Ask HN: Is Oracle that much more evil than other big companies? Every time I see that Oracle release a new product, even open source comments are full of hate for Oracle. But I don't see similar reactions to other big companies, such as Microsoft. So is Oracle really that much worse than the other big companies, or do the other companies just have better marketing targeting the developer? |
Often they will even acquire companies to expand the rent seeking empire.
Their flagship product has strict legal requirements that you are never allowed to publish benchmarks of comparable systems and believe me they have the legal force on staff to pursue you indefinitely.
They very much deserve the reputation they have.
Google, Microsoft et al. throw the community a bone with loss leaders and generate good will by not being especially litigious.
Netflix is basically not evil in any definable way.
Apple is divisive; their biggest issue is that they are awful to work for and have mastered the art of audience segmentation which is why they can charge $400 for 8G of RAM. Which to many feels evil.
Oracle is easily the worst of these.
The people who make purchasing decisions love them. As long as you pay the ransom, Oracle loves you back. The lawyers can be very friendly if you know to stay on their good side.
Microsoft pricing was up front. Oracle is “call us and talk”. This immediately made Oracle a non starter.
When I was at AWS, we could create all of the AWS accounts we wanted and do basically anything we wanted in internal accounts as long as it was tangentially work related or just to experiment with a few sensible guardrails like no publicly accessible S3 buckets without permission and no permissions to any accounts that were not also internal employee AWS accounts
The one thing we couldn’t do without a lot of approvals was start up an Oracle RDS instance without approval and justification.
There is a reason Amazon Redshift is called Redshift - it was built to let Amazon shift away from the Red company (Oracle).
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvenEvilHasStand...
If you're a big company, your C suite will be inundated with slick advertising from Oracle, in airports, on MSNBC, in person via networking.
If you're a big company, their sales people will call you, and then they'll find some problems from the top down that Oracle can Supercharge for you.
Think of it like restaurants that don't show prices. If you're very price sensitive, you're not the target market. You don't want them and they don't want to haggle with you. It's not worth spending a lot of sales effort over a small contract
(But I find the AWS story pretty telling! Seems they developped immunity the hard way from a past encounter)
On the other hand, I know an oracle dev that suffered a horrible accident and took two years to rehabilitate. Oracle kept him on paid leave that whole time despite it being unrelated to the workplace and past their usual policy.
So based on that my understanding of them now is that they're more than a bit hostile/malignant to those outside the mothership, but not necessarily evil to each other inside it.
Like the Mafia.
This is almost exclusively about the manager of that person. It's very rarely such facts speak about the company as a whole.
However when I worked there it was extremely comfy, so as an employer I would rate it very highly. Very remote friendly too!
Anecdote: Back when I was just an apprentice, I was tasked to duplicate an Oracle database (the Oracle guy just left the company). It took me over 3 hours to figure that one out (exp vs expdp, FULL=Y and OWNER=FOO come to mind).
And don't even get me started on PDBs and usernames starting with "C##"!
And even if those were positive, I'm still forced to use Outlook and Office and OneDrive and occasionally even Windows because they have so profoundly corrupted how computers are used.
Oracle doesn't have products the general public would use on the scale of a Microsoft, Amazon, or Google. So these larger companies are scrutinized far more.
Have you ever noticed how their products never - ever - improve over time? Thy don't have to innovate. If they fall too much behind on a segment, they just buy some new product. To me, that's their most evil aspect. I don't care if some corporation gets held hostage by some other corporation. Let the billionaires fight to death, I don't care. The sad externality of it is the death of innovation.
You do see that reaction to Microsoft -and it's justified. Moreover Microsoft does tend to impact the end user but even that aside...it's a rare comment section that doesn't mention things like "Embrace, extend, extinquish" or the AARD code or the Halloween Documents when the story involves MS.
Now, if you're a part of the demographic that Oracle targets; that's a different story, and probably a worse one at that.
Oracle has also spent decades picking fights with large parts of the dev community, and so has built up a lot more resentment than many other companies.
today I would say Microsoft holds the crone again
partially because they got so good at tricking people temporary into believing they are not
through that is looking at the western world, if you look beyond but using wester values like privacy then the crone probably gets passed to ByteDance
For myself I don't need Microsoft stuff. But sadly there are all these other people around.
I just need to make windows work for video games, but it kills me that I can’t make a 1 laptop lifestyle work.
Amazon takes “customer obsession” to the extreme. I saw that from the inside and outside.
Now as far as how they treat their employees. Let’s just say never meet your heroes…
GCP support people are believed to exist based on available evidence, but further research is required
Anything dealing with customers, Google is behind Amazon, Apple and Microsoft
https://opensource.microsoft.com/projects/
They also added a “Sponsor” button to Github which while I have mixed feelings about it, does help open source projects thrive.
VSCode - misspending money to prove JS can be used to build native apps? We did not say you "could not", we said you "should not".
GitHub - they just bought that, thanks for not ruining it I guess.
TypeScript and VScode are there of course to make all programming as horrible as it's on Windows.