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What honestly confuses me is why people of that caliber continue to work for Oracle when everybody has read umpteen stories like the OP and lots of us even know

What honestly confuses me is why people of that caliber continue to work for Oracle when everybody has read umpteen stories like the OP and lots of us even know people who can attest to the toxicity of the company first hand. The usual counterbalance to a company treating employees like crap is that it tarnishes the company's reputation, making it harder to find talent. Oracle's reputation has been below rock bottom for my entire career, so why are all these great people you speak of still taking jobs there? As far as I can tell the compensation there is pretty standard, so it doesn't seem like they're just buying people off. Maybe you can shed some light on this for me.

MrTonyD 8y ago
I was a PM at Oracle - our team VP reported to Larry. Everybody I worked with was very experienced and very sharp. On the other hand, we regarded most of the company as "sheep" who executed our plans. Completely expendable and generally unenlightened. Obviously there were other bright people around the company, but by and large they had no clue about our strategy or direction or the way that real decisions were made (and we kept a lot of the real reasons for things secret - we didn't want competitors to know what we were really doing or why.) You don't become a business the size of Oracle by being completely stupid. One example - since then I've worked for about 5 or 6 companies who boast about how they hired Oracle salespeople, so now they are energizing their sales. But at Oracle we spent a lot of time and effort at HQ doing things to make Sales and the Salespeople effective. So at company after company they can't figure out why hiring the "right" Salespeople isn't solving their problem. But they aren't doing any of the things that we did to support Salespeople (things throughout the rest of the company and outside the company.) We kept most of it secret from Sales, so even they didn't really know what we were doing. So are the Sales people smart? Yes. And are they sheep? Yes. Similar arguments apply to most of the other PMs outside of core database (who companies also mistakenly hire to "turbocharge" their products), most of the Engineering groups, most of the support teams, and generally everybody outside a relatively small group of people.
- nate_meurer 8y ago
  See, this just proves what I said in another comment -- that the different parts of Oracle are like completely different companies. I don't doubt what you say. But in ZFSSA QA, it was the opposite. Our director held regular all-hands meetings specifically meant to keep us all up to date on product strategy and direction. She wanted all of us to know exactly how our efforts were contributing to product revenue and to the company's strategic goals. Detailed stuff that made us (me, anyway) feel important. I've actually never seen anything like it anywhere else I've worked, even startups.
  - MrTonyD 8y ago
    I agree completely. If a director was meeting the company goals and running either a harsh or caring organization - well, at the higher levels of the organization nobody really cared as long as things worked. We would put up with lawsuits, employee complaints, and customer complaints all day if the business was going in the right direction. We spent insane amounts on lawsuits in exchange for getting non-disclosures signed. Like I said before - Oracle didn't grow to its size by being stupid. (I should add that I didn't like the environment. When Larry offered me control of a big organization I left. I was tired of the horrible values and what I would be expected to do. I walked away from a transition to an Executive position to go back to simple technical work. No regrets.)
nate_meurer 8y ago
I only have experience with the former Sun storage bits: Solaris, ZFS, storage appliance, networking. I worked in a former Sun building, and with just one exception everyone in the chain between me and Larry was a Sun employee. Sun was a really cool place to work. The periodic demoralizing layoffs were a bummer, but they didn't seem toxic; it was common for people to come right back, sometimes back to their same offices, after the company started hiring again. Sun's technology was hugely attractive. Solaris was the best Unix. ZFS, dtrace, etc. Dozens of other projects and thousands of people doing cutting edge work. Even the older stuff like tape and SAM/QFS was really cool to work on. The fact that so much of it was open source gave me a moral imperative to contribute, and I know a lot of other people felt the same. I think the shear awesomeness of the technology that Oracle inherited from Sun (and other companies) drove the demand for Oracle jobs at that site for years after the acquisition. Oracle has done their best to squander this good will, and I won't be surprised if they find it harder to attract talent going forward. I'd say the company did not generally treat us little guys like crap. I had great bosses, except for the last one, who I suspect was a hit man hired specifically to thin the ranks. Overall, I feel I was treated fairly, perhaps even better than I deserved. This is actually a pretty lame answer, sorry. My experience was too narrow to give me any useful insight.
- sanderjd 8y ago
  No this is very illuminating. For what it's worth, I work with ex-Sun people who were laid off pretty soon after the acquisition and have nothing positive to say about Oracle. But I guess on thinking about it, they probably would not have quit because they liked their projects at Sun. So it seems consistent with your account. What a bummer all around.
chrisseaton 8y ago
I work for Oracle. The freedom I get there to pursue what I'm interested in is I think almost unheard of in the rest of the industry. All my work is open source and on GitHub. Oracle gives me two weeks extra leave a year for community service. When I was in HQ I got a private soundproof locking office with a mountain view. Now I work from home. I go as many conferences as I think I should. These are all things people here usually say they'd kill for!
- repolfx 8y ago
  Yeah, and the stuff you work on is really cool. The GraalVM project is probably the most advanced compiler and VM infrastructure in the world and it's not in the old Sun parts, it seems to be pure Oracle. I have to admit, I didn't have a great impression of Oracle before the last few years or so, but sometimes I can't help feeling that their reputation may not be entirely deserved. Google went from having stellar reputation to being dumped on continuously and routinely described as 'immoral', although nothing about the firm or what it did had actually changed. Ditto for Facebook. Microsoft went from being the cool kid in the 80s (against IBM) to the evil monopolist to the stagnant yesterday's team to being cool again very recently, although I doubt the company has actually changed so drastically. If I were looking for a job tomorrow I'd definitely consider joining the Graal team. Oracle's reputation (and now these layoffs) would certainly make me think twice, but, the work is cutting edge, high impact, Oracle has been a relatively decent steward of Java and its "negative" actions have only been about trying to make it fiscally sustainable, which is hardly a bad goal. And it's not like they've pursued that goal aggressively.

MrTonyD 8y ago

I was a PM at Oracle - our team VP reported to Larry. Everybody I worked with was very experienced and very sharp. On the other hand, we regarded most of the company as "sheep" who executed our plans. Completely expendable and generally unenlightened. Obviously there were other bright people around the company, but by and large they had no clue about our strategy or direction or the way that real decisions were made (and we kept a lot of the real reasons for things secret - we didn't want competitors to know what we were really doing or why.) You don't become a business the size of Oracle by being completely stupid. One example - since then I've worked for about 5 or 6 companies who boast about how they hired Oracle salespeople, so now they are energizing their sales. But at Oracle we spent a lot of time and effort at HQ doing things to make Sales and the Salespeople effective. So at company after company they can't figure out why hiring the "right" Salespeople isn't solving their problem. But they aren't doing any of the things that we did to support Salespeople (things throughout the rest of the company and outside the company.) We kept most of it secret from Sales, so even they didn't really know what we were doing. So are the Sales people smart? Yes. And are they sheep? Yes. Similar arguments apply to most of the other PMs outside of core database (who companies also mistakenly hire to "turbocharge" their products), most of the Engineering groups, most of the support teams, and generally everybody outside a relatively small group of people.

nate_meurer 8y ago
See, this just proves what I said in another comment -- that the different parts of Oracle are like completely different companies. I don't doubt what you say. But in ZFSSA QA, it was the opposite. Our director held regular all-hands meetings specifically meant to keep us all up to date on product strategy and direction. She wanted all of us to know exactly how our efforts were contributing to product revenue and to the company's strategic goals. Detailed stuff that made us (me, anyway) feel important. I've actually never seen anything like it anywhere else I've worked, even startups.
- MrTonyD 8y ago
  I agree completely. If a director was meeting the company goals and running either a harsh or caring organization - well, at the higher levels of the organization nobody really cared as long as things worked. We would put up with lawsuits, employee complaints, and customer complaints all day if the business was going in the right direction. We spent insane amounts on lawsuits in exchange for getting non-disclosures signed. Like I said before - Oracle didn't grow to its size by being stupid. (I should add that I didn't like the environment. When Larry offered me control of a big organization I left. I was tired of the horrible values and what I would be expected to do. I walked away from a transition to an Executive position to go back to simple technical work. No regrets.)

nate_meurer 8y ago

I only have experience with the former Sun storage bits: Solaris, ZFS, storage appliance, networking. I worked in a former Sun building, and with just one exception everyone in the chain between me and Larry was a Sun employee. Sun was a really cool place to work. The periodic demoralizing layoffs were a bummer, but they didn't seem toxic; it was common for people to come right back, sometimes back to their same offices, after the company started hiring again. Sun's technology was hugely attractive. Solaris was the best Unix. ZFS, dtrace, etc. Dozens of other projects and thousands of people doing cutting edge work. Even the older stuff like tape and SAM/QFS was really cool to work on. The fact that so much of it was open source gave me a moral imperative to contribute, and I know a lot of other people felt the same. I think the shear awesomeness of the technology that Oracle inherited from Sun (and other companies) drove the demand for Oracle jobs at that site for years after the acquisition. Oracle has done their best to squander this good will, and I won't be surprised if they find it harder to attract talent going forward. I'd say the company did not generally treat us little guys like crap. I had great bosses, except for the last one, who I suspect was a hit man hired specifically to thin the ranks. Overall, I feel I was treated fairly, perhaps even better than I deserved. This is actually a pretty lame answer, sorry. My experience was too narrow to give me any useful insight.

sanderjd 8y ago
No this is very illuminating. For what it's worth, I work with ex-Sun people who were laid off pretty soon after the acquisition and have nothing positive to say about Oracle. But I guess on thinking about it, they probably would not have quit because they liked their projects at Sun. So it seems consistent with your account. What a bummer all around.

chrisseaton 8y ago

I work for Oracle. The freedom I get there to pursue what I'm interested in is I think almost unheard of in the rest of the industry. All my work is open source and on GitHub. Oracle gives me two weeks extra leave a year for community service. When I was in HQ I got a private soundproof locking office with a mountain view. Now I work from home. I go as many conferences as I think I should. These are all things people here usually say they'd kill for!

repolfx 8y ago
Yeah, and the stuff you work on is really cool. The GraalVM project is probably the most advanced compiler and VM infrastructure in the world and it's not in the old Sun parts, it seems to be pure Oracle. I have to admit, I didn't have a great impression of Oracle before the last few years or so, but sometimes I can't help feeling that their reputation may not be entirely deserved. Google went from having stellar reputation to being dumped on continuously and routinely described as 'immoral', although nothing about the firm or what it did had actually changed. Ditto for Facebook. Microsoft went from being the cool kid in the 80s (against IBM) to the evil monopolist to the stagnant yesterday's team to being cool again very recently, although I doubt the company has actually changed so drastically. If I were looking for a job tomorrow I'd definitely consider joining the Graal team. Oracle's reputation (and now these layoffs) would certainly make me think twice, but, the work is cutting edge, high impact, Oracle has been a relatively decent steward of Java and its "negative" actions have only been about trying to make it fiscally sustainable, which is hardly a bad goal. And it's not like they've pursued that goal aggressively.