Company: Oracle
Date: 2011-05-10
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former

Great place to stamp your resume, but not a company where you can grow a long-term career.
Pros: Actively encourages working from home for most employees - they don't care where you live.  This gives you a ton of flexibility in your personal life.

You can entertain yourself with the occasional pet project that you find interesting, but you should treat it as more building your portfolio rather than expect it to take off inside the company (there's a lot of red tape and consensus building required  to push any creative or new thinking up the management chain so most creative or inventive projects often die on the vine)

Being able to say you work for Oracle

Mostly  intelligent and hard-working colleagues - everyone is generally a B+ (not bad for so huge a place)

You can learn about technologies and aspects of the IT footprint you have little knowledge of through osmosis

Lots of options for benefits, and pretty good employee discount programs (Audi, Apple, etc)

Good place to take shelter in during a recession provided you can prove you're adding value

Good place to re-charge your batteries if you're burned out from previous jobs and need time to re-group.

This is also likely a really good place for new Mom's or Dad's  to hang out that need to be at home while waiting for their kids to start school full time.  Your career trajectory will still look good (because of the Oracle brand) but you won't be so consumed by work that you can't do what you need to do at home (plus you'll be working from home if you prefer).  Then when you and the kids are ready, you can leave for something more challenging  to get back on your career path (it's true and, not being cynical! Many people at Oracle do exactly this!).
Cons: Title and Salary Don't Move: 
There's a reason why Oracle has some of the best profit margins in the Fortune 500 and that's because they keep the organizational structure VERY flat (there won't be many people between you and Ellison or Hurd, which is really funny to see) and there are very few people in the company that are empowered to promote people or give them a raise.  Chances are your manager has no authority to promote you or give you a raise - regardless of how much they value you.  This keeps things nice and flat for Oracle while maintaining payroll costs,but you can be pretty sure that the salary and title you come in with will be the salary and title you'll leave with.  Also, cost of living adjustments are almost non-existent so you effectively will experience earnings power degradation if you stay 4-5+ years.  Now, there is an exception to this.  If you come in and you end up on a sales comp plan, you can make a lot of money here, but if you're not on a sales plan, your should plan for a flat salary/title trajectory during your tenure.  

No Career Development Programs:  
What has always been shocking is that there is no "High Potential Employee" program at Oracle like most other Fortune 500 companies.  This should tell you quite a lot about Oracle's attitude towards career development.  Also, there is no program for helping you move around inside the company (only an internal job board). So if you think that once you get here you can move around into other business units you'll be disappointed.  If you're looking to switch jobs internally you need to know someone who wants you and has authority to move you (keep in mind: Networking outside your immediate team or business unit is very difficult here because chances are you'll be working remotely).  Otherwise, if you see a position elsewhere in the company that you'd like to try, you might as well be coming in as someone who currently doesn't work for Oracle.  The fact that the company doesn't have any formal employee development or job rotation program (pre-recorded webinars and an internal job board do not count) is really quite crazy since it's a lot cheaper than giving raises or dealing with attrition because it does help people feel like they're being recognized or being rewarded in some way for their efforts.

Duplicate effort, too much socialization required to get anything done, internal teams competing with each other, ill defined roles and responsibilities: 
 It's not like this is a secret since Oracle is well known for having multiple sales people calling on the same account with none of them knowing this about the other, but this problem is much more toxic inside the company.  It's not like every large company doesn't suffer from these dynamics, but because of the way the organization is structured, if you are someone that gets a lot of satisfaction from owning and delivering a project from start to finish, you're going to spend a fair amount of time being frustrated and held up by other employees that think they have a right/responsibility to weigh in.  Decision rights can be pretty unclear, but the WORST aspect of this is that you spend a A LOT of time selling things internally and making everyone feel heard versus actually executing on a project. A lot of times, you'll start out with a deliverable that in the ends up looking nothing like what you started off with, and it's not a better deliverable, it's a deliverable with a lot of compromises.  I guess it's almost like getting a Bill through Congress in that regard.  Also, because of this dynamic, many projects simply fizzle or disappear (this is pretty demoralizing after a few years).

Marketing at Oracle means "Marketing Communications" and not the "Marketing" that a Product Marketing professional practices
With everything else above to consider, if you have a product marketing background and are looking to practice this at Oracle, you're going to be pretty disappointed (although see the Pro's about working here since everything is a tradeoff)  The heads of Marketing at Oracle are great event planners, and know how to make a big splash with the brand, but that's really the only thing they are focused on.  The CMO is really not a CMO, but really the Chief Event Planning and Marketing Communications Officer (and she does a great job at it!).  This is in no way a sleight, but positioning, messaging, and market analysis are really orphans within Oracle.  I think this is because the most exectives running the business units and the Sr. Execs don'tt feel like they need to worry about these aspects of marketing given Oracle 's size and market dominance.  This is good for Oracle, but not good for your career!