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The thing that is weird to me is that Ellison is CTO. I don't really think he's a highly technical person, or is he?

by j_baker 12y ago

swartkrans 12y ago
Why do you think that a CTO has to be highly technical? Does a CTO at a big technology company write code? Line level engineering managers don't even write code a lot of the time. You just deal in the high-level abstract.
- mathattack 12y ago
  He's got to be on top of all the industry trends. Say what you will about Larry, he is on top of this.
  - jayvanguard 12y ago
    Really? That isn't obvious to me by what Oracle has done over the past 10-15 years.
    - mathattack 12y ago
      Their course corrections have been as good as any large company. Even if the product wasn't there, they caught many of the biggest trends. Even Microsoft didn't see the internet coming.
phillmv 12y ago
Not to dwelve too far into Oracle hagiography but, >During the 1970s, after a brief stint at Amdahl Corporation, Ellison began working for Ampex Corporation. His projects included a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle". Ellison was inspired by a paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks".[10] In 1977, he founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) with two partners and an investment of $2,000; $1,200 of the money was his. It's really not clear from the first few hits off Google what his role was in developing Oracle, the application, but he's not like, _untechnical_.
- nostrademons 12y ago
  Relevant Quora question: http://www.quora.com/Was-Larry-Ellison-a-good-programmer http://www.quora.com/Was-Larry-Ellison-a-good-programmer Also, apparently Bob Miner programmed the bulk of the original product and ran engineering, but the Quora link above says Miner considered Ellison a good programmer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Miner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Miner
rodgerd 12y ago
Someone I spoke to after the Sun merger said one of the adjustments Sun engineers had to make was Ellison wandering around desks in Oracle talking about what people were working on, and asking "That looks cool. What could you achieve if I gave another $x million in funding?" if the technology looked interesting to him. A received anecdote, but the thrust was that Ellison is pretty keenly interested in how it all works, as well as being a ruthless businessman.

The thing that is weird to me is that Ellison is CTO. I don't really think he's a highly technical person, or is he?

by j_baker 12y ago

The thing that is weird to me is that Ellison is CTO. I don't really think he's a highly technical person, or is he?

Why do you think that a CTO has to be highly technical? Does a CTO at a big technology company write code? Line level engineering managers don't even write code a lot of the time. You just deal in the high-level abstract.

mathattack 12y ago
He's got to be on top of all the industry trends. Say what you will about Larry, he is on top of this.
- jayvanguard 12y ago
  Really? That isn't obvious to me by what Oracle has done over the past 10-15 years.
  - mathattack 12y ago
    Their course corrections have been as good as any large company. Even if the product wasn't there, they caught many of the biggest trends. Even Microsoft didn't see the internet coming.

phillmv 12y ago

Not to dwelve too far into Oracle hagiography but, >During the 1970s, after a brief stint at Amdahl Corporation, Ellison began working for Ampex Corporation. His projects included a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle". Ellison was inspired by a paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks".[10] In 1977, he founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) with two partners and an investment of $2,000; $1,200 of the money was his. It's really not clear from the first few hits off Google what his role was in developing Oracle, the application, but he's not like, _untechnical_.

nostrademons 12y ago
Relevant Quora question: http://www.quora.com/Was-Larry-Ellison-a-good-programmer http://www.quora.com/Was-Larry-Ellison-a-good-programmer Also, apparently Bob Miner programmed the bulk of the original product and ran engineering, but the Quora link above says Miner considered Ellison a good programmer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Miner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Miner

rodgerd 12y ago

Someone I spoke to after the Sun merger said one of the adjustments Sun engineers had to make was Ellison wandering around desks in Oracle talking about what people were working on, and asking "That looks cool. What could you achieve if I gave another $x million in funding?" if the technology looked interesting to him. A received anecdote, but the thrust was that Ellison is pretty keenly interested in how it all works, as well as being a ruthless businessman.