Pros
- Respected company with a strong portfolio and customer loyalty - Vendor neutral approach to database integration. Attempts to support everything. This gives plenty of interesting customer opportunities and database types. Help mailing lists are really interesting. - The company maintains a strong presence in the new technologies: Cloud, Big Data, Salesforce.com. - The company was able to ride out the turmoil in the financial markets c. 2008 without reducing overall staff numbers. - Corporate culture includes standard features of California-based software companies - flexible hours, working from home, teams distributed across various geographic locations - On a couple of occasions in 2006 and 2010, engineers were treated to off-site trips as special rewards e.g. to Puerto Rico - Parts of the company retain the energy and "can-do" attitude of small start-up companies. - The company makes wide-spread use of multi-geographic teams with benefits for reduced development costs and 24 by 7 support. - In the past the company benefited from many exceptionally competent technical managers. - In recent years as the company has started to transition to a more mature management model with process-drive agile system.
Kontras
- There has been "churn" in middle management together with problems tackling technical issues, and especially in the estimation of the effort involved in large projects. Agile development does not work well if the base mandays are wildly wrong. - The workload of Top Level management is complicated by the need to amalgamate more than a dozen disparate start-up companies. - A gap is widening between the Top Level management and the core engineering teams. This is complicated by the number and complexity of systems. - There is a conflict between the company's attempt to be vendor-neutral and the fact that almost all managers come from Oracle. The blinkered Oracle-only approach constrains the head-count in teams trying to integrate non-Oracle systems. - A lot of time gets consumed in Webex meetings, meetings attended outside office hours affects the home work balance - The company relies on "superheros" who burn themselves out after a few years. Remuneration is good but your health may suffer - especially if you work in a team with head-count constraints. - It is not much fun working in a team faced with head-count reductions because of lost burn-out "superheros" in conjunction will deliberate redundancies. - The company relies on employees being fully-trained on external database systems when they join. It can be stressful trying to get up-to-date with stuff which has come out in the last year.