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I worked for Oracle for a little while after getting acquired. For a developer, there are so many obstacles you need to overcome to ship anything on time there

by mackey 13y ago

I worked for Oracle for a little while after getting acquired. For a developer, there are so many obstacles you need to overcome to ship anything on time there or of quality. Everything is bad, from the developer hardware/tools to the red tape. The bug tracking system looks like an HTML 1.0 web page. The "database version" is a required field, even though the product you work on doesn't even use a database. I seem to remember having problems linking to issues, because the the URL was just a hashed session so you couldn't even bookmark things. You want to use that open source library that everyone else is using and does exactly what you need? All you need to do is fill out a bunch of on-line forms where you explain the material impact of using this library and how much money your BU makes and how this affects the bottom line. Once you get through all that, your request needs to travel all the way up the food chain to the office of the CEO which can take months of harassing administrative assistants of very highly payed people for that to actually happen. This doesn't even take into account the legal approval steps that need to happen which also takes a while. While this is going on, you have to work with your 3rd party library and hope that it gets approved or risk months of wasted work. In the end, you notice that other people don't even try and use 3rd party libraries because it's so frustrating. In the end they just try and re-invent the wheel, and because a certain percentage of your team has to be in a "low cost center", the library ends up sucking. Recap: Amazon has nothing to worry about, because nothing innovative or powerful is going to come out of Oracle.

tlogan 13y ago
I agree that development is challenging in Oracle - depending on org you end up working for. But, you might have basic misunderstanding of Oracle as a whole and position in the market. Oracle is an excellent acquisition and integration machine: They did excellent job with BEA, PeopleSoft, Sibel, GoldgenGate, etc. That is the key of Oracle: very well tuned system (marketing, support, sales, engineering, DDR, etc.) which can make a lot of money in enterprise environment.
- mackey 13y ago
  "Excellent acquisition and integration machine"? From who's perspective is this? The customer? The employees? From employees perspective: At least in my org, integration is still sputtering along almost 2 years after I have left. Oracle bought another company shortly after us that we had to integrate with, in addition to Oracle proper. Over the last 2 years, most of the more competent engineers have left because they couldn't take the work or environment anymore. The end result was more work for everyone else and inability to find new employees due to the hot market. New feature development are practically non-existent. On the non-technical side, there was nothing excellent about integration. We lost vacation time/holidays. We didn't have wireless for probably 6 months at the office because our wireless wasn't "secure enough". Everything worked less well than it did before, from phones to the network. From the customer perspective: For the customers that don't care about whatever product you are integrating with, they haven't seen many new features because everyone is focused on integrations. There are now less people that understand the product focused on you. For the customers that do care about the integrations, at least in my org, the integrations have been so shaky I can't help but think there will be some buyers remorse. And again the quality of people supporting you is now lower.
acdha 13y ago
That matches my experience working for a fair-sized customer: our high six figure annual support got access to an everything-is-broken portal, out of date documentation and very responsive support people who would quickly tell you something is fixed in the next paid upgrade or cannot be reproduced / is probably your fault. When IE8 was released and incompatible with a major app, I called and was told they had no plans yet for a patch – and the next week I received a call from a support manager asking if they could distribute my monkey patch to other customers… I'm skeptical Amazon has anything to worry about.

by mackey 13y ago

tlogan 13y ago

I agree that development is challenging in Oracle - depending on org you end up working for. But, you might have basic misunderstanding of Oracle as a whole and position in the market. Oracle is an excellent acquisition and integration machine: They did excellent job with BEA, PeopleSoft, Sibel, GoldgenGate, etc. That is the key of Oracle: very well tuned system (marketing, support, sales, engineering, DDR, etc.) which can make a lot of money in enterprise environment.

mackey 13y ago
"Excellent acquisition and integration machine"? From who's perspective is this? The customer? The employees? From employees perspective: At least in my org, integration is still sputtering along almost 2 years after I have left. Oracle bought another company shortly after us that we had to integrate with, in addition to Oracle proper. Over the last 2 years, most of the more competent engineers have left because they couldn't take the work or environment anymore. The end result was more work for everyone else and inability to find new employees due to the hot market. New feature development are practically non-existent. On the non-technical side, there was nothing excellent about integration. We lost vacation time/holidays. We didn't have wireless for probably 6 months at the office because our wireless wasn't "secure enough". Everything worked less well than it did before, from phones to the network. From the customer perspective: For the customers that don't care about whatever product you are integrating with, they haven't seen many new features because everyone is focused on integrations. There are now less people that understand the product focused on you. For the customers that do care about the integrations, at least in my org, the integrations have been so shaky I can't help but think there will be some buyers remorse. And again the quality of people supporting you is now lower.

acdha 13y ago

That matches my experience working for a fair-sized customer: our high six figure annual support got access to an everything-is-broken portal, out of date documentation and very responsive support people who would quickly tell you something is fixed in the next paid upgrade or cannot be reproduced / is probably your fault. When IE8 was released and incompatible with a major app, I called and was told they had no plans yet for a patch – and the next week I received a call from a support manager asking if they could distribute my monkey patch to other customers… I'm skeptical Amazon has anything to worry about.