Why Oracle Software S---s

A lot of people here complain about how much Oracle’s software (including cloud) s---s. I’d like to offer a developer’s perspective. I worked for Oracle for 8 years (by acquisition). I left last year. Here is my rant about Oracle software development.

Requirements change constantly. Important projects are reviewed by TK every 2 weeks, and he often changes his mind every (or almost every) time. It is common to have 180 degree reversal of previous decisions. On my last project (for OPC), we threw away 3 months of coding because of a requirement change. On a previous project it took us 2 years to deliver because we started over 3 times. We never delivered all the features either. This is bad not only because it delays releases, it also crushes morale. Why work hard when there’s a good chance you’re going to throw it away?

The deadlines are impossible. If you give people a challenging deadline, they usually step up. If you give them an impossible deadline, they give up. As a developer, you are asked to give estimates but those estimates are always ignored. The schedule is set based on wishful thinking not any realistic assessment of the work required. Again, this crushes morale.

The project teams are spread across the world. The work almost never splits up into neatly divisible lines, and you are working with teams in US east, US west, China, Europe, and (always) India. The result is that you spend half your time writing emails and specs and reading others emails and specs to understand how stuff will fit together. It’s incredibly unproductive and frustrating. The thinking seems to be that if there is a developer free any where in the world, assign him or her to the most important project. These global teams mostly produce crap because it is so hard to get everybody on the same page.

The development process and tools are antique. Everything is frozen in the 90s. Whatever the database team did then is the best way to do things for ever. This is slowly starting to change with a slow introduction of agile/SCRUM and git but the rate of change is far too slow.

The hardware/VM support from PDIT is terrible. It’s a constant struggle to get PDIT resources for development and testing. It’s the worst hardware environment of my career, with slow machines and frequent downtime. Even developer laptops are a joke. If you’re very lucky, you’ll get a MacBook Pro, but not a top of the line one. All the software companies I worked at before Oracle gave developers the best hardware available because it speeds them up. Even if it improves productivity a little bit, it’s worth it. However, Oracle is always focussed on cost savings not productivity.

Your opinion as a developer is unwanted and discouraged. If you have any feedback on features or ideas for new things, nobody will listen. In fact, you will be told to shut up and do what you’re told. The message is that developers are overpriced typists with no ability to think independently. This is also bad for morale.

QA is a broken organization (needs a separate rant). Testing is not well done and does not improve quality.

Support is a broken organization. The result is developers constantly get dragged in to deal with furious customers. Half the time the customer has been promised something the product can’t do and you have to be the bad guy and explain that. The support interruptions can be frequent and disrupt the schedule.

Total compensation is not competitive. If you are ranked highly, you will get decent raises and your salary will be competitive, but your bonuses and stock will not. When I told my non-Oracle developer friends my bonus numbers they were astonished. Every person I knew outside of Oracle was getting 3 - 10 times the Oracle bonus amounts. If you are not ranked highly, you will not get raises, bonuses, or stock except rarely. This is not good for morale, especially because there are plenty of good developers who are not getting raises. It is also bad for morale when you find out that the people hired from AWS make 3 times what you make.

In summary, it is a miracle that Oracle ever ships any software, crap or not.

Comment! It's anonymous!

29 replies (most recent on top)

Starts with LE, the world's largest egomaniac! Did you notice that oracle is one of the few companies in the world that doesn't have 360 feedback. The dingbats at the top don't want to hear what people think

Another problem with the engineering management is the narcissistic personalities of the managers. They all want yes-men under them and no feedback coming up from what they refer to as the worthless developers.

In this environment, direction must always come from the top. Since the top has no idea what is possible and what is not, the direction is always clueless. Anyone who complains is marginalized and attacked.... and I mean that literally. The good people leave, because they understand the futility of trying to work in an organization like this. The bad people stay, the one's that just want a job. They are content to sit and do nothing other than react to the stupid directions coming down from the top.

I know a 29-year veteran there, who told me that he didn't really see any problem with anything. He says he just does what his manager tells him and he has "done OK".

If the goal is only to just hold onto a job, any job, then that can be done at Oracle very easily. If you are good at your job and you want to do well, improve things, develop tools that are really useful, then Oracle is an unbelievably horrible place to work.

They may layoff lots of people, but the wrong people will be making that decision, so the wrong people will be laid off. It won't fix anything. They narcissistic managers will keep all of their special "yes men", and nothing will change.

The most important job of an execs is selecting the managers below them, here oracle is a total fail all around and the results show it.

I mean LE selecting TK to run dev and MH to run sales, and then those two appointing other bone heads including a whole bunch from HP where they along with MH totally f:ed up the company. Sad

Agree about TK being brilliant, but a hopeless manager. Has very poor interpersonal skills and has promoted a bunch of brown nosers to SVPs especially in FMW. He has screwed over many good people and products. His appointment as head of development will count as a pivotal moment in the downfall of engineering in this company.

There are still a lot of exceptionally good developers left. The best developers at Oracle are as good as the ones at AWS, Google, etc. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult (impossible?) for a developer at Oracle to produce good work.

How ironic, the two things that LE, TK and the other stooges do not care about is good management and a good culture, so they get the opposite poor management and no culture. And when you pipe one acquisition of top of another and another, you get a development org that's out of control and produces garbage, which describes oracle to a T

I was at Oracle for 10 years coming in through an acquisition to the fusion middleware area.

I agree with a lot of the comments of the first post for this thread.

Most of the developers I worked with are competent, but the management is so disorganized and incompetent that nothing ever gets done well. There was no development process at all.... no one making sure design reviews were done or documentation is written... there was absolutely no coordination between engineers and QA. No reasonable definition or discussion of requirements.

There were no tests for the code. I was totally appalled when I started at Oracle. This is by far the worst software development experience I have ever had.

I survived by owning a portion of the code and being responsible for that, I made sure that my area worked correctly and was tested, etc.

My impression is that a great deal of the management has absolutely no idea what they are doing. They are obsessed with looking at useless reports and dictating ridiculous instructions. When developers are given ridiculous goals, they simply ignore them.

The manager I worked for seemed to be oriented around blaming whoever he could. He was eventually removed from the group.... but not removed from Oracle... that doesn't ever appear to happen. He was just moved on the org chart to somewhere else with only 2 reports under him. That looked like a demotion to me, but he still works at Oracle. These guys don't care, so long as they are still employed. I think that most of them got their jobs through acquisition and the incompetent ones just stay forever. They accumulate.

The management always seems to cover for other managers and the bad ones never go anywhere. There are also cliques of managers/developers who attack and sabotage other groups. This, I think, comes from acquistion after acquistion. People often maintain their alliances to their original groups.

When the cloud work started, there was again no organized way of moving in that direction. Managers fought each other for projects. It was a huge clusterf--k. I just don't see how they will make their way out of the huge mess they are in. They really need to clean house and then hire the people they need.

In terms of layoffs in this area of engineering I am willing to bet that the layers and layers of useless managers that have no idea what they are doing, will stay. They are buddy-buddy with each other and since the management makes the decision about who stays and who goes, I'm betting they all vote for each other... they are all connected. Developers? Why would anyone need developers?

Developers are treated like they are the lowest form of life. Told to be quiet and do what they're told, even when what they are told is completely ridiculous. The management has no idea what they are doing. LE should get rid of the management, replace them with competent people who can work with other managers and developers.

It's just a total mess.... I could go on and on. Glad I am not there anymore :)

Everyone under LE is weak. Worst is JF in Systems. Totally useless and has zero communication and vision.

LE doesn't need to sell out. As long as Oracle retains its cash cow status, dividend and stock buy back will work out very well for LE's 25% shares. Trimming any cost line will work out well for LE. Spending on non-growing product lines won't work out. LE can still play this game for 10-15 years which is probably longer than his remaining active lifespan.

Don't know about you, but the Mexico team is the B.E.S.T. numero UNO!!!

Harry is right about

Them as the best there is, the best there was and

Pretty much the best there ever will be!

Have someone

Tell you how

Great they are!

The CEOs are cashing out for sure; not so easy for LE - share price would crash if he started selling, this higher dividend payments. But at the end of the day he has no out, stuck with tens of billions on the stock. Life is fair after all

This is reminiscing from LE's heyday, when he would sell a product and build it afterwards in the valley. Similar strategy doesn't work with the Cloud, if you promise something now and provide trials a year down the line, nobody will try it out. This, along with the shift towards the high quality, state of the art, made in India, wink wink, development, brought Oracle to its knees. I think LE and the CEO's know it very well and are already cashing out.

I've also heard that to meet aggressive delivery dates, some development managers took critical blocks and bugs and changed them to enhancement requests so that sales could have the product on the price list to sell. They would just fix it later.

In the meantime, others had to deal with customer satisfaction issues from the products not working.

I was in Development a good deal longer than the original poster and concur on every point.

One thing I would like to add is the very bad code quality I have seen from some groups. As though they had never read Knuth. Lack of comments. Not what I expected from "professionals".

One group was so secretive about how their code worked that I had to employ a Java decompiler to discover why it was not working properly.

Weinberg's classic book "The Psychology of Computer Programming" should be required reading by development managers.

It's hard to sell p--p.

@NmFqOeq - great post. Enlightening and informative. And, depressing.

You mean because Fusion is such a great product as is OPC? If that is the best you've seen, what rock have you been hiding under !

TK is the best I've seen!! It's too bad that sales can't sell it. I hope we clean out the house on the sales side.

@ary - love it!

Le experiencing hell right here in his paradise: which does he hate the least - admitting that he was wrong to make TK head of development, or continue to fall behind SFDC, AWS, and MSFT? Coming to head as oracle falls farther behind - enjoy your personal hell LE, you created it all by yourself in your infinite arrogance, selfishness and brilliance. Either way you lose! Perfect!

Not that TK. The man who runs engineering.

Names not allowed here, bro.

A Misfit here (msft) - Who is TK - The author of "Effective Oracle by Design"?

Clearly TK is a bad Chief architect or pm. he requires knowing 'everything' and putting together and formulate strategy on 'everything' but still can't deliver. Other chiefs or lesser could deliver needing less knowledge and resources.

He likes gold diggers too!

Maybe TK should suggest this idea of yours to save Oracle? You seem to know him well, perhaps suggest it. What do you have to lose?

TK likes indian coders . MH likes college kids. SC likes to trim operational fats. LE likes sailing, and cash cows.

TK is brilliant. His understanding of technical detail is impressive. His ability to understand how to put technologies together is impressive. His ability to come up with strategies is impressive. His memory is unbelievable. His work ethic is incredible.

That said, he has terrible judgment about who he promotes and hires. He is a micro manager who doesn't know how to lead and enable people under him. He disenfranchises and undercuts the managers under him. He doesn't understand how to organize and motivate people. He should be the chief product manager and chief technical architect working for or with a development head who knows how to run a development organization.

And you will recall that the guy responsible for this mess, TK, was advertised as the next oracle CEO. Then again, he can't make the place bigger mess than it already is. LOL!

Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

Why Oracle Software S---s

29 replies (most recent on top)

Post a reply