With the shrinking of the on prem workforce what is to become of the mountain of technical debt that Oracle has amassed through the crazy acquisition spree? As more of us get invited to the door it would seem that Oracle will reach a tipping point where there is so much software to maintain / security patch let alone address RFEs needed to keep up with regulatory and basic customer functionality that the stooges will reach a point where they cant keep the company functioning. As the software becomes more and more dated coupled with the propensity to ride the profits into the ground there will be no s---er willing to take the stuff off our hands exacerbating the problem. It doesnt seem like this is even being considered. Definitely time to move on.
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At least with on-prem, we get around this by not having any support Service Level Agrements (SLAs). We in support can file all the bugs we want, but for many products, the bug report will never be assigned to an engineer. We know this and try to come up with some kind of workaround for the customer when we can. But many times there is not much we can do to help. When that happens, the service request just stays in "development working" for weeks, months, or even years. As long as it takes for the customer to just give up. This used to be rare, but more and more products are like this now. I can't believe customers keep buying our products when we treat them like this.
The on-prem work went to India. Not in any organized way. The people working on it just stopped one day and the next they said someone in India is doing that now. No code handover, no documentation of the code, no nothing. In addition, some of the really good developers just quit.
No wonder there is no one to fix anything. It will only get worse.
Unfortunately, cloud development is not much better. Warring groups and managers. Sh--ty development processes where all kinds of crap is being done. When good developers step up to the plate, they are attacked from all sides. Oracle is over, it's really over. Get your resume updated and find a way out.
At least with on-prem, we get around this by not having any support Service Level Agrements (SLAs). We in support can file all the bugs we want, but for many products, the bug report will never be assigned to an engineer. We know this and try to come up with some kind of workaround for the customer when we can. But many times there is not much we can do to help. When that happens, the service request just stays in "development working" for weeks, months, or even years. As long as it takes for the customer to just give up. This used to be rare, but more and more products are like this now. I can't believe customers keep buying our products when we treat them like this.
We almost NEVER pay off any technical debt. This is why you find unpatched systems in our cloud that are running software from 7-8 years ago. Total time bomb. Each feature added just makes things worse and worse. We have so much code in production that literally no one understands at all. The people who did understand it are long gone, but the gross majority of our SaaS fleet depends in some part on abandoned software like this.
Refactoring, updating, rewriting, and replacing are words you almost never hear around here. Paying down technical debt is only something management does when they want to invest in the future. Our leaders only care about the current quarter. I'm sure they will all cash out and bail sooner than later. These con-artists know the game is almost over.