Company: Oracle
Date: 2016-12-20
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

A Big Machine
Pros: Local management is as good as industry average or better. Benefits (except holidays) are pretty good. Work is interesting and the team I worked with was good.
Free soda and  coffee. The cafeteria is pretty good also.
Cons: The Oracle culture does not believe in the worth of individual employees. They are looking for cogs who should be kept in the dark and protected from anyone trying to recruit you. 
Oracle does not believe in all-hands meetings. Oracle's internal email about quarterly results is laughably propagandistic - you need to look at external sources to see how they really were, even if they were relatively good. Oracle people are strongly discouraged from participating in external technical activities. 
When Mark Hurd got hired by Larry Ellison after being fired by HP for lying on expense reports (and after Larry laughing at HP for caring) we got an email from HR telling us that we, the lackeys, shouldn't lie on ours. Hilarious. 
When they shifted top management around, so Larry was no longer CEO, we never even got email about it. 
When they decided to force most employees to take vacation between Christmas and New Years, instead of being honest about this being good for the bottom line, the mail was about how lucky we were to be forced to take this time off. Contrast to Sun, which was honest about forcing a July 4th  week off. 
Sun had lots of internal mail and awards programs for the average employee. Oracle has none. (I think they started featuring a few HR people.) 
Oracle has a pay system which gives all the money to the top tier and nothing to anyone else. The average employee is a lot better than that - and there is a pretty rigorous interview process. After a few years of this they noticed that people were not staying late anymore. And got outraged. Wonder why? My boss, to his credit, could hardly keep himself from cracking up at the email telling us how bad we were for leaving early. 
I'm dubious about the future of this company - it is not well likes in the industry. I avoided Oracle stock and I'm glad I did. Good software people should head for Google or Facebook. 
That Larry blew off a keynote at Oracle World to watch his yacht race in the America's Cup says it all about top management.