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> Oracle will only give interviews to people with a degree from their small list of Ivy-tier universities. That's only for new grads with no work experience.

> Oracle will only give interviews to people with a degree from their small list of Ivy-tier universities. That's only for new grads with no work experience. It's a stupid policy, but in my corner of the company we generally made good hiring decisions. I disagree that the company has a lot of useless academics. IME, engineering and product management are full of very smart, capable, hard working people, some of them genuinely brilliant.

kettlecorn 8y ago
> Oracle will only give interviews to people with a degree from their small list of Ivy-tier universities. I cannot imagine that a company with a healthy culture could allow such a boneheaded policy to persist.
- nate_meurer 8y ago
  I agree, not healthy. You know what's more fucked up? Not long after I joined, just after the Sun acquisition, I learned that my previous company was dissolving, and I handed a dozen resumes to my then-director (different director from the one in my other comment; this was a guy who's no longer with Oracle). I don't take referrals lightly, because my reputation is at stake too. In this case, most of my former colleagues were H1-B from India, all of them highly experienced, expert software engineers, dedicated workers, established long-term residents, and personally delightful. These are people I can recommend for any job and I know they'll make me proud. My boss refused to even look at these men's resumes. It was never said out loud, but I was made to believe that there was an informal policy at Sun/Oracle at that time, that non-citizens would not be considered for employment, and my boss justified it by saying, "there are enough Americans who need jobs". Of the three white guys I referred, two were hired. How's that for unhealthy? Edit: Going through my old emails, it actually looks like I went 3 for 6 on the white guys. Nevertheless... [edit: needlessly inflammatory comment removed].
  - raincom 8y ago
    I thought Oracle likes H1-B folks. Even Dept of Labor filed a lawsuit against Oracle alleging that Oracle underpays H1B employees.
    - nate_meurer 8y ago
      Could be, I don't know. My view of the machine was very small.
  - tuesdayrain 8y ago
    > Of the three white guys I referred, two were hired. How's that for unhealthy? I feel like you're trying to turn this into a race or gender issue when that isn't necessarily relevant. Like your boss said, maybe he really does just prefer to hire Americans and the race/gender is irrelevant to him.
    - nate_meurer 8y ago
      Yeah, no. One of the guys I referred had a green card, been here for years, started a family here. He has an Indian name, but he's as American as I am. Didn't matter. Boss wouldn't consider him. Edit: What you said is a reasonable proposition. Nationalism and racism can be distinct from one another. But in this case, given the treatment of my green-card bearing friend and the tone of the brief discussions I had with the boss, it seemed clear to me that some amount of outright racism was at work.
      - thucydidesofusa 8y ago
        If someone is so nationalist that they make hiring decisions based on the needs of America, it's easy to imagine that they have a preference for citizens or better yet to the nationalist, natural born citizens.
sanderjd 8y ago
What honestly confuses me is why people of that caliber continue to work for Oracle when everybody has read umpteen stories like the OP and lots of us even know people who can attest to the toxicity of the company first hand. The usual counterbalance to a company treating employees like crap is that it tarnishes the company's reputation, making it harder to find talent. Oracle's reputation has been below rock bottom for my entire career, so why are all these great people you speak of still taking jobs there? As far as I can tell the compensation there is pretty standard, so it doesn't seem like they're just buying people off. Maybe you can shed some light on this for me.
- MrTonyD 8y ago
  I was a PM at Oracle - our team VP reported to Larry. Everybody I worked with was very experienced and very sharp. On the other hand, we regarded most of the company as "sheep" who executed our plans. Completely expendable and generally unenlightened. Obviously there were other bright people around the company, but by and large they had no clue about our strategy or direction or the way that real decisions were made (and we kept a lot of the real reasons for things secret - we didn't want competitors to know what we were really doing or why.) You don't become a business the size of Oracle by being completely stupid. One example - since then I've worked for about 5 or 6 companies who boast about how they hired Oracle salespeople, so now they are energizing their sales. But at Oracle we spent a lot of time and effort at HQ doing things to make Sales and the Salespeople effective. So at company after company they can't figure out why hiring the "right" Salespeople isn't solving their problem. But they aren't doing any of the things that we did to support Salespeople (things throughout the rest of the company and outside the company.) We kept most of it secret from Sales, so even they didn't really know what we were doing. So are the Sales people smart? Yes. And are they sheep? Yes. Similar arguments apply to most of the other PMs outside of core database (who companies also mistakenly hire to "turbocharge" their products), most of the Engineering groups, most of the support teams, and generally everybody outside a relatively small group of people.
  - nate_meurer 8y ago
    See, this just proves what I said in another comment -- that the different parts of Oracle are like completely different companies. I don't doubt what you say. But in ZFSSA QA, it was the opposite. Our director held regular all-hands meetings specifically meant to keep us all up to date on product strategy and direction. She wanted all of us to know exactly how our efforts were contributing to product revenue and to the company's strategic goals. Detailed stuff that made us (me, anyway) feel important. I've actually never seen anything like it anywhere else I've worked, even startups.

kettlecorn 8y ago

> Oracle will only give interviews to people with a degree from their small list of Ivy-tier universities. I cannot imagine that a company with a healthy culture could allow such a boneheaded policy to persist.

nate_meurer 8y ago
I agree, not healthy. You know what's more fucked up? Not long after I joined, just after the Sun acquisition, I learned that my previous company was dissolving, and I handed a dozen resumes to my then-director (different director from the one in my other comment; this was a guy who's no longer with Oracle). I don't take referrals lightly, because my reputation is at stake too. In this case, most of my former colleagues were H1-B from India, all of them highly experienced, expert software engineers, dedicated workers, established long-term residents, and personally delightful. These are people I can recommend for any job and I know they'll make me proud. My boss refused to even look at these men's resumes. It was never said out loud, but I was made to believe that there was an informal policy at Sun/Oracle at that time, that non-citizens would not be considered for employment, and my boss justified it by saying, "there are enough Americans who need jobs". Of the three white guys I referred, two were hired. How's that for unhealthy? Edit: Going through my old emails, it actually looks like I went 3 for 6 on the white guys. Nevertheless... [edit: needlessly inflammatory comment removed].
- raincom 8y ago
  I thought Oracle likes H1-B folks. Even Dept of Labor filed a lawsuit against Oracle alleging that Oracle underpays H1B employees.
  - nate_meurer 8y ago
    Could be, I don't know. My view of the machine was very small.
- tuesdayrain 8y ago
  > Of the three white guys I referred, two were hired. How's that for unhealthy? I feel like you're trying to turn this into a race or gender issue when that isn't necessarily relevant. Like your boss said, maybe he really does just prefer to hire Americans and the race/gender is irrelevant to him.
  - nate_meurer 8y ago
    Yeah, no. One of the guys I referred had a green card, been here for years, started a family here. He has an Indian name, but he's as American as I am. Didn't matter. Boss wouldn't consider him. Edit: What you said is a reasonable proposition. Nationalism and racism can be distinct from one another. But in this case, given the treatment of my green-card bearing friend and the tone of the brief discussions I had with the boss, it seemed clear to me that some amount of outright racism was at work.
    - thucydidesofusa 8y ago
      If someone is so nationalist that they make hiring decisions based on the needs of America, it's easy to imagine that they have a preference for citizens or better yet to the nationalist, natural born citizens.

sanderjd 8y ago

What honestly confuses me is why people of that caliber continue to work for Oracle when everybody has read umpteen stories like the OP and lots of us even know people who can attest to the toxicity of the company first hand. The usual counterbalance to a company treating employees like crap is that it tarnishes the company's reputation, making it harder to find talent. Oracle's reputation has been below rock bottom for my entire career, so why are all these great people you speak of still taking jobs there? As far as I can tell the compensation there is pretty standard, so it doesn't seem like they're just buying people off. Maybe you can shed some light on this for me.

MrTonyD 8y ago
I was a PM at Oracle - our team VP reported to Larry. Everybody I worked with was very experienced and very sharp. On the other hand, we regarded most of the company as "sheep" who executed our plans. Completely expendable and generally unenlightened. Obviously there were other bright people around the company, but by and large they had no clue about our strategy or direction or the way that real decisions were made (and we kept a lot of the real reasons for things secret - we didn't want competitors to know what we were really doing or why.) You don't become a business the size of Oracle by being completely stupid. One example - since then I've worked for about 5 or 6 companies who boast about how they hired Oracle salespeople, so now they are energizing their sales. But at Oracle we spent a lot of time and effort at HQ doing things to make Sales and the Salespeople effective. So at company after company they can't figure out why hiring the "right" Salespeople isn't solving their problem. But they aren't doing any of the things that we did to support Salespeople (things throughout the rest of the company and outside the company.) We kept most of it secret from Sales, so even they didn't really know what we were doing. So are the Sales people smart? Yes. And are they sheep? Yes. Similar arguments apply to most of the other PMs outside of core database (who companies also mistakenly hire to "turbocharge" their products), most of the Engineering groups, most of the support teams, and generally everybody outside a relatively small group of people.
- nate_meurer 8y ago
  See, this just proves what I said in another comment -- that the different parts of Oracle are like completely different companies. I don't doubt what you say. But in ZFSSA QA, it was the opposite. Our director held regular all-hands meetings specifically meant to keep us all up to date on product strategy and direction. She wanted all of us to know exactly how our efforts were contributing to product revenue and to the company's strategic goals. Detailed stuff that made us (me, anyway) feel important. I've actually never seen anything like it anywhere else I've worked, even startups.