Oracle

There are just a few good engineers at Oracle. Occasionally, you'd see a pocket of 1-2 good engineers in a team of 20+.

As it is made up of many companies, there is big disintegration.

No culture per se.

Cronyism and incompetency are rampant at Oracle. Disillusionment.

The smart people seem to quit as soon as Oracle acquires a company. Smart people seem to be deliberately not hired.

Friends and inexperienced people are welcome at Oracle.

Pro-activity, natural leadership, and experience don't seem to be encouraged or rewarded. Mediocrity is protected at all costs.

The internal tools they use are so old and obsolete that it's not even funny.

For instance:

• How can a database company not normalize the bug-status of their bug-tracking tool?
• Why would you leave it as a cross-product of two statuses that cannot uniformly describe a bug's status?
• Why would you have a disparate set of 99 bug statuses?

How can you provide better software when your own internal tools are obsolete?

This is just one example. Plenty more.

As long as the same management stays in place, nothing will change. Any talk of "restructuring," etc., is just another PR from investors to investors, to keep the stock from sinking. The sad part is that management knows they are incompetent and mediocre and are diagnosing themselves as "all is good!" This is at all vertical levels of management. Everyone knows it and no one wants to admit it. It's just another "too big to fail" company. If one person admits it, they are quickly isolated, ousted, isolated, or fired.