Company: Oracle
Date: 2016-01-30
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Contract Manager / Deal Manager
Pros: The hours permitted a work life balance and my immediate management was very considerate of my needs. I would not have stuck with this job for the pay given if the work life balance was not there.
Cons: Do not work here, if you can avoid it. Not a single pay raise in my multi-year tenure. I even saw people promoted into management and the associated salary increase delayed for months. Internal messaging is disjointed. As I was departing it seemed the company was trying to transform the contract manager role and assign some project management responsibilities. Many of my colleagues thought the long term plan was to downsize. Feedback is not really promoted by the upper management. When upper management visited it usually involved a directive meeting, after which the floor was opened to questions. At that point everyone had the impression it best not to ask questions out of concern of appearing to challenge the most recent change.

My sense was training was not coherent. Yes, there were centralized authorities for those in contract management, but not everyone - especially some senior staff - followed them. Additionally, policies were often posted in multiple places which were not all updated at the same time. Some who had been at Oracle for a long time were comfortable with this, but I often observed divergence in how senior staff would handle the same type of engagement. Outside of authorities to do the job, all training was online. The company did not value in-person training or associated training outside of work. One colleague sought to take some contracting courses at a local college and was told a very quick no.

In my view this is not a good company to work for. Again, my immediate management was great, but the company culture is horrible and workers are not valued. If you must work for this company, I would advise doing so long enough to legitimately put the name on your resume and then leave and do not look back.