[jacquesm]

From the middle of the article:

"Also, asked whether in hindsight he would have preferred Sun having been acquired by IBM (which pursued a deal to acquire Sun and then backed out late in the game) rather than Oracle, Gosling said he and at least Sun Chairman Scott McNealy debated the prospect. And the consensus, led by McNealy, was that although they said they believed “Oracle would be more savage, IBM would make more layoffs.”

That's interesting, given that Gosling now decides to quit 'of his own accord', which is probably a lot cheaper than to lay someone off.

Technically Oracle may not lay people off that readily, but I don't see how you could interpret Goslings treatment in any way but to force him out of the company. He had his compensation reduced, they clipped his wings and on top of all that used him to act at being a trained parrot.

[jacksonh]

Gosling's layoff concerns were probably more about his friends and the people that worked for him.

[jacquesm]

Yes, but if they treat him like this I can't see people lower on the totem pole being treated much better, I'd rather expect the opposite.

[mseebach]

I think the implied trade-off is between "IBM axes former SUN-division Foo, 5000 fired" and "Stuck in an unpleasant, but decently paid, job with benefits and no particular obligation not to just pack up and leave when a better opportunity comes along."

[jacquesm]

Oracle has already fired close to 7,000 people of the original 27,000 that were part of the merger, in June they announced a further 1,000 people to be thrown out but at the same time said they would hire 2,000 new ones mostly for the sales division.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6536G820100604

I don't see how IBM could have done much worse, and I think that Java would have fared a lot better under IBM, which in the longer term would have probably meant more rather than less job security for the people working near Gosling.

If he was talking about the company as a whole IBM would have had to fire more than 8,000 people to date do be doing as bad for the employees as Oracle did, now of course we'll never know so we can't really make any statements about that but I find it hard to conceive of it being so bad. IBM is very image conscious and I think they would have had a hard time murdering the core team around java at this clip, let alone destroying the technical core of Sun and replacing it with 'sales'.

[gamble]

IBM has a policy of shipping as many jobs overseas as can be managed. They've moved tens of thousands in the last decade. What I've heard from friends suggests that it's not a pleasant environment for rank-and-file employees. AFAIK, Oracle doesn't have the same zest for shipping jobs overseas.

[Tamerlin]

IBM's done worse before. In the late 90's my father was part of a first round of IBM layoffs -- in which they cut 6000 jobs... in Dutchess County, New York.

That was the <i>first round</i> of layoffs. Another few thousand got cut a year so later.

And I don't know how many they cut outside of Dutchess County...

[zacharycohn]

Were they closing down the facility in Dutchess County? How big was it?

[Gobiner]

It's pretty easy to imagine that when Gosling was employed by Sun, he enjoyed significant power to shape his own job. Under Oracle, he clearly did not have the power to make his own job into what he wanted. It's not much of a stretch to believe that lower-tier technical staff didn't have that power to begin with, and hence did not feel the same sting of new management.

[jacquesm]

Yes, that's probably very true, in part this is Gosling being a similar sized fish in a much larger pond.

But if I compare that to google where there are lots of 'names' from just about every era of computing working and being reasonably happy I can't help but notice the contrast.

That changes the atmosphere of the place and that definitely does filter down to lower levels.

[whatusername]

IBM and SUN had tons of competing products. They compete in: OS's - Solaris vs AIX; Hardware - Sun's Low end x86 vs systemX, SPARC vs Power, Disk Storage, Tape Storage; And probably a bunch more I can't think of.

Oracle and SUN weren't really competitors in many spaces. So IBM would have been better for Gosling -- but there was more hope for the rest of the employees at Oracle.