It's interesting hearing about people from other groups. You're definitely right in that there are very different cultures depending on division. I was asigned

It's interesting hearing about people from other groups. You're definitely right in that there are very different cultures depending on division. I was asigned relatively important tasks within a month or so of joining my team as I showed relatively high promise. Just a year after joining I'm essentially leading my own feature for the 12g release (a feature I proposed, no less). My biggest surprise is that there is still really interesting (at least to me) work to be done in the 30 year old RDBMS kernel. There's always places to innovate and my manager has always been encouraging of thinking of new ways to do it. But then again, I've never had the itch to work for a startup, so maybe I'm just suited for a rank-and-file job :)