Company: Oracle
Date: 2008-06-25
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

Mostly happy, but for the money
Pros: Oracle is a solid, stable company, doing some fairly innovative things, especially considering its size.  There's a good bit of opportunity, and you can succeed if you work hard and have talent.
Cons: Pay, and politics.  Raise pools have been extremely weak over the past few years, and apparently will stay that way as long as we keep buying companies.  Part of the problem is they're trying to keep cash on hand for M&A activity, and part of the problem is all the new companies we buy come with people making much higher than Oracle-average salaries, which skews the #'s for the rest of us.  On the politics side, Oracle management culture puts far too much weight on titles and the number of employees a manager has, resulting in a tendency toward premature promotions, power grabs and cutthroat reorgs.