Company: Oracle
Date: 2012-12-09
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former

Hits and Misses
Pros: Like most people, I was at a company that was acquired by Oracle, so I didn't get to choose what group I got thrown into. From what I saw, a lot of your experience will be based on what group you're in, and, more importantly, who your group's VP is. So, this is from the Fusion MiddleWare sotware development group perspective.

Anyways, good things:
- lots of chances to work on good technology and programming (depending on group and how hard you fight for it).
- flexible work environment (hours, vacation, etc.)
- good work-from home options (VPN, email, calendar, etc.)
- good benefits.
- good employee discounts.
- competitive initial salary.
Cons: - poor decisions made about acquired products.
- old-of-date, home grown infrastructure tools (if you're forced to use them, many groups just don't).
- top-down product and technology decisions forced onto dev teams.
- inflexible hardware procurement for both shared servers and development machines (i.e. no macs unless your VP fights for it, even if you're working on macos or ios software).
- many failing projects and products (if you get stuck on one).
- very small to no bonuses, on average.
- very small to no salary increases, on average.
- everything is centralized to groups with conflicting aims and goals (e.g. QA, IT, facilities, HR) that generally don't line up with development.
- very little explanation from senior management about why things are happening (e.g. product and company direction, re-orgs, lack of bonuses).