Company: Oracle
Date: 2008-06-11
Overall rating: 5/5
Employment status: current

Great work life balance in a non-startup that's entering innovative enterprise applications built on solid platforms.
Pros: It's not a startup. You get your work done then you go home (or you are already there); none of this working 80 hours a week. There are some very innovative products to work on. There are plenty of opportunities to move around within the company. If you are on a good development team, which I am, all these are true: everyone is passionate about developing (coding) the product, we get some product management and usability experience, we get to use all the cool tools and libraries available out there and we analyze and learn a lot from competing products.
Cons: There aren't enough innovative products to work on. Enterprise applications are catching up to consumer applications (Web 2.0, etc). There aren't enough people blogging so many of the products don't hit mainstream news. Many of the products take too long to get developed because of the overhead that is created by a big software company, but Oracle does come with many useful synergies and other products that can be leveraged, mainly the database. A few other downsides are that much of the company is middle aged (we need more young people) and food is a tad expensive but not bad.