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.
This has been my anecdotal experience with just about everyone I've ever known who works at or encourages use of Oracle. They just didn't seem to care about technology. They remind me of the handful of CS classmates I had at university who were only in the program because of high-salaried jobs in the industry... Needless to say, they didn't thrive.
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.
With enough effort, I'm certain someone could out me. I'm not protecting my connection or device ID in any way.
>dirty laundry
All of the things I've cited about Oracle are public knowledge. If an employee of Monsanto says that RoundUp causes cancer, is that dirty laundry, or stating a scientifically proven fact?
While not scientifically proven, the State of California currently classifies RoundUp as "probably carcinogenic".
More than 800 cancer patients have joined the lawsuit against Monsanto.
I don't know about you, but being exposed, for years and years, to something that requires a mask to administer. Hmmm gonna have to go with "more cancerous than a banana".
Lots of things are more cancerous than a banana. Fries and steak for example. And sure, if you're spraying it without the proper precautions for "years and years", it probably will negatively affect your health, though even there the cancer link is not clear.
But in spite of tons of research all over the world no one was able to establish a causal link for dietary glyphosate residue. The herbicides before glyphosate were truly vile, look it up. Glyphosate is very targeted for plants, and based on its mechanism of action it's unlikely to be toxic or carcinogenic in humans or animals, including even fish and invertebrates.
So my money is on State of California being full of shit as usual. Put simply, between glyphosate and the alternatives it's not even a question that glyphosate is much safer.
I agree with you that we don't have the evidence for dietary exposure. My polemic generalization in my earlier comment didn't make it clear that I was only speaking about "commercial and heavy-residential use", that is to say, people whose job or hobby it is to spray RoundUp for hundreds or even thousands of hours a year.
Much like how you shouldn't weld without a mask, you shouldn't spray RoundUp without a mask. But the difference is that things that can be inhaled are very tricky compared to things that are just bright.
So even the right precautions can still lead to problems.
If someone who worked at a fiberglass plant told me not to breathe in fiberglass splinters, I would believe them, regardless of what the research has confirmed.
TL;DR - An employee found fire safety violations in one of its Bangalore offices. He reported the violations internally. Nobody addressed the violations. He reported the violations to the cops. Oracle sacked and sued the employee.
Not sure why you are being down voted. It is worth knowing.
Besides the poor hours of course, I can remember the following:
1) Unpaid overtime.
2) Spiteful, political management.
3) Revolving door of employees due to firings.
4) Replacements were not trained, so nobody was set up for success and growth.
These are just things I remember experiencing second or third-hand, but so much of the grunt work and broken processes flowed to my counterparts in Oracle India.
Their reward for trying to make sense of everything was being fired, regardless of performance.
Oracle US employees were usually spared a few years of runway until being laid off, regardless of performance.
> 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.
Different incentives. Imagine a programming language team composed of a bunch of world class experts (expensive) worked on an amazing programming language that was a joy to use for millions of programmers worldwide and got a lot of academic interest and free work on it in the form of research etc. and they sold some books / support / services / consulting / certification / sponsorship that covered their salaries but did not bring in any more money than that. You and I would be very proud to be the corporation/manager that "owns" such a team, even if they don't make us a lot of money or increase the price of our stock options. But LPOD looks at this and tries to design it into a huge money maker. He realizes he cannot turn it into a long term cash cow like Oracle RDBMS but he can squeeze some profits out of it for a few years until it dies. Some profits is better than no profits. So that's what he does.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Yeah, I've played with him/against him in some practices. Much preferred playing with him, he is bigger than me and could flatten me easily. Pretty decent player, better than me (I coached Los Gatos High hockey so I have some insight into who makes a good player and who doesn't).
Another interesting tidbit about Oracle - if you leave as a peon and return back after a few years, you are given exactly the same conditions as you had when you left, regardless of what you did in the years in-between. Oracle doesn't care if you progressed in the meantime.
Oracle is a safe haven for incompetent managers and so called team leads. I know a few ex-colleagues of mine who left Oracle to join other companies and were shocked to see how fast and agile other companies were.
It is not in Oracle's DNA to hold managers accountable or fire them for management blunders or shoddy management. So when some of these managers and team leads from Oracle joined other companies, they found much to their surprise that they were answerable to higher management for the state of the project they were managing. They could not keep up with the pace of development or having concrete responsibility, and returned to Oracle to live a purposeless but relaxed life where one would earn less but otherwise thrive in the company by doing little to no actual work.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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."
- 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.
Sadly, this sort of editorializing is quite common here. Anything remotely inflammatory or political in nature will get shot down or toned down summarily.
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?
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.
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.
64 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadThat 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.
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.
Sun completely dropped the ball on Java in the last five years of its existence.
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.
For what?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/oracle_sues_employe...
I can't imagine this was a good use of the company's lawyers' time (although it was probably good from the lawyers' perspective).
"get out there and dig in the dumpster for gold nuggets!"
Management orders her to cook the books, at a public company!!
She's fired, she sues.
Oracle counter sues.
How is this ethical?
With enough effort, I'm certain someone could out me. I'm not protecting my connection or device ID in any way.
>dirty laundry
All of the things I've cited about Oracle are public knowledge. If an employee of Monsanto says that RoundUp causes cancer, is that dirty laundry, or stating a scientifically proven fact?
http://www.who.int/foodsafety/jmprsummary2016.pdf?ua=1
https://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/iarcnews/pdf/MonographVo...
The short version is that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer in consumers or farm workers:
https://www.wired.com/2016/05/monsantos-roundup-herbicide-ca...
While not scientifically proven, the State of California currently classifies RoundUp as "probably carcinogenic".
More than 800 cancer patients have joined the lawsuit against Monsanto.
I don't know about you, but being exposed, for years and years, to something that requires a mask to administer. Hmmm gonna have to go with "more cancerous than a banana".
But in spite of tons of research all over the world no one was able to establish a causal link for dietary glyphosate residue. The herbicides before glyphosate were truly vile, look it up. Glyphosate is very targeted for plants, and based on its mechanism of action it's unlikely to be toxic or carcinogenic in humans or animals, including even fish and invertebrates.
So my money is on State of California being full of shit as usual. Put simply, between glyphosate and the alternatives it's not even a question that glyphosate is much safer.
Much like how you shouldn't weld without a mask, you shouldn't spray RoundUp without a mask. But the difference is that things that can be inhaled are very tricky compared to things that are just bright.
So even the right precautions can still lead to problems.
If someone who worked at a fiberglass plant told me not to breathe in fiberglass splinters, I would believe them, regardless of what the research has confirmed.
* http://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/bangalore/cover-story/...
* http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnatak...
TL;DR - An employee found fire safety violations in one of its Bangalore offices. He reported the violations internally. Nobody addressed the violations. He reported the violations to the cops. Oracle sacked and sued the employee.
Oracle India was even worse than Oracle. I truly feel terribly for the exploited workes there. You all had it way way worse than us.
Besides the poor hours of course, I can remember the following:
1) Unpaid overtime. 2) Spiteful, political management. 3) Revolving door of employees due to firings. 4) Replacements were not trained, so nobody was set up for success and growth.
These are just things I remember experiencing second or third-hand, but so much of the grunt work and broken processes flowed to my counterparts in Oracle India.
Their reward for trying to make sense of everything was being fired, regardless of performance.
Oracle US employees were usually spared a few years of runway until being laid off, regardless of performance.
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.
You forgot narcissistic. And those attributes explain why.
http://www.businessinsider.com/oracles-thomas-kurian-has-int...
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.
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."
Oracle is a safe haven for incompetent managers and so called team leads. I know a few ex-colleagues of mine who left Oracle to join other companies and were shocked to see how fast and agile other companies were.
It is not in Oracle's DNA to hold managers accountable or fire them for management blunders or shoddy management. So when some of these managers and team leads from Oracle joined other companies, they found much to their surprise that they were answerable to higher management for the state of the project they were managing. They could not keep up with the pace of development or having concrete responsibility, and returned to Oracle to live a purposeless but relaxed life where one would earn less but otherwise thrive in the company by doing little to no actual work.
I've heard much the same about Microsoft's program managers.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
- 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.
The fact that it is James Gosling saying this instead of a random employee seems important.
Your initial comment goes quite a bit further than addressing only this particular example, however. That's what I was addressing.