James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle

Some quotes:<p>&#62; 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.<p>Says something about how they value technical people.<p>&#62; 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 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.<p>Oracle, by contrast, doesn't seem to give a shit and gets away with it[1].<p>Why?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&#38;chdd=1&#38;chds=1&#38;chdv=1&#38;chvs=maximized&#38;chdeh=0&#38;chfdeh=0&#38;chdet=1285185600000&#38;chddm=494615&#38;chls=IntervalBasedLine&#38;q=NASDAQ:ORCL&#38;ntsp=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&#38;chdd=1&#38;chds=1&...</a>

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: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle</a> <a href="http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/acquisitions/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/acquisitions/index.html</a><p>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 (<i>The Mythical Man Month</i>, by the leader of the 360 project, Fred Brooks.)<p>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.)<p>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.

From the middle of the article:<p>"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.”<p>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.<p>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.

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.

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.<p>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.

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?<p>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.

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."<p>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".

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

“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.”<p>Probably the best thing to happen as the decision makers managed to decide Sun to the selling block.

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

Darryl K. Taft is a horrible writer.

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 <i>language</i> is not one of them.)

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.

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

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.<p>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.

This is just Larry "consolidating." (Larryspeak) <a href="http://goo.gl/fb/gNsvQ" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/fb/gNsvQ</a>

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.