Company: Oracle
Date: 2013-07-26
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Career Killer
Pros: Flexible workhours, Good benefits, Some very capable and pleasant foreign employees trapped at Oracle due to visa/greencard issues.
Cons: Everything Else.  

Management is clueless about even most fundamental facts about the marketplace, and this informs their complete lack of strategic direction.  Communications with mid/senior mgmt are limited to nasty dictates on impossible deadlines with no upward flow of information. Direction turns on a dime and years of effort by many people are just thrown out the window without any accountability by the "leadership".  In few cases where game-changing innovations are proposed (that entail little cost) mgmt doesn't even understand them!  Direction for 7 years has been to deliver SaaS business aps, but no one ever thought of the infrastructural components required or how the internal processes would need to change. Now that the s#$% is hitting the fan mgmt's solution is to demand more work within the same impossible delivery schedule.  Bottom line is that mgmt is a net value subtract.  We would be better off with self-managing teams.

ZERO, ZERO, ZERO compensation or career growth.  In the very rare cases of promotions (maybe 3 out of hundreds of people in 7 years???) there is no increase in compensation.  No or trivial increases and bonuses for anyone I know for the past 5 years.  Any time someone leaves in the US they are either not replaced (and rest of the team has to pick up the workload, or they are replaced by somone in India.  

Workload is very high, deadlines are very aggressive. No one cares that the dev environments or tools needed to do the job are unavailable.  Demands are to close bugs not to fix the root causes.  Dev environments are so unstable that efficiency is minimal.  PMs can be responsible for aps for which they don't even have working environments to use.  Acronyms are rampant and no one knows what half of them mean.  There is no onboarding training of new people and no way to find out half of what you need to do your job.  People with 10 yrs of tenure still don't know basic things about how related processes work.  There are no internal resources for finding out who to talk to about a particular product or tool or internal business process that is critical to your job.  Instead lots of people just use do an email blitz (ie. 'spam') asking questions which results in only the most fragmentary knowledge transfer.

Many teams are dominated by legacy folks that view the status quo, 80s style enterprise software as the ideal and resist any innovation.  Much of the software designs are patterned on 30 yo approaches.  Many PM, Strategy and DEV personnel seem oblivious to the innovations happening right down the road from them.  Going to work is like going back in time, except that now the workforce is 60% Indian.  Nothing has changed but the demographics...