Company: Oracle
Date: 2017-08-02
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

This might be the only company you'll ever work at
Pros: This might be the only company you'll ever work at because you'll have a mighty hard time clearing interviews of companies like Google, Facebook or Amazon. 
      
This, my friends, is your dream company if 
1) You'd like your base salary to stay the same year after year. Average inflation rate is about 2-3% but you can expect to get a 0% raise at the end of every performance cycle. 
2) You may get promoted but don't expect any raises to accompany it. Most of my colleagues got promoted and got a whopping $0 raise. It may increase at the end of performance cycle but don't expect more than 5-6%    
3) You will get an amazing 5% discount on ESPP. So, if you are confident about the prospects of the company go ahead and take part in it
4) In over 5 years, we've had 2 team outings. Oracle doesn't believe in any bonding between workers outside of the daily routine. In fact, it's considered to be a waste of their resources. 
5) If you manage to compete 15 years, you will be handsomely rewarded with a $200 gift card. Thank you for your service but that's pretty much what you are worth here 
6) Oracle is one of those companies where you are encouraged to not raise questions or challenge authority. There is a definite divide between mangers/directors and individual contributors. While the higher management gets to regularly take home anywhere from $50k to $300k in RSUs, most individual contributors are lucky if they get $10k per annum in RSUs. Most of my colleagues have gotten $0
7) If you really value looking good in front of your manager, then this is the place for you. Managers blindly try to push agenda that's passed on to them from higher management without any critical inspection of the viability of such requests. You should expect to do the same. 
8) Old is Gold as far as technology is concerned. You only have to use a few of their products to realize how ugly and dysfunctional they are. Ironically, a lot of their products are still stuck using older version of Java instead of the latest Java 8. Good luck working around the bureaucracy to use the latest and greatest or open source technologies. It's another matter that their Founder doesn't understand how an open source platform like Java works and wants to hold back other companies from advancing (Google).
Cons: The #1 reason most people continue to work here despite of the above pros is job security and remote work. If you are looking for a company where you can work in isolation without any collaboration or exchange of ideas, then you have found the holy grail. However, do keep in mind, that you will experience a significant loss in your skillset if and when you do decide to get out of here. There are engineers with over 10 years of experience here who don't know how Big(O) notation works or when to use a Linked list over an Array list or how a HashMap is implemented.