Company: Oracle
Date: 2020-06-18
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Bad place to work unless you only care about money
Pros: The pay is good, the office is cool, and it's right next to a lot of great lunch spots.
Cons: First off, this job has made me question weather I even want to be a software engineer any more.

This WAS a fantastic place to work when I started. Since then it has just gone steadily downhill. When I started, the team I worked with was great. Smart, motivated people, who would band together to solve very exciting and complex engineering problems. 

When I started, I got the feeling that this was not the typical lean management type shop, and managers really wanted to grow a strong team, and were focused on developer experience, work life balance, and created an exciting environment with lots of good work to go around. 

Today as I write this review, I am counting down the days until my next round of vesting so I can get out of this place like a bat out of hell.

An engineer on my team recently expressed concerns about the ops burden, and an almost complete inability to work on anything other than ops and putting out fires. The response from management was, in not so many words, "tough sh!t." The people that have been hired recently have been producing work of a quality so low, that I honestly am embarrassed to call them my co-workers. The new projects coming down the pipe are depressing, and even those are getting put on hold because we constantly have to put out fires. My manager has been relegated to nothing more than a bearer of bad news, and that is a shame because he is honestly one of the best people I've ever worked with, and someone I have grown to consider a good friend. The code review process that use to be thorough, helpful, and very effective, is consistently being circumvented by cliques of low quality developers who work completely within their own circles. The result is code quality so low that I'm consistently struggling to resist the urge to toss my computer out the window. I recently saw a conversation with one of our veteran engineers, who was trying to wrap his mind around a seemingly poor design decision, to which his only response was to simply leave the chat group. I can only assume this was because he would have otherwise been unable to keep it professional. And our good engineers are so burnt out, that they just don't have the energy to try and correct these problems.

And not least of all, the people that seem to be getting promoted, are the people who focus on getting promoted, and not on doing a good job (with a few exceptions). The people who are more focused on contributing to their own success, rather than contributing to the success of the organization. And that is a shame.

And also, COVID-19 problems negate any of the pros related to the office and its location.

All in all, my recommendation is, don't get sucked in. They may try to sell you on some of the good qualities and core values that we use to have, but in reality, OCI has turned into another mediocre big development shop, and if you're a good engineer looking to solve challenging problems. This is not the place for you. If you want to make money, and climb the corporate ladder, then by all means, apply.