In my experience, this isn’t even close to an Oracle-specific practice. I thought it was widely-accepted wisdom that if you want to get a BIG raise, you have to shop around/move companies. We love to hope and pretend employers will act in our best interests, but at the end of the day the company only cares about its bottom line.

To be transparent, I am a white male American citizen. Considering how private most Americans treat salary information, I know almost nothing about how much my peers have been paid versus what I was paid at previous companies. I will say that I have heard of people making amounts of money that made me drool, and those people were across the whole range of color and gender. On the other hand, I have also known (very) junior developers who were grossly underpaid - multiple white males and I suspect their females and minority counterparts were underpaid as well.

It’s a problem, for sure. Racial income inequality is a problem and then there is the added problem that some of us just are not good at income negotiation and demanding fair or market pay. We trust the employer to give us what we deserve, when in reality, if the employer has a $120k upper limit on their hiring position, and you smile ear-to-ear at the first offer when they offer $90k; well, you just saved that company $30k per year.