
James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle - 10ren
http://www.eweek.com/index2.php?option=content&task=view&id=63554&pop=1&hide_ads=1&page=0&hide_js=1&catid=13
======
davidw
Some quotes:

> Oracle did not have a notion of a senior engineer or at least one equivalent
> to Gosling’s grade at Sun, where he was a fellow. “In my job offer, they had
> me at a fairly significant grade level down,” he said.

Says something about how they value technical people.

> 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

~~~
yellowbkpk
One of the reasons I left GE was because there was no notion of a senior
engineer in the software field (there are senior science positions in the
research divisions). To go beyond "Software Engineer" you had to step into a
managerial role and away from doing any software engineering.

This burned out several people (including myself). You can only wait for the
implementation of "Technical Career Path" for so long.

~~~
jbjohns
I don't get why technical people who don't want to go in management sign on as
permanent employees. Why deal with all that career review nonsense, etc. when
as a technical person you have no track anyway?

~~~
strlen
Most companies do have technical career path. Being a permanent employee not
only gives you the benefits (others have listed them), but also lets you work
on much more interesting projects (contractors typically work on isolated
projects rather than on core systems and algorithms; I know, of course, of
exceptions to that but they're rare). It also frees you up of the overhead of
finding the next contract.

I know many people who have done contracting and several told me a) the money
_is_ very good b) other than the money, it's not worth it (stressful,
uninteresting projects, high overhead).

~~~
gaius
_Most companies do have technical career path_

Genuine question - who? The technical career path at almost every organization
ends after about 10 years, then it's management or plateau.

Remember - companies are run by people who fundamentally don't, or can't,
understand why everyone doesn't aspire to management...

~~~
rwmj
Red Hat has a good technical career path. No need to go into management if you
don't want to, and plenty of people on my team in their 40s and 50s still
working happily on the "codeface".

------
paulbaumgart
A lot of big software companies seem to put significant effort into
maintaining a good relationship with the developer/technical community,
presumably in large part to keep the recruitment pipeline (especially of top
people) flowing along.

Oracle, by contrast, doesn't seem to give a shit and gets away with it[1].

Why?

[1]
[http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...](http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1285185600000&chddm=494615&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NASDAQ:ORCL&ntsp=0)

~~~
_delirium
I don't know much about this sector, but how does Oracle compare to its direct
competitors? E.g. is SAP friendlier with the developer/technical community?

~~~
Tamerlin
Other than the aforementioned DB2, the only other competitor out there for
Oracle is SQL Server.

That has some big customers -- a large part of Disney's online infrastructure
relies on SQL Server, for example.

~~~
dagw
Oracle the database isn't really Oracle's main product. They're real product
is a bunch of industry specific applications and middleware (and related
consulting services) that happens to need a Oracle database to run. So as such
they're not really directly competing with SQL server (or postgres or
whatever)

~~~
Tamerlin
That's a good point. I suppose I should have specifically labelled DB2 and SQL
Server as competitors to Oracle 10x or whatever their current DBMS version is.
:)

------
10ren
Oracle has brilliant opportunities at the moment: they own a great processor
(Sparc) that they could closely integrate with their database, application
software and even Java... and (finally!) give IBM a run for their money. They
have the cool and fast technology of both Sun's JVM and BEA's JVM (JRockit).
They have acquired other brilliant technologies, and have in practice endless
resources to acquire more:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle>
<http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/acquisitions/index.html>

But... although it's simple to appreciate the advantages of combining
technologies, it's very very hard to actually do. For example, the IBM 360
project, of a series of machines of increasing power (and price), that were
all compatible, so customers could upgrade, is a simple idea. But implementing
this was a bet-the-company project, it was celebrated as an incredible,
miraculous achievement, and the lessons learnt from it remain popular to this
day ( _The Mythical Man Month_ , by the leader of the 360 project, Fred
Brooks.)

To pull off these technical feats, you need the public superstar developers,
but also the hidden superstar developers (the x100 coders; the people who,
after working closely with them for a while, you observe, oh that guy's a
genius); and then the x10 coders, who want to hang out with the geniuses and
learn from them. It's places like HP used to be, where Woz wanted to work, at
almost all costs (Woz himself being a x100 guy.)

If you only have x5 or x7 coders; and if you don't support them (with
infrastructure, secretarial etc - not just compensation, adequate decision-
making power, and some kind of recognition.), then, well, you can't do these
technical feats. You may seek but not find; ask but it shall not be given;
knock but it shall not be opened. Though this is not a disruptive issue, the
same factors occur of the difficulty for an established successful company to
change its culture and business architecture. And Oracle doesn't want to
change anyway.

~~~
Tamerlin
" they own a great processor (Sparc)"

I'm not so sure about that.

For years x86 has been chewing up the market for Sparc processors, and one of
the reasons that Sun had such poor finances is that it was selling x86-based
servers more than Sparc based servers (they cost considerably less, and
perform better).

Fujutsu's Sparc implementation significantly outperforms Sun's.

Contemporary Xeons outperform both these days.

Besides, Sun has had a long history of massive screwups -- and they put "don't
tell anyone we screwed up" clauses in their support contracts. One company
just gave up when they got their UltraSPARC3 rig, found that not only was it
not nearly performant enough to meet expectations, but also in order for it to
function reliably, they had to disable the 2nd level cache on every CPU, or
else a cache glitch would bring down the entire server (32 procs).

It's not a great processor. It hasn't been for a long time. Sun has been the
"flock of chickens" vs the POWER "bull" as a result.

~~~
jbarham
For those who don't get the chickens vs. bulls reference:

"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use?... Two strong oxen
or 1024 chickens?"

\- Seymour Cray

There are a lot of other great Cray quotes.

~~~
sprout
Of course, look at any modern Cray ads and Cray is using the same 1024
chickens everyone else in the livestock industry is using.

Sparc isn't failing because it's inferior to x86. Sparc is failing because
Solaris is failing, and no other OS is built from the ground up for Sparc. You
can run Linux and other Unix-likes on it, but given the choice between x86 and
Sparc, you choose x86 because that's what's least likely to cause
incompatibility issues.

~~~
protomyth
Well, to be fair, Seymour Cray is sadly not around anymore to build some
better oxen and Cray has changed hands quite a few times.

------
jacquesm
From the middle of the article:

"Also, asked whether in hindsight he would have preferred Sun having been
acquired by IBM (which pursued a deal to acquire Sun and then backed out late
in the game) rather than Oracle, Gosling said he and at least Sun Chairman
Scott McNealy debated the prospect. And the consensus, led by McNealy, was
that although they said they believed “Oracle would be more savage, IBM would
make more layoffs.”

That's interesting, given that Gosling now decides to quit 'of his own
accord', which is probably a lot cheaper than to lay someone off.

Technically Oracle may not lay people off that readily, but I don't see how
you could interpret Goslings treatment in any way but to force him out of the
company. He had his compensation reduced, they clipped his wings and on top of
all that used him to act at being a trained parrot.

~~~
jacksonh
Gosling's layoff concerns were probably more about his friends and the people
that worked for him.

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, but if they treat him like this I can't see people lower on the totem
pole being treated much better, I'd rather expect the opposite.

~~~
mseebach
I think the implied trade-off is between "IBM axes former SUN-division Foo,
5000 fired" and "Stuck in an unpleasant, but decently paid, job with benefits
and no particular obligation not to just pack up and leave when a better
opportunity comes along."

~~~
jacquesm
Oracle has already fired close to 7,000 people of the original 27,000 that
were part of the merger, in June they announced a further 1,000 people to be
thrown out but at the same time said they would hire 2,000 new ones mostly for
the sales division.

<http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6536G820100604>

I don't see how IBM could have done much worse, and I think that Java would
have fared a lot better under IBM, which in the longer term would have
probably meant more rather than less job security for the people working near
Gosling.

If he was talking about the company as a whole IBM would have had to fire more
than 8,000 people to date do be doing as bad for the employees as Oracle did,
now of course we'll never know so we can't really make any statements about
that but I find it hard to conceive of it being so bad. IBM is very image
conscious and I think they would have had a hard time murdering the core team
around java at this clip, let alone destroying the technical core of Sun and
replacing it with 'sales'.

~~~
Tamerlin
IBM's done worse before. In the late 90's my father was part of a first round
of IBM layoffs -- in which they cut 6000 jobs... in Dutchess County, New York.

That was the <i>first round</i> of layoffs. Another few thousand got cut a
year so later.

And I don't know how many they cut outside of Dutchess County...

~~~
zacharycohn
Were they closing down the facility in Dutchess County? How big was it?

~~~
Tamerlin
IBM has a LOT of facilities in Dutchess County -- including their own HQ in
Armonk. There are several significant plants there, and I think they still
have some semiconductor manufacturing there -- which might help explain the
severe pollution in the Hudson River from that area on down to New York City.

IBM's presence before that massive layoff was such that almost everyone in
Dutchess County with a corporate job worked at IBM, it really felt like you
either worked for IBM or you worked at the mall or a gas station. (I doubt
that this is quite the case, but you get the point hopefully.)

I am fairly certain that until that massive layoff, there were hardly any tech
companies other than IBM in the area. I didn't find any, at least. The only
job opportunities I ever found in the area were at IBM.

I think they did close down a few facilities entirely during those layoffs. My
mother's job moved from Meyers Corners to Poughkeepsie around then, because
they closed down the MC facility IIRC. They probably sold or leased it out or
something, it was a pretty large office building from what I remember.

------
cageface
So where does a guy like Gosling go now? Google seems to be serving the role
that Bell Labs once did in giving all the top technical dogs a big playground
but other than that it's hard to guess where he might fit in.

------
hopeless
Oracle sounds as bad a company internally as externally. I'm hugely grateful
that I've found other languages, frameworks and databases to base my career on
and minimise Oracle's involvement in my life.

Although I never worked for them, I loved the hardware and software output
from Sun. It was good to have them in the tech ecosystem. I can't say the same
about Oracle.

------
va_coder
I sympathize with all the great Sun engineers that got a bad deal, but didn't
Sun do poorly from an investor perspective? And isn't that important?

As much as I really hate Oracle (I'm a programmer and don't like their
products), they do really well for investors. They make fat profits each
quarter. I don't really understand why - why people buy their overpriced,
complex products - but they do.

~~~
tsotha
The sales organization gets priority in Oracle. They're never going to start a
project by asking "what would be cool?", but rather "what do our customers
want?". Not the path to the most technically satisfying jobs, but companies
like that stand a better chance of making money.

I've worked at a few (smaller) software companies, and from what I can tell
the ones that go out of business do so because they make really cool products
that either 1) don't get connected to the right customers or 2) are missing
some critical feature customers need because developers didn't understand the
business space. Both problems are the result of a poor or unsupported sales
organization.

As a technical guy I get irritated by the sales people as much as anyone else,
especially when they try to promise away my nights or weekends. But a software
company won't survive without them. Based on my own experience I'd say the
most successful companies could better be described as sales organizations
that do software instead of software companies that do sales.

~~~
va_coder
I agree. I also think managers with discipline and ok intelligence are better
than managers that are really intelligent with little discipline.

The disciplined managers focus on what needs to get done and do it. (The don't
spend part of their day reading HN ;)

------
adharmad
From the article: "All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-
wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide
anything was just gone."

It need not have come to that if they had used their "ability to decide" in
managing Sun properly. You cannot hang your hat for very long on "we made good
software but were unable to sell it".

~~~
hga
And then there's the interminable delay in Java 7. In this case, " _made_ ",
as in the past tense of " _make_ " is the operative word. As I noted
elsewhere, I'm not sure Oracle wanted to give Gosling and his peers decision
making authority (let alone retain them) based on their _recent_ preformance.

------
ataranto
"But unlike Oracle, Davis and the Raiders have not had a winning season for
awhile – not since my Baltimore Ravens flattened their hopes and the shoulder
of quarterback Rich Gannon after a vicious pancake tackle by Tony Siragusa on
the way to a Ravens’ Super Bowl winning season in 2001."

The Raiders were 11-5 the next year (2002) and went to the Super Bowl.

~~~
philwelch
By "in 2001" he actually means the 2001 Super Bowl, so the 2000 season. The
2001 season was a Super Bowl winning season for the Patriots.

------
fondue
“All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job
titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just
gone.”

Probably the best thing to happen as the decision makers managed to decide Sun
to the selling block.

------
rbanffy
I love the way Gosling uses "financial realities" as a delicate euphemism for
"poor management"...

------
absconditus
Darryl K. Taft is a horrible writer.

~~~
skullsplitter
For real,

"That bent Gosling’s resolve like a wishbone in the hands of two eager
siblings in mid-pull after Thanksgiving dinner, but even that didn’t break
it."

~~~
flatline
And later - I'm not sure what I was actually reading about for half the
article:

"But unlike Oracle, Davis and the Raiders have not had a winning season for
awhile – not since my Baltimore Ravens flattened their hopes and the shoulder
of quarterback Rich Gannon after a vicious pancake tackle by Tony Siragusa on
the way to a Ravens’ Super Bowl winning season in 2001."

------
zvrba
Personally, I think that Gosling got what he deserved considering the pain he
inflicted on myriads of developers with Java. (Yes, there are some nice
technologies in the Java platform. But Java _language_ is not one of them.)

------
Astro9k
It's interesting that a pay cut and a down-grade in title isn't what did it
but that their marginalization of his input and control is what pushed him
over the edge.

------
strait
I'm wondering what happened to the real mastermind, Guy Steele.

~~~
hga
Heh.

Nah, he was brought in after Java was going to help write the language
definition document, given his fantastic demonstrated ability to do this:
Scheme, co-author of the best one for C, Common Lisp.

He's now working on Fortress, a HPC language
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_%28programming_languag...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_%28programming_language%29)).
As far as I know, people doing research are still happy (enough), employed,
etc., e.g. that project is still going with the most recent release a month
and a half ago and the Maxine JVM in Java was fine as of the time Oracle sued
Google, when I stopped paying attention to it.

------
sshah
JAVA handled by the micro managers. That means each new feature will be nicely
documented first...in a contract. It will go through a rigorous due diligence
process, the basic questions being 'Whats in it for Oracle', 'Does it help our
performance', etc. Oracle makes good enough software but at a slow pace.

Gosling's not going to say 'I am really worried about JAVA and chances are it
may not evolve'. But I think its quite clear from this interview.

~~~
rbanffy
You obviously make the risky assumption the managers in question know how to
properly document and develop software.

------
paramendra
This is just Larry "consolidating." (Larryspeak) <http://goo.gl/fb/gNsvQ>

------
VladRussian
a lot of Sun's prima donnas didn't make it in Oracle wolf pack. They had their
day at Sun (it was an unbelievable feast during plague), and it resulted in
the failure of the company on all fronts, business and engineering, software
and hardware.

~~~
bcantrill
More accurately, we (for there are many of us) realized that we could go solve
much more interesting problems elsewhere -- and in a much better environment
besides. Why would anyone wish to suffer at a technically mediocre company
when there are so many interesting problems yet to solve?

~~~
VladRussian
O-o-o-o-h! who can forgot this one. The technical brilliance of scattering
profiler calls across Solaris sources (which endeavor took enormous
engineering and marketing budgets at the time when Solaris was eaten alive by
Linux) is, no doubt, a sound platform to "mediocrate" a company whose products
in a highly competitive marketplace are among the leaders, technically and
commercially (people actually pay to use them, whereis Sun had trouble
convincing people to use its products, in particular Solaris, even for free)

Apples to apples - Oracle DB has excellent profiler capabilities and even
useful tools around it. Of course, in this day and age, excellent profiler
capabilities and tools is just a normal must-have, a technical mediocracy and
nowhere a sign of technical brilliance.

Great, the more of "we (for there are many of us) realized that we could go
solve much more interesting problems elsewhere", the less chances for the
Oracle server to suffer the fate of Solaris.

