Who in their right mind would want to work for oracle in 2017? That's like fighting for a gig at DEC circa 1997. They're doing candidates a favor by refusing them entrance on the Titanic.
I support several people. If I were laid off, I would need an income within x amount of time before we all became homeless. If I were to approach that limit, I would take whatever job would prevent it.
I can safely say you've never been homeless, hungry, or if you have, you had a support structure that loaned you food and a nice warm house. If that's not true, then I can guarantee you didn't force several other people to endure homelessness just because you didn't want to work somewhere.
Oracle has many many departments. Do you know about Server Technologies (the RDBMS department)? When I applied for Oracle Server Technologies in 2016, I found their interviews to be of the same difficulty level as that of Amazon and Google. They expect a single candidate to know everything from real world work involving Linux kernel details and system programming to abstract concepts like probabilistic data structures, hash trees, distributed computing algorithms, etc. And they expect you to write working code free of bugs and syntax errors in the interview to prove that you know what you are talking about.
In my experience, not many companies in the Silicon Valley expect this kind of rigor and knowledge in the interviews except for the likes of Amazon and Google.
In my experience this does happen too as I've been asked questions of similar difficulty at many companies but the outcomes have been consistent with what people on the cscareerquestions subreddit (where they obsess about these things) also say.
First, the facts.
* I could clear Oracle interviews and get an offer. I applied for a RDBMS development position in Oracle ST.
* I could also clear Apple interviews and get an offer. Apple interviews were easier than Oracle ST's.
* I could clear interviews in several startups and other small companies too.
* I could not clear interviews in Google. I did not get an offer.
* I did not apply to Microsoft, Facebook or Amazon.
Now, the reasons.
* Oracle ST (RDBMS) provided me an opportunity to work in system development in C and ASM language down to the level of Linux syscalls and memory management (think custom memory allocators, designing locking semantics, distributed file systems).
* I was almost ready to join Apple because the offered work was quite similar to Oracle's and the offered salary was about 5% more than Oracle's but Apple's stringent security policies turned me off. I learnt that Apple would dictate what I can and cannot discuss with my wife. I learnt that I cannot discuss with a friend within the same company what I was working on. All of this may be reasonable from Apple's perspective but I wanted to work for some place with more open culture.
* Most startups and small companies I could get offer from required me to work on web services in Java, Python, Node.js, etc. This kind of work does not interest me.
* I could not solve all the algorithm problems asked by Google but I found Oracle ST's interview a little bit easier. I could solve most of Oracle ST's interview problems and got an offer.
* The openings available in Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon did not interest me. Moreover, I felt I was under-prepared for Facebook's interviews. I felt I was well-prepared for Amazon's interviews. I have many friends in Amazon and I don't find them happy due to long working hours. I learnt that they require developers to provide on-call support at add hours. These things scared me a little bit. Due to these reasons I did not apply to these companies.
So considering the offers I could manage to get and my love for system programming, I had a strong reason to choose Oracle over the other offers.
Why is it so hard to believe that everyone working in Oracle would similarly have their own reasons to choose Oracle?
* People who love RDBMS technology. Oracle's Database division is big and has a lot of veteran and very skilled software developers and architects who work with the Database kernel code. New employees can also work on this code. I am sure a lot of people would like to work on the database kernel with skilled and intelligent teams. RDBMS as a domain can be fascinating for developers. It involves everything from compiler design (SQL) to system programming (memory management, locking semantics, concurrency, etc.)
* People who love to work on open source and get paid well. Since Oracle ships its own Linux and since the database is also certified to work on many Linux environments (not just Oracle Linux), Oracle takes the responsibility of patching security problems in the supported open source environments if the upstream does not patch in time. A lot of people like this kind of work where they can work on open source, security and development at the same time and get paid while doing so.
* System programmers. Many developers working on the Oracle Database are involved in system programming.
Disclaimer: I work for Oracle.