alt Hacker NewsEven at 100k employees I’m still dumbfounded by that number. What do all these people do all day?
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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
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.
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.
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.
I’m guessing development is so slow that they have stacks of teams working in parallel to accomplish what 1 team could normally.
More than 70% of the employees are probably Sales/Support/Service -- on par with any large enterprise firm (Think Cisco/Salesforce/ServiceNow etc)
When you send your database a query, who do you think is gathering those tables?
Well, whatever Oracle is doing, which brings us back to a question very similar to your original one.
Me too. Anyone here to enlighten us?
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.