Company: Oracle
Date: 2015-09-18
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

A few steps away from being a great place to work
Pros: -Private healthcare benefits:
-- Insured limits are high
-- Dental and vision coverage for the employee
-- Insures spouse and child (no vision or dental)
- Life insurance
- Car benefits probably one of the best in the country 
- Salaries are on par with the rest of the industry
- Can work from either European or the Asian side office
- Lots of career opportunities local or regional and managers support internal transfers
- Very open working environment. Even senior leaders have open door policy. No formal salutations.
- Successful Turkish leaders in the region
- Employees enjoy strong brand name
- Enables young employees to grow
Cons: - No annual salary raises! Some people get no raise for years. Very hard to get your manager to increase your salary. So negotiate very hard.
- Huge organization sometimes makes you feel tiny.
- A lot of instances where everybody is working but nobody is really doing anything
- Lots of directors and VPs who are more expensive to fire then keep (especially in Western Europe). They are just doing nothing.
- The number of people who support sales are more than the number of people who actually do sales.
- The legal and paperwork overhead is TREMENDOUS (can't stress this enough)
- Virtually impossible to find the information you need in the intranet. The intranet portal looks and performs like it is from 2 decades ago
- Most local leaders are there simply because they spent too much time at Oracle and know how the internal dynamics work. Rest of the industry have much more capable leaders. Some leaders only capitalize on the strong brand name.
- Not too many influential people in the country. However, there are some brilliant people and leaders in the region whom you'll look up to.
- The depth of the local organization is shallow. You might find your self locked-in at a position.
- A completely self-service organization. You can find yourself spending hours and days trying to fix a simple administrative issue. The number of local admin personnel is very low. Payroll, expenses, IT and all support departments are in other countries.
- If you are in sales, when closing a deal, you'll spend 30% of the overall effort with the customer. The rest is dealing with your manager, getting the approvals, making sure the contracts and other paperwork is in place and finally booking. The internal approval process can make you regret ever doing the sale!
- Apart from a few established products (like DB, Weblogic, engineered systems, etc), you'll have to deal with a lot of bad products. The product development organization is filled up with arrogant people (at all levels) who are completely disconnected from the field. 
- Some managers and directors doesn't know a world other than Oracle (working there for more than decade). This impairs some judgments and makes the egos run high