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Horrible on-call rotation

Senior Software Engineer (IC4)
Former Employee
Worked at Oracle for 2 years
April 10, 2025
Seattle, Washington
1.0
Doesn't Recommend
Pros

They respect senior engineers. Management does listen to and seek out input. The design phase of a project is fairly well done.

The salary was good, as are the stock payouts.

Cons

Sadly, you never get past the design phase, and furthermore, you have to do it between the gaps of operational fires. The on-call rotation is absolutely miserable. I once received 100 pages in a week, and I did not have a single week where I was not woken up in the middle of the night for a pointless and non-customer-affecting page.

Furthermore, if you are a US citizen, you will be put on two separate on-call rotations (a second one for their gov clouds), and management does nothing to help you line up the rotations. Prior to being hired, I was told there would be a single on-call rotation with six people. Shortly after, I was on two rotations of five people, which often landed me on call twice in a month. Management was not forthcoming with this information before I was hired, even though I asked quite a bit about the rotation. If you are thinking of going to OCI, make sure you ask very specific questions.

To make it even more painful, there is no interest in any kind of long-term investment to make these alarms less frequent. They seem to be happy just throwing people at it without regard for the toll it takes on them.

Advice to Management

Care more about the stress your people are under due to the on-call rotation.

Stop stressing people out with all-hour alarms for regions that are still being built and thus have no customers.

Additional Ratings

Work/Life Balance
1.0
Culture and Values
1.0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
2.0
Career Opportunities
4.0
Compensation and Benefits
4.0
Senior Management
1.0

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