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Oracle Needs a Clue As Brain Drain Accelerates
The Contrarian writes "It looks like Oracle is not suiting former Sun staff well, nor community members in the Java and OpenOffice.org communities. This weekend saw an unusually large number of rather public departures, with (among many others listed in the article) the VP running Solaris development quitting, the token academic on the JCP walking out and top community leaders at OpenOffice.org nailing their resignations to the door after having the ex-Sun people slam it in their face. The best analysis comes from an unexpected place, with the marketing director of Eclipse — usually loyal defenders of their top-dollar-paying members — turning on Oracle and telling them to get a clue."
Where are they going? And are they hiring?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Oracle wanted Sun IP. They got that. They don't want to do much with it except bring in some cash so engineers are of no use.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I honestly wonder what Oracle is doing, was it really worth buying SUN strictly for its hardware side? Maybe they don't care about the software engineers? Maybe they are lost with what to do with them??? Is Oracle completely blind?
"Why would a company just sit in the corner quietly letting the community distrust them, leave, and never want to come back."
Abusiveness is a pastime of billionaires such as Larry Ellison and Bill Gates. They abuse the rest of us because they can. Abusiveness is just a hobby for them.
Both Oracle and Microsoft make so much money because they have virtual monopolies, not because they are good at what they do. It is too difficult and painful to go elsewhere for what they supply, so their customers accept the abusiveness.
Oracle doesn't like playing with anyone, unless they are attempting an acquisition.
Recently I had to enquire about buying Solaris licenses for a client so they can upgrade next year and was told by our channel provider they had to be purchased directly from Oracle now, then got a warning that Oracle had been going behind Sun Partners backs and attempting to sell to their clients directly.
I hope they find good and fulfilling work with a company that values them more highly. I'm scared they're going to start messing up VirtualBox next!
Viva Libre Office!!!
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Back in April '09 Schwartz sent an email out that touched on Oracle and Sun's employees. Specifically:
Having spent a considerable amount of time talking to Oracle, let me assure you they are single minded in their focus on the one asset that doesn't appear in our financial statements: our people. That's their highest priority - creating an inviting and compelling environment in which our brightest minds can continue to invent and deliver the future.
I suspect the most interesting point here is whether Oracle considers these departures to be a problem or not - the open source community obviously has its priorities and skill sets it would consider key, but Oracle may take a different view.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
From Mike's blog (in reference to the ZFS+Fishworks effort), probably the highest profile departure from the aforementioned article is this fun fact:
"What began as a mere $2.1M incremental engineering investment for 2.8 years has now shipped more than 100 petabytes, more than 6000 systems, and 100X in revenue. "
... I think you are right on this one. I am really beginning to dislike Oracle, they make Microsoft and Apple look like saints.
Oracle has never been a place to make a career. On average, employees leave every 3 years. Why? because that is the culture encouraged by Ellison - politics among employees
Dear Oracle,
Half the MySQL people have run off screaming, OpenSolaris is now as good as dead (and with it the last best hope for Solaris itself) , OpenOffice has pretty much lost its shit, and James frigging Gosling, of all people, has basically packed his bags and gone home.
Sure you got the Sun IP. Now what? Hire some 20yos to work on it? Good luck with that shit!
I hope to hell Google kick your ass in court, then build an Enterprise stack out of Davlik, so your left with empty hands.
Your ignoring Sun, now Sun is going away. Congratulations!
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Apple is ditching Java and Flash. At the same time, they're actively supporting legitimately open web technologies, they've relaxed restrictions on the use of third-party development tools for iOS, and they ship Ruby bindings for Cocoa (and Ruby on Rails) with every Mac.
I merely see Apple picking and choosing what third-party platforms it likes. And as nearly as I can tell, they're doing it on the basis of quality and meaningful openness. That is, not just looking at whether there's an open specification for something, or an open source implementation, but whether it's de facto controlled by a single vendor and what the intentions of any such vendor seem to be.
I don't think the timing of Apple's Java announcement in relation to the Oracle acquisition is a coincidence. Steve Jobs might be friends with Larry Ellison, but Apple is rumored to have also walked away from ZFS over concerns about how Oracle might handle licensing of it. I don't think Apple trusts Oracle's intentions at all. And who could blame them?
Quite.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
If you're a long term investor, I'd start slowly leaking Oracle shares out of your portfolio about now. Microsoft? Maybe. Watch to see what venture capitalists are lining up behind those brilliant ex-employees, and ponder. This industry hasn't run out of breakthroughs yet.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Working at Oracle is a bit crazy. They'll fork over $1200 for fancy chairs, but if you want a 1920x1200 screen instead of the default 1440x900 then the laptop request has to go to Larry Ellison's office for personal approval. IT denied my request for 8GB ram on my test server to load a >4GB dataset. I'm looking at eBay to find an old server with 16GB ram so I can actually get my testing done. No, I'm not joking.
Oracle pays well and has good benefits, but sometimes it is extremely frustrating to be unable to obtain the tools and resources you need to do your job. That kind of thing can drive you crazy.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
How old is Ellison? Maybe he just wants to make maximum coin before he retires, have a good 20 years or so before he croaks, and f*ck the rest. I wonder if his board of directors thinks of this when the big moves happen. Hell, he doesn't even have to be that selfish at this point -- how good will his children, grandchild, and great-(^4)grandchildren live on what he's got? He can just play egomaniac as much as he wants now, it makes no difference.
I merely see Apple picking and choosing what third-party platforms it likes.
True but they are closing off their software to others which isn't all that open. I know it all sounds circular (open to promote things that aren't open?...um?), but the point being is that Apple does understand the open aspect of things, unlike say Microsoft. Apple however is pushing these open stacks as a means to promote their hardware first and foremost. That's not a bad thing in the world of business and go them. However, I liken all their openness to the small snafu that begot WebKit. In the end Apple came through, barely and still continue to limp with the KHTML people, but it really took some points from their whole openness thing.
It is one thing to embrace openness to promote your stack. It is another thing to give parts of your stack back to the open community. Much like Microsoft's contribution to the Linux Kernel for their Hyper-V, I am so glad that they are continuing to support that contribution (oh wait they're not.)
Oracle is another beast altogether. They have taken something that has grown a very fruitful community; and have given reasons to their supporters to provide ammo to the Java detractors. It's something when someone like Miguel de Icaza who likes to bash Java starts quoting James Gosling to support one of his points for disliking Java. That my friend is a clear sign that all is not well (in that, "I'm in my house and I'm surrounded by fire" kind of not well way.)
Hell, at least IBM has a voice in the Java community, albeit a small one that many people carefully listen to and take with a grain of salt, but Oracle is just acting like Open-Source doesn't exist and really could care less (well couldn't say that for sure since Oracle is saying how they feel at all) what feelings or sentiments get stepped on in the process of driving that bottom dollar. That's going to build of an aversion to the Java platform. Maybe at first like how you would shy away from someone with a cold, but it may very well build up to say tuberculosis style aversion. With the way Oracle's running this show we've reached flu stage in record time.
Fuck, this post made my day. About a year ago, I quit at a job after years of political tyranny, bullying and self serving crap of the higher echelons. I was at the end of my rope and the noose was getting tight. Like you say everyones was on the verge of hanging themselves including those that perpetuated the political agenda to aggrandize their positions and get a 1UP on the ladder. I left just in time. 3 months afterwards everything blew up in their faces and either left by themselves for fear of being exposed or they were exposed and were fired by the board. I had the same thoughts of being a quitter, but the day I left, doors started opening. The grass isn't always greener, but sometimes you have to get of the lawn altogether.
Basically, as soon as the acquisition was announced, any sense of fiscal responsibility at Sun went well and truly out the window.
The prevailing attitude was, "No need to worry, we'll just do whatever -- Oracle can deal with the consequences."
It thus came as no surprise to me that one of the very first things Oracle did when they took possession was to axe anybody at Sun with "Director" or higher rank in their job title on the grounds that 99%+ of the old Sun management consisted of complete and utter wastrels.
(MySQL AB/Sun/Oracle employee here.)
Then as a large business, just *recognising* the value of the Java brand should be enough to stop such disregard for its reputation. Seriously, the impression from any large tech site now is "Oracle is destroying Java". Whether you love it or not, Java is HUGE and everywhere, from Blu-ray players to mobile phones to household PC's and pissing away such a huge and recognised brand is bad business.
Question: If Java if that much of a loss, why not just push it out to the already-external organisations that would happily oversee it for you. Take control of the brand itself (ala Firefox vs Iceweasel), don't do anything with the code yourself, but actually encourage its use and distribution with your branding all over it for free? Same with OpenOffice - that way you get a "this came via Oracle originally" good reputation, you get to control naming rights ("nobody can call it Java or OpenOffice but us") but in a gentle, controlled way, and nobody gets angry and starts resigning / giving you bad press.
It's *hugely* incompetent to hold such an enormous, popular and well-known brand (loss-making or not) and then piss it away in pursuit of some "clear-out" of people who don't agree with you. Next year, Java will be dead and buried and "Coffee" (or whatever) will be on everyone's machine instead and you'll have zero control over it unless you want to start suing former customers for some obscure, irrelevant patents (*cough* Oracle vs Google *cough).
My dad knows what Java is (roughly) and that he "needs it" whenever he gets a new machine, and my dad can barely manage copy / paste. Wasting that sort of brand is like Coke sacking all its executives, suing people who drink it, turning it into a lemonade and still only ever calling it Coke. Then they wonder why people get pissed at them.
All I know is that since Oracle took over Sun, OpenOffice have deserted them, Java have deserted them, they're suing Google (which is a stupid move in the first place with such a weak set of patents stated), and they broke my Eclipse config because they rebranded the Sun Java installer to say "Oracle" and didn't bother to properly inform people at one of their largest external users of the changes. And now the Eclipse guys are ranting and raving at them for poor management of the Java process and brand. I don't really care, as a user, what their beef is. They're not telling me, they're just suing people, making silent changes that break stuff, and making threatening noises, while all I want is somewhere I can reliably download a supported OpenOffice / Java derivative that works. In the space of a few months, they've turned two of the largest IT brands in history into something that people now associate with being sued, and hoping for a fork that's disassociated from Oracle. That's *bad* for business, even if you never intend to use or do anything with OpenOffice / Java yourself.
I am somewhat in the same boat. I'd love to say I didn't walk away because I didn't want to be a quitter, but when you live in an area with a high concentration of similar skill sets, it's a little more difficult.
I first learned the lesson of this OP when I worked at Sprint PCS. I worked with incredible, intelligent, wickedly clever colleagues. When MCI was rumored to be talking merger with Sprint, the very best immediately left. With about 10 years distance to reflect, I still see it from the same perspective. When an abusive company talks merger, the elite start walking. Let that be your initial "warning shot." The merger never happened but the damage began. Next, we started getting top level leadership from the more "mature" side of the company, the "landline." It's a different culture, leadership style, technology management to dealing with cutting edge (wireless comm) versus entrenched markets (buried copper). Dumb things like, "Work Harder, Work Smarter," start happening, such as deciding, "If X amount of errors occur in a 4 hour maintentance window, then X * 75% will happen in a 3 hour maintenance window." I kid you not, but a senior VP made this decision. Next thing I know, 2nd Tier technical support calls went through the roof.
The next job I was the Director. I knew the company was a market follower and the HR manager even said to me, "We don't expect anyone to stay here more than 2 years." However, I built a good chunk of the group. I enjoyed working with them and it amazed me most of them stayed. When I got called to Active Duty, I returned to a group with a few ready to leave. I put things back in order and the group hummed along. I knew the economy was about to tank and I should have walked away, but again, I enjoyed the people I worked with, even if the job itself wasn't intellectually stimulating.
Which leads to today. I could stay where I am now, but I'm choosing not to. The smartest have walked away, and I'm about to likely follow. In the US, I grew accustomed to certain underlying, accepted facts, that I'm re-learning while working with European software developers and program managers. For me, CMMI level 3 style engineering is a no-brainer, however, here it's unlikely they'd get past level 2. It's not uncommon to ask, "Why does this feature not work, or what should it do?" and get silence. The responses are sometimes worse. "It's not supported." OK, the question was what should it do? These are military systems, so code should be written for a specific requirement. What was the requirement? I won't even follow the next logical question, "Why was the support dropped." So long story still long, I'll have no problems walking away.
I've come full circle. Even though I'm getting mid-career, I'm back to where I want to work with people who are forward leaning, clever, and intellectually stimulating. Maybe I'll regret it, but I'm still an optimist despite 20 years of job experience. :)
Nor do you as a software business make money by treating developers of your platform like shit.
Ha! Tell that to Apple.
That is a relatively new thing at Apple, one I disagree with. Years ago I joined as a member of Apple Developer Connection, however I don't think I'll ever pay for a membership again.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?