptly banning remote work. Marissa Mayer was known for this kind of thing at Yahoo too.
0xDEFC0DE 8y ago
I've been seeing quite a few layoff posts since the new year. Is this just my own bias or has anyone noticed an uptick in massive layoff events?
- tehlike 8y ago
  Some of it is recency bias, some of it is true. Combine it with stock market woes, yield curve, it makes you think.
- nathanaldensr 8y ago
  Speculation, but I think corporations are expecting a recession... and thus, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
RickJWagner 8y ago
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.
- rooam-dev 8y ago
  Really? Oregon vs. Oracle doesn't inspire much trust. https://www.marklogic.com/blog/oracle-oregon-lawsuit https://www.marklogic.com/blog/oracle-oregon-lawsuit
  - sidcool 8y ago
    That is quite damning. Had no idea of this incident.
fencepost 8y ago
It would be nice to be able to expect better from Oracle, but I don't.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  Yeah this behavior sounds entirely on-brand to me.
kplex 8y ago
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?
- ssalazars 8y ago
  high paying multi million dollar companies https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/iaas/customers https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/iaas/customers
  - why_only_15 8y ago
    Interesting that few of those are tech companies. For comparison, AWS's list is mostly tech companies: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/
    - ahi 8y ago
      I know a CIO of a large private company (billions revenue) that has an associates in business mgmt and was promoted from within. Excellent people skills and a good golf game. There's no way they can recruit a competent and empowered IT team so a good sales team makes the decisions. Outside of tech companies, I have no doubt that this is the norm.
- ineedasername 8y ago
  > too deep into the Oracle ecosystem to go anywhere else This is certainly part of it. I read something around the time of a quarterly earnings report recently that spoke about how OCI revenue was increasing rapidly, but was doing so by cannibalizing traditional revenue sources.
- TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
  The government. The government has been funding Oracle from the start, and it's never stopped. Who do you think the NSA and CIA use for all of their data storage and warehousing? It was the FBI that started this mess, and it's the rest of the government that continues it. Ellison often comes off as untouchable in this stories, and that's because he is. He made it possible for the spooks to build "Echelon" 30 years ago. God knows what that's morphed into now. He's a hero to them. Yes, I'm being purposely sardonic, but only a little.
abvdasker 8y ago
A close family member of mine worked for Oracle as a mechanical engineer for 6 years. He had survived many rounds of layoffs at Sun before it was acquired by Oracle and at StorageTek before it was acquired by Sun. He described a depressing corporate culture at Oracle with a seemingly infinite number of middle managers. One of his co-workers spent most of his time in the office managing his real estate business. Larry Ellison is universally hated by the employees. The company is full of academically talented but practically useless people because Oracle will only give interviews to people with a degree from their small list of Ivy-tier universities. Not long ago he retired and left Oracle. As a result of his experience there I'm now of the opinion that these older tech companies frankly can't die fast enough.
- president 8y ago
  What you're describing is general corporate culture after a company has experienced its hayday. Usually all the passionate people including original founders have cashed out, exited the company, and there is nobody left that actually cares about the company. There is a lot of room for mistakes and not delivering results because money grows on trees. People end up skating by and milking their one-hit-wonder cashcow product for years. Politics becomes rampant and an endless supply of bad hires cause the company to slowly rot to its death.
  - monocasa 8y ago
    Oracle's something special in this regard though. It's not like Sun was top of the world when they acquired StorageTek, but having worked in the tape library industry in CO at the time, Oracle seems to be a special section of hell.
    - nate_meurer 8y ago
      Many, many, people who worked on Java and Solaris would agree with you.
  - dasil003 8y ago
    Perhaps best described by the Gervais Principle (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...)
pololee 8y ago
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 at all. Me: "Do I have to pay back sign on bonus and relocation? I've been here for less than 2 months." VP: "You were supposed to, but I pushed it back to the management. Now you are forgiven. That's a very good question." Me: ......................&^#^(%#&)@! Today mark as my first out-of-employment day. I am on H-1B, which is an even worse situation. I'll need to find a new job ASAP :(
- pololee 8y ago
  The VP also mentioned they were thinking about the plan in Jan. So why the hell did you hire me then? I joined at the end of Jan.
  - nradov 8y ago
    Mass layoff decisions like this are typically made at a higher level of the organization. The executives don't give much advance notice to the middle managers who make hiring decisions for most engineers in order to prevent leaks.
    - mgarfias 8y ago
      hiring at oracle is weird. when i worked there my offer had to be approved by larry.
      - whatshisface 8y ago
        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.
        8y ago
patientplatypus 8y ago
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 probably either corrupt, incompetent, or probably both.
- ineedasername 8y ago
  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 designed for them in favor of more flexible SaaS offerings. As a consequence, if you're into data plumbing, data integration jobs are flowering in Higher Ed.
  - crispyambulance 8y ago
    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.
    - ineedasername 8y ago
      About 10 years ago my organization opted for the People Soft ERP, a version customized for the industry. We were sold on it because we were demoed capability that literally did not exist. A year into the implementation as we were about to go live on a major component, they were still building major parts of it. In one truly bizarre meeting, they gleefully announced that a feature-- basically the ability for a user to submit word document or similar into the web interface, was done. Great! I thought. Then I asked the question, "Okay, so where do you go to review the submissions once they're made?" There was no response. I asked again. Then it came. "You want to be able to see them? That's not part of the product. Well, I guess your DBA can query them or something. If you want more, that will be a user customization, our estimates put that around $100,000. That of course wasn't the only issue of this sort. When we refused to sign off on a major deliverable that really hadn't been delivered, literally overnight they walked off the job. Dozens of people. We cancelled the whole project and switched vendors. There was a lawsuit. They settled with us-- those initial demos had been recorded :)
0x0000000 8y ago
Oracle's M.O. is to be very quiet about these things. Same day notification, no heads-up. Over at thelayoff, where you do have to take everything with a grain of salt, users suggest they structure the layoffs specifically to avoid WARN laws. They reportedly laid off hundreds of employees via robocall within the last couple years: https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/3016768/oracle-engineers-working-on-sparc-and-solaris-unix-operating-system-terminated-by-robo-call https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/3016768/oracle-engineer...
packetized 8y ago
If Oracle or Larry Ellison were on fire, I wouldn’t bother pissing on them to extinguish the flames.
- dang 8y ago
  Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
nightfly 8y ago
Anyone know if Oracle still has anyone left working on Solaris at this point?
- servrite 8y ago
  Yes, a very very small core team remains. Many were let go this past Thursday (most remote sites outside HQ were shut down).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
garyclarke27 8y ago
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.
- fgonzag 8y ago
  I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but anyone here works in a medium to large company using Postgres (especially one that switched from multi million dollar licensing), convincing the hire ups of setting a up a small yearly donation or buying a support contract from a core developer is how we can give back. I honestly think PostgreSQL is one the core pillars of the open source community, and one of the more underfunded ones.
  - anarazel 8y ago
    Hear hear.
SoulMan 8y ago
Heard there are some layoffs in India as well https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/oracle-lays-off-100-in-india-as-part-of-its-restructuring/articleshow/68514821.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...
shmat 8y ago
I left Oracle 2 years ago when I decided to retire early. I was the developer contact for a set of internal APIs that are used by many Oracle products, so I worked with developers from all over the company in dozens of countries. The quality and culture of Oracle development organizations is all over the place. There are areas with great developers that are happy and (more) places with lousy developers and hellish cultures. And everything in between. I also know a few people from the Seattle OCI group. That might as well be a different company. They don't have to use any of the sh*tty internal tools and aren't subject to the really bad, political management that is taking over more and more. The question is whether that group will eventually be subject to the bad management that has made more and more of the development org a living hell.
krn1p4n1c 8y ago
I was in the OCI group, left just over a year ago, and just heard from a couple of my old colleagues that they were just let go. Unreal since our group was one of the few really really profitable ones. I agree with the comments about the quality of people in OCI, it was a big step up from the first pass with the PSM group. Much more of the move-fast and do things right kind of mentality and a lot of hires of people with real scale experience trying to do it better the next time. I hope everyone affected can find better jobs.
hooper2019 8y ago
For all sorts of hacking contact this guy via email with guardianofpeace247 AT GMAIL DOT COM. He is very fast and reliable you get all you need in a few hours
yogthos 8y ago
live footage from Oracle offices around the world https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xVip745osc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xVip745osc
yeukhon 8y ago
This makes SAP layoff more sane. At least my friend got about 3-4 months to actually find a job (with severance)
Karrot 8y ago
I was one of the very first groups to be let go early morning on the east coast. I still have access to the blind app oracle channel, and it looks like layoffs are going to continue until September. No notice, no thank you for your work, just goodbye. DCO is filled with people who do nothing, and have data backing up how inefficient they are, but not a single layoff over there. Too many people were hired just because they knew someone. From what my ex-coworkers have told me is Oracle slack is freaking out.

207 points by teklaperry 8y ago

I wouldnt be able to say why anyone would want to be working at oracle these days. What compelling reason does oracle even have to attract talent? (Im not being snide, seeious questions)

sgwae 8y ago
If we compare software engineering to retail, not everyone can work for walmart (Google), but have to make do with the random dollar store chain (Oracle). There is only so many decent jobs you know.
- rongenre 8y ago
  I've done [tech] interviews for engineers out of Oracle and haven't been super impressed.
- Spearchucker 8y ago
  I despise Oracle. And yet if faced with a choice I'd work for Oracle without hesitation before working for Google or Facebook.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    I'd choose "none of the above".
    - analognoise 8y ago
      Unless you've got a mortgage, young kids, a family member to take care of, or you like to eat consistently. I lot of people talk big about not taking those jobs, but those that actually follow through are extremely rare.
      - erinnh 8y ago
        If you have the pick between Oracle, Google and Amazon, youd likely also have an offer at a different company. So its a valid choice.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        Raises hand. I can absolutely with all honesty say that I would never work for a large company. I worked for a Fortune 10 (non tech) company for 3 years out of my 20 year career and I said never again. Large companies are too stifling and too regimented for me. Even if I didn’t have to move from my low cost of living area and a I was offered a job at a FAANG, I would say no. Well with one exception, I might be willing to work for AWS as a consultant.
      - anyfoo 8y ago
        Sorry, but: This is nonsense. It's not like these are the only options, and you cannot get a comparable offer somewhere else.
      - JohnFen 8y ago
        I have all of those things, and I've followed though. I know lots of other quality devs who have done the same. I don't think people like us are as rare as you suppose. It's not like the job market is particularly tight, after all.
  - mancerayder 8y ago
    From an ethical perspective, Oracle is mean to tech (open source, buyouts and so on, mean licensing setups with companies). On the other hand, Google and Facebook seem to contribute more to tech while being absolutely vile to the general public. Cutesy yellow and green bicycles and thumbs up signs don't negate the societal harm these companies have done by vacuuming personal data and selling it at such scale. Then again, what is moral? Finance ? Ad tech? And don't say government, IT there is a wreck and a waste (enter Oracle, IBM contracts to piss taxpayer money to). We're highly paid for a reason unfortunately.
    - ineedasername 8y ago
      Higher Education, colleges and universities, are generally excellent work environments with excellent benefits. Depending on job, salary isn't always competitive with the tech sector though.
      - ahi 8y ago
        I work in higher ed. Salaries are nowhere near competitive. However, everyone I work with has opted for good work environment over money. Tends to lead to self-selection of nice people, even if they aren't "rockstars".
        samstave 8y ago
        I knew a couple of people who worked at Stanford in various capacities (admissions, and administration, IIRC) -- and while I didnt understand what they were good at, or what they did per se, they were some of the more genuinely nice and honest than many people I have met. My problem is that I am too naive to sharks and assholes. I have met thousands and thousands of people in may 22 year career in tech. Of which a very very small number I am friends with still - as I find that many people are way more cunning and conniving than I allow myself to admit.
      - klipt 8y ago
        Also getting a cushy tenured position takes years of hard work, and the alternative is being a perpetual postdoc which is paid abysmally.
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
  Oh that comparison is wonderful. I would suggest Dollar Tree for Oracle because it's reasonably successful at making money
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    Their motto: "Smellier than Dollar General, not as smelly as Family Dollar!"
- johan_larson 8y ago
  Number 6 on the Forbes list of software companies, with a market cap of 176 billion. Their main product is very heavily used by a heck of a lot of companies. It's just a bit messy and configuration-intensive, so it doesn't get a lot of respect among the techerati. A software engineer looking for work could do a lot worse.
  - bluedino 8y ago
    None of that means they make great products. Have you ever dealt with their support or engineers? Ugh.
    - johan_larson 8y ago
      Not all of us are in a position to work only on great products. My impression of Oracle products is that they are frustrating to work with, feature-rich rather than elegant. They can work well, but take a lot of configuring and tuning. The ex-Oracle folks I've worked with have been a mixed bag. Their reports about working for Oracle have also been mixed, skewing toward the bad. I suspect the company is basically run by sales, not engineering, certainly not customer support.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        If you’re a software engineer in the year of 2019, you’re not exactly hurtinv for opportunity.
    - gamblor956 8y ago
      I have seen both a well-implemented Oracle ERP and a poorly/non-implemented Oracle ERP. It is both the best and worse SaaS I have ever used, though my company may be switching to NetSuite ERP soon (technically also now an Oracle product).
- ineedasername 8y ago
  If Google is Walmart, who is the high-end retail? Exciting startups?
nate_meurer 8y ago
Oracle is huge, and the different parts feel like completely different companies in some ways, with different cultures, paces, levels of cooperation, etc. The parts that used be Sun (where I worked) still felt very Sun-y for a decade afterward. I loved my job, never had a bad working relationship in all my experience with 0.1% of the company.
deleted 8y ago
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orathrow 8y ago
I work for Oracle (and I'm reasonably high-end in my niche - speak at conferences about it and stuff). None of their competitors were willing to consider remote work for the type of stuff I do. Oracle was OK with it. Hence, I work (remotely) at Oracle for the time being. I'd have loved to take a job at a local startup, but of the limited local options for my skillset, none had salaries that would pay the mortgage....
anti_milestone2 8y ago
The new cloud infrastructure group is kind of hidden gem. Its very different than the rest of Oracle. It started in Seattle about 4 years ago and is like 40% ex Amazon and 40% ex Microsoft. They also pay very well, because Oracle doesn't have a great reputation. The work is good, with a TON of room for growth and leadership. The goal is ambitious (take on the big players) and well funded. The people are good. Worklife is good. They are also still hiring.
- sofaofthedamned 8y ago
  I went through the recruitment process for a cloud role in their Bristol, UK office. It was bizarre. I was video interviewed by 3 of their people around Europe, but none seemed to have an idea of what they were trying to do or crucially what they wanted me to do. The people I spoke to were technically proficient, but not driven in the same way you'd imagine a FAANG employee to be. I eventually gave up after the process dragged out too far. You can imagine Amazon / AWS being able to get away with this, but Oracle?
  - tinyhouse 8y ago
    Don't know about Oracle, but in many big companies and especially FAANG, the people interviewing you usually have no idea what you're going to work on or what the team is working on. It's usually only the hiring manager who can give you such info. There are so many people and teams in every organization, and the people who interview you are usually people with the right skills that happen to be available in the time slots you provided. It's usually not the people you will work with.
- rooam-dev 8y ago
  Is the work enjoyable? I would assume you have to use only Oracle branded solutions/tools which I am not sure is for everyone.
  - volkadav 8y ago
    I work at OCI. It's a pretty good gig, all things considered. Just my two cents. There isn't a super strong push to use The One True Corporate Solution as you mention, by and large we're given a very free hand in terms of tech selection.
r00fus 8y ago
> What compelling reason does oracle even have to attract talent? It used to be benefits. Back in 2005 (when I worked for them for a year) they had what I understood to be the 2nd best benefits plan in tech (just after Microsoft).
gricardo99 8y ago
I can see why most people would think working for the "fucked by the cloud" companies[1] would be a terrible idea. But as others have said, those companies are huge, and they have pretty cutting edge R&D groups. Some of the business units still put out products with very nice growth and profit margins. 1 - https://www.wired.com/2015/10/meet-walking-dead-hp-cisco-dell-emc-ibm-oracle/ https://www.wired.com/2015/10/meet-walking-dead-hp-cisco-del...
shereadsthenews 8y ago
I recently interviewed somebody who's been working at Yahoo since the dawn of time. Some people just value stability.
bluedino 8y ago
They’re a bodyshop
philwelch 8y ago
According to rumor--lots and lots of cash.
- chillacy 8y ago
  So much cash, I hear even more than a lot of FAANG offers.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  I'm aware of at least one person who was a millionaire on Google RSUs in 2014 who got hired away by Oracle.
ssalazars 8y ago
I currently work for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure; ex AWS for Commerce Platform and Identity organizations. Let me tell you, OCI has a group of brilliant, industry mature developers and people. I've been working here for 2 years, and I've never been happier before. This org is nothing like Oracle Corp; started by ex-AWS/MSFT people, the environment feels just like those companies + a well funded start-up hype. And the best thing, no assholes and backstabbing like in AWS. :)
- samstave 8y ago
  Can you expand on the AWS culture of backstabbing? (Serious question: Could that be due to the number of H1-B employees they have?)
geodel 8y ago
Just a guess, may be some people need job and Oracle is offering one.
Karrot 8y ago
DCO has been poaching anyone they can get from Amazon/Microsoft by offering higher salary. If you come from one of those or you know someone at oracle you're in. I know DCO's that couldnt tell you how to find the ip of an interface that make 85k+/yr

nate_meurer 8y ago

Here's a useless anecdote: I was fired from Oracle a couple years back, and it was done as pleasantly as one could expect. It completely depends on who's running your department. I was in storage testing. My direct manager had mediocre people skills, but the director is a superb manager in all respects, and she was the one who pulled the trigger in a face-to-face meeting with me. She made it as clean and honest as it gets. I'm not a huge fan of the company, but I wouldn't hesitate to work for her again. Obviously the experience of a singe drone has little bearing on anyone else. I feel bad for everyone getting pushed out of the boat this month.

nine_k 8y ago
> I'm not a huge fan of the company, but I wouldn't hesitate to work for her again. This. I always find myself loyal not to the company but to my (extended) team.
toyg 8y ago
I left when the writing was on the wall; it took another 4 years for them to pull the plug on the rest of the (UK) group, because the slow-erosion strategy wasn't working quickly enough; but they were given a pretty fair treatment, by all accounts. Oracle is a massive company, even with trade unions here in Europe. They will not screw you over, as long as you agree that their first and foremost priority is their bank account and act accordingly.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- solarkraft 8y ago
  Could you describe the slow-erosion strategy?
  - nate_meurer 8y ago
    In its most honest form, it's just letting attrition work naturally. Slimy companies do things to undermine morale and make work untenable for established employees, especially the expensive senior ones. Good example is IBM abruptly banning remote work. Marissa Mayer was known for this kind of thing at Yahoo too.

0xDEFC0DE 8y ago

I've been seeing quite a few layoff posts since the new year. Is this just my own bias or has anyone noticed an uptick in massive layoff events?

tehlike 8y ago
Some of it is recency bias, some of it is true. Combine it with stock market woes, yield curve, it makes you think.
nathanaldensr 8y ago
Speculation, but I think corporations are expecting a recession... and thus, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

RickJWagner 8y ago

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.

rooam-dev 8y ago
Really? Oregon vs. Oracle doesn't inspire much trust. https://www.marklogic.com/blog/oracle-oregon-lawsuit https://www.marklogic.com/blog/oracle-oregon-lawsuit
- sidcool 8y ago
  That is quite damning. Had no idea of this incident.

fencepost 8y ago

It would be nice to be able to expect better from Oracle, but I don't.

JohnFen 8y ago
Yeah this behavior sounds entirely on-brand to me.

kplex 8y ago

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?

ssalazars 8y ago
high paying multi million dollar companies https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/iaas/customers https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/iaas/customers
- why_only_15 8y ago
  Interesting that few of those are tech companies. For comparison, AWS's list is mostly tech companies: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/
  - ahi 8y ago
    I know a CIO of a large private company (billions revenue) that has an associates in business mgmt and was promoted from within. Excellent people skills and a good golf game. There's no way they can recruit a competent and empowered IT team so a good sales team makes the decisions. Outside of tech companies, I have no doubt that this is the norm.
ineedasername 8y ago
> too deep into the Oracle ecosystem to go anywhere else This is certainly part of it. I read something around the time of a quarterly earnings report recently that spoke about how OCI revenue was increasing rapidly, but was doing so by cannibalizing traditional revenue sources.
TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
The government. The government has been funding Oracle from the start, and it's never stopped. Who do you think the NSA and CIA use for all of their data storage and warehousing? It was the FBI that started this mess, and it's the rest of the government that continues it. Ellison often comes off as untouchable in this stories, and that's because he is. He made it possible for the spooks to build "Echelon" 30 years ago. God knows what that's morphed into now. He's a hero to them. Yes, I'm being purposely sardonic, but only a little.

abvdasker 8y ago

A close family member of mine worked for Oracle as a mechanical engineer for 6 years. He had survived many rounds of layoffs at Sun before it was acquired by Oracle and at StorageTek before it was acquired by Sun. He described a depressing corporate culture at Oracle with a seemingly infinite number of middle managers. One of his co-workers spent most of his time in the office managing his real estate business. Larry Ellison is universally hated by the employees. The company is full of academically talented but practically useless people because Oracle will only give interviews to people with a degree from their small list of Ivy-tier universities. Not long ago he retired and left Oracle. As a result of his experience there I'm now of the opinion that these older tech companies frankly can't die fast enough.

president 8y ago
What you're describing is general corporate culture after a company has experienced its hayday. Usually all the passionate people including original founders have cashed out, exited the company, and there is nobody left that actually cares about the company. There is a lot of room for mistakes and not delivering results because money grows on trees. People end up skating by and milking their one-hit-wonder cashcow product for years. Politics becomes rampant and an endless supply of bad hires cause the company to slowly rot to its death.
- monocasa 8y ago
  Oracle's something special in this regard though. It's not like Sun was top of the world when they acquired StorageTek, but having worked in the tape library industry in CO at the time, Oracle seems to be a special section of hell.
  - nate_meurer 8y ago
    Many, many, people who worked on Java and Solaris would agree with you.
- dasil003 8y ago
  Perhaps best described by the Gervais Principle (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...)

pololee 8y ago

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 at all. Me: "Do I have to pay back sign on bonus and relocation? I've been here for less than 2 months." VP: "You were supposed to, but I pushed it back to the management. Now you are forgiven. That's a very good question." Me: ......................&^#^(%#&)@! Today mark as my first out-of-employment day. I am on H-1B, which is an even worse situation. I'll need to find a new job ASAP :(

pololee 8y ago
The VP also mentioned they were thinking about the plan in Jan. So why the hell did you hire me then? I joined at the end of Jan.
- nradov 8y ago
  Mass layoff decisions like this are typically made at a higher level of the organization. The executives don't give much advance notice to the middle managers who make hiring decisions for most engineers in order to prevent leaks.
  - mgarfias 8y ago
    hiring at oracle is weird. when i worked there my offer had to be approved by larry.
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      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.
      - 8y ago

patientplatypus 8y ago

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 probably either corrupt, incompetent, or probably both.

ineedasername 8y ago
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 designed for them in favor of more flexible SaaS offerings. As a consequence, if you're into data plumbing, data integration jobs are flowering in Higher Ed.
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  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.
  - ineedasername 8y ago
    About 10 years ago my organization opted for the People Soft ERP, a version customized for the industry. We were sold on it because we were demoed capability that literally did not exist. A year into the implementation as we were about to go live on a major component, they were still building major parts of it. In one truly bizarre meeting, they gleefully announced that a feature-- basically the ability for a user to submit word document or similar into the web interface, was done. Great! I thought. Then I asked the question, "Okay, so where do you go to review the submissions once they're made?" There was no response. I asked again. Then it came. "You want to be able to see them? That's not part of the product. Well, I guess your DBA can query them or something. If you want more, that will be a user customization, our estimates put that around $100,000. That of course wasn't the only issue of this sort. When we refused to sign off on a major deliverable that really hadn't been delivered, literally overnight they walked off the job. Dozens of people. We cancelled the whole project and switched vendors. There was a lawsuit. They settled with us-- those initial demos had been recorded :)

0x0000000 8y ago

Oracle's M.O. is to be very quiet about these things. Same day notification, no heads-up. Over at thelayoff, where you do have to take everything with a grain of salt, users suggest they structure the layoffs specifically to avoid WARN laws. They reportedly laid off hundreds of employees via robocall within the last couple years: https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/3016768/oracle-engineers-working-on-sparc-and-solaris-unix-operating-system-terminated-by-robo-call https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/3016768/oracle-engineer...

packetized 8y ago

If Oracle or Larry Ellison were on fire, I wouldn’t bother pissing on them to extinguish the flames.

dang 8y ago
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

nightfly 8y ago

Anyone know if Oracle still has anyone left working on Solaris at this point?

servrite 8y ago
Yes, a very very small core team remains. Many were let go this past Thursday (most remote sites outside HQ were shut down).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

garyclarke27 8y ago

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.

fgonzag 8y ago
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but anyone here works in a medium to large company using Postgres (especially one that switched from multi million dollar licensing), convincing the hire ups of setting a up a small yearly donation or buying a support contract from a core developer is how we can give back. I honestly think PostgreSQL is one the core pillars of the open source community, and one of the more underfunded ones.
- anarazel 8y ago
  Hear hear.

SoulMan 8y ago

Heard there are some layoffs in India as well https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/oracle-lays-off-100-in-india-as-part-of-its-restructuring/articleshow/68514821.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...

shmat 8y ago

I left Oracle 2 years ago when I decided to retire early. I was the developer contact for a set of internal APIs that are used by many Oracle products, so I worked with developers from all over the company in dozens of countries. The quality and culture of Oracle development organizations is all over the place. There are areas with great developers that are happy and (more) places with lousy developers and hellish cultures. And everything in between. I also know a few people from the Seattle OCI group. That might as well be a different company. They don't have to use any of the sh*tty internal tools and aren't subject to the really bad, political management that is taking over more and more. The question is whether that group will eventually be subject to the bad management that has made more and more of the development org a living hell.

krn1p4n1c 8y ago

I was in the OCI group, left just over a year ago, and just heard from a couple of my old colleagues that they were just let go. Unreal since our group was one of the few really really profitable ones. I agree with the comments about the quality of people in OCI, it was a big step up from the first pass with the PSM group. Much more of the move-fast and do things right kind of mentality and a lot of hires of people with real scale experience trying to do it better the next time. I hope everyone affected can find better jobs.

hooper2019 8y ago

For all sorts of hacking contact this guy via email with guardianofpeace247 AT GMAIL DOT COM. He is very fast and reliable you get all you need in a few hours

yogthos 8y ago

live footage from Oracle offices around the world https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xVip745osc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xVip745osc

yeukhon 8y ago

This makes SAP layoff more sane. At least my friend got about 3-4 months to actually find a job (with severance)

Karrot 8y ago

I was one of the very first groups to be let go early morning on the east coast. I still have access to the blind app oracle channel, and it looks like layoffs are going to continue until September. No notice, no thank you for your work, just goodbye. DCO is filled with people who do nothing, and have data backing up how inefficient they are, but not a single layoff over there. Too many people were hired just because they knew someone. From what my ex-coworkers have told me is Oracle slack is freaking out.