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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 wh

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 :)

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 :)