Oracle

Work is very technical and diverse, giving plenty of opportunities to learn new technologies and keep your skills up to date with market requirements. The learning curve keeps going higher and never flattens.

Being a large corporation, job stability is very good, even in times of economic turmoils in the IT industry.

Team members spanning from different parts of the globe make it easy to have flexible work hours and work from home a few days a week.

Other employee benefits, such as cafeterias, a huge gym including sports facilities like basketball, cricket, badminton, and swimming, plus regular health and other information sessions help employees with their day-to-day lives.

Management and other senior employees are very technically sound and great educators for less experienced people.

Jobs at Oracle are great for your first job, as well as for experienced people.

Overall, it is a very strong and stable company. Moreover, internal transfers within the company to different groups are very common, so it is easy to move around as per your liking and comfort.

Another positive is the diverse culture. At the HQ, employees celebrate all important festivals around the world, like from China and India.

Downsides depend and vary by group. Some managers are very demanding, and it is difficult to satisfy them no matter how hard you work. But that would be the case in any company where such managers exist. While a team spread globally does provide flexibility and work-from-home opportunities, some phone conference times could be odd to accommodate people in different time zones.

With flexible work hours comes the disadvantage of having to work over the weekends sometimes. If you are given a short task on a Friday and are expected to finish by early next week, what other choice would you have? But this greatly varies across groups.

Being a large corporation, the management hierarchy is quite deep, making it harder to get paid what you really deserve. Overall, the compensation is about the average market rate. However, the upsides clearly outweigh the downsides.

Performance reviews should be done frequently, and expectations from employees should be clearly laid out after discussion with them. In development, it usually takes more time and work to develop performant code than management would usually expect.