What the hell does oracle need 6000 engineers for?

I was just reading the pitfalls of outsourcing article and this occured to me oracle hasn't come out with a great product in years, I know the are adding features to the DBMS, and trying to fix their crm, but 6000 engineers? what the hell are they all doing, does this include support people, and sysadmins? because if they have 6000 engineers on product developemnt they are not getting very good roi, here or in india

the artist formerly known as prince
Monday, February 16, 2004

They do a lot of stuff, and yeah they call just about everyone engineers.

Li-fan Chen
Monday, February 16, 2004

Sure, but the entire Microsoft SQL Server team (developers, testers, Product managers, sysadmins, etc) is a mere 1900 people. 
  Granted, Oracle also has some CRM type products, but I assume (admittedly no facts to back this up) that those products are just customized versions of the database that don't need many engineers.
  Also, the OP says Oracle was outsourcing 6000 engineers, but they'll presumably continue to keep some additional number of engineers in the US for a while longer.  Which means at least 10,000 engineers world-wide, quite possibly more? Seems awfully high for a product that's been around for 20+ years.

Anon. Coward
Monday, February 16, 2004

They need them to add more bloat to their product at an ever-increasing pace.  You'd be surprised all the crap they have floating around in their DBMS.

MR
Monday, February 16, 2004

Like Li-fan Chen mentioned, I believe those press releases are simply lumping everyone together who is associated with product development and internal support. Also, Oracle has more than one product that they sell.

 
Monday, February 16, 2004

Uh, oracle has an application server....that alone probably takes a ton of developers. 

vince
Monday, February 16, 2004

Oracle Financials?

Out of interest, I wonder how many developers PeopleSoft and SAP have - they're Oracles competition. Quite a few I would guess.

Monday, February 16, 2004

12,000 employees.

http://www.peoplesoft.com/corp/en/about/overview/corp_back.jsp

-T.J.

T.J.
Monday, February 16, 2004

28,900 employees.

http://www.sap.com/company/

T.J.
Monday, February 16, 2004

40,615 employees.

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/investor_relations/2Q04_pdf.pdf

T.J.
Monday, February 16, 2004

BTW, funny enough -- Peoplesoft was so easy to find.  One click.  SAP was a bit tricky -- had to read.  Oracle?  *clickclickclick* no, wait... *backback* *clickclick*  Hmm, nah.  Lets try Investor Relations. *back*  *clickclick*  *scrollscrollscrollscroll*  Aha!

The bigger you are... [insert common refrain here]

T.J.
Monday, February 16, 2004

"Uh, oracle has an application server....that alone probably takes a ton of developers."

Actually, no, their application server was written by one person.  They bought a copy of the Orionserver code. 

Unfortunately, after Oracle's Java staff got hold of it, the quality went down quite a bit, so maybe you're right.  That is what big teams do best.

Nah
Monday, February 16, 2004

well, maybe I should stand corrected...

but a full fledged J2EE application server seems like a *ton* of stuff for one person to write.  I mean, I don't even know what half the J2EE features do and I'm a J2EE developer :-D

vince
Monday, February 16, 2004

I'm not at all surprised that Oracle is 3 times bigger than the SQL Server division at Microsoft.

Oracle has at least 3 times as many useless features as SQL Server. ;)

Doesn't anyone just concentrate on making a high quality database anymore? Maybe if they stopped trying to bolt useless crap onto it, and instead concentrated on their core product, they wouldn't have as many stupid bugs.

Sum Dum Gai
Monday, February 16, 2004

Yeah Oracle do have an app server, 

But Oracle's application server was written by IronFlare - http://www.orionserver.com/ was what became 9iAS

Walter Rumsby
Monday, February 16, 2004

When I was interviewing for a job at Oracle in, um, 1990, the "cool" programmers wrote the original code for the Unix platform and they had about 5 times as many programmers who just ported Oracle all day long to all the zillion other platforms they run on.

BTW Oracle does have a whole set of enterprise applications which probably have more developers than the DBMS.

Joel Spolsky
Fog Creek Software
Monday, February 16, 2004

vince,

oracle app server is part of the mystary, from what I understand it is a re-branded version of Orion server, that is developed by a team of 3

the artist formerly known as prince
Monday, February 16, 2004

With all their applications and platforms etc, Oracle probably also has a ton of 'engineers' working in verification and testing, platform support, documentation, training, loadbuild, bug fixing, sales, tech support, etc. Then there's consulting and customisation, which could involve a lot of people.

Darren Collins
Monday, February 16, 2004

Do they count support or people doing customization for particular customers?

What about all those other apps/tools?

What about the folks tending Larry's bonzi trees?

Anon
Monday, February 16, 2004

The database team is quite small (relatively ;-))

The Making of Oracle Database 10g
http://otn.oracle.com/oramag/oracle/03-sep/o53making10g.html

700 developers, 150 testers, 80 product managers.
Compare that to MS SQL team size.

Besides database there is:
* Application Server (J2EE)
* Collaboration Suite (kind of Exchange replacement)
* Oracle Applications (Fina, HR, ERP, etc)
* Analytical tools (OLAP, Discoverer)
* Developer tools: Designer, JDeveloper

nobody u know
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

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