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Comment by soloracle | Hacker News Reader

I call FUD. Oracle acquired Sun in 2010 - that's seven years, and it wasn't until this past January and August that major project changes were made and large number of staff laid off. "Get out now" seems unnecessarily alarming. Also, this may vary from org to org, but our (sparc/solaris dev) laptop replacement was every three years.

I'll admit that the way they've handled the recent layoffs is atrocious, with most employees finding out via FedEx notification and a pre-recorded concall message. Rumors of this major cut have been circulating for months. I've lost many good friends with 10,20,30+ years in Sun/Oracle. But I think Oracle gave hardware a fair shake.

Full disclosure: I worked in a Solaris dev/sustaining group until this past week.

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I was part of the Hyperion acquisition. A relative of mine was dependent on Micros. I am speaking from experience, at least on the software side.

I’m telling people forcefully because Oracle has been doing the acquisition game for a very long time; they’ve figured out how to string people along to get the maximum value out of the acquisition. I personally lost out on thousands in pay by sticking around for too long.

Oracle as a company does not value engineers. A software engineer is scum compared to sales. If you want to be an engineer and make the real money (and get any respect) work in Sales Engineering. You’ll be away from home for 40 weeks a year but you get decent hardware and a small commission from the deals.

For those with career ambitions or self respect my original advice applies: get out.

I think that Solaris and SPARC had different fates in this regard: Solaris was dead the moment they (re)closed it in 2010 -- there was simply no way that Solaris was going to survive as a proprietary operating system (the era for which had passed half a decade before).

As for SPARC, Oracle does seem to have invested heavily, in part because of the elaborate self-delusion that Ellison seemed to have that he could develop magical database hardware that would somehow repeal the laws of physics.

As for the warning, it is indeed apt; Oracle is a mechanized and myopic profit-maximizer -- a remorseless and shameless corporate sociopath that lacks the ability to feel anything at all for its customers. Yes, your products will die of asphyxiation and incompetence and so on, but the much more acute damage will be to one's sense of purpose in the world: working for Oracle is a nonstop trip to either an existential crisis or a mercenary's existence (or both). And as many discovered on Friday, working for such an entity out of a noble (if misplaced) sense of duty or loyalty is pointless; Oracle feels nothing for you, its employees, for the same reason it feels nothing for its customers or its partners or the domain or the industry or society writ large: because it feels nothing at all.

"Do not make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison [or Oracle] " - Bryan Cantrill

> ... - Bryan Cantrill

Guess who that "bcantrill" person is that you replied to :-)

The moment Oracle acquired Sun, early 2010, I called a meeting with my boss and boss's boss and said "Speaking as a Solaris admin, with several years' Solaris on my CV, we need to get off Solaris immediately and move to Linux." Took us a couple of years for most of it, and the last went when we finally got rid of Oracle and hence its SPARC box. Stack was substantially internally-developed Java.

Any idea what (if any) the academic or other foundations of this delusion were & how far Oracle got before cutting their losses? Rock seems to have been suffocated before the ink on the acquisition was dry so I'm assuming that's not it.

I love reading about the dead-end roads of computer engineering, especially those that had a few gigadollars driven down them.

It took less than a year from Oracle acquiring Sun for OpenOffice to die. It then marched on as a zombie for years.

And the MySQL and Hudson debacles, respectively before and shortly after the acquisition closed...

You mean MariaDB and Jenkins? I kid! I kid!

I wish it were more funny but it's not. Oracle has a special way of decimating open source projects.

> I wish it were more funny but it's not. Oracle has a special way of decimating open source projects.

Actually, all three of the mentioned open-source projects Oracle has "decimated", have gone on to live happy, healthy, productive lives.

Perhaps Oracle just pushes baby birds out of the nest to see who can survive on their own, and who falls to their death.

OpenOffice was 100% garbage from day 1 until Libre actually showed up. It was never viable under Sun's watch. Source: I used it full time for 6 years, filled with hatred.

> it wasn't until this past January and August that major project changes were made and large number of staff laid off.

Haha, what? Oracle (silently!) closed-sourced Solaris again seven months after its acquisition and much of the core talent walked.

Oracle kept Sun alive in a vegetative state to sustain the Java lawsuit against Google. That's pretty much it.

Agreed. Oracle does kill products and end teams, but no more so than other large acquireres. Hell, it is NOTHING compared to Yahoo! or HP. HP is the absolute kings of ruining products and teams long term, while Yahoo! has killed more acquired products than any other company I can think of. Oracle has good benefits, takes pretty good care of their employees, but they'er old school so people don't get to work at home and have to drive to Redwood City every day. Not the worst, but not the best either.

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