
Why I Quit Oracle (2010) - stephenbez
http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-why-i-quit-oracle
======
quuquuquu
I worked at Oracle until very recently.

They are a rent-seeking, lawsuit-heavy cancer upon this Earth.

Oracle routinely sues its own employees.

Oracle routinely moves to stamp out innovation.

Oracle's stock price has increased over the past decade, but only from
acquisition and price-gouging large corporations and agencies.

It is a racket. Working at Oracle is the antithesis of creating fun and useful
software for everyone's gain.

~~~
smegel
> Oracle routinely sues its own employees.

For what?

~~~
saghm
For winning arbitration (the company-mandated way to solve disputes) against
them, for instance:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/oracle_sues_employe...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/oracle_sues_employee_undo_arbitration_loss/)

~~~
geofft
Oh wow, and then they lost that petition in court.
[https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/08/22/oracle_wilson_decision.pdf](https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/08/22/oracle_wilson_decision.pdf)

I can't imagine this was a good use of the company's lawyers' time (although
it was probably good from the lawyers' perspective).

~~~
quuquuquu
Larry has so much money and so many lawyers, this is his way of reassuring
himself that his legal team isn't just lazing around.

"get out there and dig in the dumpster for gold nuggets!"

------
stephenbez
I'm curious why the mods changed the title from "Java Creator James Gosling:
Why I Quit Oracle (2010)" to "Why I Quit Oracle (2010)"

The fact that it is James Gosling saying this instead of a random employee
seems important.

~~~
bubblethink
Sadly, this sort of editorializing is quite common here. Anything remotely
inflammatory or political in nature will get shot down or toned down
summarily.

~~~
grzm
It's easy to see examples where moderation rubs someone the wrong way or
appears to be done poorly. I think effective moderation is more difficult than
one would initially think. Do you think this is out of line with the mods oft-
repeated goals of promoting constructive discussion and limiting flamewars?
Given these goals (setting aside whether you agree with the goals), how would
you handle this?

~~~
bubblethink
Of course, moderation is difficult. That's why you do as little of it, only
when absolutely necessary. In this specific case, I don't see how the omission
of the name, which is quite pertinent, makes the discussion more constructive.
I don't even see how it could have started a flamewar. As the OP suggests,
that information is quite vital to this post.

~~~
grzm
I agree; in this case I don't see why it was changed. I'm not concerned about
it enough to contact the mods in this case, but have in the past and gotten
responses, and they lean heavily towards keeping the original title. If you're
curious, I suggest emailing them via the contact link in the footer.

Your initial comment goes quite a bit further than addressing only this
particular example, however. That's what I was addressing.

------
canremember
As another Oracle anecdote, a family member worked for IBM (this was about 15
years ago) as a software engineer and then as (what is now called) a sales
engineer/technical consultant, where he'd travel to client sites and demo IBM
products, answer technical questions, etc.

He said Oracle was without a doubt the most unethical competitor they ever
had. IBM had internal guidelines on acceptable limits for gifts, meals etc you
could give to clients, but Oracle sales people had no such qualms and would
sometimes essentially bribe VPs/whoever had the power to make the purchasing
decision.

IBM was certainly no saint (this family member ended up leaving a few years
later), but he was astounded by how ethically untethered Oracle as a company
was.

------
whack
An anecdote from the article which really speaks volumes.

> _Making his point about the "creepiness," not only with Ellison but with
> Oracle's power structure, Gosling said he sparked a notion to try to improve
> morale amongst the Sun faithful who endured the Oracle acquisition. He said
> the company decided to rent out the Great America amusement park in Santa
> Clara, Calif., and allow the Sun folks to have a day of fun. Scott McNealy
> and Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz signed off on the project that came in well
> under budget and all systems were go, Gosling said. Except a few days before
> the event was to occur, Oracle Co-President Safra Catz got wind of it and
> put the kibosh on the thing._

> _" Safra found out and had a fit," Gosling said. "The word came down that
> Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. So she forced the thing to
> be cancelled. But they didn't save any money because the money had been
> spent - so we ended up giving the tickets to charities. We were forced to
> give it up because it wasn't the -Oracle Way.' On the other hand, Oracle
> sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million."_

~~~
oraguy
Let me share a few anecdotes myself.

\- A couple of years ago, the company was providing us Oracle branded
corporate diary for free. An employee was allowed to order one diary. The cost
center would pay the price of the diary which if I remember correctly was
$3.00. There were many managers who did not allow their departments to order
this diary in order to save that $3.00 per employee for their cost centers.
"But I want the Oracle branded diary!" "No, we need to save money!" "I will be
proud to show the Oracle branded diary to my family" "No, we need to save
money!" "Then why bother providing the diaries in the first place?" "No, we
need to save money!" And all this commotion happened when Oracle was spending
millions of dollars in legal fees for its lawsuit against Google.

\- In a meeting with a very senior VP of our department, we asked our senior
VP why there were no fun activities in our team, like a day out for fun, or
even something as small as a team lunch. The response by the senior VP to the
best of my recollection was, "Think not what the company can do for you. Think
what you can do for the company. You guys are incredibly privileged to work
for Oracle. What more can one need? This is not the time to think about fun.
This is the time to think how you can reduce the number of bugs in our
product." It was no surprise later that within a year, all the smart
developers of our team left to other companies who not only pay better than
Oracle, but also offer diaries without fuss, and have team lunches and other
fun events.

Disclaimer: Worked for Oracle for 3 years. Will never work for Oracle again.

------
sanguy
I knew Gosling when he resided in Calgary. A very bright guy but he was also
extremely possessive of Java. Even during the Sun days it was clear it was his
baby, and nobody else’s.

I can imagine him being very frustrated at oracle and google where motivations
are different enough to not cause his ego to be fed.

And as much of a scourge Oracle is they have moved java forward much fast and
further versus Sun. All with gosling being sidelined. Perhaps that is part of
his motivation for this article. Someone raised his baby better than he could.

~~~
altotrees
To the point about his ego not being fed at Google: when he went there, I
wondered what he would be working on and if being another name on a roster if
insanely talented engineers and scientists(Norvig, Pike, on and on and
on)would help him grow and create more great things, or prove a frustration in
some way. What was he working on there, I haven't read many details, does
anyone know?

~~~
nappy-doo
I worked at Google while he was there. It was common knowledge that he did
about nothing while there. He wrote a document detailing why Google's
development practices were broken, and left in under a (if I remember) year.
Again, if I remember, he filed no bugs, committed no code, and wrote no design
documents.

~~~
altotrees
Interesting, I know he has been at a few places since then, wonder if his
output has picked up? Getting into Java was my first taste of programming and
I loved it, thought really highly of Gosling and still do. I just had a friend
tell me this morning "heh Java is so dying." I swear I hear this every few
months, but I fail to see it going anywhere. Maybe I'm not looking hard
enough?

------
gleenn
I got the chance to talk to Gosling at a discussion about adding closures to
Java a while back. You could tell immediately that he was an amazing and
incredibly friendly guy. I have a ton of respect for him.

That being said, this is a really boring article. If there was anything meaty,
he said he couldn't really say. The rest of it is that Oracle didn't pay him
well and effectively demoted him. I feel like that is really unsurprising
given Oracle's stance with Java and Sun stuff. They bought it strategically,
not because they liked Java. Same for them with MySQL. They don't care, it's
just another line item on their corporate acquisitions. The fact that they
aren't taking the people they acquired seriously, even a fantastic guy like
Gosling, is just another day at a mega corp.

Edit - grammar.

~~~
hota_mazi
While it's pretty clear that Oracle acquired Sun in the hope of suing Google,
it's also obvious to anyone who's been following the industry that Oracle has
been doing an excellent job with Java.

When Oracle acquired Sun, Java had been stagnating without seeing any major
version for five years.

In the four years following the acquisition, Oracle released two major
versions of Java, including some very long awaited (and tricky to implement)
features.

~~~
jaimex2
Features which were in the pipeline already from Sun days.

~~~
hota_mazi
It's easy to have a pipeline, what's hard is actually doing the work.

Sun completely dropped the ball on Java in the last five years of its
existence.

------
toyg
Alright, let's have the periodic bout of Oracle bashing, we all know it is
well-deserved.

But allow me a bit of devil's advocate playacting.

There are some incontrovertible facts: as fun as it could have been for
employees to work there, Sun wasn't making enough money, so it died; and as
shit as Oracle can be for employees (and boy do I know that as an ex-O), they
are still there squeezing out cash for Larry (and for Wall Street) on command.

Oracle is the ugly side of the market, but you'll never have a market without
an ugly side. It takes skills to walk the tightrope between hard realities and
"being fun geeks", and sometimes there is a lot of hypocrisy involved. Oracle
just don't care, they are out for the dollar and they don't really hide it. At
least with them you know where you stand from day 1.

------
bitmapbrother
Pretty much all you need to know about working at Oracle:

 _Making his point about the "creepiness," not only with Ellison but with
Oracle's power structure, Gosling said he sparked a notion to try to improve
morale amongst the Sun faithful who endured the Oracle acquisition. He said
the company decided to rent out the Great America amusement park in Santa
Clara, Calif., and allow the Sun folks to have a day of fun. Scott McNealy and
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz signed off on the project that came in well under
budget and all systems were go, Gosling said. Except a few days before the
event was to occur, Oracle Co-President Safra Catz got wind of it and put the
kibosh on the thing._

 _" Safra found out and had a fit," Gosling said." The word came down that
Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. So she forced the thing to be
cancelled. But they didn't save any money because the money had been spent -
so we ended up giving the tickets to charities. We were forced to give it up
because it wasn't the -Oracle Way.' On the other hand, Oracle sponsors this
sailboat for about $200 million."_

~~~
bluedino
Wasn't McNealy on the Sun company ice hockey team back in the old days? It
sounded like an incredible place to work back then

~~~
bitL
Yeah, SUN was cool back in the day before it moved to the "cursed" Santa Clara
building. Interestingly, their original office is now occupied by Facebook (1
Hacker Way) and there is still sign of SUN in front of Facebook - unofficially
to remind Facebook it shouldn't stop innovating.

~~~
lobster_johnson
What do you mean by "cursed"?

~~~
bitL
Scott McNealy blamed SUN's misfortune on moving to a former psychiatric ward
in Santa Clara - it coincides with SUN's loss of luck (and some directors
really believed the building was cursed). Also, business-wide there is a known
"headquarters curse", when a company feels it needs to have a more
representative HQ. Let's see what it does to Apple.

~~~
fred_is_fred
I think the failure has more to do with leaders who believe in curses than
actual curses.

------
m00s3
It makes me sad that organizations like the BC Gov't bend and over and take
whatever crap Oracle decides to throw at them. The amount of money and
developer effort that is spent on Oracle is staggering. All because 'no one
gets fired for choosing Oracle'. They are blight on the industry.

~~~
candiodari
From another comment in this thread:

> He said Oracle was without a doubt the most unethical competitor they ever
> had. IBM had internal guidelines on acceptable limits for gifts, meals etc
> you could give to clients, but Oracle sales people had no such qualms and
> would sometimes essentially bribe VPs/whoever had the power to make the
> purchasing decision.

------
oh_sigh
I'd like to hear about his tenure at Google and why he left so quickly

------
KKKKkkkk1
> And the micromanagement Gosling says he felt may have been less of an issue
> at IBM. Specifically, Gosling says he felt the hand of Larry Ellison in
> nearly all the decisions affecting Java. Certainly IBM Chairman and CEO Sam
> Palmisano would not personally get his hands into the goings on with an
> acquisition, even a key one like Sun. But then IBM is not the house that Sam
> built like Oracle is Ellison's creation. There is a major difference in
> that.

Why the fuck has Larry Ellison sidelined the creator of Java in the
development of Java in favor of himself making the key decisions? What
qualifications does Ellison have to make these decisions? That's just
colossally egocentric and incompetent.

~~~
sqlminus
The entire Oracle leadership is full of narcissistic and technically
incompetent leaders. Take for example, this article that for some reason
glorifies profanity in business meetings.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/oracles-thomas-kurian-has-
int...](http://www.businessinsider.com/oracles-thomas-kurian-has-interesting-
rules-for-holding-meetings-2016-8)

The leader here, who is known as TK internally, is known for being abusive and
profane to his team. In my 5 years at Oracle, I have not met a single
developer who respected TK. He was unanimously hated by all his developers.
The general opinion among developers is, "This guy tries to be like Bill
Gates, but come on, has he done anything in his life beyond managing supply
chain management solutions?"

Yet, this guy is glorified within Oracle, just because Larry Ellison likes
him. It is really a situation of one man versus all, where the one man is
winning due to an intricately established bureaucracy over decades that cannot
be unsettled anymore.

------
grzm
Discussion at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1716731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1716731)

------
jgrant27
Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

