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I previously worked at Oracle for years in the dotcom era and I can tell you the company culture was horrid. It was completely sales driven, sales people would
by cromwellian 7y ago
I previously worked at Oracle for years in the dotcom era and I can tell you the company culture was horrid. It was completely sales driven, sales people would often lie to customers and promise the product had a feature which it either didn’t have or was not well supported and then have to fly in expensive consultants afterwards to fix the resulting shitshow.
I accompanied Sales Account managers with fellow female engineers to client meeting where they, and I’m not kidding, discussed which strip clubs they would go to after the meetings.
If Apple is a designer culture, and Google is an engineer culture, then I‘d say Oracle is driven by a hierarchy of sales culture.
- mrep 7y ago> I‘d say Oracle is driven by a hierarchy of sales culture. Isn't Oracle a legal driven company [0] :) [0]: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
- chrisseaton 7y ago> It was completely sales driven Another perspective is that Oracle is one of just a few tech companies left that has a proper dedicated research lab that does long-term research without asking about profit. I worked on my research project there for six years and nobody once asked me how we were going to make money from it, let alone talked about sales. That’s pretty special these days. Oracle even paid me a senior developer salary while I worked on my PhD. Hard to say that’s ‘completely sales driven!’
- mav3rick 7y agoGoogle has this as well.
- chrisseaton 7y agoI don’t think Google has dedicated research labs do they? They’re very proud that they integrate research into (sales driven) product groups. https://youtu.be/0wqc69oNbms https://youtu.be/0wqc69oNbms And so what anyway? Google is also good at supporting things not sales driven means that Oracle isn’t?
- mav3rick 7y agoGoogle specifically has Google Research and a Research Scientist track.
- chrisseaton 7y agoTheir video says that’s not separate, but people embedded in product groups.
- dodobirdlord 7y agohttps://ai.googleblog.com/2019/10/quantum-supremacy-using-programmable.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/10/quantum-supremacy-using-pr... There's plenty of lab research going on.
- cameronbrown 7y agoDeepMind, Google Brain, Google AI..
- dralley 7y agoProject Zero could be counted as well
- saagarjha 7y agoIsn’t that basically Microsoft Research?
- chrisseaton 7y agoYes like MSR. I said ‘one of just a few’ so that doesn’t invalidate what I said. There aren’t many. IBM as well.
- newswasboring 7y agoDiscussing strip clubs in front of your colleagues is bad. Isn't worse because they are female.
- cromwellian 7y agoTrue but it’s even more tone deaf when the sales bros/Mad Men aren’t even woke enough to realize what they’re doing outside the lockerroom.
- newswasboring 7y agoYeah but saying it to me (a male) would still be tone deaf, right? There are no locker rooms even in locker rooms these days. All I'm saying is, it being in front of me is disgusting enough.
- snagglegaggle 7y agoWhy is that? Are you uncomfortable with men expressing their sexuality? Or perhaps you see strippers as abused and taken advantage of? I personally think stripclubs arre a waste of money, but I know femenists that would take exception to either of those above.
- newswasboring 7y agoI'm not afraid or uncomfortable with expressions of sexuality but a boardroom is hardly an appropriate place for it. I don't understand the argument that just because something is a normal part of life it somehow becomes ok to talk about it anywhere. Taking a shit is a normal part of life, that doesn't make it ok to discuss your weekly bowl movements in the board room. In different social settings there are different levels of comfort between people. You can be ok with strip clubs, there are perfectly valid opinions for and against them, but I come to a board room to discuss business, not your sexuality.
- snagglegaggle 7y agoIf it was the topic of the board meeting, definitely not appropriate, but otherwise it's just the conversation was not meant for you. Can you imagine the abuse I'd catch if I complained about overhearing women talk about their periods? Or, to make it more fair, planning some kind of hypersexualized bachelorette party.