Company: Oracle
Date: 2015-08-27
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Poor engineering culture
Pros: - Fairly relaxed work culture. You can work from home pretty much all the time. Also, some of the benefits in India - reimbursement for phone/broadband and quality of medical insurance coverage are pretty good compared to other companies. It's a good company to 'retire' or 'park' yourself for a while, if your personal circumstances require that.
- In the right team, work can be challenging and rewarding
Cons: - Note that I said 'in the right team'. I should add: under the right management. I re-orged from under a fairly good manager with so-so, not so challenging work to a team with a terrible manager and the same kind of work.  In the team I was in(and I've seen this in other groups too), the best work was done in the US, and only grunt work is sent to India. 

- Even in the good teams, engineering culture is quite poor. Coming from an Oracle 'competitor' in the enterprise software space, I was shocked at just how poor coding standards, code review practices and development at Oracle was overall. You get to work on marquee products which solve challenging technological problems, but it feels like stuff is held together with duct tape. Features are released without real QA, QA teams are understaffed and under skilled (the 'automation' QA teams write would be laughed at in other companies), and customer deployments act as default QA. Middle managers play the blame game quite well, getting enough of the blame shifted elsewhere.
- Compensation increases are poor. Hikes/bonuses are low or non-existent, so negotiating well while joining is a good strategy. India is seen as a 'low-cost' development centre, and cost cutting in terms of budgets is visible quite often. The contrast to competitors for both business and engineers (Microsoft, NetApp, VMWare) wrt these things is glaring. 
- Decision making including approvals for exceptional expenses (e.g. new devices for mobile testing) can take months, if not a year or more since everything goes up to at least a VP in the US.
- I did not attempt to change teams in my time there, but was also heavily advised against it, with at least one veteran saying "It's career suicide".