Even at 100k employees I’m still dumbfounded by that number. What do all these people do all day?

hyperpape 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

1. They maintain and sell one of the largest relational databases.

2. They're the primary maintainer of one of the largest programming languages.

3. They do tons of HR/ERP type software.

4. They have a supply chain division (my company is a direct competitor, and we have 2000 employees--it's a drop in the bucket, but a few thousand here, a few thousand there and it starts to add up. Afaik, their supply chain org is bigger than ours).

5. Other things I probably don't know about.

Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency, which swells the number of workers by a lot.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not remotely a fan, I like to quote Bryan Cantrill's rant. However, they do a lot of things.

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burningChrome 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

>> Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency,

I have some anecdotal evidence for this. I worked at a medium sized family owned business. They were going through a massive ERP upgrade/replacement. One of the bids was from Oracle. The company was able to essentially test drive each company they were reviewing to see if the software was going to be a good fit.

Oracle's sales team was like a having a football on site. They sent over no less than about 20 people to swarm our pretty small office, barge into the dev spaces and generally annoy the fuck out of everybody for several months. The other vendors? They sent one, maybe two people to work alongside us as we test drove their software.

It was funny being in those meetings listening to people talk about the Oracle people. Nobody even remembered how good or bad their software was. Every single comment was about how overbearing and pushy their sales people were.

Needless to say, we went with a different company.

	▲	bombcar 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		That sales process is directly tied to the type of customer they're aiming for, which is larger than a "medium-sized family-owned business". They mis-aligned but for someone like Boeing or United, they'd go gaga over the footy-crowd.

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mikeyouse 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They also own multiple other huge companies that had tens of thousands of their own employees working in completely different areas (Netsuite, Cerner, Acme, etc)

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PyWoody 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

6. Lawyers

	▲	B1FF_PSUVM 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		"The first thing we do, let's AI all the lawyers" ?

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raverbashing 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Also their cloud

And all the supporting legal team of course.

	▲	hyperpape 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		No better proof that they're a huge company than that I could forget about an entire public cloud offering. Good point.

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baumy 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember reading this post years ago, and it has stuck in my brain ever since: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

So I suspect the answer is: they need _at least_ 10x as many engineers to get things done as you would expect. Maybe more like 50x

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B1FF_PSUVM 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

That was a highlights grade comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights )

And the last comment by 'oraguy' - I hope he just picked up another id because "never work for Oracle again" ...

	▲	muskstinks 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		what a horrible horrible read :\| Clearly shows that either no one understands the whole picture anymore or that it became so diverse custom, that this is the only way of handling this now. I think though that these companies are more business companies than tech companies and move themselves into this nightmare.

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bombcar 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's even more wild when you realize that other similar-sized enterprise companies don't have all that and either leave bugs to sit around for decades, or randomly break shit trying to fix them.

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seniorThrowaway 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That is really wild

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rocmcd 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Unless you have worked with Oracle or other big enterprises, you may not realize the scale of how these companies operate and the breadth of what they actually do. Just by looking at their product page[0] you can see they offer software, hardware, cloud, consulting, support, and even financing solutions. In addition to the technology and product people (of which there are many), you also need HR, sales, marketing, accounting, support, etc for the entire global organization.

Sure, 100,000 people is a lot, but Oracle also does a lot.

[0] https://www.oracle.com/products/

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blackaspen 3 days ago | parent [-]

This! They do _everything_.

In the real world, there are a lot of things you need to run a business: HR, ERP, Financing, Cloud, Compliance, CRM, etc. There is really only one company who can sell them all to you on one piece of paper, and that's Oracle.

	▲	bombcar 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Salesforce does one aspect of what Oracle can do (Access as a Service) and they have 83,000 employees. Oracle may actually be pretty lean.

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stackskipton 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oracle sells alot of software that is accompanied by hordes of consultants to set it up.

Last F50 I was at did a PeopleSoft migration. We probably had 400 Oracle employees pass through the doors over 2 years helping to get it off the ground.

Most Enterprises don't just buy software and that's it. They buy software + support to implement it for their business.

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CoolGuySteve 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sure but what did those guys do all day? 400 people is a lot of people

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stackskipton 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Write code to connect this system with that system. Teach people what setting does what. Integrate with Entra ID. Create custom reports that hordes of Executive on our side want. Scale out the system from undersized nodes we originally gave it. That's all I picked up by just listening to them. I wasn't involved in the project, just sat nearby listening to it.

This is extremely customizable software that is designed to pretty much run your entire business and touched by over 40k employees. It requires a ton of care and feeding. There is plenty of people who dedicate themselves to PeopleSoft. Zip Recruiter is showing 5 jobs near me for "PeopleSoft Administrator"

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odyssey7 3 days ago | parent [-]

The need to teach people what setting does what is a sort of consulting moat that AI dismantles when it can access the right context.

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zdragnar 3 days ago | parent [-]

They don't make any of the documentation for those settings easy to find or understand because the support contracts make them so much money.

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odyssey7 3 days ago | parent [-]

Before, that could create a moat.

Soon, it will be table stakes to put scattered internal communications, notes, documents into an AI’s knowledge base, where the information can no longer hide.

When that fails, the AI can read the code itself, so that the settings and how to change them are easily explained in simple terms. Actually, this is possibly even better than letting the scattered internal information serve as an intermediate layer.

	▲	zdragnar 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		That works for small customers who actually want to spend time customizing things themselves. Big customers love having to sign support contracts, because it gives them someone to blame when something goes wrong. Nobody else gets to touch any of the settings or knobs to avoid breaking anything. Being big is the actual moat.

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irl_zebra 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Creating powerpoints. Presenting the powerpoints to others in synchronous meetings.

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chasd00 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The training team and what's called 'Change Management' for an F50 company that's spread across the globe implementing a new application like an ERP could be 100 people by itself. It's extremely complex and hard to do those kinds of projects which is why many ERP migrations take a decade to complete if not fail entirely.

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kadushka 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Probably had a lot of meetings

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davidw 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

"Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?!"

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pearlsontheroad 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

plus yearly support maintenance

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zipy124 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Almost certainly a large amount of support staff, so management/HR/IT etc... Then you've got your customer account managers, sales, lawyers/finance etc.... Given they do an insane amount of B2B and government sales I can see this being easy to reach tbh. Governement contract processes require an insane amount of bureacracy and negotations.

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ra_men 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m guessing development is so slow that they have stacks of teams working in parallel to accomplish what 1 team could normally.

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shusaku 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When you send your database a query, who do you think is gathering those tables?

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kwisatzh 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

More than 70% of the employees are probably Sales/Support/Service -- on par with any large enterprise firm (Think Cisco/Salesforce/ServiceNow etc)

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drowntoge 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, whatever Oracle is doing, which brings us back to a question very similar to your original one.

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hulitu 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Solaris ?

	▲	jabl 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Didn't they fire most of Solaris devs some time ago? Incidentally, Solaris been stuck on 11.4.x for, well, forever and a half..

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Simboo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Me too. Anyone here to enlighten us?