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).
https://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling...
[quoted]:
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.”
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.
One of the tricky issues is when you have other office locations based outside of the US.
There's TONS of hoops you have to follow to offer comparable benefits for employees in other locations around the world.
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.
Their products are total shit, but it was sweet where I was!
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.