Oracle

It's a market leader with its eyes on first place in each market area. The culture is very get-things-done. The top people are experts in their fields. The strongest product areas (i.e., database) are widening their leads over competitors. Lots of opportunities for customer feedback, and the customers are experts too, who can help to hone employees' skills. Whether you want to work in a buttoned-down, corporate-style team, or a small, agile, startup-style team, there's a product group that's right for you.

Career development is largely in the hands of each employee, and opportunities vary depending on the savvy of each area's management.

The long adoption cycle for products means that it can take a long time before your cool new feature has a big impact.

Old-timers and teams from newly acquired companies find themselves competing to prove whose product and processes deserve to become the standard.

Some people operate, and some managers manage, out of an inordinate fear of getting fired.

More transparency and attention to the review, salary, and career development processes, PLEASE!

Broaden the app dev focus beyond "all Java all the time" to more of the popular scripting languages like Python and Perl.

Put more focus on usability -- all the way up from the lowest levels of the database, like error messages and SQL*Plus -- to drive adoption from the bottom up as well as top-down from the bean counters.