I work for Oracle (and I'm reasonably high-end in my niche - speak at conferences about it and stuff). None of their competitors were willing to consider remote work for the type of stuff I do. Oracle was OK with it. Hence, I work (remotely) at Oracle for the time being.

I'd have loved to take a job at a local startup, but of the limited local options for my skillset, none had salaries that would pay the mortgage....

The new cloud infrastructure group is kind of hidden gem. Its very different than the rest of Oracle. It started in Seattle about 4 years ago and is like 40% ex Amazon and 40% ex Microsoft.

They also pay very well, because Oracle doesn't have a great reputation.

The work is good, with a TON of room for growth and leadership.

The goal is ambitious (take on the big players) and well funded.

The people are good. Worklife is good.

They are also still hiring.

Why do you think Oracle has a chance at cloud? Honest question.

Their competition at the low end is Google, which doesn’t bode great on quality, and with AWS and Azure they’re fighting on quality and against strong enterprise groups. Not sure who would predict that would go well, but it’s a big market and I suppose they have to try.

I’ve seen Oracle cloud jobs and admittedly balked, no bone to pick with them but don’t see a bright future.

> Why do you think Oracle has a chance at cloud? Honest question.

Because Oracle still has an extremely large customer base, and an exceptionally good and extensive sales organisation that's really good at selling stuff to people.

The enterprise market is still not that well tapped by existing cloud providers. Look at the kinds of sales figures enterprise serving companies pull in, and consider that only a smaller fraction of them have moved to the cloud.

Anecdote: When OCI was announced ("Oracle Bare Metal Cloud") about 2 1/2 years ago, the staff who were there launching it at the Oracle conference had CIOs and the like coming up to them, even then, saying "So what really is this 'cloud' thing"

> I’ve seen Oracle cloud jobs and admittedly balked, no bone to pick with them but don’t see a bright future.

Succeed or fail, it's still interesting work. It pays well. Flexible on hours. Good co-workers, good sense of direction. Lots of interesting problems to solve. None of the bullshit "work everyone to the bone" that I kept seeing in AWS. Good opportunities to make a difference.

In all honesty, I was burned out at AWS and thought "Well.. I've put up with absolute hell in prior tech jobs, and have built up a reasonable resume. I can always move on if it turns out to be hell". My expectations were pretty low. I knew the director I was going to be working for, having worked with him in AWS, and knew he actually gave a damn about operations. It turns out to have been one of the better career decisions I've made. Which is definitely not anything I would have associated with a job working for Oracle.

I feel so old because to me OCI means Oracle Call Interface, their DB client C API. I guess nobody cares that it may confuse people like me.

Oh wow... finally another person who has used it. I remember writing a C++ class library to wrap base OCI functions about 15 years ago.

No need to do that anymore because they now have their own C++ api, and it's called ... OCCI!

Yeah, that's one that keeps popping up over and over again, especially in google searches.

To me it means "Open Container Initiative".

Microsoft has a good and extensive sales organisation too. AWS has a massive head start. VMWare have a pretty solid lock in on-prem. And while all three have pissed in their customer's wells, none of them has poisoned customer wells quite so consistently and thoroughly as Oracle has for the past few decades.

Honestly as an individual contributor not holding any stock, what more can you ask for?

Whether the company's long term plan pans our or not is mostly irrelevant to whether you're able to do your best work.

So you are saying there were CIOs in 2017 that had no idea what cloud is?

Oracle has somewhat of a monopoly due to its Micros acquisition. A hotel group upgrading their servers for some Opera products are given their choice for "servers": Windows 2008 R2, Windows 8 (yes, for servers) or let Oracle run it in Oracle Cloud.

What are they calling “cloud”?

Netsuite does own the largest cloud-based ERP

Netsuite is owned by Oracle but is a separate business unit from Oracle Cloud.

I went through the recruitment process for a cloud role in their Bristol, UK office. It was bizarre. I was video interviewed by 3 of their people around Europe, but none seemed to have an idea of what they were trying to do or crucially what they wanted me to do.

The people I spoke to were technically proficient, but not driven in the same way you'd imagine a FAANG employee to be. I eventually gave up after the process dragged out too far. You can imagine Amazon / AWS being able to get away with this, but Oracle?

Don't know about Oracle, but in many big companies and especially FAANG, the people interviewing you usually have no idea what you're going to work on or what the team is working on. It's usually only the hiring manager who can give you such info. There are so many people and teams in every organization, and the people who interview you are usually people with the right skills that happen to be available in the time slots you provided. It's usually not the people you will work with.

Enjoy it while it lasts, but keep an eye out for the writing on the wall and move on when you see it. It is Oracle, after all

Is the work enjoyable? I would assume you have to use only Oracle branded solutions/tools which I am not sure is for everyone.

I work at OCI. It's a pretty good gig, all things considered. Just my two cents. There isn't a super strong push to use The One True Corporate Solution as you mention, by and large we're given a very free hand in terms of tech selection.

This is not true, when I was there each team could use whatever they wanted to build and deploy their services. Go, Python, Java, C++, etc. Literally anything was allowed. I have no idea now.

That is the same group this story is about ? Funny recommendation

Oracle is huge, and the different parts feel like completely different companies in some ways, with different cultures, paces, levels of cooperation, etc. The parts that used be Sun (where I worked) still felt very Sun-y for a decade afterward. I loved my job, never had a bad working relationship in all my experience with 0.1% of the company.

I currently work for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure; ex AWS for Commerce Platform and Identity organizations. Let me tell you, OCI has a group of brilliant, industry mature developers and people. I've been working here for 2 years, and I've never been happier before. This org is nothing like Oracle Corp; started by ex-AWS/MSFT people, the environment feels just like those companies + a well funded start-up hype.

And the best thing, no assholes and backstabbing like in AWS. :)

Can you expand on the AWS culture of backstabbing? (Serious question: Could that be due to the number of H1-B employees they have?)

If we compare software engineering to retail, not everyone can work for walmart (Google), but have to make do with the random dollar store chain (Oracle).

There is only so many decent jobs you know.

I despise Oracle. And yet if faced with a choice I'd work for Oracle without hesitation before working for Google or Facebook.

From an ethical perspective, Oracle is mean to tech (open source, buyouts and so on, mean licensing setups with companies). On the other hand, Google and Facebook seem to contribute more to tech while being absolutely vile to the general public. Cutesy yellow and green bicycles and thumbs up signs don't negate the societal harm these companies have done by vacuuming personal data and selling it at such scale.

Then again, what is moral? Finance ? Ad tech? And don't say government, IT there is a wreck and a waste (enter Oracle, IBM contracts to piss taxpayer money to).

We're highly paid for a reason unfortunately.

Higher Education, colleges and universities, are generally excellent work environments with excellent benefits. Depending on job, salary isn't always competitive with the tech sector though.

I work in higher ed. Salaries are nowhere near competitive. However, everyone I work with has opted for good work environment over money. Tends to lead to self-selection of nice people, even if they aren't "rockstars".

I knew a couple of people who worked at Stanford in various capacities (admissions, and administration, IIRC) -- and while I didnt understand what they were good at, or what they did per se, they were some of the more genuinely nice and honest than many people I have met.

My problem is that I am too naive to sharks and assholes.

I have met thousands and thousands of people in may 22 year career in tech. Of which a very very small number I am friends with still - as I find that many people are way more cunning and conniving than I allow myself to admit.

Also getting a cushy tenured position takes years of hard work, and the alternative is being a perpetual postdoc which is paid abysmally.

I'd choose "none of the above".

Unless you've got a mortgage, young kids, a family member to take care of, or you like to eat consistently.

I lot of people talk big about not taking those jobs, but those that actually follow through are extremely rare.

Raises hand.

I can absolutely with all honesty say that I would never work for a large company. I worked for a Fortune 10 (non tech) company for 3 years out of my 20 year career and I said never again. Large companies are too stifling and too regimented for me. Even if I didn’t have to move from my low cost of living area and a I was offered a job at a FAANG, I would say no.

Well with one exception, I might be willing to work for AWS as a consultant.

If you have the pick between Oracle, Google and Amazon, youd likely also have an offer at a different company. So its a valid choice.

I have all of those things, and I've followed though. I know lots of other quality devs who have done the same. I don't think people like us are as rare as you suppose. It's not like the job market is particularly tight, after all.

Sorry, but: This is nonsense. It's not like these are the only options, and you cannot get a comparable offer somewhere else.

Number 6 on the Forbes list of software companies, with a market cap of 176 billion. Their main product is very heavily used by a heck of a lot of companies. It's just a bit messy and configuration-intensive, so it doesn't get a lot of respect among the techerati.

A software engineer looking for work could do a lot worse.

None of that means they make great products. Have you ever dealt with their support or engineers? Ugh.

Not all of us are in a position to work only on great products.

My impression of Oracle products is that they are frustrating to work with, feature-rich rather than elegant. They can work well, but take a lot of configuring and tuning.

The ex-Oracle folks I've worked with have been a mixed bag. Their reports about working for Oracle have also been mixed, skewing toward the bad. I suspect the company is basically run by sales, not engineering, certainly not customer support.

If you’re a software engineer in the year of 2019, you’re not exactly hurtinv for opportunity.

I have seen both a well-implemented Oracle ERP and a poorly/non-implemented Oracle ERP.

It is both the best and worse SaaS I have ever used, though my company may be switching to NetSuite ERP soon (technically also now an Oracle product).

Oh that comparison is wonderful. I would suggest Dollar Tree for Oracle because it's reasonably successful at making money

Their motto: "Smellier than Dollar General, not as smelly as Family Dollar!"

If Google is Walmart, who is the high-end retail? Exciting startups?

I've done [tech] interviews for engineers out of Oracle and haven't been super impressed.

> What compelling reason does oracle even have to attract talent?

It used to be benefits. Back in 2005 (when I worked for them for a year) they had what I understood to be the 2nd best benefits plan in tech (just after Microsoft).

I can see why most people would think working for the "fucked by the cloud" companies[1] would be a terrible idea. But as others have said, those companies are huge, and they have pretty cutting edge R&D groups. Some of the business units still put out products with very nice growth and profit margins.

1 - https://www.wired.com/2015/10/meet-walking-dead-hp-cisco-del...

I recently interviewed somebody who's been working at Yahoo since the dawn of time. Some people just value stability.

According to rumor--lots and lots of cash.

I'm aware of at least one person who was a millionaire on Google RSUs in 2014 who got hired away by Oracle.

So much cash, I hear even more than a lot of FAANG offers.

DCO has been poaching anyone they can get from Amazon/Microsoft by offering higher salary. If you come from one of those or you know someone at oracle you're in.

I know DCO's that couldnt tell you how to find the ip of an interface that make 85k+/yr

Just a guess, may be some people need job and Oracle is offering one.

They’re a bodyshop