Oracle

You work for a big-name company.

I had started at a small company as a younger engineer making decent pay. Then we were bought by Oracle.

We received zero pay increases for anyone, despite being profitable before we were bought out. Instead, there was a systematic stripping of benefits. We used to have free lunches, snacks, regular company outings, parties, runs, etc.

Not the biggest deal, right? But Oracle attributes a dollar amount to it, and that's all you ever are, too.

I was promoted to Senior Engineer. No pay increases.

There were several people that left my team because priorities became mismanaged by Oracle. That means more work for the rest of us. Still no increase.

Instead of hiring qualified local candidates, we were immediately pushed to outsource. There are now significantly more India devs on my team than U.S. ones.

I am also a person of color, and I know that there are other people in my position being paid a lot more than I am.

Work-wise, our product was doing very well before we were bought. We thought Oracle would mean an influx of money, leading to better management and coding practices.

Instead, we were pushed from day one to, instead of focusing on customer needs, use Oracle products. Convert all of our applications to use the horribly thought-out OracleDB instead of PostgreSQL.

The database is not user-friendly at all and really requires you to be a professional Oracle DBA to get off the ground. So now I have to learn this on top of my other work, still no qualified team members, still no pay increases. The products suffer, the customer suffers, the employees suffer.

The tools they give you are outdated. This is not the place to go if you want to be doing anything current.

Upper management has no idea what they are doing and are pushing nonsense products and offerings (aka huge push for using blockchains for no reason other than press). "Autonomous" DB that actually requires way more upkeep than people are being told. Push employees to use products that are totally useless, like Oracle's version of YouTube and Facebook.

It has been approximately three years, and I'm leaving. I am one of the last ones in my office to do so.

Care about something. Your employees, your country. Something.