Pros
There are some nice people that work here, and it's been fun to meet people from many different cultures. There are some people who are willing to help and have made some sacrifices to do so. The work itself is engaging when I know how to do it. It's fun to help people. It's nice that I can order the equipment I need without much fuss. We've had some fun activities. I have of course heard of the new approachable Oracle and I have some hope that things will slowly get better. Oracle looks great on a resume. Generous paid time off.
Cons
There are also a few jerks. After sitting through several months of training videos that make no sense, I am thrown into helping customers with the most massive piece of software and basically expected to train myself and maintain a high customer satisfaction rating. I am having to rely on coworkers who are already stretched too thin, and documentation that is sparse and threadbare, if I can find it. Often it is not searchable or understandable to a noob like me. It is missing steps, and often is ten years old, written way before many iterations of the software. There are many things that the documentation refers to but does not explain. For example, it may say that a field exists and can't be changed, but no attempt is made to explain what changes will do. The training videos dump me into very advanced content. It's like throwing a kindergartener into a chemical engineering class. It's not that the kindergartener is stupid, it's just that they have no basis for what is being taught. The software itself is embarrassing, missing functionality that existed in the desktop version, and I'm amazed at how nonintuitive it is - i.e. don't put the iteration number in the field that says iteration number or the system will reject, and do you see the tiny icon that is greyed out? Yes, that's what you should click on. Counterintuitive is the new intuitive, I guess. What used to be able to be done on one screen is now done in many different places throughout the software, with each screen taking a long time to load. So now users can do some of the same functions, only with more steps. Even things that look like they should work, as in all the pieces are there, don't. My coworkers, who aren't given raises and are now not allowed overtime, are expected to train me in between working their own SRs and dealing with customers who are understandably impatient. Many of them are impatient, and would rather spend time telling me that I should know something or figure it out, than to teach me and help me understand. I have never worked so hard to learn so little, and when someone is kind enough to really help me, I find myself wondering if I should send them an enormous gift basket. I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to test the software only to find out later that I was going in a terribly wrong direction - I would say misguided, but often I am left to my own devices. I'm embarrassed when I talk to customers and with a few minutes it's very apparent to them that I don't know what I'm doing. I'm embarrassed that it takes so long to give them an action plan. When I talk to friends about Oracle, they often say that their software tends to combine new technology in some places with old clunky programming in others, and this is certainly the case. Drag and drop doesn't exist yet and what sounds like a simple task can take hours and sometimes days. As one developer friend of mine put it, "Oracle doesn't hire programmers, they hire attorneys". Managers are typical of most companies, loyal to the bureaucracy. It seems everyone there has a story of how they've been treated terribly by one of the managers, and I can't say I'm an exception. One manager even glares at me as I walk around the building - I don't even know her! My computer came in a box along with all the peripherals, and when I didn't know how to set it up I was once again at the mercy of coworkers who already had lots to do. I constantly feel like I'm stealing time from others in order to get my work done and I hate that. It is company policy that work must be done in the office. I'd love to live someplace cheaper - I'm not getting paid that much and can't anticipate a raise. Often when on calls, one can hear people in the background, sometimes so loud that they seem to be part of the call, and we start trying to respond to them or ask them to clarify, and the person we need to be listening can't be heard. The building is often an uncomfortable temperature. Some rooms are too hot, some are too cold, space heaters aren't allowed. As far as the new approachable Oracle goes, many of the managers and people who really know the software are very unapproachable. Their knowledge is essential, but they really take the attitude of telling the rest of us to go figure it out. That means that the few rock-stars who are willing to help are stretched very thin. When someone comes in to teach a class, sometimes the tech doesn't work and then they're ornery because of the inconvenience. This makes it harder for everyone involved. No bonus - too big to fail means too big to care, and all the money is going to senior management.
