It might take you a year to find a new job, so how do you think a few months of severance is going to work out for you? Your Oracle skill set is dated and not in demand. Consider getting out now and don’t let Oracle victimize you again.
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So true @T8FY9Az-mdc
I winded up ditching EBS for the Cloud and am trying my darnest to pick up as much of it as quickly as possible in case the axe falls. I have been here over 15+ years and unless you want to do Fusion support, your options are limited. Moral of the story is make yourself marketable and know the up to date skills, not what you learned in Oracle to do your job.
The post from Anonymous | Post ID: @T8FY9Az-mdc was one of the most honest and insightful posts I have read on this site. May I also add that if you are not doing and learning different things each year at the company, then you don't have, say, 15 years of experience, but 1 year of experience that you happened to do 15 times over. I was laid off, and got a job with a better, more forward-thinking company for more money. Still banking my severance pay too.
@T8FY9Az-vop very true but you still need healthcare until Medicare kicks in. It's a calculated gamble. Good luck everyone !
The one exception here, is if you are close to retirement and you are just looking for a large bonus on your way out the door. You might have more chance of being laid off in that position and more to gain since you don't have to find the next job.
The severance may be a significant amount of money but remember you will now need to buy medical, dental and vision insurance for full price. Also you now have the emotional stress of unemployment, feeling of worthlessness as you get turned down from one company after another, so you don’t get to “enjoy” living off your severance.
From talking with former colleagues who have been at Oracle for 15+ years, they want the severance based on the assumption they'll get several weeks of pay for the base package and then another 1 week of pay per week of tenure. Plus any vacation pay, if they have any left to their credit (after Oracle changed the policy last year). Assuming that Oracle doesn't change the severance package "formula", that is a significant amount of money, so it isn't unreasonable to want to wait and see if one can get it.
However, whether one is waiting for severance or fed up and looking to leave, absolutely look at your skills and make sure that you are marketable. I cannot emphasize that enough.
I left on my own a while ago after spending time studying (e.g. Udemy, online tutorials, hands-on examples, published solution papers, free Cloud accounts) in order to update my skills. It was very enlightening to see how much Oracle is lagging behind the market with the exception of OLTP database and some aspects of business applications. It really is a bubble that is increasingly isolated from the rest of the world. I landed at a major Cloud company and there are some other ex-Oracle people here too, but not that many. I am now seeing Oracle employees interviewing -- either ones who have been let go or those who are trying to find a way out. Unfortunately, the vast majority get screened out due to a lack of basic technical knowledge of anything other than what they've worked with at Oracle. Let me emphasize that -- people with 15+ years of experience often show less knowledge, skill and promise than those with 5 years in the field. This is truly heartbreaking to see -- especially for those who have been involved in a layoff and are only now discovering that the position they were in at Oracle has limited their opportunity to get another job. Don't let yourself get into that position! Always keep yourself marketable.