During my final year at the University I was, as a good student, actively looking for a company to hire me. Since I had good grades and I knew I was a great prospect, I went for companies that seemed to be the best for my future. By that I mean a company where I would learn a lot, have plenty of great mentors around me, offer a lot of possibilities for advancement and where resources would not be an issue. Let’s just say that my definition for that has changed quite a bit since I started working in a startup. Oracle seemed to offer all of this: plenty of senior developers around, plenty of management levels and I think it’s safe to say that Oracle isn’t short on money.

I applied at a few other companies but none seemed to offer the level of professionalism Oracle could offer (except Google but I did not get a position there). However, the Google story is for another post.

Everything was going well with Oracle, I had already applied there for an internship but I did not take the position because I had to accept or reject another job before I received any feedback from them (more about the internship process in a future post), however after 3-4 interviews I guess I was not doing too bad. I did all their interviews and after a lengthy process they told me I was chosen for the position. Unfortunately, there was a catch: I first had to go through their background investigation process which is standard procedure for big corporations and their headquarters in California (I was applying for a position in Montreal) had to approve the expense.

The background investigation took a lot of time because my references were either in vacation or did not know how to return a phone call (and I was in vacation so it was difficult to handle all the communications), but it finally came to an end positively. This was very tedious but it’s usually a fairly straightforward process which just happened to hit all the obstacles.

By the time the background investigation had ended (about two months after being told I was their candidate of choice) they had not yet received any new information about my approval from the headquarters. The office in Montreal could not hire me before this was completed and approved and my contact did not have access to information about the time frame this would take (or could not tell me). I was told this usually take a few weeks sometimes up to two months, but this had already taken over two months and they did not know how much longer it would take. Everything else was done and approved, all they needed was an approval for my salary.

I was optimistic that the approval request would eventually get through soon since everything else was done so I decided I would wait and take the free time as vacation. However the months passed and by mid-summer, four months after being “chosen”, I was running low on money and I finally gave up hope on them, I would have to find another job. Luckily for me, in a matter of two weeks I had found a new job and things turned out pretty good.

I did not hear from them for a month or two after being hired at Hint Innovation. My contact at Oracle called me in fall offering me the “chance” to apply for another position at Oracle. They didn’t offer me a job, they offered me the opportunity to waste my time again, just like last time.

No thanks.

P.S.: For those wondering about the error number, it’s the date of the post.