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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 is losing good employees, good teams, the kind of people who won't have trouble finding more work. Also a layoff may not have been forthcoming. Oracle doesn't seem to be big on downsizing their Sun acquisition, just mismanaging it. So you could well find if you said "Fuck it, I'll stay on until they lay me off," that in a year you are still there, and still on a horribly mismanaged project that you hate.
Plus they are leaving to make a point.
I hope they pay the price for their ignorance and hubris. What did they get for buying Sun, exactly? As far as I can tell, they got a busload of very smart engineers who can find work wherever they want, or found new companies. Oracle needs them more than they need Oracle, even in this economy.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
I've never worked at Oracle or Sun, but if I read the man correctly he is not about to be swayed by either criticism or staff departures, even high level staff. At any rate, replacements can be hired or brought in through acquisition; no engineer or manager is indispensable.
Clearly, Ellison does not think of Oracle as an open, collaborative enterprise like a university, but rather as an empire, like IBM in the '60s and '70s (his own analogy) or Microsoft in the '90s. If people don't like it, tough. They'll usually end up paying him to use his stuff anyway.
these people aren't dropping java, they're dropping oracle. there is a big difference - this has nothing to do with apple or your beloved SJ. you wont find too many oracle-haters who dont also believe java should be freed from oracle (and therefore still used globally).
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
"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.
If you're good enough to get a better job somewhere else, just leave. The best people aren't going to get laid off unless they make it quite clear that they aren't doing any work.
Besides, this is about making a statement, making a stand on principle. In early 2009 I quit a job I'd had for 10 years, on principle. It was a tough move to make, but absolutely the right one.
Sometimes, when you are pushed into making a move, you realize it's the move you should have made years before.
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.
Seems to me this is a bunch of people standing up for what they believe in even though it may cost them financially. It would be nice to see a few Apple employees do the same.
Maybe the fact that there aren't a slew of Apple employees leaving means that a lot of people are happy to work for Apple. Just sayin'...
Sapere aude!
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. "
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
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.
Yes. I can speak from the other side of that decision. Several times now I have been in terrible jobs. And I chose to stay. I doubted whether the job was going as badly as it looked. Kept trying to work with people even after they'd clearly demonstrated that they were incompetent, bullying, abusive, and treacherous. At one job it was so bad we never even got around to doing any real work, but stayed mired in political foolishness. We could not agree on what to do, because everyone was so much more interested in being the big man who was calling the shots that they'd rather hang than endorse any plan other than their own. They all saw being the author of The Plan as the ticket to job security. In the end, we all hung, and deserved it.
Why did I stay? Didn't want to be seen as a wimp and a quitter, and don't like giving up. Yes, yes, for fear of looking like a wimp, I wimped out. Talked myself into doubting the meanings of what I was seeing. Then there are all the vague fears of what such a move might do to your career. And you can always find news about the job market being terrible right now, even when it isn't. Too easy to buy into that. Supposedly it doesn't look good on the resume if you're a job hopper. Potential employers will be wondering if you are "reliable". They have a whole bunch of subjective criteria that are all the more powerful for being just about unconscious. If you left one job before you had another job lined up, they'll doubt your sanity. It's very hard, and scary, to walk away from a paycheck. To some people, pay trumps all. No matter how beat up, abused, and demoralized you are, no matter if every proposal you make is instantly mocked, shredded, and dismissed for political reasons that have nothing to do with the merits of the ideas, nor how many doubts and aspersions about your competence and your work ethic are expressed and cast, no matter how many times you are manipulated and shoved into a hopeless situation and then blamed for failing, or framed, you should take it like a man because you are being paid. Stiff upper lip.
Well, no, you shouldn't. No one should take that. Keep some savings on hand so you can leave. Then do so, even if you aren't good enough to get a job somewhere else. Do it not just for your own sake, but for all the others who are in the same boat as you. I wish I had. Staying on is implicit approval of the management. My hat is off to you, sir, for having the guts to give them what they had coming.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
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)
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.
The disadvantage is that the employees most likely to volunteer for redundancy are often those the employer would least wish to lose, namely the good performers who are able to find a new job easily.
I was working at a company recently acquired by Oracle in 2005 (name left as exercise for reader), and my coworker pretty much told his manager he wanted the severance. This guy was pretty good and self-directed, but he was not an Oracle type (more of an independent consultant), and Oracle won by cutting him loose, and the guy got enough cash to start his consultancy... with which he's doing well.
Moral: Sometimes the folks who want to leave won't necessarily be doing well for your company, even though they're stellar and very hireable (note: I left after a year as the merged company wasn't a fit for me either).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I didn't say it was moral, good for you, or the route to improved community(s) relationships. It is what Oracle does: make money.
No, you're not listening, er reading. You don't make money by paying billions of dollars buying a company then dumping that company's products. Nor do you as a software business make money by treating developers of your platform like shit. Oracle is foolhardy doing so. Sure right now they're the 800 pound gorilla but there are other enterprise scale databases on the market. Microsoft will even help customers transition from Oracle to SQL Server. IBM has it's own offering, DB2 as does HP. Of course there are also open source based DBMSs such as ones based on PostgreSQL, Computer Associates spin-off Ingres, and Firebird.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
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.
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?