Comment by masklinn

8 years ago

And remember,

> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)

And

> I actually think that it does a dis-service to not go to Nazi allegory because if I don't use Nazi allegory when referring to Oracle there's some critical understanding that I have left on the table […] in fact as I have said before I emphatically believe that if you have to explain the Nazis to someone who had never heard of World War 2 but was an Oracle customer there's a very good chance that you would explain the Nazis in Oracle allegory. — also Brian Cantrill (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=24m)

41 comments

masklinn

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hinkley  8 years ago

Wired did an article about high tech connected homes. The section on Larry Ellison had an anecdote about how Larry got frustrated with his system and threw the remote at a wall, smashing it.

He made one of the engineers drive out to his house with a new one on a Saturday night.

Now, the fact that this story is true is telling enough, but what sort of experience did the writers have with Larry that inspired them to put in that story that paints him as a petty, tyrannical manchild?

  • legohead  8 years ago

    Ellison is the kind of guy who lands his private jet late at night, knowing he will have to pay fines for night noise, then sues over it.

    • mc32  8 years ago

      I think the google guys did the same, no? Not that it makes the behavior better or normalizes it, but just that he's not the single exception.

  • gist  8 years ago

    > He made one of the engineers drive out to his house with a new one on a Saturday night.

    Did it occur to anyone that that engineer might be happy to be picked as the one to drive out and do that? To some people that is the way to get noticed and stand out with the boss (or king, whatever).

    > tyrannical manchild?

    Like any anecdote we don't know the full story here and exact circumstances. Just the fact that juxtaposed against what people have be told about Ellison it appears that he must certainly be 'a tyrannical manchild'.

    • hinkley  8 years ago 

          threw the remote at a wall, smashing it.

      That’s a tantrum. Is there any empathetic version of this story where someone over 45 looks like a grownup doing it?

krylon  8 years ago

I kind of feel for Bryan Cantrill and his blood pressure. Getting this worked up cannot be healthy.

But damn, few people are that much fun to listen to when ranting.

  • theoh  8 years ago

    There's another aspect, which is that some people find his aggressively dismissive style personally abusive and distressing.

    I don't know enough to validate this perspective, but it's something for all of us to consider:

    https://blog.valerieaurora.org/2016/10/22/why-i-wont-be-atte...

    • throwaway0071  8 years ago

      It's the first time I read this blog post (thanks for sharing) but it's not surprising to me.

      I always cringe when I see people quoting Bryan because that's exactly my experience interacting with him on mailing lists or watching him give talks.

      At this point I don't have the energy to deal with people like him. I just accept him as a natural occurrence in our field. I certainly praise does who do have the energy for fighting that.

      1 reply →

    • krylon  8 years ago

      > some people find his aggressively dismissive style personally abusive and distressing.

      Thank you for pointing this out.

      There are many cases of what I call the "brilliant jerk" in programming.

      Personally, I deal very badly with confrontational behavior. And it makes me rather sad. If I can deal with people by being friendly (or at least polite) and soft-spoken, it can't be that hard, now, can it?

      And there are some examples of brilliant programmers that are also nice people and very pleasant to deal with. Richard Hipp of SQLite and Fossil seems to be this kind of person. If I cannot be as brilliant as him, at least I want to be as friendly and respectful as him.

      It seems that a lot of software projects have begun adopting codes of conduct. I tend to feel a little ambivalent about this phenomenon, because it attempts to codify things I think should be the natural state of people interacting. But maybe in the long run, it is necessary to be a little more formal about this.

      And still, when Bryan Cantrill gets sufficiently worked up about a subject, he is very entertaining to listen to.

    • barrkel  8 years ago

      Personally, I have a hard time favouring diversity and safe spaces over good software and solid architecture where the two goals compete. I'm also aware that the competitive streak in me pushes me to excel, and without it - without an element of technological one-upmanship in my personality - I'd be much less ambitious and I'd have achieved far less.

      So overall I don't think Bryan is wrong, per se, to take the tack he does within the pool he plays in; it's just a pool for type-A personalities (in the system dev domain), and not the right place to play in if you're starting out, or are otherwise fragile. Build up your skin and chops in smaller ponds first. Stay out of them if you don't feel comfortable swimming there, because the discomfort of competition actually serves a purpose for those swimmers.

      (Yes, some people can pursue and sustain excellence without the heat of competition. But not everyone is like that.)

      3 replies →

bigzen  8 years ago

While I agree with the lawnmower sentiment, should we really write off unethical behavior by comparing humans to machines?

  • derefr  8 years ago

    Machines are one of the only things most people are familiar with that don't hold to all the same values that living beings (humans, other mammals, most vertebrates) usually do. (You might call Ellison a "force of nature", but that might not play well for people who attribute an "eventually-consistent omnibenevolence" to nature.)

    Really, without the metaphor, what's going on is that Larry Ellison has modified himself to hold the values that a corporation holds, in order to more efficiently drive said corporation toward optimizing on its corporate goals (i.e. increase share value, etc.) Where human values and corporate values are in conflict, Ellison has chosen to forget about his human values and, effectively, become the avatar of the corporation's interests. He's the "ideal CEO", in about the same way as Locutus of Borg is an ideal CEO.

    A better analogy for this effect, for those who understand it, would be to compare Ellison to a https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer, but that's not really that well-known a meme.

    • yuhong  8 years ago

      I am seriously disliking the current debt-based economy now for this reason and more. There are other examples of its effects like Mozilla, Google, and VCs (I have several Twitter threads with @BrendanEich about that one). Sun and Oracle are probably worth mentioning here too, including Jonathan Schwartz.

    • mmirate  8 years ago

      > Really, without the metaphor, what's going on is that Larry Ellison has modified himself to hold the values that a corporation holds, in order to more efficiently drive said corporation toward optimizing on its corporate goals (i.e. increase share value, etc.)

      Hmm. I wonder why this augmentation is newsworthy/nontrivial/frightening. Perhaps our human frailty makes this feat truly difficult even for an average CEO?

      4 replies →

  • protomyth  8 years ago

    If you watch the video, Brian Cantrill most certainly does not write off Oracles’s bad behavior, quite the opposite actually.

  • robert_foss  8 years ago

    I can't tell you if it is right, but it does effectively communicate the lack of decency in anything Oracle does.