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Even at 100k employees I’m still dumbfounded by that number. What do all these people do all day?
by CoolGuySteve 6mo ago
Even at 100k employees I’m still dumbfounded by that number. What do all these people do all day?
- ra_men 6mo agoI’m guessing development is so slow that they have stacks of teams working in parallel to accomplish what 1 team could normally.
- Simboo 6mo agoMe too. Anyone here to enlighten us?
- drowntoge 6mo agoWell, whatever Oracle is doing, which brings us back to a question very similar to your original one.
- stackskipton 6mo agoOracle sells alot of software that is accompanied by hordes of consultants to set it up. Last F50 I was at did a PeopleSoft migration. We probably had 400 Oracle employees pass through the doors over 2 years helping to get it off the ground. Most Enterprises don't just buy software and that's it. They buy software + support to implement it for their business.
- CoolGuySteve 6mo agoSure but what did those guys do all day? 400 people is a lot of people
- davidw 6mo ago"Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?!"
- irl_zebra 6mo agoCreating powerpoints. Presenting the powerpoints to others in synchronous meetings.
- kadushka 6mo agoProbably had a lot of meetings
- stackskipton 6mo agoWrite code to connect this system with that system. Teach people what setting does what. Integrate with Entra ID. Create custom reports that hordes of Executive on our side want. Scale out the system from undersized nodes we originally gave it. That's all I picked up by just listening to them. I wasn't involved in the project, just sat nearby listening to it. This is extremely customizable software that is designed to pretty much run your entire business and touched by over 40k employees. It requires a ton of care and feeding. There is plenty of people who dedicate themselves to PeopleSoft. Zip Recruiter is showing 5 jobs near me for "PeopleSoft Administrator"
- odyssey7 6mo agoThe need to teach people what setting does what is a sort of consulting moat that AI dismantles when it can access the right context.
- zdragnar 6mo agoThey don't make any of the documentation for those settings easy to find or understand because the support contracts make them so much money.
- odyssey7 6mo agoBefore, that could create a moat. Soon, it will be table stakes to put scattered internal communications, notes, documents into an AI’s knowledge base, where the information can no longer hide. When that fails, the AI can read the code itself, so that the settings and how to change them are easily explained in simple terms. Actually, this is possibly even better than letting the scattered internal information serve as an intermediate layer.
- zdragnar 6mo agoThat works for small customers who actually want to spend time customizing things themselves. Big customers love having to sign support contracts, because it gives them someone to blame when something goes wrong. Nobody else gets to touch any of the settings or knobs to avoid breaking anything. Being big is the actual moat.
- chasd00 6mo agoThe training team and what's called 'Change Management' for an F50 company that's spread across the globe implementing a new application like an ERP could be 100 people by itself. It's extremely complex and hard to do those kinds of projects which is why many ERP migrations take a decade to complete if not fail entirely.
- pearlsontheroad 6mo agoplus yearly support maintenance
- baumy 6mo agoI remember reading this post years ago, and it has stuck in my brain ever since: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 So I suspect the answer is: they need _at least_ 10x as many engineers to get things done as you would expect. Maybe more like 50x
- seniorThrowaway 6mo agoThat is really wild
- B1FF_PSUVM 6mo agoThat was a highlights grade comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights ) And the last comment by 'oraguy' - I hope he just picked up another id because "never work for Oracle again" ...
- muskstinks 6mo agowhat a horrible horrible read :| Clearly shows that either no one understands the whole picture anymore or that it became so diverse custom, that this is the only way of handling this now. I think though that these companies are more business companies than tech companies and move themselves into this nightmare.
- bombcar 6mo agoIt's even more wild when you realize that other similar-sized enterprise companies don't have all that and either leave bugs to sit around for decades, or randomly break shit trying to fix them.
- zipy124 6mo agoAlmost certainly a large amount of support staff, so management/HR/IT etc... Then you've got your customer account managers, sales, lawyers/finance etc.... Given they do an insane amount of B2B and government sales I can see this being easy to reach tbh. Governement contract processes require an insane amount of bureacracy and negotations.
- hyperpape 6mo ago1. They maintain and sell one of the largest relational databases. 2. They're the primary maintainer of one of the largest programming languages. 3. They do tons of HR/ERP type software. 4. They have a supply chain division (my company is a direct competitor, and we have 2000 employees--it's a drop in the bucket, but a few thousand here, a few thousand there and it starts to add up. Afaik, their supply chain org is bigger than ours). 5. Other things I probably don't know about. Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency, which swells the number of workers by a lot. Don't get me wrong, I'm not remotely a fan, I like to quote Bryan Cantrill's rant. However, they do a lot of things.
- PyWoody 6mo ago6. Lawyers
- B1FF_PSUVM 6mo ago"The first thing we do, let's AI all the lawyers" ?
- mikeyouse 6mo agoThey also own multiple other huge companies that had tens of thousands of their own employees working in completely different areas (Netsuite, Cerner, Acme, etc)
- raverbashing 6mo agoAlso their cloud And all the supporting legal team of course.
- hyperpape 6mo agoNo better proof that they're a huge company than that I could forget about an entire public cloud offering. Good point.
- burningChrome 6mo ago
- rocmcd 6mo agoUnless you have worked with Oracle or other big enterprises, you may not realize the scale of how these companies operate and the breadth of what they actually do. Just by looking at their product page[0] you can see they offer software, hardware, cloud, consulting, support, and even financing solutions. In addition to the technology and product people (of which there are many), you also need HR, sales, marketing, accounting, support, etc for the entire global organization. Sure, 100,000 people is a lot, but Oracle also does a lot. [0] https://www.oracle.com/products/ https://www.oracle.com/products/
- blackaspen 6mo agoThis! They do _everything_. In the real world, there are a lot of things you need to run a business: HR, ERP, Financing, Cloud, Compliance, CRM, etc. There is really only one company who can sell them all to you on one piece of paper, and that's Oracle.
- bombcar 6mo agoSalesforce does one aspect of what Oracle can do (Access as a Service) and they have 83,000 employees. Oracle may actually be pretty lean.
- hulitu 6mo agoSolaris ?
- jabl 6mo agoDidn't they fire most of Solaris devs some time ago? Incidentally, Solaris been stuck on 11.4.x for, well, forever and a half..
- shusaku 6mo agoWhen you send your database a query, who do you think is gathering those tables?
- kwisatzh 6mo agoMore than 70% of the employees are probably Sales/Support/Service -- on par with any large enterprise firm (Think Cisco/Salesforce/ServiceNow etc)