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A small, mildly entertaining, anecdote about soda: When Oracle acquired the company I was working for, they made the soda free. That is, Oracle made the soda d

A small, mildly entertaining, anecdote about soda: When Oracle acquired the company I was working for, they made the soda free. That is, Oracle made the soda dispensing machines simply dispense soda when you pressed a button. The same company that had a self-service "I Quit" page. Free soda is an indicator about how a company treats its employees, but perhaps not the best.

wolverine876 4y ago
I had a client that stocked kitchen fridges with free basic foods - drinks, meats, breads, etc. - and quality, healthy stuff too. That always impressed me, sending a simple, strong message that they cared about their employees and people like me, and it had a positive impact on me when I ate my share (and didn't have to worry about taking time to get lunch). At one point they brought in a relatively large team of contractors to work day and night on a critical, time-sensitive project. A week after the team started I was there, talking casually to the manager. They told me that there were complaints that they were running low on food in the fridge because the contractors were eating it too. What would they do? Ban the contractors, with only arms-length loyalty to the business, working day and night, and on whom the business's fortunes depended, from the kitchens.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  > At one point they brought in a relatively large team of contractors to work day and night on a critical, time-sensitive project. To me that is a huge red sign that something is seriously wrong with the company. Bringing in a bunch of new people and having them work long hours does not seem conducive to good code.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    Not everything is permanent code that has to be maintained forever. Sometimes you have a migration, or a bunch of data to suck in one time from a vendor or acquisition, or whatever. You can run appropriate quality checks to bound the error rate.
    - ReactiveJelly 4y ago
      But sometimes the most permanent code is the "just once" code.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    It wasn't an IT company.
- ls15 4y ago
  "Be my guest, but don't touch the food!"
  - philwelch 4y ago
    There's a lot of talk on Twitter the last couple of days about how this is apparently a cultural norm for house guests in Nordic countries!
    - na85 4y ago
      I mean if an electrician or whatever came into my house to do a job, and ate my food without being offered it, I'd consider that extremely rude.
      - Nextgrid 4y ago
        Scale and context matters. The loss of a single food item in your own house has a much larger impact than the loss of a single food item in a kitchen stocked to feed dozens of employees - in the former case, your lunch disappeared but in the latter case there's just one less pack of crisps in a box of 100 that nobody will even notice and the positive impact of that (in terms of morale, especially for regular contractors) outweighs the 50c the pack of crisps costs.
    - cgriswald 4y ago
      For the curious, here is the reddit thread and comment that seems to have started it: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/uxz68j/what_is_the_weirdest_thing_you_had_to_do_at/ia1ji6z/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/uxz68j/what_is_t... > @Wowimatard > I remember going to my swedish friends house. > And while we were playing in his room, his mom yelled that dinner was ready. And check this. He told me to WAIT in his room while they ate. > That shit was fucking wild.
      - klipt 4y ago
        So what do Swedish guests do - bring their own food to others' houses, or just always leave before mealtime?
- tomrod 4y ago
  Accounting/PeopleOps meets the Real World! Great anecdote. The free meals are a perk paid for by the people creating the revenue. I suspect that perk probably wasn't budgeted for addition to the Contractor work. An oversight, perhaps? Hopefully folks working got fed.
voidfunc 4y ago
Is Oracle all that bad of a place to work? Everyone _hates_ Oracle for product reasons but I've never met any engineers that said it was a terrible place to work or particularly worse than any other big tech b2b companies (e.g. ibm, microsoft, etc).
- arebop 4y ago
  Every ex-Oracle engineer I've met says it was a terrible place to work compared to the big tech company where I work now. I also don't know anyone who went to work for Oracle after leaving my current company, fwiw.
- volkadav 4y ago
  it strongly depends on which org you're in, with an average of "boring, with a big steaming pile of bureaucracy" based on my observations spending five years at the seattle-based cloud org. if you had a good manager and skip-level stuff could be pretty alright, if you didn't god help you.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    This. If you have a good manager, and your project doesn't span across orgs, you have a ton of freedom. Crossing orgs creates red tape you wouldn't believe, since such requests "must go through Larry's office". They also have an absolutely stellar health plan - I know of one (US) employee whose spouse got cancer, and they didn't pay one penny out of pocket for the entire treatment.
    - thebean11 4y ago
      I don't think that's out of the ordinary. With most big tech health plans you'd probably pay little or nothing if you stayed in network.
- rst 4y ago
  Immediately after the Oracle/Sun acquisition, there was a huge exodus of senior engineering talent (e.g., most of the core Solaris kernel development team). This writeup of why James Gosling left has some of the obvious reasons (e.g., he was asked to take a significant pay cut), but also this anecdote, showing Oracle managements' general attitude toward the talent: https://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-why-i-quit-oracle/ https://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling... [quoted]: Making his point about the “creepiness,” not only with Ellison but with Oracle’s power structure, Gosling said he sparked a notion to try to improve morale amongst the Sun faithful who endured the Oracle acquisition. He said the company decided to rent out the Great America amusement park in Santa Clara, Calif., and allow the Sun folks to have a day of fun. Scott McNealy and Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz signed off on the project that came in well under budget and all systems were go, Gosling said. Except a few days before the event was to occur, Oracle Co-President Safra Catz got wind of it and put the kibosh on the thing. “Safra found out and had a fit,” Gosling said. “The word came down that Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. So she forced the thing to be cancelled. But they didn’t save any money because the money had been spent – so we ended up giving the tickets to charities. We were forced to give it up because it wasn’t the -Oracle Way.’ On the other hand, Oracle sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million.”
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cptnapalm 4y ago
Self-service "I Quit" page... that's... wow...
- mberning 4y ago
  It’s not that rare. Many large companies have an HR portal and one of the many options is usually to “end your employment”.
  - throwaway284534 4y ago
    I assume the form has some dissuading text along the lines of, “Upon submitting, a goon squad will be sent for your immediate removal from the premises.” Or maybe they just send spiders through the ethernet. It’s a big company.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      With 200,000 employees (at my time of employment), they couldn't care less about turnover. Acqui-hires and people wanting a working retirement keep Oracle afloat in the tech department. Realistically, if you weren't on the Oracle DB development team and didn't draw too much attention to yourself (for example, via daily reimbursed meals at elite restaurants accompanied by the best wines for years on end), you didn't really matter.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    Somewhat ironically, it was the only way to do it. If you tried to talk to your manager, they would direct you to the self-help page. There were just too many scripts tied to it - from disabling your access to notifying your manager to setting an end date in their payroll system. There were legends of folks who failed to press the button, and were being paid for years thereafter. While I imagine a kernel of truth is here, I can only shake my head at the thought of Oracle's lawyers getting ahold of the ex-employee in question.
RajT88 4y ago
I worked for a post-startup company early in my career. The Christmas parties were awesome, my first few years there included parties at the Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museum. There were subsidized vending machines as well. I knew engineers who would spend a dollar on the vending machine and get a few bags of chips for lunch. Subsidized vending machines were the first to go. Then the Christmas parties. Then a bunch of other changes which showed derision for customers and employees both.

wolverine876 4y ago

I had a client that stocked kitchen fridges with free basic foods - drinks, meats, breads, etc. - and quality, healthy stuff too. That always impressed me, sending a simple, strong message that they cared about their employees and people like me, and it had a positive impact on me when I ate my share (and didn't have to worry about taking time to get lunch). At one point they brought in a relatively large team of contractors to work day and night on a critical, time-sensitive project. A week after the team started I was there, talking casually to the manager. They told me that there were complaints that they were running low on food in the fridge because the contractors were eating it too. What would they do? Ban the contractors, with only arms-length loyalty to the business, working day and night, and on whom the business's fortunes depended, from the kitchens.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> At one point they brought in a relatively large team of contractors to work day and night on a critical, time-sensitive project. To me that is a huge red sign that something is seriously wrong with the company. Bringing in a bunch of new people and having them work long hours does not seem conducive to good code.
- mlyle 4y ago
  Not everything is permanent code that has to be maintained forever. Sometimes you have a migration, or a bunch of data to suck in one time from a vendor or acquisition, or whatever. You can run appropriate quality checks to bound the error rate.
  - ReactiveJelly 4y ago
    But sometimes the most permanent code is the "just once" code.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  It wasn't an IT company.
ls15 4y ago
"Be my guest, but don't touch the food!"
- philwelch 4y ago
  There's a lot of talk on Twitter the last couple of days about how this is apparently a cultural norm for house guests in Nordic countries!
  - na85 4y ago
    I mean if an electrician or whatever came into my house to do a job, and ate my food without being offered it, I'd consider that extremely rude.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      Scale and context matters. The loss of a single food item in your own house has a much larger impact than the loss of a single food item in a kitchen stocked to feed dozens of employees - in the former case, your lunch disappeared but in the latter case there's just one less pack of crisps in a box of 100 that nobody will even notice and the positive impact of that (in terms of morale, especially for regular contractors) outweighs the 50c the pack of crisps costs.
  - cgriswald 4y ago
    For the curious, here is the reddit thread and comment that seems to have started it: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/uxz68j/what_is_the_weirdest_thing_you_had_to_do_at/ia1ji6z/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/uxz68j/what_is_t... > @Wowimatard > I remember going to my swedish friends house. > And while we were playing in his room, his mom yelled that dinner was ready. And check this. He told me to WAIT in his room while they ate. > That shit was fucking wild.
    - klipt 4y ago
      So what do Swedish guests do - bring their own food to others' houses, or just always leave before mealtime?
tomrod 4y ago
Accounting/PeopleOps meets the Real World! Great anecdote. The free meals are a perk paid for by the people creating the revenue. I suspect that perk probably wasn't budgeted for addition to the Contractor work. An oversight, perhaps? Hopefully folks working got fed.

voidfunc 4y ago

Is Oracle all that bad of a place to work? Everyone _hates_ Oracle for product reasons but I've never met any engineers that said it was a terrible place to work or particularly worse than any other big tech b2b companies (e.g. ibm, microsoft, etc).

arebop 4y ago
Every ex-Oracle engineer I've met says it was a terrible place to work compared to the big tech company where I work now. I also don't know anyone who went to work for Oracle after leaving my current company, fwiw.
volkadav 4y ago
it strongly depends on which org you're in, with an average of "boring, with a big steaming pile of bureaucracy" based on my observations spending five years at the seattle-based cloud org. if you had a good manager and skip-level stuff could be pretty alright, if you didn't god help you.
- falcolas 4y ago
  This. If you have a good manager, and your project doesn't span across orgs, you have a ton of freedom. Crossing orgs creates red tape you wouldn't believe, since such requests "must go through Larry's office". They also have an absolutely stellar health plan - I know of one (US) employee whose spouse got cancer, and they didn't pay one penny out of pocket for the entire treatment.
  - thebean11 4y ago
    I don't think that's out of the ordinary. With most big tech health plans you'd probably pay little or nothing if you stayed in network.
rst 4y ago
Immediately after the Oracle/Sun acquisition, there was a huge exodus of senior engineering talent (e.g., most of the core Solaris kernel development team). This writeup of why James Gosling left has some of the obvious reasons (e.g., he was asked to take a significant pay cut), but also this anecdote, showing Oracle managements' general attitude toward the talent: https://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-why-i-quit-oracle/ https://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling... [quoted]: Making his point about the “creepiness,” not only with Ellison but with Oracle’s power structure, Gosling said he sparked a notion to try to improve morale amongst the Sun faithful who endured the Oracle acquisition. He said the company decided to rent out the Great America amusement park in Santa Clara, Calif., and allow the Sun folks to have a day of fun. Scott McNealy and Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz signed off on the project that came in well under budget and all systems were go, Gosling said. Except a few days before the event was to occur, Oracle Co-President Safra Catz got wind of it and put the kibosh on the thing. “Safra found out and had a fit,” Gosling said. “The word came down that Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. So she forced the thing to be cancelled. But they didn’t save any money because the money had been spent – so we ended up giving the tickets to charities. We were forced to give it up because it wasn’t the -Oracle Way.’ On the other hand, Oracle sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million.”

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cptnapalm 4y ago

Self-service "I Quit" page... that's... wow...

mberning 4y ago
It’s not that rare. Many large companies have an HR portal and one of the many options is usually to “end your employment”.
- throwaway284534 4y ago
  I assume the form has some dissuading text along the lines of, “Upon submitting, a goon squad will be sent for your immediate removal from the premises.” Or maybe they just send spiders through the ethernet. It’s a big company.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    With 200,000 employees (at my time of employment), they couldn't care less about turnover. Acqui-hires and people wanting a working retirement keep Oracle afloat in the tech department. Realistically, if you weren't on the Oracle DB development team and didn't draw too much attention to yourself (for example, via daily reimbursed meals at elite restaurants accompanied by the best wines for years on end), you didn't really matter.
- falcolas 4y ago
  Somewhat ironically, it was the only way to do it. If you tried to talk to your manager, they would direct you to the self-help page. There were just too many scripts tied to it - from disabling your access to notifying your manager to setting an end date in their payroll system. There were legends of folks who failed to press the button, and were being paid for years thereafter. While I imagine a kernel of truth is here, I can only shake my head at the thought of Oracle's lawyers getting ahold of the ex-employee in question.

RajT88 4y ago

I worked for a post-startup company early in my career. The Christmas parties were awesome, my first few years there included parties at the Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museum. There were subsidized vending machines as well. I knew engineers who would spend a dollar on the vending machine and get a few bags of chips for lunch. Subsidized vending machines were the first to go. Then the Christmas parties. Then a bunch of other changes which showed derision for customers and employees both.