What an unimaginable horror! You can't change a single line of code in the product without breaking 1000s of existing tests. Generations of programmers have worked on that code under difficult deadlines and filled the code with all kinds of c-ap.
No wonder Kurian left for greener pastures. See the link below for more:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=oraguy
The HQ area I was in was like a morgue. No sounds anywhere. No one talks to anyone. No one goes to lunch. Everyone hiding in their cubes afraid of saying anything to anyone else or asking an honest question.
Oracle is not a workplace, it's a morgue. People go there to end their careers.
In my 5+ years at Oracle, we had one team dinner. ONE. That was it. I worked at places that do quarterly bashes, boat trips, swimming outings, lakeside bbq parties and all kinds of fun stuff.
Oracle is a stagnation place and misery. The only reason I stayed that long was telecommuting position and not putting up with too much management BS. People tried to recruit me afterwards but no way, I'm NEVER ever going back.
You people need to start looking, don't stay in such a miserable and toxic environment and complain. Just leave, you won't have any problems getting a job elsewhere with Oracle in your resume (unless it's a company that recently got into lawsuit battles with Oracle.) Just make sure to do your due diligence on places like Glassdoor and avoid management-bloated places with too many sh-tty managers and politics drama.
Find a positive workplace and leave, you'll be all the better for it. Your stress levels will drop to an ATL and your depression will magically disappear. I promise.
Anyone with sense already packed up and left.
The CEO's give themselves raises for doing a terrible job. The employees are killing themselves to make the company money and are rewarding with no raises and even layoff notices.
The SC-MH team of “co-CEOs” is a wasteful joke. Here you have a company who squeezes a nickel til it screams, proudly refuses to consider pay raises, yet can afford two CEOs with all their attendant salaries and perks. The poor optics are astounding.
SC forced Sun to cancel our final employee bash even before the acquisition was complete: https://gawker.com/5646501/computer-genius-slams-oracle-ceo-gives-me-the-creeps
It was too late to get a refund though, so they donated the tickets to children’s groups instead. It was more important to set an example that Oracle despises employees even when it didn’t save a dime.
Oracle programmers seem to have a horror of using comments in their code.
oraguy pretty much nailed it. Tests would fail so many times because the test farms had antiquated hardware and poorly written tests and then you spent weeks negotiating the failures with a manager who didn't give a cr-p about your particular bug that you were fixing and had zero incentive to help. 25M lines of code is not that unusual for a large system like the Oracle RDBMS. The fragile test infrastructure, heavyweight procedures, and lifeless managers are the problems.
I think that rewarding employees in any way, is not the Oracle way. Threatening them works fine, except for the ones that leave, of course, and who needs them anyway.
Very complex pieces of logic, memory management, context switching, etc. are all held together with thousands of flags. The whole code is ridden with mysterious macros that one cannot decipher without picking a notebook and expanding relevant pats of the macros by hand. It can take a day to two days to really understand what a macro does.
Sometimes one needs to understand the values and the effects of 20 different flag to predict how the code would behave in different situations. Sometimes 100s too! I am not exaggerating.
The only reason why this product is still surviving and still works is due to literally millions of tests!
Wow, and I thought our code was a mess. I was assuming things were done differently in db area, maybe some documentation of flags might have been good, but then maybe the developers there are the same as everywhere else..... undocumented code means job security.
Seems like it would be a serious problem to lose db developers that might know the area. Without them, it could turn into a very slow moving nightmare.
I would expect the ones that have gone to Amazon to work on their db's, will be able to do a much better job the second time around. They would know the features that are important and know what the issues are with adding them. I'm betting on Amazon.
No-fun is dictated by SC. She was once famously on public record saying that "Oracle doesn't allow employee recognition events, that's not the Oracle way."
@Wa63bIc-asu Glad you hear you made it out.
That manager wasn't TK by chance? The guy who just went to Google? Oracle people should be laughing at Google right now.
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.