Company: Oracle
Date: 2008-05-14
Overall rating: 5/5
Employment status: current

This is a great place to work, but negotiate a high starting salary.
Pros: Oracle creates more than 100 complex software applications that provide tremendous opportunities for creative designers to improve and thereby improve the efficiency and satisfaction of millions of corporate professionals.  Each of these applications provides access to enormous amounts of data.  As a user interface designer specializing in data visualization, working at Oracle gives me rich challenges and opportunities for bringing my experience to bear on solving complex problems and designing rich interactions.  The people I work with here are intelligent, professional, and productive.  Management is receptive to creative ideas and free with recognition and support. On the whole, I have to say this is the best job I have had in my career of more than 20 years in the software industry.
Cons: While Oracle management provides plenty of benefits, recognition, support, flexible hours, and stock options, it remains very difficult to get raises -- even small cost-of-living raises. One of my colleagues has worked here for six years without a raise.  The lack of raises has the negative effect of causing a lot of people to leave Oracle for more lucrative positions, which, in turn causes everyone else to have to spend a lot of time interviewing new job applicants.  Also, because the nature of the technology industry is so complex, new people require a tremendous amount of time to come up to speed on both internal tools and systems as well as business practices.