TLDR; I joined as an IC4 early last year. Wanted to create a post with unbiased feedback as OCI is trying to hire too many engineers since last two months. Hoping this may help a few who are interested to learn about the OCI. I joined OCI with these expectations: 1. Majority of the azure fundamental services have already been built. So I wanted to try a place hoping I can learn building these fundamental services (tier-0). 2. I wanted to build core distributed systems which I was not able to do at my previous job at MS as they have already been built, we were simply using them. 3. Obviously to move out of Microsoft stack. Reality: 1. Most the tier-0 services has been built already. Most of the folks who built the initial services left the company. With the experience that they gained, they got to the staff level mostly at FANG or Unicorns. 2. Tools are basic at the best. I am so much in love with kusto (azure log analytics solution). Logging and tracing at OCI - people know jack shit about this. And they care the least about it and no investments made to improve it what so ever. (Azure was in similar situation back in 2013, when kusto was just being built). I heard some of the teams built some in-house solution to make things better, but there is no org wide push for the same. I dont think upper management is taking it serious enough. 3. Their vision for touch less region build is good, but the execution is messed up to the core. People are the VP levels wanted to get this thing done quick and dirty. I am pretty sure they had a good reason to put engineers through this pain. But it totally messed up junior engineers morale. And on-call because of it is a mess too. I personally know nothing about TORB yet I am on call for it. 4. CI/CD needs a huge improvement. After using visual studio online for several years, I see the tooling they have is sub-par compared to what I worked at Microsoft. 5. Some teams tend to work in silos. This is the most I hate. You will know what the team is working but you wont know the design choices they made. 6. Least of all, I cannot proudly say that I work for Oracle :). Why I enjoy my work? 1. Solving scaling problems is a huge challenge. I am happy that I am working on real world problem with scaling rather than reading designing data intensive applications (which is a nice book of-course) 2. Whatever component I touch, there is something new that I learn and I find a way to make it better. I implement that too. I like this freedom. 3. Less politics compared to what I faced in Microsoft. Teams that I have been at Microsoft had the least politics btw. I don't see much of the politics in my entire organization. (I cannot reveal the org name as that would reveal my identity) 4. People are smart. On an average I see people are smarter compared to what I worked with before. 5. This is applicable mainly to me. I like moving away from .Net stack to java/go etc. 6. I got generous refreshers this year way more than what I was expecting. I heard people got much more than what I got. I don't know how it would be next year how it was the year before I joined. But so far so good. Following are my advice. 1. Anyone who are planning to join OCI, needs to be aware of the fact that you wont have rich tooling as they are still young. Obviously with time they will get mature. But if you want to work on the best tooling, then OCI is not the place. 2. You need to either be a leader or a follower. By leader I meant, you either take a lead on a system design or component design and get it funded. Or you follow the leader who do it. If you are not both, you are at the discretion of your manager to get the best work which you wont most of the time as leaders/followers will be doing it. 3. Ops is a mess. I am sure this will get better as thats how teams evolved so far in my experience. But it will be a mess for next few months particularly for the services that are already out. Good thing is you wont be 24x7 ops in most of the teams as they have presence in India. I used to do 24x7 back in MS. If you are not looking for ops overload, choose a greenfield project which are being built. There is a lot of greenfield projects happening as well. 4. Promotions are purely based on impact. If you are someone who think that you may need to get promoted because you stayed in the team for 'n' years, you will be disappointed. 5. You might be able to coast, but you wont get much of a growth. 6. If you are a motivated engineer and wants to make a difference, you will grow much faster in here. 7. If you expect good work come your way, you may not get it most of the time. This is true with atleast Microsoft as well. Not sure about Amazon as I never worked there. 8. Least of all if you think brand name matters the most, then you may not be liking it here. But if you think learning matters you will learn how and how not to build a distributed system at the least when we are hitting a scale limit as most of the services need to scale now. Ask me anything!, hoping I can answer best to my knowledge. Though I cannot reveal my org. PS: I am not getting paid for posting this and I am not a HR. I dont think OCI HR would be spending time to create this post when they dont even spend time to respond to candidates :) But my vested interest is that we will get some good engineers to join my team. TC: ~500K YOE: 12 #oci #oracle #engineering #swe #software #feedback #compensation
So, as an Indian thinking about oci - nope?
Does it make any difference?
Sorry for the unhelpful question. Let me rephrase - assuming you're in the us, do you know if any good work gets sent to oci India or is it mostly ops and maintenance
Very nice post OP and congratulations to you for receiving great refreshers. I agree with most of the things you mention here. The biggest thing people coming from big tech need to realize is that they would definitely feel the pinch of not being able to proudly announce their place of work. I didn’t think much about this in the beginning but it started bothering me ~6 months in. Unfortunately the refreshers were pathetic for me even after crushing the ratings which made me look outside. Overall a nice place to be in if you’re looking for learning and money, and don’t mind bad oncall.
Oracle is probably tier 1 only below Google in prestige
Thank you beinghuman, I personally feel losing a talent by not giving fair pay is the worst that can happen to a company like OCI as talent is what they are short of. I am very sorry to hear this. Good luck with next challenge!
Hey, I would like to interview for OCI. Planning to interview around end of February. Can I get a referral?
Sure, please dm your LinkedIn, I will ask my org leader to reach out to you
Sent!
Are you a pmts or cmts? Heard that every one won’t get refreshers at OCI. Is that true?
Pmts, yes that’s what I heard as well. Atleast comment from above confirmed it.
Nice that you got it. Do you work in Seattle and with which group?
Is it true OCI uses AWS for some components? And why
Most of the process and naming are based off Amazon. I don’t think we are using Amazon components. IMO, using even open source has its cons. We may be able to bootstrap quicker but maintenance would be a hell.
Also I burnt the bridge with OCI by mistake back in 2019, so you think they will blacklisted me forever?
I don’t know. If you are interested in applying DM your LinkedIn profile I can refer you
Hi thanks for the write-up. Was looking for something like this. For IC4 what are the expectations ? Is to to lead a small team or just a senior IC in the team ? I mean do you have to manage sprint, stakeholders for the project etc as well. I have an IC4 offer and contemplating joining.
IC4 you are expected to drive a larger feature end to end leading junior engineers. You are more expected to do the design and let the junior engineers code and learn from you and grow. Impact is mainly calculated based on how complex the design and how many junior engineers got better by working with you. You are expected to learn and lead the product to grow into IC5.
Thanks. Were you doing a similar role in Microsoft or were you levelled up by OCI ?
Do you know good orgs in US for junior engineers? From what I see in all teams it's ops work most of the time. And it's even without oncalls, that are also very hectic
I heard good things about security org. That being said, based on my observation, every service that has already been built will have ops load until they start forming SRE teams. And most important, tracing is subpar in OCI which is causing on-call to be stressful. My 2 cents, you either move to green field projects, which I heard happening a lot in security org or you lead the change to improve on-call this can get you promoted pretty quick.
Op, thanks for insights. What is expectation from an IC5? Ratio of IC5 to IC4 in a team/group? Do teams share IC5’s across them?
I noticed one or two IC5 for all IC4s in the teams that I noticed. IC5 gets involved in design reviews across the org along with driving the overall architecture for the team you work for. You can still code but based on my observation that is not the highest priority for you. But you are expected to build/have deep knowledge on the tech stack and architecture that you are working on. You mentor and grow ic4 and down.
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