Oracle

Note: Your overall experience will vary depending on your team, manager, and peers. So here I will try to summarize the characteristics that are most common in all of them. Hope this is useful.

From my experience, this is one of the best software development companies to which you can work in Mexico. If you studied Computer Science and entered the right team, this is where you will really enhance your abilities, especially if you are a new grad.

Good benefits, I would say really above average:

• Adjustable minor/major health insurance (You can decide to include more or fewer benefits depending on the credits you have, like a dental/vision plan).
• Free food, coffee, and snacks if you arrive early at the office.
• Good offices and equipment. Some floors even have pool/mini-soccer tables.
• Good amount of vacation and illness days.
• Sometimes there are special events and trips for team building, like pizza day or donuts day.

As a global company, it has international standards, so you will gain good exposure to the best practices in software development. You will gain experience in QA processes, as you will have to write a lot of test cases for your own code, and many senior developers will review your code, from which you can learn a lot.

Home office option. However, this will depend totally on your manager and your team. I have met folks who are allowed to permanently work from home, and on the other side, peers who are obligated to be in the office always during working hours.

Time flexibility. In general, you are allowed to take time to perform your personal/daily activities when required, and arrive late or leave early when needed (e.g., when you need to pick up your children from school, or when you have a medical appointment).

Of course, this is under the assumption that you will have to respond when there is urgent work that needs to be taken care of, like when some urgent bug arrives or when there is an urgent deadline, even if it is 3 am.

So, more than a defined work schedule from 9 to 6, instead you need to include and mix your daily activities with your work. It’s a flexible schema, but maybe not good for everyone.

I would say that the work environment within the members of the teams is a big plus. Almost everyone is very cooperative, and it feels like you were working with your friends from college.

A big amount of developers and managers are based in India. This means that as a CT time developer, more often than not, you will find yourself waiting at midnight for a meeting or waiting to talk to someone who needs to approve or review something. This sometimes gives you the feeling that you’re always working.

Also, this sometimes creates slow communication, as you sometimes need to wait a full day for a response to a simple question.

However, on the positive side, if your team has an on-call rotation, this comes in handy, as urgent issues can be worked on at night without the need that you don’t sleep.

Very few teams in Mexico are the ones actually building new stuff, as most of the core development is done in the USA and India. Chances are that you will probably maintain and enhance legacy code for most of your time.

Experience and pressure vary a lot from team to team. There is no standard. I know guys who work 14 hours per day, including weekends, and on the contrary, there are other teams who barely have work.

Expect no documentation or training. However, this is not particular to this firm. You should expect to be dropped right away on hot and priority issues without any mentoring or previous training, which tends to be very stressful.

Salary raises and promotions are hard to obtain. There is not a policy about obligatory annual increases. The bar is very high, and you need very great visibility to get a promotion, which is often difficult if you work in a team that develops internal tools. Positions that impact customers are the most likely ones to help you get a promotion, but they will also be the stressful ones.

It’s difficult to change from the development path to the manager path. Usually, the only way you could get promoted to a manager position is if your previous manager leaves the firm and you are chosen to be the replacement.

In summary: This is a very great company to start your career or if you want a very stable environment with good benefits and flexible schedules, where you can learn a lot if you want to. It’s not so good if you expect to increase your salary income within a few years or change to the manager path.

More effort should be put into having each product very well documented and into creating good training programs for newcomers.

It’s a very common case that a senior developer leaves the company, and no one else has any idea of how his products work, which requires a lot of effort from the teams to reverse-engineer his work.