Company: Oracle
Date: 2021-03-19
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

College Graduates/Young Professionals Beware
Pros: I worked at Oracle for 3.5+ years. Started in the Class Of program when it included a trip to California. The company did a great job of introducing everyone to tech sales. Pre-Covid, Class Of was a good way to make friends and score some freebies. 

The people are one of Oracle's best assets. It's easy to network and make friends since most people are willing to help and don't act too pretentious.

You get to choose from a number of locations across the country. However, salaries are fixed so your dollar will probably go farther in Austin than in Santa Monica.

Bonuses/Commission rates used to be better and promotions used to be plentiful. It was fairly common for a BDC to get promoted to a closing role after 1+ year in seat. Wasn't unheard of for recent college graduates to be making close to 6 figures.

Benefits are pretty solid, nothing to complain about here.

Sales training is top-notch. However, only recently did the company start caring about giving its salespeople a strong technical foundation.

Overall, a lot of Oracle's pros can be found at any other large tech company.
Cons: Oracle is a behemoth of a company. You're just a number and any recognition you'll receive for doing a good job will be shortly met with a "what have you done for me lately?" mentality from your boss/director. 

Decision-making is a privilege reserved solely for upper management who rarely if ever step foot on the sales floor. For example, FY20 brought sweeping changes to OD Sales, with tons of people demoted without notice. I had 6 different managers my final year at the company. Sales here is a total revolving door.

Promotions are much harder to come by now as Covid led to several hiring freezes. The company would rather hire more Class Ofs for less money than promote internally or hire from the outside. Speaking of which, every account has upwards of 50 sales reps all calling into the same DBA, IT Manager, etc. so that by the time you reach out, you'll most likely be hung up on or sent straight to voicemail.

With promotions come minuscule 5% salary increases and unreasonable sales targets and commission rates.

BDCs, Inside Sales, and Field Sales, are often pitted against each other due to asinine territory management plans. Instead of working together to sell across product verticals, sales reps have to horde opporunity intelligence to ensure they can hit their quotas.

While Oracle does well in HW, On premise DB, and some SaaS, its PaaS & IaaS offerings are sorely lacking and the pressure to compete with the likes of AWS and Azure falls, unfortunately, on the sales reps.

While Oracle may be a well-known name to add to a resume, I'd highly suggest looking elsewhere. Or, at the very least, not spending too much time here.