> Seriously if I can't trust that I am going to actually be told and not lied too when there is a security incident at the bare minimum, why would I chose to work with a company? What is Oracle's end goal here?
I think you're coming at this from the wrong point of view. Oracle couldn't care in the slightest about what regular people think of them. Remember, they are the company that sent lawyers after the employers of folks who downloaded non-free but bundled by default extensions to VirtualBox, and the company that declared that you need to license every core their software could _potentially_ run on in your virtualisation estate (so if you have a 8 vCPU VM for some Oracle software, you need licenses for however many physical cores you have on your cluster). They've variously been described as a law firm with an engineering side business, and One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellisson. Speaking of whom, he multiple times flat out lied on stage to make his shitty "cloud" nobody cares about seem relevant compared to AWS.
Nobody buys Oracle because they like them or their good reputation. You buy them because you have legacy stuff that depends on them and you have no choice (even Amazon took many years to get off Oracle databases, and they wrote a gloating success story one they were done with it because they were that happy to be rid of the leeches), or because your bosses' boss was convinced at a golf course they're getting a good deal. Or because their bandwidth is very cheap and you accept the risk of dealing with the devil incarnate with zero morals. (cf. Zoom).
Oracle is like Broadcom. Everyone hates their guts, everyone who worked there has a black mark on their CV. Yet they persist, continue leeching off companies too scared to make the jump elsewhere.
> everyone who worked there has a black mark on their CV. Yet they persist, continue leeching off companies too scared to make the jump elsewhere.
This is just your opinion. Most people I know who work there feel just fine if not very happy. Pay/benefits are good. Work is about same everywhere. In fact depending on group there maybe good, challenging technical work there.
As far as CV is concerned working there is mostly positive or at best neutral in term of job change.
> Nobody buys Oracle because they like them or their good reputation.
Oracle is quite expensive but they have reputation of solid database for enterprise workloads.
Also their cloud business is doing fine and growing and not irrelevant. One can see that from their quarterly results.
> Work is about same everywhere
Well, no. When a customer at my job makes a mistake, we don't send lawyers chasing after them because we're assholes. And when someone proposes something that will hurt those customers, people speak up and voice their disagreement.
In large companies people don't keep up with what all other departments are up to. And further even if they know they can also see nuance that lawyers are involved because current situation can harm their employer.
> When a customer at my job makes a mistake, we don't send lawyers chasing ...
Maybe you own the company or are in its executive ranks and can take decision on such scenarios. But in large companies most rank and file employees do not particularly feel good or bad about their employers.
I wonder if the senior engineering talent OCI poached from AWS (including the guy who introduced formal methods to AWS) is still there?
For sure they'd have. I have heard they hired tons of people in Seattle area, presumably from Amazon. Also Amazon hired lots of people from Oracle. Starting from many deeply technical Java/JVM experts to tons of B-grade solution architects types.
To me this assumption that rank and file employees would find their employer evil but keep working there nonetheless is unrealistic.
My wife is a hospital pharmacist. Cerner is a poular EMR system, is ~#2 in the market (behind Epic). These systems are ridiculously difficult to change between (everyone from your front-check-in desk to every surgeon who has privileges needs to be trained on how the new system works in addition to the technical problems with ETL'ing all your data over, and each hospital has an enormous amount of customization done to their workflows that has to be ported over to the new system)- she's done that twice at two different places and it was a huge, process, 18 months minimum. So these EMR's have an enormous amount of lock-in.
The punchline is, in 2022 Oracle purchased Cerner, renamed it Oracle Health, and started accelerating the process of enshittifying it. I have to tip my hat to them, it's like their BizDev team found a market segment that had as much lock-in as SQL databases do, and are now trying to replicate all the evil tricks they learned from that in another market segment. Because what are hospitals but giant bags of money to be drained so Larry Ellison can buy another yacht?
True, but with one exception that I saw (Memorial Sloan Kettering), every EMR that isn’t Epic is a steaming pile. And I think MSK is switching.
Epic is my wife's favorite, for sure. Both of the switch-overs she was involved in were to Epic. They also cost more than the others.
One thing I have learned in my two decades of SWE'ing is how vitally important active competition is. One of the major competitors voluntarily taking themselves out of the competition so it can be sucked dry of value always seems to be good news for the market share, dominance, and profitability of the #1 in the market, and bad news for everyone's customers.
As a health consumer, Epic is so dang slow that I wonder what it's like for medical professionals.
> everyone who worked there has a black mark on their CV
I hope this is hyperbole. Rank and file employees are not responsible for corporate policy or direction, especially in places like Oracle.
It really isn't. Oracle has had a terrible reputation since forever, and every ex-Sun engineer I've met has taken great pains to explain they did not join Oracle voluntarily.
It's kind of like working for a tobacco company or arms manufacturer in payroll or something: you're not directly responsible for killing millions of people, but by choosing to work there you're still kind of condoning it.
> arms manufacturer in payroll or something: you're not directly responsible for killing millions of people, but by choosing to work there you're still kind of condoning it.
It morbidly amuses me that this kind of argument can still be made given what's going on in Ukraine. Governments have militaries for a reason, and there's a reason Europe is now scrambling to re-arm itself.
Governments have militaries for many reasons. If you work at a US arms manufacturer, some of your output may indeed being going to defend Ukraine, but some of it is also going to the Israeli military in Gaza, the Saudi Arabian military in Yemen, and a long, long list of countries listed here:
See how the goalposts now move from "arms manufacturer in general" to "I don't agree with US foreign policy."
And even assuming that's true for the sake of argument, what? Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, et al. are just supposed to shut down for good the moment one politician makes a morally questionable decision? Life is not that black and white.
You're inventing your own goal posts here, since I didn't say anything of the sort.
To repeat: if you work for an arms manufacturer, you condone killing people. Hopefully it's because you think the weapons are killing enough Nazis/terrorists/bad guys to outweigh the occasional innocent civilian, but their blood is still on your hands.
I'm curious, does it end only at Oracle?
What about Google, Facebook & Microsoft. They do some things that are disliked by many. Should we consider that the engineers who work there are indirectly condoning the no-privacy, ad-infested dystopia that HN hates, and should they be penalized. I bet many of these companies and a lot of others use Oracle products and there by support them directly with money. If you know that your favorite website/product is built on top of Oracle database/products, will you stop using it?
If Oracle (or any other unpopular company) employees are really shunned, then that's only because rejecting them is a no-risk, no-cost, easy thing to do.
Some people absolutely do judge people who work at those companies, especially Facebook. Google used to have a halo but that's pretty tarnished now, while Microsoft under Satya seems to have pulled off the unlikely trick of redeeming its reputation.
> Should we consider that the engineers who work there are indirectly condoning the no-privacy, ad-infested dystopia that HN hates, and should they be penalized. > [..] then that's only because rejecting them is a no-risk, no-cost, easy thing to do.
Exactly as you say. It's less about enforcing ethical behaviour than getting safe revenge on what is perceived as an easy target. For example considering the rise of LLMs, people affiliated with google search are probably about to feel the full force of 10+ years of increasing frustration with declining quality, rather than being legendary high value hires. Unhirables that are completely ostracized? Of course not. But a black mark? Yes, probably.
You're also contributing to weapons that can be used to fight violent dictators like Putin when he invades yet another country (or the same one again).
I'll never understand the West's public aversion to military R&D and manufacturing. How do you people think WW2 was won? Nice words, trade deals and hookers? At some point diplomacy fails and you need to be able to do something about it.
Coincidentally, I posted an Ask HN on that same question (actually prompted by a post on a different company today), but it hasn't gotten upvoted yet:
Ask HN: Do you penalize hiring candidates from companies that do shady things? | 1 point by neilv 1 hour ago| 3 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43538530
They're not responsible for the policy, but typically when you're thinking of a job at Oracle, you likely can have other options. At least if we're taking about software engineers and similar people. I was being recommended for a position by friends who moved there and I refused, because it's a shit company. The money is not worth it. It's the whole "contractors on Death Star" thing from Clerks.