Cons
1) Overworked, Underpaid: People work extreeeeemly late. 12 hour days consistently. It's a direct reflection of one of the executives who believes that work > life (or work = life). If you're assigned a QBR with this select executive, you will receive emails at all hours of the night and be expected to respond. It's very common to hear, "Oh that's just how [insert name] is!" Additionally, there is very little support on accounts. I kept hearing "We're hiring, we're working on it!" but the hiring process takes months if not years. Literally. Also, people are extremely underpaid. Raises are very, very rare. There are very few growth opportunities but people are told to believe in the vision and trust that things will work out.
2) Unhappiness: People are very unhappy at Moat cross-teams, cross-countries, cross-everything. Moat is powered by a culture of promises and fear. You are promised a place in the future, a place at Moat where you can achieve the "mecca of employment" that is almost within an arm's reach. However, you'll never actually reach that goal. When you start to think about leaving and address your concerns, they'll butter you up with some cheesy lines about how much they love you and your work, and simultaneously instill fear that you'll never find an opportunity like this again and you're giving up something really special. You then start believing this place is great and try to make it work (like an unhealthy relationship). Then you realize weeks later, "Hey wait, that's a lie!" Then you get convinced again it's "a great opportunity!" The cycle continues on and on, and sadly turnover has stayed remarkably low because of these manipulation tactics.
3) Weak Infrastructure: Similar to the above. There are limited growth opportunities at Moat. Managers are not equipped to make decisions that can benefit your career - most don't know much about management in general. The executives make all of the decisions and there is minimal transparency behind their decision-making. People truly believe they're going to grow but if your manager doesn't know how they can get promoted, how will you?
4) Small cog in a the corporate wheel: Moat was once a start-up and it had a lot of potential. It's now within a gigantic corporation called Oracle Data Cloud - ODC. There are many, many processes put in place that make your job difficult: an email platform called "Beehive" (Goodbye Outlook, Goodbye Gmail), a Portal to request badges for office access, a Portal for your expense reporting (a slow and tedious process riddled with various emails aliases and poorly executed automation I might add), a Portal to get the password to access the office internet which changes every single day, a Portal to ask for permission to use a restroom (just kidding, but probably). Some portals can only be accessed while on a VPN (another daily login opportunity). There are so many portals and processes in place that you cannot maintain an efficient workflow. These internal hiccups make communication across the organization difficult, lower team morale and add additional strain on your job. Oracle has acquired many companies and a lot of them contain inferior technology that haven't been updated since the 90's. A common answer to new hire questions about the internal inefficiencies: "That's just Oracle."
5) Social taboos: I'm a firm believer that if you want to drink, you're entitled to as long as it's not during work hours, it doesn't affect your job performance and you're respectful and responsible about it (duh). Drinking at Moat events is frowned upon. I felt judged for drinking at our company retreat as well as other company-sponsored events. I would never ask a company to promote drinking, but come on. You're going to make people feel bad about indulging in a cocktail because a certain executive is against drinking?
The list goes on and on. I want my voice to be heard since it was drowned out at my time at Moat. Power to the people!
