I only have experience with the former Sun storage bits: Solaris, ZFS, storage appliance, networking. I worked in a former Sun building, and with just one exce

I only have experience with the former Sun storage bits: Solaris, ZFS, storage appliance, networking. I worked in a former Sun building, and with just one exception everyone in the chain between me and Larry was a Sun employee. Sun was a really cool place to work. The periodic demoralizing layoffs were a bummer, but they didn't seem toxic; it was common for people to come right back, sometimes back to their same offices, after the company started hiring again. Sun's technology was hugely attractive. Solaris was the best Unix. ZFS, dtrace, etc. Dozens of other projects and thousands of people doing cutting edge work. Even the older stuff like tape and SAM/QFS was really cool to work on. The fact that so much of it was open source gave me a moral imperative to contribute, and I know a lot of other people felt the same. I think the shear awesomeness of the technology that Oracle inherited from Sun (and other companies) drove the demand for Oracle jobs at that site for years after the acquisition. Oracle has done their best to squander this good will, and I won't be surprised if they find it harder to attract talent going forward. I'd say the company did not generally treat us little guys like crap. I had great bosses, except for the last one, who I suspect was a hit man hired specifically to thin the ranks. Overall, I feel I was treated fairly, perhaps even better than I deserved. This is actually a pretty lame answer, sorry. My experience was too narrow to give me any useful insight.