Why I Quit Oracle (2010)
eweek.com
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They are a rent-seeking, lawsuit-heavy cancer upon this Earth.
Oracle routinely sues its own employees.
Oracle routinely moves to stamp out innovation.
Oracle's stock price has increased over the past decade, but only from acquisition and price-gouging large corporations and agencies.
It is a racket. Working at Oracle is the antithesis of creating fun and useful software for everyone's gain.
For what?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/oracle_sues_employe...
I can't imagine this was a good use of the company's lawyers' time (although it was probably good from the lawyers' perspective).
"get out there and dig in the dumpster for gold nuggets!"
Management orders her to cook the books, at a public company!!
She's fired, she sues.
Oracle counter sues.
How is this ethical?
With enough effort, I'm certain someone could out me. I'm not protecting my connection or device ID in any way.
>dirty laundry
All of the things I've cited about Oracle are public knowledge. If an employee of Monsanto says that RoundUp causes cancer, is that dirty laundry, or stating a scientifically proven fact?
http://www.who.int/foodsafety/jmprsummary2016.pdf?ua=1
https://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/iarcnews/pdf/MonographVo...
The short version is that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer in consumers or farm workers:
https://www.wired.com/2016/05/monsantos-roundup-herbicide-ca...
While not scientifically proven, the State of California currently classifies RoundUp as "probably carcinogenic".
More than 800 cancer patients have joined the lawsuit against Monsanto.
I don't know about you, but being exposed, for years and years, to something that requires a mask to administer. Hmmm gonna have to go with "more cancerous than a banana".
But in spite of tons of research all over the world no one was able to establish a causal link for dietary glyphosate residue. The herbicides before glyphosate were truly vile, look it up. Glyphosate is very targeted for plants, and based on its mechanism of action it's unlikely to be toxic or carcinogenic in humans or animals, including even fish and invertebrates.
So my money is on State of California being full of shit as usual. Put simply, between glyphosate and the alternatives it's not even a question that glyphosate is much safer.
Much like how you shouldn't weld without a mask, you shouldn't spray RoundUp without a mask. But the difference is that things that can be inhaled are very tricky compared to things that are just bright.
So even the right precautions can still lead to problems.
If someone who worked at a fiberglass plant told me not to breathe in fiberglass splinters, I would believe them, regardless of what the research has confirmed.
* http://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/bangalore/cover-story/...
* http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnatak...
TL;DR - An employee found fire safety violations in one of its Bangalore offices. He reported the violations internally. Nobody addressed the violations. He reported the violations to the cops. Oracle sacked and sued the employee.
Oracle India was even worse than Oracle. I truly feel terribly for the exploited workes there. You all had it way way worse than us.
Besides the poor hours of course, I can remember the following:
1) Unpaid overtime. 2) Spiteful, political management. 3) Revolving door of employees due to firings. 4) Replacements were not trained, so nobody was set up for success and growth.
These are just things I remember experiencing second or third-hand, but so much of the grunt work and broken processes flowed to my counterparts in Oracle India.
Their reward for trying to make sense of everything was being fired, regardless of performance.
Oracle US employees were usually spared a few years of runway until being laid off, regardless of performance.
The fact that it is James Gosling saying this instead of a random employee seems important.
Your initial comment goes quite a bit further than addressing only this particular example, however. That's what I was addressing.
He said Oracle was without a doubt the most unethical competitor they ever had. IBM had internal guidelines on acceptable limits for gifts, meals etc you could give to clients, but Oracle sales people had no such qualms and would sometimes essentially bribe VPs/whoever had the power to make the purchasing decision.
IBM was certainly no saint (this family member ended up leaving a few years later), but he was astounded by how ethically untethered Oracle as a company was.
> 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."
- A couple of years ago, the company was providing us Oracle branded corporate diary for free. An employee was allowed to order one diary. The cost center would pay the price of the diary which if I remember correctly was $3.00. There were many managers who did not allow their departments to order this diary in order to save that $3.00 per employee for their cost centers. "But I want the Oracle branded diary!" "No, we need to save money!" "I will be proud to show the Oracle branded diary to my family" "No, we need to save money!" "Then why bother providing the diaries in the first place?" "No, we need to save money!" And all this commotion happened when Oracle was spending millions of dollars in legal fees for its lawsuit against Google.
- In a meeting with a very senior VP of our department, we asked our senior VP why there were no fun activities in our team, like a day out for fun, or even something as small as a team lunch. The response by the senior VP to the best of my recollection was, "Think not what the company can do for you. Think what you can do for the company. You guys are incredibly privileged to work for Oracle. What more can one need? This is not the time to think about fun. This is the time to think how you can reduce the number of bugs in our product." It was no surprise later that within a year, all the smart developers of our team left to other companies who not only pay better than Oracle, but also offer diaries without fuss, and have team lunches and other fun events.
Disclaimer: Worked for Oracle for 3 years. Will never work for Oracle again.
I can imagine him being very frustrated at oracle and google where motivations are different enough to not cause his ego to be fed.
And as much of a scourge Oracle is they have moved java forward much fast and further versus Sun. All with gosling being sidelined. Perhaps that is part of his motivation for this article. Someone raised his baby better than he could.
That being said, this is a really boring article. If there was anything meaty, he said he couldn't really say. The rest of it is that Oracle didn't pay him well and effectively demoted him. I feel like that is really unsurprising given Oracle's stance with Java and Sun stuff. They bought it strategically, not because they liked Java. Same for them with MySQL. They don't care, it's just another line item on their corporate acquisitions. The fact that they aren't taking the people they acquired seriously, even a fantastic guy like Gosling, is just another day at a mega corp.
Edit - grammar.
When Oracle acquired Sun, Java had been stagnating without seeing any major version for five years.
In the four years following the acquisition, Oracle released two major versions of Java, including some very long awaited (and tricky to implement) features.
Sun completely dropped the ball on Java in the last five years of its existence.
But allow me a bit of devil's advocate playacting.
There are some incontrovertible facts: as fun as it could have been for employees to work there, Sun wasn't making enough money, so it died; and as shit as Oracle can be for employees (and boy do I know that as an ex-O), they are still there squeezing out cash for Larry (and for Wall Street) on command.
Oracle is the ugly side of the market, but you'll never have a market without an ugly side. It takes skills to walk the tightrope between hard realities and "being fun geeks", and sometimes there is a lot of hypocrisy involved. Oracle just don't care, they are out for the dollar and they don't really hide it. At least with them you know where you stand from day 1.
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."
Oracle is a safe haven for incompetent managers and so called team leads. I know a few ex-colleagues of mine who left Oracle to join other companies and were shocked to see how fast and agile other companies were.
It is not in Oracle's DNA to hold managers accountable or fire them for management blunders or shoddy management. So when some of these managers and team leads from Oracle joined other companies, they found much to their surprise that they were answerable to higher management for the state of the project they were managing. They could not keep up with the pace of development or having concrete responsibility, and returned to Oracle to live a purposeless but relaxed life where one would earn less but otherwise thrive in the company by doing little to no actual work.
I've heard much the same about Microsoft's program managers.
> He said Oracle was without a doubt the most unethical competitor they ever had. IBM had internal guidelines on acceptable limits for gifts, meals etc you could give to clients, but Oracle sales people had no such qualms and would sometimes essentially bribe VPs/whoever had the power to make the purchasing decision.
Why the fuck has Larry Ellison sidelined the creator of Java in the development of Java in favor of himself making the key decisions? What qualifications does Ellison have to make these decisions? That's just colossally egocentric and incompetent.
You forgot narcissistic. And those attributes explain why.
http://www.businessinsider.com/oracles-thomas-kurian-has-int...
The leader here, who is known as TK internally, is known for being abusive and profane to his team. In my 5 years at Oracle, I have not met a single developer who respected TK. He was unanimously hated by all his developers. The general opinion among developers is, "This guy tries to be like Bill Gates, but come on, has he done anything in his life beyond managing supply chain management solutions?"
Yet, this guy is glorified within Oracle, just because Larry Ellison likes him. It is really a situation of one man versus all, where the one man is winning due to an intricately established bureaucracy over decades that cannot be unsettled anymore.