As an Asian male this article also frustrates me. Google has always been a company I've wanted to work for but if this article is true and Google discriminates against Whites and Asians in their hiring process then they're not the dream company I previously believed they were.
I'm here to report to you that unfortunately they are not that company. I hear they used to be everything the nerds dreamed, but as the company grew, the original culture was unable to defend itself.
I like Facebook as an engineering organization, and was tempted when I was heavily recruited there. Problem is, many feel Facebook the social media company is making the world a worse place in many different ways, and their leadership had their head in the sand. Otherwise, I'd love to work there.
If you are a $race $gender, Google will hire you. The diverse candidate pool just means you need to work harder on your resume, interviewing skills, etc - since there's more competition.
With the _big_ difference that Oracle are _really_ good at writing invoices and cashing big cheques...
All of the really talented Oracle people I know are enterprise sales people, and they're _really_ good. All the good tech people I know "joined" via acquisition and jumped ship as soon as financially sensible.
I vehemently agree with you. Their sales staff is vicious and effective... however comma ...
My stodgiest, most risk averse (Oracle using) clients are beginning to migrate to Postgres. I'm so shocked by this it still sounds like a lie as I type it. For most of my career it's been "nobody got fired for picking Oracle". Now that nobody gets fired for picking AWS the penny pinchers are looking at the RDS pricing delta between Postgres and Oracle and all of the sudden it's a no brainer. Maybe because the only sales person involved is from Amazon? IDK but Oracle will slowly die by it's own worms.
I'm surprised companies still buy Oracle software, I figured that they were only in business because of Vendor lock in from governments and large corporations.
Because Oracle do not sell to the sort of people who read Hackernews, they sell to people who read Financial Review and CIO Monthly or whatever. Same as SalesForce, Adobe, and a whole bunch of other "enterprise" software businesses that most dev's ignore or write off as pointless.
I worked at a place where I saw two renewals for AdobeCQ licenses paid while I worked there at ~$600k/year, all the time we were using Alfresco underneath (and I see now that site is running on Sitecore...)
Probably, although I work for a government department that uses Oracle extensively but no new projects are on the platform, eventually everything will be migrated off it (mostly to the SQL Server hosted on Azure).
And let me guess - the project timelines for "eventually everything will be migrated off it" run easily into seven figures of Oracle invoices? (And realistically the delays in those migration projects will mean double that gets paid to Oracle before they're completely out of your billing system?)
I don't think there's any real timeline to get rid of Oracle just that new projects won't be using it as a DB and eventually it will no longer be in use.
Like eventually nobody will be using mainframes... except they are still there, and somebody is still cashing cheques for their support.
Ironically, it's Oracle itself who is busy self-destroying. The move to cloud-based subscription services, where switching to competitors can be so much easier, looks good in the immediate but it's pulverizing their stranglehold on partner ecosystems, and making their long-term outlook more fragile.
Yes, bean counters. When the only sales person involved is now the AWS Architect the bean counters put Postgres and Oracle side by side and it becomes a no brainer. You're going to see lots of enterprise development moving away from Oracle as they move to AWS.
I'm not so sure it's the stereotypical "beancounter" here. There seems to be absolutely no penny pinching going on (which is the impression I get from "beancounter").
I'd say it's more the "Contract Signers" who're at fault. The devs and AWS Architect are perfectly happy to use inexpensive AWS options, but somebody _else_ goes golfing and drinking with the Oracle sales team - and arrives at work hung over the next day with a shiny new half million dollar a year Oracle licence which everyone else is now required to use.
The Oracle database is very good at its job: take data in, give it back fast and reliably, optimise bad queries, etc. The interface can be hair-tearingly awful, but the software fundamentally works.
The bad part of running Oracle is absolutely everything else, especially the bit where you ever have to talk to Oracle. When we moved our stuff from Oracle to Postgres, the best bit was never ever having to think about licensing.
The DB course at my university uses Oracle software and references to DB software in my professors lectures are almost exclusively about Oracle (SQL Developer or something).
Sales people entertain clients, this doesn't imply they're alcoholics, only that eating/drinking is part of the job. That said there also are many customers that are led by functioning alcoholics and tend to select vendors they can drink with. It varies.
Enterprise software sales can be a lot of fun (I am in sales engineering, not at Oracle) as it is well paid and ultimately about enabling customer successes. But I have to look myself in the mirror at night, and can only sell something I believe in - things like open source, or cloud computing benefits, etc. Oracle database used to be worth believing in maybe 10 years ago: boring but valueable software. But these days the company is such a blight on the industry that it would be hard to work there.
Is it just so they can say "not my fault, our project is only using big name frameworks, DBs, etc so I did all I could?"
Or is it because they don't even begin to understand what's going on in the tech scene and just buy what appears to be the most shiny, expensive solutions?
Support is one reason. If your database goes down, they'll send a team of engineers to figure out what's wrong. If they have to, they'll bring in hardware to duplicate your systems, and have engineers working on it 7x24 until they find out what's wrong. Not many vendors can provide that level of service, and if your business requires it, you're willing to pay for it.
I was once in a meeting on site. The task was to get some data from an AS/400 to a Linux server and display it on a website.
Text files would have been enough to cache the data. But you never know how a project can change over time so I proposed PostgreSQL or IBM DB/2. The latter in case they absolutely wanted to pay for a database and they are already using an IBM AS/400. (We were using PostgreSQL and Informix.)
At the meeting they said they have already bought a license for an Oracle DB. Without consulting us. So we were forced to use it without prior experience.
I've had an enterprise vendor offer to drop money into my personal account to make sales. Not naming them, but the sad thing is they actually did have the best product in their space by a long shot. The ones who sucked were probably even better at bribes.
I have seen a high-profile CTO dismissed for just cause because he accepted an invitation to speak at a vendor conference in Paris. When hired, we signed a very strict code of conduct document that prevented us from accepting any valuable gifts from vendors.
A vendor once sent me a mug. I had to open the box in front of a witness.
That sounds like the definition of a bribe, which is a crime. I would advise you to not make this information public or at least public under an account that can be traced back to you.
The second to last paragraph suggests it is a possibility though:
"To draw a firm conclusion, however, would take a clearer understanding of the direction of causation. While games improved since the turn of the century, labour-market options for young people got worse. Hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated for young college graduates since the 1990s, while pay for new high-school graduates has declined. The share of young high-school and college graduates not in work or education has risen; in 2014 about 11% of college graduates were apparently idle, compared with 9% in 2004 and 8% in 1994. The share of recent college graduates working in jobs which did not require a college degree rose from just over 30% in the early 2000s to nearly 45% a decade later. And the financial crisis and recession fell harder on young people than on the population as a whole. For people unable to find demanding, full-time work (or any work at all) gaming is often a way to spend some of one’s unwanted downtime, rather than a lure out of work; it is much more a symptom of other economic ills than a cause."
This is very true. I am usually not the best reader but I recently picked up an excellent fantasy novel and couldn't put it down and ended up reading like 4 or 5 hours straight. On the flip side when I read nonfiction or textbooks it's hard to push myself to keep learning.
While I agree that gaming is very engaging, if you visit a library you'll be caught off guard how many people are there every single day. Now I will acknowledge that many of the people at my local library are kids playing games on the library computers, however there are also lots of people that genuinely enjoy reading and the other activities hosted at the library.
Your comment is definitely true. While the argument that sports are cheaper than video games does have some merit I contend that the barrier to entry for video games is much much lower than sports. With video games their learning curves are typically very gentle, you can play video games by yourself if others aren't available to join you, you can play from home, etc.
That's not to say that anything is wrong with sports, because I definitely feel sports are awesome, but rather that I genuinely feel it's easier to jump into gaming than to organize a team sport like a game of basketball at the local park.
Every mile is roughly 2000 steps depending on how long your stride is. 10K steps is roughly 5 miles. Depending on how fast you walk you're probably looking at around 90 minutes to 120 minutes per day of walking. Of course you could dramatically reduce that time if you ran or jogged rather than walked.
Cool, yeah, when I hit 7k in an hour, I'm not exactly speed-walking, but I'm not just ambling along either. I'd describe as walking with a purpose. Jogging or running for very long hurts my knees, likely because I'm overweight. Maybe one day.
I'm surprised no one is focusing on this as well. I believe that ebooks being overpriced is the main reason they aren't selling well. If ebooks were at least the same price as paperbacks instead of more expensive I would buy more of them. But right now it's cheaper to buy physical copies of books than ebooks.
