Goodbye, Oracle

Oracle Campus, seen from trail outside my apartment.

After working in Oracle Public Cloud for 2.5 years, today this journey comes to an end.

I got the opportunity when the college hiring season almost ended, back in 2013 summer. Ying, my later-would-be manager, extended me offer after an onsite interview. I became the third, and last hire from the team that year, and soon started real coding work after I joined. I joined the team while Oracle committed to transform itself to a Cloud-first company. The team is working on Oracle Public Cloud’s deployment infrastructure. There are always new requirements coming in, new service types going alive, and expansion of market-share requires robust, scalable infrastructure. I am lucky to be in part of it, make it possible to generalize different service types so that our architecture won’t change due to some specific requirements, yet make it possible to have them fit into our big picture without effort. I personally support 30 or so different service types, many of them demoed by Oracle president in annual Oracle Open World. It’s proud that my work is highly visible to top executives, and well recognized among different service teams.

I also feel lucky that I work in a team that everyone is smart, willing to help and supportive. We work on different features but work closely to make sure the implementation is reasonable, no regression would be caused, and automation test would cover new code. We review each other’s code so all would benefit from each other. We talk about technical books and courses. We go to gym together. We have fun together in team lunch, movie and outing, have birthday cakes and snacks. Just like close friends hanging out together.

There are bitter moments, there are sweet moments. Like I was called when dining with friends to help DevOps, but made Ops guys pretty happy when I wrote a simple Python script to solve their big problem. I was sought after by different teams at the same time when I was busy with my own stuff, I was treated after I helped them. I joined long meetings which my senior director dominated and kept talking, yet I took many notes from his knowledgeable, convincing words and learned a lot. By the way, my senior director, graduated from MIT and won championship in a national ski tournament, is extremely tech-savvy, always able to figure out the real requirements, take acceptable change and push back unreasonable ones, and reach an fit-for-everyone solution.

I live close to Oracle campus, just 10 minutes walk away. I can see the campus from my patio, which is a great view. Although I have to leave for my next journey, I would not forget my great experience at Oracle.

Good luck, to Oracle, and to me.