Company: Oracle
Date: 2014-07-07
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Lack of direction; lack of identity; lack of vision;
Pros: There are just a few good engineers at Oracle. Occasionally you'd see a pocket of 1-2 good engineers in a team of 20+.
Cons: As it is made up of many companies, there is big disintegration. No culture per se. Cronyism and incompetency are rampant at Oracle. Disillusionment. The smart people seem to quit as soon as Oracle acquires a company. Smart people seem to be deliberately not hired. Friends and inexperienced people are welcome at Oracle.  Pro-activity, natural leadership, experience doesn't seem to be encouraged or rewarded. Mediocrity is protected at all costs.

The internal tools they use are so old and obsolete that is not even funny. For instance: How can a database company not normalize the bug-status of their bug-tracking tool? Why would you leave it as a cross-product of two statuses, that cannot describe uniformly a bug status? Why would you have disparate set of 99 bug statuses? How can you provide better software when your own internal tools are obsolete?

This is just one example. Plenty more.