> Oracle did not have a notion of a senior engineer or at least one equivalent to Gosling’s grade at Sun, where he was a fellow. “In my job offer, they had me at a fairly significant grade level down,” he said.
Says something about how they value technical people.
> 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
One of the reasons I left GE was because there was no notion of a senior engineer in the software field (there are senior science positions in the research divisions). To go beyond "Software Engineer" you had to step into a managerial role and away from doing any software engineering.
This burned out several people (including myself). You can only wait for the implementation of "Technical Career Path" for so long.
> Oracle sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million
That's just Larry's favorite toy, I'd imagine the IRS to be interested in that as a deferred payment rather than Oracles shareholders, whatever floats Larry's boat (pun intended) is fine with them, as long as he delivers.
I was under the impression that Ellison pays for the sponsorship out of his pockets but puts the Oracle logo on the sailboat. Also, it is the BMW Oracle team and the total amount spent was "reported" to be around $200 million.
> Says something about how they value technical people.
I don't know much about Oracle but I have heard, FWIW, that they are one of the few remaining companies that really does and did whatever they could to not lay droves of folks off during the slow down. It's kind of hard to get a job there but they'll keep you forever if you do. I'm not sure how true that is or isn't.
Maybe not the sexiest titles but if that's true it shows that they do value employees.
A lot of big software companies seem to put significant effort into maintaining a good relationship with the developer/technical community, presumably in large part to keep the recruitment pipeline (especially of top people) flowing along.
Oracle, by contrast, doesn't seem to give a shit and gets away with it[1].
It probably doesn't matter much to Oracle to stay on good terms w/ the technical community since technical people aren't their customers.
The people who have the budgetary authority to buy Oracle's very expensive products very likely haven't been doing anything technical for many years, if they ever did. Programmers in organizations that use Oracle aren't asked if they want to use Oracle, they're told they're going to use Oracle...
Unless you get your kicks from working on a 30-year-old database written in 80's style C, I don't think there's much appeal to working for Oracle as a programmer.
as has been stated before in other threads in this topic, the decision to use oracle products is rarely a technical one. its a business one, made by business/managerial types. and so that is who oracle plays to. if you build a product that treats the client's developers as interchangeable incidentals, you're going to do the same to your own developers.
I don't know much about this sector, but how does Oracle compare to its direct competitors? E.g. is SAP friendlier with the developer/technical community?
Oracle has brilliant opportunities at the moment: they own a great processor (Sparc) that they could closely integrate with their database, application software and even Java... and (finally!) give IBM a run for their money. They have the cool and fast technology of both Sun's JVM and BEA's JVM (JRockit). They have acquired other brilliant technologies, and have in practice endless resources to acquire more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oraclehttp://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/acquisitions/index.html
But... although it's simple to appreciate the advantages of combining technologies, it's very very hard to actually do. For example, the IBM 360 project, of a series of machines of increasing power (and price), that were all compatible, so customers could upgrade, is a simple idea. But implementing this was a bet-the-company project, it was celebrated as an incredible, miraculous achievement, and the lessons learnt from it remain popular to this day (The Mythical Man Month, by the leader of the 360 project, Fred Brooks.)
To pull off these technical feats, you need the public superstar developers, but also the hidden superstar developers (the x100 coders; the people who, after working closely with them for a while, you observe, oh that guy's a genius); and then the x10 coders, who want to hang out with the geniuses and learn from them. It's places like HP used to be, where Woz wanted to work, at almost all costs (Woz himself being a x100 guy.)
If you only have x5 or x7 coders; and if you don't support them (with infrastructure, secretarial etc - not just compensation, adequate decision-making power, and some kind of recognition.), then, well, you can't do these technical feats. You may seek but not find; ask but it shall not be given; knock but it shall not be opened. Though this is not a disruptive issue, the same factors occur of the difficulty for an established successful company to change its culture and business architecture. And Oracle doesn't want to change anyway.
For years x86 has been chewing up the market for Sparc processors, and one of the reasons that Sun had such poor finances is that it was selling x86-based servers more than Sparc based servers (they cost considerably less, and perform better).
Besides, Sun has had a long history of massive screwups -- and they put "don't tell anyone we screwed up" clauses in their support contracts. One company just gave up when they got their UltraSPARC3 rig, found that not only was it not nearly performant enough to meet expectations, but also in order for it to function reliably, they had to disable the 2nd level cache on every CPU, or else a cache glitch would bring down the entire server (32 procs).
It's not a great processor. It hasn't been for a long time. Sun has been the "flock of chickens" vs the POWER "bull" as a result.
"Also, asked whether in hindsight he would have preferred Sun having been acquired by IBM (which pursued a deal to acquire Sun and then backed out late in the game) rather than Oracle, Gosling said he and at least Sun Chairman Scott McNealy debated the prospect. And the consensus, led by McNealy, was that although they said they believed “Oracle would be more savage, IBM would make more layoffs.”
That's interesting, given that Gosling now decides to quit 'of his own accord', which is probably a lot cheaper than to lay someone off.
Technically Oracle may not lay people off that readily, but I don't see how you could interpret Goslings treatment in any way but to force him out of the company. He had his compensation reduced, they clipped his wings and on top of all that used him to act at being a trained parrot.
IBM and SUN had tons of competing products. They compete in: OS's - Solaris vs AIX; Hardware - Sun's Low end x86 vs systemX, SPARC vs Power, Disk Storage, Tape Storage; And probably a bunch more I can't think of.
Oracle and SUN weren't really competitors in many spaces. So IBM would have been better for Gosling -- but there was more hope for the rest of the employees at Oracle.
So where does a guy like Gosling go now? Google seems to be serving the role that Bell Labs once did in giving all the top technical dogs a big playground but other than that it's hard to guess where he might fit in.
Oracle sounds as bad a company internally as externally. I'm hugely grateful that I've found other languages, frameworks and databases to base my career on and minimise Oracle's involvement in my life.
Although I never worked for them, I loved the hardware and software output from Sun. It was good to have them in the tech ecosystem. I can't say the same about Oracle.
I sympathize with all the great Sun engineers that got a bad deal, but didn't Sun do poorly from an investor perspective? And isn't that important?
As much as I really hate Oracle (I'm a programmer and don't like their products), they do really well for investors. They make fat profits each quarter. I don't really understand why - why people buy their overpriced, complex products - but they do.
The sales organization gets priority in Oracle. They're never going to start a project by asking "what would be cool?", but rather "what do our customers want?". Not the path to the most technically satisfying jobs, but companies like that stand a better chance of making money.
I've worked at a few (smaller) software companies, and from what I can tell the ones that go out of business do so because they make really cool products that either 1) don't get connected to the right customers or 2) are missing some critical feature customers need because developers didn't understand the business space. Both problems are the result of a poor or unsupported sales organization.
As a technical guy I get irritated by the sales people as much as anyone else, especially when they try to promise away my nights or weekends. But a software company won't survive without them. Based on my own experience I'd say the most successful companies could better be described as sales organizations that do software instead of software companies that do sales.
Oracle is very good if you're the sort of company that wants to make one phone call and buy a turnkey system to do something very boring, but important, that isn't really core to your company. You simply place one call and say "Hi I need a payroll system for my company with a few 100K employees spread around the world", then Oracle takes care of providing everything from hardware and OS right up to support and training, with each component bearing the Oracle brand. Very few companies can offer that.
Oracle is marketing and support organization, notba software company. I wouldn't want to work for them, and don't like their products, but I respect that they deliver real value to their customers.
It seems kinda odd to me that gosling isn't going out and getting a great job at a hot startup.... He could write his own ticket.
It really isn't oracles job to retain him, they dont really need him it seems.
I can answer that one... their pointy haired bosses read the ads in the airports and business magazines that say "98% of Fortune 500 companies" use Oracle
From the article: "All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone."
It need not have come to that if they had used their "ability to decide" in managing Sun properly. You cannot hang your hat for very long on "we made good software but were unable to sell it".
And then there's the interminable delay in Java 7. In this case, "made", as in the past tense of "make" is the operative word. As I noted elsewhere, I'm not sure Oracle wanted to give Gosling and his peers decision making authority (let alone retain them) based on their recent preformance.
"But unlike Oracle, Davis and the Raiders have not had a winning season for awhile – not since my Baltimore Ravens flattened their hopes and the shoulder of quarterback Rich Gannon after a vicious pancake tackle by Tony Siragusa on the way to a Ravens’ Super Bowl winning season in 2001."
The Raiders were 11-5 the next year (2002) and went to the Super Bowl.
“All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone.”
Probably the best thing to happen as the decision makers managed to decide Sun to the selling block.
Personally, I think that Gosling got what he deserved considering the pain he inflicted on myriads of developers with Java. (Yes, there are some nice technologies in the Java platform. But Java language is not one of them.)
It's interesting that a pay cut and a down-grade in title isn't what did it but that their marginalization of his input and control is what pushed him over the edge.
Nah, he was brought in after Java was going to help write the language definition document, given his fantastic demonstrated ability to do this: Scheme, co-author of the best one for C, Common Lisp.
He's now working on Fortress, a HPC language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_%28programming_languag...). As far as I know, people doing research are still happy (enough), employed, etc., e.g. that project is still going with the most recent release a month and a half ago and the Maxine JVM in Java was fine as of the time Oracle sued Google, when I stopped paying attention to it.
JAVA handled by the micro managers. That means each new feature will be nicely documented first...in a contract. It will go through a rigorous due diligence process, the basic questions being 'Whats in it for Oracle', 'Does it help our performance', etc. Oracle makes good enough software but at a slow pace.
Gosling's not going to say 'I am really worried about JAVA and chances are it may not evolve'. But I think its quite clear from this interview.
a lot of Sun's prima donnas didn't make it in Oracle wolf pack. They had their day at Sun (it was an unbelievable feast during plague), and it resulted in the failure of the company on all fronts, business and engineering, software and hardware.
More accurately, we (for there are many of us) realized that we could go solve much more interesting problems elsewhere -- and in a much better environment besides. Why would anyone wish to suffer at a technically mediocre company when there are so many interesting problems yet to solve?
[+] [-] davidw|15 years ago|reply
> Oracle did not have a notion of a senior engineer or at least one equivalent to Gosling’s grade at Sun, where he was a fellow. “In my job offer, they had me at a fairly significant grade level down,” he said.
Says something about how they value technical people.
> 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
[+] [-] yellowbkpk|15 years ago|reply
This burned out several people (including myself). You can only wait for the implementation of "Technical Career Path" for so long.
[+] [-] jacquesm|15 years ago|reply
That's just Larry's favorite toy, I'd imagine the IRS to be interested in that as a deferred payment rather than Oracles shareholders, whatever floats Larry's boat (pun intended) is fine with them, as long as he delivers.
[+] [-] protomyth|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheCondor|15 years ago|reply
I don't know much about Oracle but I have heard, FWIW, that they are one of the few remaining companies that really does and did whatever they could to not lay droves of folks off during the slow down. It's kind of hard to get a job there but they'll keep you forever if you do. I'm not sure how true that is or isn't.
Maybe not the sexiest titles but if that's true it shows that they do value employees.
[+] [-] paulbaumgart|15 years ago|reply
Oracle, by contrast, doesn't seem to give a shit and gets away with it[1].
Why?
[1] http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...
[+] [-] ajaxian|15 years ago|reply
The people who have the budgetary authority to buy Oracle's very expensive products very likely haven't been doing anything technical for many years, if they ever did. Programmers in organizations that use Oracle aren't asked if they want to use Oracle, they're told they're going to use Oracle...
Unless you get your kicks from working on a 30-year-old database written in 80's style C, I don't think there's much appeal to working for Oracle as a programmer.
[+] [-] noodle|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _delirium|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 10ren|15 years ago|reply
But... although it's simple to appreciate the advantages of combining technologies, it's very very hard to actually do. For example, the IBM 360 project, of a series of machines of increasing power (and price), that were all compatible, so customers could upgrade, is a simple idea. But implementing this was a bet-the-company project, it was celebrated as an incredible, miraculous achievement, and the lessons learnt from it remain popular to this day (The Mythical Man Month, by the leader of the 360 project, Fred Brooks.)
To pull off these technical feats, you need the public superstar developers, but also the hidden superstar developers (the x100 coders; the people who, after working closely with them for a while, you observe, oh that guy's a genius); and then the x10 coders, who want to hang out with the geniuses and learn from them. It's places like HP used to be, where Woz wanted to work, at almost all costs (Woz himself being a x100 guy.)
If you only have x5 or x7 coders; and if you don't support them (with infrastructure, secretarial etc - not just compensation, adequate decision-making power, and some kind of recognition.), then, well, you can't do these technical feats. You may seek but not find; ask but it shall not be given; knock but it shall not be opened. Though this is not a disruptive issue, the same factors occur of the difficulty for an established successful company to change its culture and business architecture. And Oracle doesn't want to change anyway.
[+] [-] Tamerlin|15 years ago|reply
I'm not so sure about that.
For years x86 has been chewing up the market for Sparc processors, and one of the reasons that Sun had such poor finances is that it was selling x86-based servers more than Sparc based servers (they cost considerably less, and perform better).
Fujutsu's Sparc implementation significantly outperforms Sun's.
Contemporary Xeons outperform both these days.
Besides, Sun has had a long history of massive screwups -- and they put "don't tell anyone we screwed up" clauses in their support contracts. One company just gave up when they got their UltraSPARC3 rig, found that not only was it not nearly performant enough to meet expectations, but also in order for it to function reliably, they had to disable the 2nd level cache on every CPU, or else a cache glitch would bring down the entire server (32 procs).
It's not a great processor. It hasn't been for a long time. Sun has been the "flock of chickens" vs the POWER "bull" as a result.
[+] [-] jacquesm|15 years ago|reply
"Also, asked whether in hindsight he would have preferred Sun having been acquired by IBM (which pursued a deal to acquire Sun and then backed out late in the game) rather than Oracle, Gosling said he and at least Sun Chairman Scott McNealy debated the prospect. And the consensus, led by McNealy, was that although they said they believed “Oracle would be more savage, IBM would make more layoffs.”
That's interesting, given that Gosling now decides to quit 'of his own accord', which is probably a lot cheaper than to lay someone off.
Technically Oracle may not lay people off that readily, but I don't see how you could interpret Goslings treatment in any way but to force him out of the company. He had his compensation reduced, they clipped his wings and on top of all that used him to act at being a trained parrot.
[+] [-] jacksonh|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatusername|15 years ago|reply
Oracle and SUN weren't really competitors in many spaces. So IBM would have been better for Gosling -- but there was more hope for the rest of the employees at Oracle.
[+] [-] cageface|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hopeless|15 years ago|reply
Although I never worked for them, I loved the hardware and software output from Sun. It was good to have them in the tech ecosystem. I can't say the same about Oracle.
[+] [-] va_coder|15 years ago|reply
As much as I really hate Oracle (I'm a programmer and don't like their products), they do really well for investors. They make fat profits each quarter. I don't really understand why - why people buy their overpriced, complex products - but they do.
[+] [-] tsotha|15 years ago|reply
I've worked at a few (smaller) software companies, and from what I can tell the ones that go out of business do so because they make really cool products that either 1) don't get connected to the right customers or 2) are missing some critical feature customers need because developers didn't understand the business space. Both problems are the result of a poor or unsupported sales organization.
As a technical guy I get irritated by the sales people as much as anyone else, especially when they try to promise away my nights or weekends. But a software company won't survive without them. Based on my own experience I'd say the most successful companies could better be described as sales organizations that do software instead of software companies that do sales.
[+] [-] dagw|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lzw|15 years ago|reply
It seems kinda odd to me that gosling isn't going out and getting a great job at a hot startup.... He could write his own ticket.
It really isn't oracles job to retain him, they dont really need him it seems.
[+] [-] wh-uws|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adharmad|15 years ago|reply
It need not have come to that if they had used their "ability to decide" in managing Sun properly. You cannot hang your hat for very long on "we made good software but were unable to sell it".
[+] [-] hga|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ataranto|15 years ago|reply
The Raiders were 11-5 the next year (2002) and went to the Super Bowl.
[+] [-] philwelch|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shoover|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fondue|15 years ago|reply
Probably the best thing to happen as the decision makers managed to decide Sun to the selling block.
[+] [-] rbanffy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] absconditus|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skullsplitter|15 years ago|reply
"That bent Gosling’s resolve like a wishbone in the hands of two eager siblings in mid-pull after Thanksgiving dinner, but even that didn’t break it."
[+] [-] zvrba|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Astro9k|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strait|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hga|15 years ago|reply
Nah, he was brought in after Java was going to help write the language definition document, given his fantastic demonstrated ability to do this: Scheme, co-author of the best one for C, Common Lisp.
He's now working on Fortress, a HPC language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_%28programming_languag...). As far as I know, people doing research are still happy (enough), employed, etc., e.g. that project is still going with the most recent release a month and a half ago and the Maxine JVM in Java was fine as of the time Oracle sued Google, when I stopped paying attention to it.
[+] [-] sshah|15 years ago|reply
Gosling's not going to say 'I am really worried about JAVA and chances are it may not evolve'. But I think its quite clear from this interview.
[+] [-] rbanffy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paramendra|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VladRussian|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcantrill|15 years ago|reply