Is Oracle all that bad of a place to work? Everyone _hates_ Oracle for product reasons but I've never met any engineers that said it was a terrible place to work or particularly worse than any other big tech b2b companies (e.g. ibm, microsoft, etc).
Immediately after the Oracle/Sun acquisition, there was a huge exodus of senior engineering talent (e.g., most of the core Solaris kernel development team). This writeup of why James Gosling left has some of the obvious reasons (e.g., he was asked to take a significant pay cut), but also this anecdote, showing Oracle managements' general attitude toward the talent:
Making his point about the “creepiness,” not only with Ellison but with Oracle’s power structure, Gosling said he sparked a notion to try to improve morale amongst the Sun faithful who endured the Oracle acquisition. He said the company decided to rent out the Great America amusement park in Santa Clara, Calif., and allow the Sun folks to have a day of fun. Scott McNealy and Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz signed off on the project that came in well under budget and all systems were go, Gosling said. Except a few days before the event was to occur, Oracle Co-President Safra Catz got wind of it and put the kibosh on the thing.
“Safra found out and had a fit,” Gosling said. “The word came down that Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. So she forced the thing to be cancelled. But they didn’t save any money because the money had been spent – so we ended up giving the tickets to charities. We were forced to give it up because it wasn’t the -Oracle Way.’ On the other hand, Oracle sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million.”
I've always found it somewhat amusing that Ellison's facial hair is virtually identical to the episode of Star Trek where they cross into another dimension where they are all evil. Like somewhere there's a clean-shaven Larry who is the life of the party and getting recognized by the City Council for his humanitarian work.
1. "Oracle does not do employee appreciation events" is not the same as treating staff badly. Events like that have all kinds of frankly important accessibility and inclusion concerns that are tricky to handle. Not saying it's the choice I would have made, but I think it would be fair to, rather than navigating that poorly and leaving some people unhappy, simply not have a budget for that type of event and (theoretically) fold that into salary. After all, those perks are technically part of your comp.
2. The fact that you segment technical staff from other staff is exactly the kind of tiered treatment a blanket policy would seek to avoid.
Every ex-Oracle engineer I've met says it was a terrible place to work compared to the big tech company where I work now. I also don't know anyone who went to work for Oracle after leaving my current company, fwiw.
Oracle was one of my favorite places to work ever, I barely did anything at all. Extremely low expectations. Got a raise every year and eventually a promotion to Staff. Got to go on free trips to different datacenters. Free soda, catered meals on holidays, lots of morale parties.
Their products are total shit, but it was sweet where I was!
Super anecdotal, but I once interviewed an engineer who was currently working for Oracle. During the interview he told me that every six months he would go apply to jobs at startups, get an offer or two, and bring them back to his manager and ask for a raise. He had been at Oracle for 15 years doing this apparently the entire time. So it seems some people very much like working there. Needless to say I recommended we pass on him...
it strongly depends on which org you're in, with an average of "boring, with a big steaming pile of bureaucracy" based on my observations spending five years at the seattle-based cloud org. if you had a good manager and skip-level stuff could be pretty alright, if you didn't god help you.
If you have a good manager, and your project doesn't span across orgs, you have a ton of freedom. Crossing orgs creates red tape you wouldn't believe, since such requests "must go through Larry's office".
They also have an absolutely stellar health plan - I know of one (US) employee whose spouse got cancer, and they didn't pay one penny out of pocket for the entire treatment.
