Career Advice About Oracle

In July, I received a mid-year evaluation indicating room for improvement, with a rating of 2 out of 5 on the scale. My goal is to achieve an outstanding rating by this time next year. Here are the areas my manager provided feedback on for improvement:

He is a college hire, so he is a very junior developer.  He is an enthusiastic member of the team and seems eager to make contributions. He has struggled to learn the fundamental skills required for the job (programming, database, web development).  He will need to improve upon these skills in order to make contributions to the team with little assistance from his peers.

One of my colleagues from university recently completed his final interview round with SDM & Senior SWE. It has been five business days since then, but he hasn't heard back about whether he was selected for the role. He mentioned that the interview was supposed to be with HackerRank but encountered issues, so they used Google Docs instead. He said the questions were exclusively on basic Java and little bit of algo. He completed all five questions, except for one where he didn't notice a bug in the line, and another where his syntax was incorrect, although his logic was sound. His recruiter has been consistently responsive, which I told him is a good sign. I want to know what is taking them so long, whether they are considering rejecting him because of his mistakes or if they are planning to give him an offer.

This question always stresses me because I'm a backend Python developer and the stuff I could learn is a lot that I end up studying/practicing nothing.

I use in my day to day: Python, Flask Docker, and Oracle. I don't know what else I could study or if I need to get better at these technologies.

I’ve recently been applying to various jobs, just in case of an unexpected layoff (golden parachute). Lately, I’ve been motivated to upskill as a developer. I’ve now reached the two-year mark at my company. After the reorg, I have a new manager, team, and director, and I really like this team. My performance over the past six months has been better than it was with my old team. Recently, Google reached out to me for an interview, but I haven’t really studied data structures and algorithms (DSA) due to work. My performance hasn’t been great, and now I also have a phone interview with Meta.

On the plus side, my company's stock has surged, and we’ve received bonuses, raises, and promotions. In my last 1-on-1 meeting with my manager, he told me I should be more independent and that my performance is great (hinting at a promotion)—fingers crossed. My family and friends are encouraging me to interview with both Meta and Google, but I don’t really want to leave my current company.