Comment by foo101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by foo101 | Hacker News Reader

I hope he finds Amazon to be a much better place than he found Oracle to be. The experiences he shared while leaving Oracle were unpleasant.

"As to why I left, it's difficult to answer: Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good."

"For the privilege of working for Oracle, they wanted me to take a big pay cut."

"In my job offer, they had me at a fairly significant grade level down."

"Oracle is an extremely micromanaged company. So myself and my peers in the Java area were not allowed to decide anything. All of our authority to decide anything evaporated."

"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."

Source: http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-...

I realize people like to hate on Oracle, and some hate justified, but there's also a reason why Oracle is one of the extremely few tech companies that have survived the test of time.

Gosling is complaining about about pay and management oversight.

Has anyone wonder if overpay and no oversight is what contributed to Sun's failure.

Speaking as an insider, I can say with 100% certainty it was.

Sun had this hardware business that was printing money and then the music stopped.

I wonder if Google might suffer a similar fate like Sun. As soon as ad-revenue slows down, will they need to grow up and be managed like a real company by putting restrictions on pay and enforce management oversight.

You're right on most accounts but (and it's a big but) there is a world between SUNW lush-y experience, events, "primadonnas" and Oracle's "it's just extorting money from customers locked-in in any case so fk off the people working for us". (disclaimer: I've been in both).

> Speaking as an insider, I can say with 100% certainty it was.

Can you elaborate on that?

I don't know that it's fair to say that Oracle has survived the test of time; their core business has been on a steady decline for years; now they are playing catch-up in cloud and are talking about second derivative growth like they were an undergrad startup.

The fact is that they have not grown their top line for five years(1), 70% of their business is in a dying sector and they have opted to cut R&D spending in favor of stock buybacks and dividend payouts for years(2).

I don't see how they can change course; their investors keep asking for dividends while the bulk of their competitors are either privately owned or public with strong founder/owners; point being Oracles competitors are controlled by investors that want R&D spending, Oracle is not, and Oracle sorely needs R&D to build a portfolio that'll keep them from being yet another leveraged buy-out..

    (1) https://ycharts.com/companies/ORCL/revenues
    (2) http://marketrealist.com/2016/12/oracles-share-buybacks-dividend-trend-will-run-2017/

> will they need to grow up and be managed like a real company by putting restrictions on pay and enforce management oversight.

I've been at a couple of larger than Oracle-sized organizations that paid quite well and didn't have a lot of 'management oversight'....which I am taking to mean, roughly, 'top-down, heavy-handed management'.

You're saying that Oracle has grown up. This is a quote from your security chief:

>Stop checking our code for vulnerabilities

That's not the reaction from a company that's "grown up". It's a sign of a company that still has growing up to do.

What killed Sun was they made a big bet in something that was an evolutionary cul-de-sac. In business sectors that rely heavily on innovation, if you make and test bets carefully, you survive. If you don't, you don't. Cushy perks* don't matter.

And the jury certainly is out on Oracle. Right now Oracle is a company where great software goes to die. All signs point to them eventually ending up like Yahoo. It'll take a while, but the handwriting is already on the wall.

(*within reason)

The more I hear about Oracle the less respect I have for them. My company is already working hard at dropping all things Oracle. I really can't wait for the day when we can wash our hands of them completely. Its not that far off really.

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