Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

Oracle president Thomas Kurian says Oracle Cloud is at the front of today’s #cloud market. But how does that help customers adopt tomorrow’s technologies? http://ora.cl/3ai7D

TK

It is not just development that is under such dysfunctional leadership. Our cloud is actually run by PDIT, which also reports to TK. PDIT is a total train wreck where no one is actually in charge or responsible for anything. Some unlucky customers suffer outages that last for DAYS just because PDIT can't find anyone in their own org willing to take responsibility to roll out a needed fix. The weak leadership has prevented what should have been world-class operations team from becoming anything more than a glorified help-desk, filled with barely computer-literate script readers.

LE can’t afford to buy AWS and JB would never sell it. Yep, AWS is worth more than oracle and much, much, much more than the amount of money LE can get his hands on. Game over! JB is also better loklokinh and much, much, much smarter than LE - Princenton grad vs no college. Eat your heart out LE!

Ellison should just go the typical oracle route: acquisition . Offer to buy AWS from bezos and get himself an actual cloud company.

The oracle cloud is non existent. A marketing fabrication.

Here's the most recent board meeting transcript.

Oracle's (ORCL) CEOs Safra Catz and Mark Hurd Hosts Annual Meeting of Stockholders (Transcript)

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4125329-oracles-orcl-ceos-safra-catz-mark-hurd-hosts-annual-meeting-stockholders-transcript

Fish rot from the head done and this one has been fermenting for a very long time, very rotten by now

Oracle and dev ops has no future, GTFO ASAP!

Ah hah, sales force pr trolls again. You judge a tree by its fruits. Good trees yield good fruits, bad trees yield bad fruits. Some people here suggested to replace the guy at the top to save the org. Some other people here suggested to purging the entire dev org ignore good and bad and start from scratch. The devil just exposed themselves. If you are part of the org and want the org and yourselves saved, fight with everything you've got against these trolls. If you are part of the org and want yourselves saved but wanted the org collapse, GTFO asap, you are a devil, your stay is not welcomed, and the only way to save yourself is to GTFO anyway.

ES replacing TK or not Ian irrelevant, the whole development org is so F:ed up that for oracle to survive a new dev ops org would need to be created from scratch with entirely new staff and keep apart from the existing one. Yes, there are some good and competent people in the current dev ops org, but sorting out who is who is impossible, better to start from scratch. Needless to say, this won’t happen so the current decline and misery will continue till the inevitable end. Sad!

who can access the board meeting notes? Is ES to replace TK a subject at a recent board meeting or is it old news?

Very true. Any company cannot survive without great products. We have not produced anything killer and almost all acquired products have been decimated.

Oracle may still have time to recover provided engg leadership is changed at the very top.

As should be abundantly clear from the number of detailed costs in this thread, oracle’s development org, which should be the core of any tech co, is so utterly F:ed up that there is absolutely no possibility that oracle can survive and prosper. All that is left is a long slide with never ending layoffs and declining revenues. Why would anybody with even half a brain own any oracle stock is beyond me. Dump the garbage while you can

TK organization is hopeless because the only method of leadership is to bring more people from India. Get one VP from India or Indian origin and soon everyone will be replaced by people from Bangalore. Also, their culture is such that manager is like a god and this work through the entire chain of command. Noone dares to argue even when decisions are utterly stupid.

I mean, why would adults act this way, for what purpose?

You are making an assumption when you ask this question. There is no purpose, other than some insane behavior centered on the manager's ego.

Narcissism is a personality disorder. It's a form of insanity. A lot of these managers are narcissists, and I mean that they are the walking insane. They have collected in TK's org for some reason... acquisition after acquisition or the upper level management is comfortable with them.

Narcissists are obsessed with themselves, lack any kind of empathy for anyone, and are intensely insecure. They are often obsessed with developing a loyal team of followers, these have to be people who will do anything they say without question, because their fragile egos can't handle any questions at all.

Typically, narcissists are good at charming and manipulating people. They do this to create their loyal followers and direct them to attack anyone who might damage the narcissists ego.

Narcissists are also typically incompetent and this increases the need for them to be surrounded by people who will never question anything they say.

Narcissists tend to attack other people, particularly competent people that they feel threatened by. They behave in a juvenile manner, like junior high kids, building their loyal little cliques and having fun attacking other people.

Narcissists never grow up. They never become responsible for their own actions. They blame other people constantly and they can make up intricate stories to tell people, all to avoid any bad view of themselves. They often don't see the effect of their behavior on others. However, there are some narcissists who are also sociopaths and are sadistic in their behavior and intentionally hurt people. Personally, I think several managers that I knew are in this category. They really, really enjoy destroying people.

This behavior has become normal in this area at Oracle, but this is not a normal environment at all.

Think of Donald Trump. He is an adult, at least in age. But he behaves like a child. He is obsessed with every tiny slight that might occur, and sometimes he creates the slight in his own mind when nothing was intended or actually happened. Donald lashes out and blames everyone else for everything. He can't deal with the idea that he might need to correct something in himself. He has created a loyal group of followers and they help to shield him from reality so that he can cope. He's basically nuts and recently a group of psychologists/psychiatrists wrote a paper stating that he is seriously ill.

Personality disorders are on the rise. Some people believe that this is related to the explosion of autism and I am one in that camp. I have family members diagnosed with autism and aspergers syndrome and the behavior patterns are very much the same. Lack of empathy, lack of understanding of other people. I think that narcissists are basically aspergers/autistic individuals who have been brought up with parents who cannot allow the possibility of any mistake. Teaching their children that they must appear perfect or the world will end.

The management in TK's org is obsessed with their egos. They reward or punish managers based on the number of reports they have on the org chart. They sometimes put people into groups where they don't belong simply because the manager needs to be rewarded with more people. I guess the narcissists stick in this area because the rest of the management is the same. Everyone thinks that there is nothing more important than the manager's ego.

This is all crap, of course. There is actual work that has to be done. Donald Trump doesn't know that and neither do these guys. It's just fun and games time for them with the people/objects around them.

Developers can't even have a conversation with their manager where they can bring up an issue or correct a problem and there are people, good people, who are being sabotaged because they did something the manager didn't like. Often that happens without the person even knowing what they did. Narcissists assume things a lot, like they will assume that "you know what you did", they just KNOW you do, when you don't. Then they flip out and start arranging their followers to attack and isolate you.

It's a very, very sick and disturbing place to work. So, you question what the purpose is? That's completely irrelevant. There is no real purpose other than to soothe their egos.

Watch Donald Trump and you will get it. He doesn't do anything for real. He doesn't know how anything he does affects anyone and he doesn't care. He is completely without empathy for anyone. People are just objects to be used and manipulated all just to give his ego a boost for a short time. These type of people also never think ahead, that's a symptom of autism. They don't think ahead, because they can't physically do it. They only know "right now". Donald never thinks ahead. He does one stupid thing after another, all just for the moment, just to attack the next perceived attacker.

There are lot of books out there on narcissism and also a lot of books on tricks played on people in the workplace. This is a growing problem in companies and you will find a lot of people online who are complaining about elaborate tricks played on them.

I guess I probably wouldn't have believed it either, until it actually happened to me and I could really see who a couple of seriously sadistic managers really were. It takes a little time, but keep watching Donald Trump.

Did anyone else hear the rumor that LE wanted to replace TK with ES to run all R&D efforts but the board killed the idea?

Old news is MH’s equivalent of Trimp’s fake news, MH doesn’t care about posts about TK

"TK's Org Desperately Needs New Leadership" IS old news and I keep wondering why the "old news" commenter doesn't show up here...

Sh-- always flows from the top, that’s all there is to it

The first thing you have to do to recognize what is going on is to realize that the idiots you think you are working with are not really idiots. Someone on here said something about their manager being an idiot, well guess again.

Here is part of my story....

I came in from another company and found a place in a group in TK's org because of my technical background. I didn't know anyone in the group before I started there.

My manager was at HQ and I was not. I was spending a day in a cube outside his office and there was a steady stream of people in and out of his office all day. At one point the door was open and someone was in there asking for a new feature, really begging for a new feature in the area I was assigned. I popped my head up over the cube wall and said "I can do that".

And I did do that, I got the requirements directly, right then, and my manager was really pissed. He was going to say "No" to a simple feature when I had absolutely nothing to do. It was clear this was really needed by the other group.

I did that feature. This occurred when I was trying to get something to work on. I had created small design documents for features that I thought would be useful or fixes to issues that I saw, and this is what was done with them.

1) I create a short design document.

2) Send the design document to the manager.

3) Discuss it with him on the phone.

4) He tells me verbally over the phone that he does not want me to do the work.

5) He makes up some reason like "it's too risky" right now or I'll be working on something else soon.

6) A few weeks go by and he sends me an email, asking me if I did the work defined in the design document.

7) I reply "No", not thinking that I need to defend myself because he knows perfectly well that he told me not to do the work.

8) Then this repeats several times and I think the man is a complete idiot and can't remember anything. But when I talk to him about various features, he doesn't really seem like an idiot?

So what was this? The only thing I can think of is that it was a scam to make up a paper trail showing that I never did any work. That I kept coming up with designs, but was too incompetent to do the work?

Other things happened.....

I found a bunch of my bugs assigned to someone else that had just been sitting there without me knowing. Someone else in the group suddenly had over 100 bugs at one point and then they were gone. Were they hiding his bugs somewhere by assigning them to someone else who was working with the manager?

Then they suddenly spring them on him? I had been told that the process was the manager will review and assign bugs to you. But, I started searching by category from then on.

Visiting the group I was in was like visiting a morgue. Not a sound anywhere, everyone hiding in their cubes and offices. When I first started, the manager completely ignored me, didn't bother to introduce me to anyone in the office. I had to walk around and introduce myself. One guy I said hello to had his desk facing the back wall of the office and didn't even bother to turn around, just raised one hand and said "hello".

There were no status meetings, no organization that I could see. I went on and isolated myself around the application I was responsible for. I stopped bothering to discuss changes with the manager and just started doing whatever I thought was necessary. There was nothing else to do. I didn't know anyone. I thought maybe after a while when they saw that I knew what I was doing things would change.

But, it seemed to me, the more I showed that I was quite competent, the more I was isolated. I believe that at some point the manager made up lies about me, because certain people who had been working with me, suddenly stopped doing that.

It gets much worse from there, when I got given to another manager. They staged a full-on campaign to get me to do work for someone else that they could claim credit for, then sabotaged the sh-- out me to make me resign.

I'm sorry, I know it sounds bizarre, and you would think that an organization that is this sick and this corrupt couldn't last long. But there are always new people coming in in acquisitions. Always new people to work over and use.

The last manager had a description in that talent profile app that they started using. It says that he is looking for "talent". I know that he brought someone else in from somewhere, had them write the beginning of an application for them, then screwed them over so they would leave them the application, that they could never have started by themselves. Very similar to myself.

Everything seems to be arranged around who gets credit for things. The upper level managers must be complete idiots and they don't know how people are being used or they don't care. The managers in charge are intensely corrupt, their groups are made up of loyal idiots who will do anything to protect their egos and their managers egos. Everything is a scam run by narcissistic weirdos.

The last thing this last manager did happened a couple of weeks before I finally quit. He asked me to make a backup of the code and put it on my laptop. I have no idea why he wanted me to do that, but I've had a thought since then.

When I quit I turned the laptop into him. I think that he wanted to make the case that I was stealing Oracle code. Possibly that was told to HR? Hey, HR, if someone was stealing code, they wouldn't put the code on their laptop and give it to the manager, would they? They'd delete it. If that was the scam, HR should be paying attention, but I suspect they don't care, so long as that "horrible person" has left the company.

It's really all over with. There is no way there will be a working oracle cloud. Some people in other org's where maybe this kind of thing is not going on, may find this all difficult to believe, but I assure you this and much more is going on. You can't build software in this kind of corrupt environment.

Maybe LE knows that. Maybe that's really why he hired MH. To just s--- whatever they can out of the company and make that last for as long as possible. As employees, you should all make your own decisions. A lot of you know perfectly well what is going on, as a lot of you are doing the things I'm talking about.

To whoever referred to your manager as your "idiot manager", you should think about that again. If you are not getting assigned work, there's a reason for it. You may say to yourself that you didn't do anything to deserve that, but maybe all you did was help the wrong person. Being helpful is a crime in TK's org.

I confirm what Post ID: @QfAKigt-2xqm stated is the truth.

I was in TK's Tech Development for about six years. This is the truth.

There is constant fighting and politics within the team.

It is very siloed and chaotic.

This is LJE's strategy. The constant infighting has always been his strategy. In fact, it was in one of the book about him. I think it was called SoftWars. Let the teams fight it out and the better team will win. Incredible !! Quality software engineering.........right.....

TK has lost lot of influence in last 2 years. Many teams like Apps, DB, BI and cloud give him sham updates and keep working on hidden projects and do whatever they like.

It is very difficult to believe that any of what you people are saying is true. I'm not saying you are not telling the truth, just that it is very hard to believe. I mean, why would adults act this way, for what purpose?

I work at Oracle, not in engineering, but in customer support. I came via an acquisition and have been here for a good while now. One of the hardware products that I support is integrated into an "appliance" with other hardware products gained through other acquisitions, and the whole appliance is powered by Oracle-written software. I have seen the development engineers from these different acquired companies work very well together to create this appliance.

Now that the appliance is installed at customer sites, customer support engineers and managers from different organizations often have to work together to solve a customer issue, and that mostly works very well -- except when we have to involve an Oracle software customer support engineer. Then it becomes a nightmare of blaming everything else and finger pointing, requesting logs ad nauseum that have already been collected before, transferring the service request from one engineer to another with no work being done, the next engineer requesting the same logs again, and on and on and on, because "it's obviously not a software problem".

Many of the hardware customer support engineers from these different groups (myself included) have gotten so fed up with this treatment from the software customer support engineers and the way that they treat our customers, that a lot of us are taking it upon ourselves to learn the Oracle software that runs this appliance so we do not have to rely on the software customer support engineers (even though we support hardware, there is software to make that hardware work, and we also provide support on the hardware's internal software - so supporting software is not foreign to us).

So maybe there is some truth to all of this, and that mentality has bled over into the Oracle software customer support organization as well.

PS - this appliance was not created under TK's org (but under another branch of ES), but the software that runs it came from TK's org.

And the sabotage and attacks are not just from one group to another. They are up and down the chain of command. I worked for couple of managers under a senior director, across projects. The senior director knew what he was doing and, I think, was really trying to help the managers under him succeed in a real way.

The senior director was telling the two managers that it was really important to have senior engineers who design and oversee technical work that is done. Both the managers, clueless narcissists, both of them, thought that was stupid. They were both micromanaging idiots who didn't have any understanding of how software is developed. They were obsessed with absolute control of the people under them.

The senior director would tell them to insert senior engineers in their projects, then the managers underneath would then sabotage and harass the senior engineers until they left. They thought it was funny. They thought the senior director was an idiot. But, they are the idiots.

Stupid is as stupid does, I guess.

Even when there is someone in the management that can be learned from, many of the managers are just too clueless and stupid to take the advice. To the senior director's face, of course, they are both "yes" men. They undermine him in a way where he can't tell what they are doing. They think are clever, but they are unbelievably stupid. They do a great job faking management, but have no idea what they are doing.

It really can't go on like this much longer.

Coming into Oracle on an acquisition I couldn't believe how obsessively managers were focused on undermining one another, putting their politics above competition in the market and far above delivering value to the customer. I had seen plenty of company politics before in other companies, but never anything remotely approaching Oracle's situation. When an engineer in another department would cooperate with me for the overall good of Oracle, we had to carefully keep it secret from our management chains lest there be terrible retribution.

LE is so over the hill and out of touch with the reality at oracle, it would make for a really funny sitcom if it wasn’t true. Sometimes you just can’t make Sh*t like this up, you have to see it to believe it. Oracle is dead, dead, dead.

Yes, sail off to the sunset in the beautiful yacht to your Hawaiian Island. I’m sure MH will be your tennis buddy or 'ball' boy

Thanks for the chuckle: "Larry's balls are way too small now to fix the sh-- he created by ignoring the problem for too long." Even the cryonics chamber he's betting on to extend his life indefinitely won't save him now.

TRUTH: “Try and look at the management as if they are all in junior-high and it will all make much more sense.”

Well put. Exactly.

Yes, yes, yes, there are no adults in the room. No manager who can go over to the next manager and have a real discussion about how to work together. And if there were one, he would be sabotaged by the others. It's all over.

I've never seen anyone so hostile to ISVs and other outside developers as TK. He never understood that you need to win engineers' hearts and minds to really make any new product or service a success. The guy just doesn't understand what modern customers expect. He's a mental dinosaur, which is why our cloud is so pathetically behind every other major player.

True, Larry's fault. He got too comfortable for too long. After a couple of decades, the more you go up the ladder the biggest sh-- you find. In support we get to talk to a lot of people from within Oracle. In Cloud support, "SR escalated to TK" is a joke, everybody laughs at it, even the ladies who bring it up. On the other hand being able to prove your bootlicking qualities will take you from an IC to a M position. Proving your backstabbing qualities can get you to a Director position. At the executive levels, you have to keep them comfortable until you retire and only then you'll take their place. Leadership doesn't want to know about your problems.

The problem with all these idiots that filled the structure is called "Cloud". Many other companies take a bite at a time out of Oracle's market share and Oracle's leadership is so idiotic they can't see half a foot down the road. Too many things to bring up here, most importantly, Oracle doesn't have the right pedigree to understand both, its structure and the outside war. Larry's balls are way too small now to fix the sh-- he created by ignoring the problem for too long. All the executives are cashing out. The best contributors are leaving at will. Isolating in Seattle and Austin will not save the day. Keep sharp and good luck.

#TRUTH: “Try and look at the management as if they are all in junior-high and it will all make much more sense.”

Well put. Exactly.

Ted F. is back - Making Oracle Great Again.

Too many changes in direction, late, subpar, crappy, overpriced, and over-engineered products.

This is what my 10 years of experience in TKs org leads me to believe:

"Late" : This is a very important project and the manager's loyal thugs must do it so they are the ones that get the credit. They are sh--ty engineers, so they take forever.

"subpar" and "crappy": Manager has been screwed over by other managers. Probably the guy is pretty good at actual management and development but has been given bad information or needed tasks done by other groups that refused to help or did crappy work because they knew he would get the blame in the end.

"over-engineered": Developer was extremely good, so they had to make-up ridiculous requirements in the hope that they would fail in the attempt. Developer has no idea they were being sabotaged and just thinks they were given a tough project because they are good at their job. Then they don't understand why the manager is so upset when they met all the requirements.

"changes in direction": Someone left in disgust, so they had to quickly re-spin what was going to be done. Or someone is getting too much attention, so they need to reverse that. Or they want to screw over a group that has invested a lot of time in one area to teach them a lesson.

"overpriced": Someone wants to make sure this feature never gets used by anyone so they can make sure to eliminate an area or manager that is too successful. In my experience, there are marketing people working with managers in engineering. I think this is entirely possible.

Everything happens for a reason. It's not just that the guys at the top are idiots. There's just something going on that you don't know about.

Try and look at the management as if they are all in junior-high and it will all make much more sense.

If they need to make changes, they need to make changes to the engineering org.

Absolutely agree, this is where the real problem is, under TK in engineering. But this will never happen because the directors in this area can't work with anyone.

Why aren't the teams working in an integrated way?

Because the directors all hate each other and are so obsessed with their own egos that they can't function in terms of getting actual work done.

I was in fusion working on an editor that was used by another group. The director I worked with was telling me to remove functionality or not add anything so that he could screw the other group over, cause they had screwed him over. I strongly suspect, that he was then blaming me for doing what I was doing to other people.... like he just can't be responsible for anything the people in his group do. In response, the other group made up bogus and ridiculous requirements.

Then I worked for another manager who I thought might be better since he came from an acquisition. But, he had been there too long and he had already been attacked by the first director and had retaliated. He and the people in his group refused to work on certain features that were needed by the editor I had worked on, so that was screwed.

Then I worked for another manager who kept extremely tight control over the people in his group. He openly sabotaged the smartest person in his group, giving him stupid things to work on and changing the requirements all the time. Gotta keep those smart people in-line and make sure they don't get ahead of any of the manager's thugs, cause you need your thugs to attack and sabotage people in the other groups.

I saw this manager refuse to work on new features because they were suggested by specific managers he was suspicious of. Is the requirement real? Or are they setting him up somehow? Hard to tell isn't it? Once this starts, nothing can fix it. Then, I sat in a meeting where other requirements for his group were being discussed. They were obviously bogus.

And, then, the biggest problem of all, is that a lot of the managers really ENJOY the intrigue. They ENJOY plotting and controlling people and get the biggest thrills out of screwing someone over they can't stand.

Really, they can't work with each other? Who'd have guessed?

Engineering is the problem. These 3 managers are functionally INSANE. They can't work with anyone and they are not going to change. And they are not by any stretch of the imagination the only ones with problems. I could tell story after story about what is going on in engineering.

If you want to have a functional engineering group at this point, you need to do a mass delete of the engineering management tree. Top to bottom, in TK's org. Otherwise, nothing is going to change.

I would really like to see some change, but I have given up. I was sabotaged, too, cause I'm pretty sharp. Can't have me around to show any of the idiots up? Can we?

It's all screwed. Think for yourselves and do whatever you need to do to insure you have good skills and can get the next job. This area in Oracle is over. This has gone on way to long for it to be fixed in any way.

Oh, and if anyone complains to the management above, they get told that they just need to work that out, cause they're not going to get involved.

The Oracle database is one of the most successful tech products ever created. Sadly through busienss practices and now terrible investment and support along with viable just good enough alternatives, organizations are finally moving away. The cash cow is no longer the cash cow. It's not the mainframe. It won't go away anytime soon but it won't grow. It will slowly shrink as people migrate their applications and data away as they modernize their systems and infrastructure. Oracle will fail to capture customer spend on cloud as they move towards AWS, Azure, and Microsoft.

The end is night.

If they need to make changes, they need to make changes to the engineering org. There is no semblance of sanity. Too many changes in direction, late, subpar, crappy, overpriced, and over-engineered products. They will never make it if they don't get their act together on the engineering side and start turning out decent products.

BMCS is actually a decent product but it's taking them too long to get the product out. It's also too expensive. Besides that, the clouds aren't even integrated. How does gen 1 cloud talk to gen 2 cloud? It has to go over the public internet which is subpar. You seriously cannot make this crap up. Why aren't the teams working in an integrated way? Meanwhile all the talent is being laid off or walking out the door. MH and SC are incompetent leaders. LE has checked out. How can employees stay on the ship if they have no idea which direction it is pointed in or where it will go? Is hiring cheaper Millenial workers the answer? It's all a cost cutting move. It's a desperate attempt to survive but if history shows us anything, it's that MH leaves disaster in his wake. Oracle will be no different and will suffer the same fate of HPE, Teradata, and more. The man should go work for a hedge fund where they can buy companies, dismantle them piece by piece and profit while they are destroyed. He's running Oracle like Eddie Lampert runs Sears/K-Mart.

LE did attend college, but did not graduate. But in those days, software engineering was not taught in college anyway. Anyone who has been working in tech for over 5 years, and keeps current, is not relying on what he learned in class anyway - the field changes too fast.

An area he always seemed weak in was distributed processing, something all the latest advances in A.I. and in scalable architectures depend on.

LE doesn't have a college degree? Really? Holy sh--.

People under him are afraid to contradict anything he says, no doubt. That's what happens when you are abusive to people. They don't just magically do what you say, instead they just clam up or lie back to you. Anything to deal with the abuse.

There will never be a real working Oracle cloud. Everyone knows that, it's just a matter of when to jump ship. I think unless you are planning to retire after being laid off, you should be working on your resumes. The longer you hang out at Oracle, the worse off you are in terms of being able to find a job, because your skills are out-of-date. I don't think anyone's looking for ADF experience.

He keeps making commitments to customers we have no hope of fulfilling. Either he is helplessly ignorant of his own team and our technology, or he's knowingly lying to our customers. My guess is a fair bit of both.