Company: Oracle
Date: 2009-04-17
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

Love the flexible schedule and benefits - and the people are awesome too.
Pros: Oracle has great compensation packages.  Even though they don't like to purchase hardware, Oracle is willing to raise your salary out of band if they really value you.  The people here are great.  Oracle has a culture of valuing independent contributions and ideas.  This leads to you being able to work as much or as little as you like, within the limits of reason, of course.  Oracle offers great work\life balance, with flexible hours, telecommuting, and other small perks.   The best part of it all is that the managers at Oracle are all excellent.  Oracle tends to promote managers from technical people, so they understand the work that you do.  You don't need to go management to make cash though - Oracle offers a technical track which rewards technical people just as much.  In addition to all this, Oracle has an awesome HQ, with gym, pool, etc.
Cons: Lack of interest in purchasing hardware - makes it very hard to develop code when you can't access hardware.  I often spend my time waiting for a process to finish when I could have been done in half the time with more disk space, faster machine, etc.  When you consider the cost of hardware versus my time, its very short sited.  Also, like many companies, Oracle will take all you have to give and than ask for more.  Performance feedback is also very lacking.  I've been here 4 years and gotten 1 formal review.  In addition to this, getting hired at Oracle can take some time, sometimes people have to wait a long time (up to a year) for Larry to approve their offer....  yes, that Larry.  All job offers go through Larry Ellison at some point.  (In fact, lots of things do.  Its very much like a small company in that way.)