Opower Reviews

Cons

Working at Opower/Oracle was one of the most disheartening experiences of my professional life. Much like a toxic relationship, it was so surreal that it took distance to recognize how manipulative and evil it was. This is no longer a startup that cares about the environment or your career development. Product teams called "tribes" as in tribal warfare, were organized to fight against each other for resources or to get initiatives on the sacred roadmap. It was impossible to get anything built because the engineering teams were incorrectly staffed. The development department is a poster child for "full stack dilettante" any specialization was circa 1990. User testing, research, and data science are nonexistent, they fired that entire department before the acquisition, all that's left is a shell of its former self. The design and engineering teams, operate like a molasses waterfall. Management will lie to you about promotions here and there, oh next year we'll have the budget. They'll also interview prospective hires, tell them the job has closed, then weeks later tell them it's open again. The only way to become promoted is by sheer chance or by counter offering. Expect to be stuck on the one project forever. Want to take initiative and lead another project? They'll hire someone else to do that and keep you in your silo. On the plus side: the nice thing about the level of effort expected is you did not need to show up for work. So work life balance was a major plus, nobody cared and you could coast along into oblivion or just… work from home… Think you can use google drive, or dropbox, or anything modern? Think again! Oracle's tyrannical stronghold on being a monolith extends into its totalitarian culture: home brewed horrifying mail client from 1990 check, oradocs (aka bad google drive which misplaces documents) check, impossible to use expense reporting tool check.

Cons

-your happiness will depend heavily on which team you get staffed on. There are some highly under-resourced teams that result in frustration and burn-out among employees.