Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe | Hacker News Reader

Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe

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207 pointsteklaperry170 comments

I was one of the people being let go in this round. I moved to Seattle and joined OCI as a Senior Engineer at the end of Jan 2019. Yesterday when I came to the office and was doing my work at 9:00 AM, the whole team about 20 people were called by VP to have a meeting at 10:00 AM. He said the whole team got terminated. We had to turn in the computer by 12:00 PM and leave the office by 3:00 PM. There was no buffer time at all.

Me: "Do I have to pay back sign on bonus and relocation? I've been here for less than 2 months."

VP: "You were supposed to, but I pushed it back to the management. Now you are forgiven. That's a very good question."

Me: ......................&^#^(%#&)@!

Today mark as my first out-of-employment day. I am on H-1B, which is an even worse situation. I'll need to find a new job ASAP :(

The VP also mentioned they were thinking about the plan in Jan. So why the hell did you hire me then? I joined at the end of Jan.

Mass layoff decisions like this are typically made at a higher level of the organization. The executives don't give much advance notice to the middle managers who make hiring decisions for most engineers in order to prevent leaks.

hiring at oracle is weird. when i worked there my offer had to be approved by larry.

If Larry is approving hires it's just as a rubber stamp. There's no way anyone at the head of a company that size could think about anything at the employee level.

Don't underestimate Larry. Not in this regard anyway.

No kidding. We were a 500 person shop that was gobbled up by Oracle. First meeting with Larry - we were all suited out. Walk in, he is in jeans and a teeshirt. He asked, 'why you all dressed up?' A very, very technical discussion on our company's software. He had been thoroughly briefed on our stuff and asked very insightful questions on how our J2SE app worked.

At Google, hires had to be approved by the founders as of 2013. This was when the company was hiring a few hundred people per week, so the founders got a spreadsheet with links or something like that. And apparently they did sometimes say no to some people.

It seems like a bonkers practice to me. I understand that it is important to hire good people. But this could be delegated several levels down, at least for entry-level hires. I suppose the top dogs could worry about promotions and hirings starting at the level of the junior managers, if they wanted to.

For the longest time, APMs had to have a phone screen with Marissa Mayer before they got hired. My main question when she asked me if I had any questions was whether this was the best use of her time. I don't know if that had any influence or not over their decision.

Don't leave us hanging - did it have a negative or positive effect on the outcome?

Candidates aren't told why they were accepted/rejected from a job.

It is entirely plausible that they hired you so that they won't have to lay off someone they actually care about.

Well they laid off the entire team, so that's unlikely. These are typically product pivots, not financial downsizings when it's entire teams.

They could have done it on the division level. Pad your org with a relatively useless team just before the forced 10% layoff and you've dodged the bullet.

Are you trolling? You're accusing management of onboarding an H1-B, paying a sign-on bonus, paying relocation expenses and then paying them for 2 months to surreptitiously "pad the relatively useless team" so you can initiate a layoff instead individual firings. Nope. Generally, firings at big corp go like this: 1. Create an improvement plan for your under-performing worker. 2. Evaluate worker based on that plan in 1 month. 3. Fire worker.

When you have several layers of middle management trying to sabotage one another in pursuit of better chances at the next reorg, even weirder things could happen. Been there myself.

Why would you lay off an entire team for a product pivot? Unless all of the company's other products are fully staffed... how often does that ever happen?

Hey friend, don't take it personally. A layoff indicates a failure (of planning, of budgeting, or whatever) at a much higher level of the organization than you

Your position may have been opened before the layoff decision was made, so they decided to leave it open so as not to raise suspicions (managers will rightfully get upset if headcount is taken away from them with no explanation). They might've know the number of people they needed to cull in January, but not decided where it would happen.

There's a lot of work in Seattle. If you're cunning maybe you can get a second hiring bonus in Q1 2019.

>>Hey friend, don't take it personally. A layoff indicates a failure (of planning, of budgeting, or whatever) at a much higher level of the organization than you

And yet it is always the low-level folks who get fucked, while the executives who make the lay-off decisions often are rewarded with promotions and bonuses at the end of the year.

Sounds to me like "the left hand knoweth not what the right hand doeth" at Oracle. At least with regard to your department. But I agree with the other guy in this thread who said not to take it personally. You shouldn't. It's more a commentary on the state of corporate flux than it is on your work, that's the healthiest way to view things.

Sounds to me like "the left hand knoweth not what the right hand doeth" at Oracle. At least with regard to your department. But I agree with the guy who said not to take it personally. You shouldn't. It's more a commentary on the state of corporate flux than it is on your work, that's the healthiest way to view things.

This has happened to me. Two weeks in the door and a massive layoff of peers occurs but I survived the hatchet as I came via a recruitment agency charging 20% of base salary. Higher ups can’t disclose plans until they’re executing them as it’s a warning sign something is afoot if a sudden hiring freeze occurs mid-quarter. Could be seen as disposing financial info unfairly.

Sorry to hear this sucks. Try to look at the silver lining, you don't want to work for such a company. I hope you find something very soon.

That's a bummer, reach out if you want a referral to another popular ex-OCI company in Seattle.

Was on pololee's team as well. We were all crushed because the team was only a few months old and were we just all getting to know each other well.

That's complete bullshit, hiring bonuses don't have to be repaid if they terminate you for any reason. They were trying to make you feel like the manager went to bat for you, which isn't the case.

Check your employment paperwork. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. To make you pay it back after just hiring is a jerk move, but not all executives are kind.

Why would anyone sign a contract that makes them liable for the relocation expenses (that could be easily ~50K for intercontinental moves) based on a risk that is outside their control?

- Because they didn't read that part so closely.

- Because they read it closely but didn't interpret it correctly.

- Because they brought it up and their counterpart said "don't worry, that's boilerplate and we've never actually used that clause".

- Because the alternative was signing a contract that had no relocation/hiring bonus.

- Because they needed a job, and that's what was there.

- Because they really really needed a job to keep health insurance or their visa, and they had no leverage.

- Because they had leverage, but were too inexperienced in negotiations to realize it.

- Because they had leverage, but were not comfortable using it, and were taken advantage of.

There's lots of reasons, of varying quality, that someone may do something that seems ridiculous to you. Why are you implying that the (hypothetical) losing party here is the one who's done something wrong?

All I am saying is that in a relatively safe first world countries in 2019 there are not that many ways to screw up your life big time. But signing a contract that lets someone take take more than your net worth might be based on a risk that they control and you don't, is certainly one of them.

I have actually been in a somewhat similar situation myself and I had spent hours googling all the legalese and running the "worst case" simulations in my head before signing it. And my understanding of possible paths and their consequences was very helpful later when the corporate politics unfolded the wrong way and it helped me exit the situation with a net plus.

We are talking about Oracle here..

And H-1B. I wouldn't put anything past that combination.

My employer has that language in the employment offer. If for any reason during the first 12 months then the pro-rated remainder needs to be returned.usually through withholding future earnings.

I’m hiring Sr developers right across the street at Expedia. Shoot me a note: joholland at expedia.com

Do companies like expedia look to hire people moving from the GDS? I'm not sure I want to stay in the travel industry, but I really like the challenging problems. Just not sure I want to stay with the current company I'm at.

Yes! Shoot me an email.

Pololee and pnloyd feel free to reach out. There are plenty of related jobs in seattle.

The H-1B situation, at least back in my day, is that formally you need a new job within X days, but in reality no one cares as long as you don't leave the country.

If you're unsure/nervous, talk to an immigration lawyer. A 1 hour consultation is quite affordable.

It's not that simple. Whenever you report the exact dates of employment (which you can't easily fudge as they have to match with what the employer can / will attest to), such as for applying for a Green card, it will be clear that you have been in violation of status, in case you were out of work for >60 days. And then you are at the mercy of USCIS/DHS. You also have to attest that you have not been in violation of status when you apply for a visa. Most people don't want to commit perjury by lying on Visa forms.

It should also be noted that this 60-day margin is a recent (2015 or so) relief by the Obama administration that for some reason managed to fly under the Trump radar of undoing Obama's immigration-related reprieves.

Before that, you would technically be in violation of status literally the next day of the firing. Imagine living in the US legally for 10+ yrs, having a house and kids here who are American citizens, and suddenly be in violation of status and expected to pack your bags and leave the next day coz you got laid off.

I see a lot of (well-justified) anger on HN against H-1B etc. but most citizens don't know what perversities our so called 'highly qualified' labor pool has to deal with. These are unique to the United States, btw. No other developed country has such a ridiculous work visa system.

What the lawyers will inform you, is that there is the letter of the law, and the practical reality, and especially so in immigration law, they differ quite a lot.

> Before that, you would technically be in violation ...

The word technically is my point. Nobody was actually treated that way in reality, and lawyers know what's real and what's just theory.

My H1B info is second hand and 10+ year old, so don't take it at face value, but the same goes for what this kinkrtyavimoodh persona says :)

IANAL, but consider whether you can apply for transition to a B-1/2 visa today while your H-1B is still. They take 6 months to grant and allow valid stay while you're waiting. Talk to an immigration lawyer for details on whether this works for your case.

I emigrated to Europe but I have about 20 friends who are on the H1B living in the US. I think folks on the H1B put up with awful treatment and don’t even know how awful it is because they haven’t seen a country that’s actually welcoming to immigrants.

I’ve pointed out this awful situation where you can not afford to ever get let go from your job under any circumstances without jeopardising your life and your family’s life. In response I get “well if they’re so highly skilled, why are they getting let go?” Ask that question to the top comment on this thread, if you think it’s a fair one.

Every year H1Bs need to go back to their home country to get their visa stamped. Why can’t they just go to a government agency within the US? Fuck if I know.

Switching jobs again is a huge pain. A friend of mine has been waiting in India for a few months for his visa to be transferred from one company to another. Imagine if he had kids who were going to school.

But you think this is temporary right? Eventually you get a Green Card and everything gets much better. Wrong. If you’re Indian it could take anywhere between 15 to 20 years to get that Green Card. You will be living the life of a H1B until then.

Contrast all this to my experience in Europe. I got my visa within 2 weeks. I’m treated with respect here. There’s a clear path to Permanent Residency here - just stay in the country for 5 years on my current visa. There’s a clear path to citizenship if I want it - just be a Permanent Resident for 1 year. I don’t get jerked around with stamping requirements. My spouse can work without worrying about rule changes.

Of course, the vagaries of the H1B program along with the indignities and suffering that people go through might actually be a feature, not a bug. The goal could be to create a “hostile environment” to keep the bad sort out. In that case it’s doing really well.

> If you’re Indian it could take anywhere between 15 to 20 years to get that Green Card.

Unless you are filing as EB1, expect to (and plan to) not get it in your lifetime unless the govt changes something.

Plan to, I agree with that. But "Expect to" as well?

I'm asking mostly rhetorically (since I know of a handful of people that applied as well as got their non-EB1 green cards within the span of my lifetime), but slightly curiously as well (if you know any recent trends, etc).

Plan to is absolutely the best advice as far as I'm concerned

As an American-born person my frustration with H-1B is twofold: lower wages and abusive treatment of employees. Perspective taking and empathy can be hard when you're talking about a situation you can't relate to but that hardly excuses the atrocious behavior on the part of employers.

If you or anyone affected is interested: I'm hiring in AWS both in Seattle and Vancouver, BC. Email me at alljay at amazon.com.

What a win.

Isn't Seattle mostly OCI? Why the layoffs there?

A close family member of mine worked for Oracle as a mechanical engineer for 6 years. He had survived many rounds of layoffs at Sun before it was acquired by Oracle and at StorageTek before it was acquired by Sun.

He described a depressing corporate culture at Oracle with a seemingly infinite number of middle managers. One of his co-workers spent most of his time in the office managing his real estate business. Larry Ellison is universally hated by the employees. The company is full of academically talented but practically useless people because Oracle will only give interviews to people with a degree from their small list of Ivy-tier universities.

Not long ago he retired and left Oracle. As a result of his experience there I'm now of the opinion that these older tech companies frankly can't die fast enough.

What you're describing is general corporate culture after a company has experienced its hayday. Usually all the passionate people including original founders have cashed out, exited the company, and there is nobody left that actually cares about the company. There is a lot of room for mistakes and not delivering results because money grows on trees. People end up skating by and milking their one-hit-wonder cashcow product for years. Politics becomes rampant and an endless supply of bad hires cause the company to slowly rot to its death.

Oracle's something special in this regard though. It's not like Sun was top of the world when they acquired StorageTek, but having worked in the tape library industry in CO at the time, Oracle seems to be a special section of hell.

Many, many, people who worked on Java and Solaris would agree with you.

Perhaps best described by the Gervais Principle (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...)

I wonder what will sprout up in the ashes once Google goes further in that direction. Today the real tech companies are shining beacons of comparative competence but that can't last forever.

and Google is full on speed in that direction

> Oracle will only give interviews to people with a degree from their small list of Ivy-tier universities.

That's only for new grads with no work experience. It's a stupid policy, but in my corner of the company we generally made good hiring decisions. I disagree that the company has a lot of useless academics. IME, engineering and product management are full of very smart, capable, hard working people, some of them genuinely brilliant.

> Oracle will only give interviews to people with a degree from their small list of Ivy-tier universities.

I cannot imagine that a company with a healthy culture could allow such a boneheaded policy to persist.

I agree, not healthy. You know what's more fucked up? Not long after I joined, just after the Sun acquisition, I learned that my previous company was dissolving, and I handed a dozen resumes to my then-director (different director from the one in my other comment; this was a guy who's no longer with Oracle).

I don't take referrals lightly, because my reputation is at stake too. In this case, most of my former colleagues were H1-B from India, all of them highly experienced, expert software engineers, dedicated workers, established long-term residents, and personally delightful. These are people I can recommend for any job and I know they'll make me proud.

My boss refused to even look at these men's resumes. It was never said out loud, but I was made to believe that there was an informal policy at Sun/Oracle at that time, that non-citizens would not be considered for employment, and my boss justified it by saying, "there are enough Americans who need jobs".

Of the three white guys I referred, two were hired. How's that for unhealthy?

Edit:

Going through my old emails, it actually looks like I went 3 for 6 on the white guys. Nevertheless... [edit: needlessly inflammatory comment removed].

> Of the three white guys I referred, two were hired. How's that for unhealthy?

I feel like you're trying to turn this into a race or gender issue when that isn't necessarily relevant. Like your boss said, maybe he really does just prefer to hire Americans and the race/gender is irrelevant to him.

Yeah, no. One of the guys I referred had a green card, been here for years, started a family here. He has an Indian name, but he's as American as I am.

Didn't matter. Boss wouldn't consider him.

Edit:

What you said is a reasonable proposition. Nationalism and racism can be distinct from one another. But in this case, given the treatment of my green-card bearing friend and the tone of the brief discussions I had with the boss, it seemed clear to me that some amount of outright racism was at work.

I thought Oracle likes H1-B folks. Even Dept of Labor filed a lawsuit against Oracle alleging that Oracle underpays H1B employees.

Could be, I don't know. My view of the machine was very small.

What honestly confuses me is why people of that caliber continue to work for Oracle when everybody has read umpteen stories like the OP and lots of us even know people who can attest to the toxicity of the company first hand. The usual counterbalance to a company treating employees like crap is that it tarnishes the company's reputation, making it harder to find talent. Oracle's reputation has been below rock bottom for my entire career, so why are all these great people you speak of still taking jobs there? As far as I can tell the compensation there is pretty standard, so it doesn't seem like they're just buying people off. Maybe you can shed some light on this for me.

I was a PM at Oracle - our team VP reported to Larry. Everybody I worked with was very experienced and very sharp. On the other hand, we regarded most of the company as "sheep" who executed our plans. Completely expendable and generally unenlightened. Obviously there were other bright people around the company, but by and large they had no clue about our strategy or direction or the way that real decisions were made (and we kept a lot of the real reasons for things secret - we didn't want competitors to know what we were really doing or why.) You don't become a business the size of Oracle by being completely stupid.

One example - since then I've worked for about 5 or 6 companies who boast about how they hired Oracle salespeople, so now they are energizing their sales. But at Oracle we spent a lot of time and effort at HQ doing things to make Sales and the Salespeople effective. So at company after company they can't figure out why hiring the "right" Salespeople isn't solving their problem. But they aren't doing any of the things that we did to support Salespeople (things throughout the rest of the company and outside the company.) We kept most of it secret from Sales, so even they didn't really know what we were doing. So are the Sales people smart? Yes. And are they sheep? Yes.

Similar arguments apply to most of the other PMs outside of core database (who companies also mistakenly hire to "turbocharge" their products), most of the Engineering groups, most of the support teams, and generally everybody outside a relatively small group of people.

See, this just proves what I said in another comment -- that the different parts of Oracle are like completely different companies. I don't doubt what you say. But in ZFSSA QA, it was the opposite. Our director held regular all-hands meetings specifically meant to keep us all up to date on product strategy and direction. She wanted all of us to know exactly how our efforts were contributing to product revenue and to the company's strategic goals. Detailed stuff that made us (me, anyway) feel important. I've actually never seen anything like it anywhere else I've worked, even startups.

I agree completely. If a director was meeting the company goals and running either a harsh or caring organization - well, at the higher levels of the organization nobody really cared as long as things worked. We would put up with lawsuits, employee complaints, and customer complaints all day if the business was going in the right direction. We spent insane amounts on lawsuits in exchange for getting non-disclosures signed. Like I said before - Oracle didn't grow to its size by being stupid. (I should add that I didn't like the environment. When Larry offered me control of a big organization I left. I was tired of the horrible values and what I would be expected to do. I walked away from a transition to an Executive position to go back to simple technical work. No regrets.)

I only have experience with the former Sun storage bits: Solaris, ZFS, storage appliance, networking. I worked in a former Sun building, and with just one exception everyone in the chain between me and Larry was a Sun employee.

Sun was a really cool place to work. The periodic demoralizing layoffs were a bummer, but they didn't seem toxic; it was common for people to come right back, sometimes back to their same offices, after the company started hiring again.

Sun's technology was hugely attractive. Solaris was the best Unix. ZFS, dtrace, etc. Dozens of other projects and thousands of people doing cutting edge work. Even the older stuff like tape and SAM/QFS was really cool to work on. The fact that so much of it was open source gave me a moral imperative to contribute, and I know a lot of other people felt the same.

I think the shear awesomeness of the technology that Oracle inherited from Sun (and other companies) drove the demand for Oracle jobs at that site for years after the acquisition. Oracle has done their best to squander this good will, and I won't be surprised if they find it harder to attract talent going forward.

I'd say the company did not generally treat us little guys like crap. I had great bosses, except for the last one, who I suspect was a hit man hired specifically to thin the ranks. Overall, I feel I was treated fairly, perhaps even better than I deserved.

This is actually a pretty lame answer, sorry. My experience was too narrow to give me any useful insight.

No this is very illuminating. For what it's worth, I work with ex-Sun people who were laid off pretty soon after the acquisition and have nothing positive to say about Oracle. But I guess on thinking about it, they probably would not have quit because they liked their projects at Sun. So it seems consistent with your account. What a bummer all around.

I work for Oracle. The freedom I get there to pursue what I'm interested in is I think almost unheard of in the rest of the industry. All my work is open source and on GitHub. Oracle gives me two weeks extra leave a year for community service. When I was in HQ I got a private soundproof locking office with a mountain view. Now I work from home. I go as many conferences as I think I should. These are all things people here usually say they'd kill for!

Yeah, and the stuff you work on is really cool. The GraalVM project is probably the most advanced compiler and VM infrastructure in the world and it's not in the old Sun parts, it seems to be pure Oracle.

I have to admit, I didn't have a great impression of Oracle before the last few years or so, but sometimes I can't help feeling that their reputation may not be entirely deserved. Google went from having stellar reputation to being dumped on continuously and routinely described as 'immoral', although nothing about the firm or what it did had actually changed. Ditto for Facebook. Microsoft went from being the cool kid in the 80s (against IBM) to the evil monopolist to the stagnant yesterday's team to being cool again very recently, although I doubt the company has actually changed so drastically.

If I were looking for a job tomorrow I'd definitely consider joining the Graal team. Oracle's reputation (and now these layoffs) would certainly make me think twice, but, the work is cutting edge, high impact, Oracle has been a relatively decent steward of Java and its "negative" actions have only been about trying to make it fiscally sustainable, which is hardly a bad goal. And it's not like they've pursued that goal aggressively.

Here's a useless anecdote: I was fired from Oracle a couple years back, and it was done as pleasantly as one could expect. It completely depends on who's running your department. I was in storage testing. My direct manager had mediocre people skills, but the director is a superb manager in all respects, and she was the one who pulled the trigger in a face-to-face meeting with me. She made it as clean and honest as it gets. I'm not a huge fan of the company, but I wouldn't hesitate to work for her again.

Obviously the experience of a singe drone has little bearing on anyone else. I feel bad for everyone getting pushed out of the boat this month.

I left when the writing was on the wall; it took another 4 years for them to pull the plug on the rest of the (UK) group, because the slow-erosion strategy wasn't working quickly enough; but they were given a pretty fair treatment, by all accounts.

Oracle is a massive company, even with trade unions here in Europe. They will not screw you over, as long as you agree that their first and foremost priority is their bank account and act accordingly.

Could you describe the slow-erosion strategy?

In its most honest form, it's just letting attrition work naturally.

Slimy companies do things to undermine morale and make work untenable for established employees, especially the expensive senior ones. Good example is IBM abruptly banning remote work. Marissa Mayer was known for this kind of thing at Yahoo too.

Any sort of promotion stopped, pretty much all career progression options were taken off the table, and people were not replaced when they left. Management was almost entirely dedicated to opening similar offices in countries with lower salaries (and labor protections...), then sending us out to train people there. When it failed in one place, they tried again elsewhere, and again, and again... Our office kept shrinking, both in terms of workforce and actual desk space, while workload per head inevitably went up as people moved on.

A year after I left, they moved to a smaller office, and after another couple of years they closed for good. It was all very predictable.

StorageTek?

No, just Sun, briefly, but I worked with a lot of StorageTek people.

> I'm not a huge fan of the company, but I wouldn't hesitate to work for her again.

This. I always find myself loyal not to the company but to my (extended) team.

This is when I cheers Mexico's government work rules (Oracle is firing in Mexico too): By law of you are fired without a reason attributable to you, the company has to pay you 3 months salary.

I wouldnt be able to say why anyone would want to be working at oracle these days.

What compelling reason does oracle even have to attract talent?

(Im not being snide, seeious questions)

If we compare software engineering to retail, not everyone can work for walmart (Google), but have to make do with the random dollar store chain (Oracle).

There is only so many decent jobs you know.

I've done [tech] interviews for engineers out of Oracle and haven't been super impressed.

I despise Oracle. And yet if faced with a choice I'd work for Oracle without hesitation before working for Google or Facebook.

I'd choose "none of the above".

Unless you've got a mortgage, young kids, a family member to take care of, or you like to eat consistently.

I lot of people talk big about not taking those jobs, but those that actually follow through are extremely rare.

If you have the pick between Oracle, Google and Amazon, youd likely also have an offer at a different company. So its a valid choice.

Raises hand.

I can absolutely with all honesty say that I would never work for a large company. I worked for a Fortune 10 (non tech) company for 3 years out of my 20 year career and I said never again. Large companies are too stifling and too regimented for me. Even if I didn’t have to move from my low cost of living area and a I was offered a job at a FAANG, I would say no.

Well with one exception, I might be willing to work for AWS as a consultant.

Sorry, but: This is nonsense. It's not like these are the only options, and you cannot get a comparable offer somewhere else.

I have all of those things, and I've followed though. I know lots of other quality devs who have done the same. I don't think people like us are as rare as you suppose. It's not like the job market is particularly tight, after all.

From an ethical perspective, Oracle is mean to tech (open source, buyouts and so on, mean licensing setups with companies). On the other hand, Google and Facebook seem to contribute more to tech while being absolutely vile to the general public. Cutesy yellow and green bicycles and thumbs up signs don't negate the societal harm these companies have done by vacuuming personal data and selling it at such scale.

Then again, what is moral? Finance ? Ad tech? And don't say government, IT there is a wreck and a waste (enter Oracle, IBM contracts to piss taxpayer money to).

We're highly paid for a reason unfortunately.

Higher Education, colleges and universities, are generally excellent work environments with excellent benefits. Depending on job, salary isn't always competitive with the tech sector though.

I work in higher ed. Salaries are nowhere near competitive. However, everyone I work with has opted for good work environment over money. Tends to lead to self-selection of nice people, even if they aren't "rockstars".

I knew a couple of people who worked at Stanford in various capacities (admissions, and administration, IIRC) -- and while I didnt understand what they were good at, or what they did per se, they were some of the more genuinely nice and honest than many people I have met.

My problem is that I am too naive to sharks and assholes.

I have met thousands and thousands of people in may 22 year career in tech. Of which a very very small number I am friends with still - as I find that many people are way more cunning and conniving than I allow myself to admit.

Also getting a cushy tenured position takes years of hard work, and the alternative is being a perpetual postdoc which is paid abysmally.

Oh that comparison is wonderful. I would suggest Dollar Tree for Oracle because it's reasonably successful at making money

Their motto: "Smellier than Dollar General, not as smelly as Family Dollar!"

Number 6 on the Forbes list of software companies, with a market cap of 176 billion. Their main product is very heavily used by a heck of a lot of companies. It's just a bit messy and configuration-intensive, so it doesn't get a lot of respect among the techerati.

A software engineer looking for work could do a lot worse.

None of that means they make great products. Have you ever dealt with their support or engineers? Ugh.

Not all of us are in a position to work only on great products.

My impression of Oracle products is that they are frustrating to work with, feature-rich rather than elegant. They can work well, but take a lot of configuring and tuning.

The ex-Oracle folks I've worked with have been a mixed bag. Their reports about working for Oracle have also been mixed, skewing toward the bad. I suspect the company is basically run by sales, not engineering, certainly not customer support.

If you’re a software engineer in the year of 2019, you’re not exactly hurtinv for opportunity.

I have seen both a well-implemented Oracle ERP and a poorly/non-implemented Oracle ERP.

It is both the best and worse SaaS I have ever used, though my company may be switching to NetSuite ERP soon (technically also now an Oracle product).

If Google is Walmart, who is the high-end retail? Exciting startups?

Oracle is huge, and the different parts feel like completely different companies in some ways, with different cultures, paces, levels of cooperation, etc. The parts that used be Sun (where I worked) still felt very Sun-y for a decade afterward. I loved my job, never had a bad working relationship in all my experience with 0.1% of the company.

I work for Oracle (and I'm reasonably high-end in my niche - speak at conferences about it and stuff). None of their competitors were willing to consider remote work for the type of stuff I do. Oracle was OK with it. Hence, I work (remotely) at Oracle for the time being.

I'd have loved to take a job at a local startup, but of the limited local options for my skillset, none had salaries that would pay the mortgage....

The new cloud infrastructure group is kind of hidden gem. Its very different than the rest of Oracle. It started in Seattle about 4 years ago and is like 40% ex Amazon and 40% ex Microsoft.

They also pay very well, because Oracle doesn't have a great reputation.

The work is good, with a TON of room for growth and leadership.

The goal is ambitious (take on the big players) and well funded.

The people are good. Worklife is good.

They are also still hiring.

I went through the recruitment process for a cloud role in their Bristol, UK office. It was bizarre. I was video interviewed by 3 of their people around Europe, but none seemed to have an idea of what they were trying to do or crucially what they wanted me to do.

The people I spoke to were technically proficient, but not driven in the same way you'd imagine a FAANG employee to be. I eventually gave up after the process dragged out too far. You can imagine Amazon / AWS being able to get away with this, but Oracle?

Don't know about Oracle, but in many big companies and especially FAANG, the people interviewing you usually have no idea what you're going to work on or what the team is working on. It's usually only the hiring manager who can give you such info. There are so many people and teams in every organization, and the people who interview you are usually people with the right skills that happen to be available in the time slots you provided. It's usually not the people you will work with.

Is the work enjoyable? I would assume you have to use only Oracle branded solutions/tools which I am not sure is for everyone.

I work at OCI. It's a pretty good gig, all things considered. Just my two cents. There isn't a super strong push to use The One True Corporate Solution as you mention, by and large we're given a very free hand in terms of tech selection.

This is not true, when I was there each team could use whatever they wanted to build and deploy their services. Go, Python, Java, C++, etc. Literally anything was allowed. I have no idea now.

Enjoy it while it lasts, but keep an eye out for the writing on the wall and move on when you see it. It is Oracle, after all

Why do you think Oracle has a chance at cloud? Honest question.

Their competition at the low end is Google, which doesn’t bode great on quality, and with AWS and Azure they’re fighting on quality and against strong enterprise groups. Not sure who would predict that would go well, but it’s a big market and I suppose they have to try.

I’ve seen Oracle cloud jobs and admittedly balked, no bone to pick with them but don’t see a bright future.

What are they calling “cloud”?

Netsuite does own the largest cloud-based ERP

Netsuite is owned by Oracle but is a separate business unit from Oracle Cloud.

> Why do you think Oracle has a chance at cloud? Honest question.

Because Oracle still has an extremely large customer base, and an exceptionally good and extensive sales organisation that's really good at selling stuff to people.

The enterprise market is still not that well tapped by existing cloud providers. Look at the kinds of sales figures enterprise serving companies pull in, and consider that only a smaller fraction of them have moved to the cloud.

Anecdote: When OCI was announced ("Oracle Bare Metal Cloud") about 2 1/2 years ago, the staff who were there launching it at the Oracle conference had CIOs and the like coming up to them, even then, saying "So what really is this 'cloud' thing"

> I’ve seen Oracle cloud jobs and admittedly balked, no bone to pick with them but don’t see a bright future.

Succeed or fail, it's still interesting work. It pays well. Flexible on hours. Good co-workers, good sense of direction. Lots of interesting problems to solve. None of the bullshit "work everyone to the bone" that I kept seeing in AWS. Good opportunities to make a difference.

In all honesty, I was burned out at AWS and thought "Well.. I've put up with absolute hell in prior tech jobs, and have built up a reasonable resume. I can always move on if it turns out to be hell". My expectations were pretty low. I knew the director I was going to be working for, having worked with him in AWS, and knew he actually gave a damn about operations. It turns out to have been one of the better career decisions I've made. Which is definitely not anything I would have associated with a job working for Oracle.

Honestly as an individual contributor not holding any stock, what more can you ask for?

Whether the company's long term plan pans our or not is mostly irrelevant to whether you're able to do your best work.

I feel so old because to me OCI means Oracle Call Interface, their DB client C API. I guess nobody cares that it may confuse people like me.

Oh wow... finally another person who has used it. I remember writing a C++ class library to wrap base OCI functions about 15 years ago.

No need to do that anymore because they now have their own C++ api, and it's called ... OCCI!

To me it means "Open Container Initiative".

Yeah, that's one that keeps popping up over and over again, especially in google searches.

Microsoft has a good and extensive sales organisation too. AWS has a massive head start. VMWare have a pretty solid lock in on-prem. And while all three have pissed in their customer's wells, none of them has poisoned customer wells quite so consistently and thoroughly as Oracle has for the past few decades.

So you are saying there were CIOs in 2017 that had no idea what cloud is?

Oracle has somewhat of a monopoly due to its Micros acquisition. A hotel group upgrading their servers for some Opera products are given their choice for "servers": Windows 2008 R2, Windows 8 (yes, for servers) or let Oracle run it in Oracle Cloud.

That is the same group this story is about ? Funny recommendation

> What compelling reason does oracle even have to attract talent?

It used to be benefits. Back in 2005 (when I worked for them for a year) they had what I understood to be the 2nd best benefits plan in tech (just after Microsoft).

I can see why most people would think working for the "fucked by the cloud" companies[1] would be a terrible idea. But as others have said, those companies are huge, and they have pretty cutting edge R&D groups. Some of the business units still put out products with very nice growth and profit margins.

1 - https://www.wired.com/2015/10/meet-walking-dead-hp-cisco-del...

I recently interviewed somebody who's been working at Yahoo since the dawn of time. Some people just value stability.

They’re a bodyshop

According to rumor--lots and lots of cash.

So much cash, I hear even more than a lot of FAANG offers.

I'm aware of at least one person who was a millionaire on Google RSUs in 2014 who got hired away by Oracle.

I currently work for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure; ex AWS for Commerce Platform and Identity organizations. Let me tell you, OCI has a group of brilliant, industry mature developers and people. I've been working here for 2 years, and I've never been happier before. This org is nothing like Oracle Corp; started by ex-AWS/MSFT people, the environment feels just like those companies + a well funded start-up hype.

And the best thing, no assholes and backstabbing like in AWS. :)

Can you expand on the AWS culture of backstabbing? (Serious question: Could that be due to the number of H1-B employees they have?)

Just a guess, may be some people need job and Oracle is offering one.

DCO has been poaching anyone they can get from Amazon/Microsoft by offering higher salary. If you come from one of those or you know someone at oracle you're in.

I know DCO's that couldnt tell you how to find the ip of an interface that make 85k+/yr

Maybe Postgres plays a part in this?? I used to have a business that sold Microsoft Dynamics ERP/CRM which required Enterprise version SQL licences, at truly insane prices per core ie $100k+ per server. At that time Oracle was even more expensive. When I started a business based on Postgres, I found it incredible that we could get a (much better dev platform for our needs) completely free! Recently Postgres has added many Enterprise features inc parallel query, logical replication etc Enterprise db offer Oracle compatibility. This must be taking significant business away from Oracle.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but anyone here works in a medium to large company using Postgres (especially one that switched from multi million dollar licensing), convincing the hire ups of setting a up a small yearly donation or buying a support contract from a core developer is how we can give back.

I honestly think PostgreSQL is one the core pillars of the open source community, and one of the more underfunded ones.

Hear hear.

Oracle's M.O. is to be very quiet about these things. Same day notification, no heads-up. Over at thelayoff, where you do have to take everything with a grain of salt, users suggest they structure the layoffs specifically to avoid WARN laws.

They reportedly laid off hundreds of employees via robocall within the last couple years: https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/3016768/oracle-engineer...

I've been seeing quite a few layoff posts since the new year.

Is this just my own bias or has anyone noticed an uptick in massive layoff events?

Some of it is recency bias, some of it is true. Combine it with stock market woes, yield curve, it makes you think.

Speculation, but I think corporations are expecting a recession... and thus, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Heard there are some layoffs in India as well https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...

I left Oracle 2 years ago when I decided to retire early. I was the developer contact for a set of internal APIs that are used by many Oracle products, so I worked with developers from all over the company in dozens of countries. The quality and culture of Oracle development organizations is all over the place. There are areas with great developers that are happy and (more) places with lousy developers and hellish cultures. And everything in between. I also know a few people from the Seattle OCI group. That might as well be a different company. They don't have to use any of the sh*tty internal tools and aren't subject to the really bad, political management that is taking over more and more. The question is whether that group will eventually be subject to the bad management that has made more and more of the development org a living hell.

Who is actually spending money on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure? Is it just organisations who are too deep into the Oracle ecosystem to go anywhere else?

high paying multi million dollar companies https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/iaas/customers

Interesting that few of those are tech companies. For comparison, AWS's list is mostly tech companies: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/

I know a CIO of a large private company (billions revenue) that has an associates in business mgmt and was promoted from within. Excellent people skills and a good golf game. There's no way they can recruit a competent and empowered IT team so a good sales team makes the decisions. Outside of tech companies, I have no doubt that this is the norm.

> too deep into the Oracle ecosystem to go anywhere else

This is certainly part of it. I read something around the time of a quarterly earnings report recently that spoke about how OCI revenue was increasing rapidly, but was doing so by cannibalizing traditional revenue sources.

The government. The government has been funding Oracle from the start, and it's never stopped. Who do you think the NSA and CIA use for all of their data storage and warehousing? It was the FBI that started this mess, and it's the rest of the government that continues it. Ellison often comes off as untouchable in this stories, and that's because he is. He made it possible for the spooks to build "Echelon" 30 years ago. God knows what that's morphed into now. He's a hero to them.

Yes, I'm being purposely sardonic, but only a little.

We know what echelon morphed into. Much of it was in the Snowden docs. If you are highly technical it’s not hard to imagine a few steps forward from what was in that release and realize just how massive the infrastructure and internet vacuum is.

Good point. More specifically, I was thinking about the supposed "acres" of underground computers that was slurping up phone call data when the program was discovered. I wonder how much storage and equipment it all takes now.

Railroad Lake, Henderson, NV

Mostly those. I have worked with organizations who are so deep in the Oracle quagmire that migration is next to impossible. Everything is Oracle in these firms.

It would be nice to be able to expect better from Oracle, but I don't.

Yeah this behavior sounds entirely on-brand to me.

I was in the OCI group, left just over a year ago, and just heard from a couple of my old colleagues that they were just let go. Unreal since our group was one of the few really really profitable ones.

I agree with the comments about the quality of people in OCI, it was a big step up from the first pass with the PSM group. Much more of the move-fast and do things right kind of mentality and a lot of hires of people with real scale experience trying to do it better the next time. I hope everyone affected can find better jobs.

I was one of the very first groups to be let go early morning on the east coast. I still have access to the blind app oracle channel, and it looks like layoffs are going to continue until September.

No notice, no thank you for your work, just goodbye. DCO is filled with people who do nothing, and have data backing up how inefficient they are, but not a single layoff over there. Too many people were hired just because they knew someone.

From what my ex-coworkers have told me is Oracle slack is freaking out.

As a programmer, I'm no fan of Oracle. I think customers feel badly about a lot of things the company does, too. Obviously employees are going to think badly of Oracle as well.

But they are sharp in business dealings. If I had to pick one company to own for just pure business efficiency, Oracle would be high on the list.

Really? Oregon vs. Oracle doesn't inspire much trust.

https://www.marklogic.com/blog/oracle-oregon-lawsuit

That is quite damning. Had no idea of this incident.

This makes SAP layoff more sane. At least my friend got about 3-4 months to actually find a job (with severance)

Anyone know if Oracle still has anyone left working on Solaris at this point?

Yes, a very very small core team remains. Many were let go this past Thursday (most remote sites outside HQ were shut down).

I worked (mercifully briefly) as a sales engineer for the cloud platform. I left because it seemed my job was primarily built around lying to customers about what the product could do and most of what we were selling was half baked and frankly broken. Like "massive java monolith with buried buried buried menus to get anything done, and then it still breaks" broken. If you're still using Oracle products in 2019 you're probably either corrupt, incompetent, or probably both.

They are, unfortunately, entrenched in certain enterprise products. The major ERP products that run the Higher Education industry, for example. They mostly use Oracle on the back end. And it doesn't help that one those (lesser used) ERP systems is a customized version of people soft.

Cloud options are chipping away at the edges of this. For example, Admissions offices have largely ditched portion of these ERP systems designed for them in favor of more flexible SaaS offerings. As a consequence, if you're into data plumbing, data integration jobs are flowering in Higher Ed.

We use Oracle EBS at work. It's a horrible, counter-intuitive, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink nightmare. Manufacturing, operations, employee self-serve, order entry, and many other functions all rolled into one hot mess complete with a disinterested non-communicative support guy in India.

Part of it is a shitty html-based interface and part is a nearly unusable suite of java applets with inscrutable UI that would have been considered poor even in the late 90's.

I got hand it Oracle engineers, though. What magic to they use to induce C-levels to buy this stuff? They must have mastered the art of inducement with steak, strippers, martinis and lies.

About 10 years ago my organization opted for the People Soft ERP, a version customized for the industry. We were sold on it because we were demoed capability that literally did not exist. A year into the implementation as we were about to go live on a major component, they were still building major parts of it.

In one truly bizarre meeting, they gleefully announced that a feature-- basically the ability for a user to submit word document or similar into the web interface, was done. Great! I thought. Then I asked the question, "Okay, so where do you go to review the submissions once they're made?" There was no response. I asked again. Then it came. "You want to be able to see them? That's not part of the product. Well, I guess your DBA can query them or something. If you want more, that will be a user customization, our estimates put that around $100,000.

That of course wasn't the only issue of this sort. When we refused to sign off on a major deliverable that really hadn't been delivered, literally overnight they walked off the job. Dozens of people. We cancelled the whole project and switched vendors. There was a lawsuit. They settled with us-- those initial demos had been recorded :)

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