Company: Oracle
Date: 2016-05-19
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Working @ Oracle: An Unconvenient Truth
Pros: The pros are:  
the benefits, 
the resources at your disposal, 
some corporate events, 
food is quite cheap and relatively good and diverse,
If you like self-service it’s nice as well and you can get some incentives (refer people, buy vacations, and get discounts)…

If you’re not necessarily skilled or good at your job, and you can slip through the net and get some commissions by chance. For some cases, people were lucky enough to be at the right place in the right time and get a big paycheck – before leaving, and others have been here for nearly 2 years without closing any deals. 

Oracle is sometimes closer to the social welfare or a casino than a proper IT company made of talented salespeople. It's a HUGE lottery.
Cons: I’ve never seen a corporation like this. Let’s try to be objective and go through this step-by-step:

•	Getting to Oracle: scam
Their recruiters are like a huge propaganda department. Someone from some place will contact you by phone, tell you they have a golden opportunity for you and they will invite you to an “assessment center”. They’ll tell you it’s better to do it ASAP as it’s “one of the last” to take place (actually they take place every month or so). You will have to do a PowerPoint (why me, why oracle, why this job) and you have to sell yourself. Basically most of the people in the assessment center get an offer, half of the time if people don’t join it’s because they refuse.
Note: If you’re lucky enough to belong to a strong market (Dutch, German or Scandinavian...), you probably will be able to skip that and be recruited directly through the phone or almost, it happened sometimes.
Beware to have correct data on your resume as they check through their screening partner. Don’t be too excited about their relocation package, because they will hunt you down if you want to leave to pay it back.

•	Starting at Oracle: DIY
So, you come at your desk, they give you a laptop, a to-do-list, and here you go, it’s all about DIY. Self-service pushed to the extreme. Nobody tells you if what to do is right, but they will tell you if it’s wrong. No real on-boarding plan, you spend 3 weeks watching videos and you have to order your own screens, mouse, keyboard etc.
You probably won’t even know in which team you belong to nor meeting your manager before a few days for those who are lucky, and it can take a whole quarter to get a team – they call it “overhires”. You’re a collateral damage of Oracle Direct strategy. It’s not your fault but that’s the way it is.

•	Training at Oracle: Going away to the college
Ok so after your 3 weeks of watching random videos. You have their 2 weeks on-site training in fancy hotels with people coming from Dubai, Malaga, Berlin, Prague… it’s cool to meet those people. The first week is a training (boring) about sales techniques, and the one-man-show of some american salesguy who teaches you how to cold-call in such a way it would portray Barack Obama as an introvert. Not very applicable elsewhere than in Texas or LA..
The second week you have presentations to do (individual or group presentations), assessments consisting of a sales call with a scenario.

This was back in the days, now it consists of 4 weeks in a remote place in Kildare where you have to come every day (3 hours driving in and out) where you have to make presentations every weeks in front of your group (120 people attend it) and you’re put under pressure for these 4 weeks as there are different tiers (Q1 / Q2 / Q3 / Q4) and from this grading system your evolution will depend a lot. As you’re back in school, you have presentations to prepare in the evening for the day after so you won’t finish off before 9 or 10 pm actually.

•	Working at Oracle: Hardcore

Well… for those who have a manager or a territory from the beginning, which is basically the purpose they were hired, lucky them. For the other over-hires
Their CRM is very slow, messy, not intuitive and too much data are duplicated. It’s hard to have 360 view on what's going on in your territory / deals.
The sales processes are VERY LONG but it’s not much because of the negotiation / implementation timeframe. Salespeople are fighting internally 90% of the time than against the customers to get discounts from the teams in the states who don’t understand that the products are way above the average in terms of price and there’s a discount in most of the time to get a sell, probably more than 50% or even 60% in many cases.
Oracle is an American company and they are worried about their “branding” and legal issues. When an executive made awkward comments about minorities for joking in a conference, he was quickly urged to apologize for his “sense of humor”, blaming his personality, so let's say they have some issues sometimes but they try to fix it.
The management is inexistent: the company is suffering from its gigantism. Nobody really knows what’s going on and each zone/country/department/team/manager and everybody has a little piece of the puzzle. 
We’ve seen executives being deposed from their position to lower because of the mess created by the wave of resignations, paired with the lack of power to motivate or keep their employees. They always talk about the money, money, MONEY you could make, but they still don’t understand that the targets are unreachable for most of the people except some lucky ones and they lost the trust from their employees and are not credible, or even well-liked… at all.

•	Career Evolution

Managers don’t have power except to annoy you for your KPIs, they won’t help you in designing your career path or go to the frontline to get more realistic targets. They are obeying to those above etc. and don’t even have more visibility on what’s going on than their subordinates.
If you lick the right person’s boots, you can be sure it will pay off almost all of the time, even if you’re not skilled in your job. It’s all about credibility and people don’t check so far the words of the others. It’s easy to smoke managers or others about someone’s performance or suitability for a role.
Oracle is a giant and they are really proud, if not arrogant about that. Such as their CEO, they love to split on the competitors. Most of the income of Oracle comes from their databases business and they are lacking in so many areas that they counterbalance it with the cash flow they invest and companies they acquire. So they will make you believe it’s the time to be in the company (like all the companies do), they will invite the press and even politics to show how many new openings they are responsible of. But they won’t tell that the turnover is just impressive because of the lack of perspectives and work conditions.
If you want to evolve at Oracle, you must leave and come back, they even encourage people to do so they come back with a stronger knowledge and network in exchange of a higher position or paycheck. In the meantime, if you want to work hard and reap the rewards of their work, just go on your way.

•	Leaving Oracle

That's a delicate situation. Many people want to leave actually but they feel stuck because of the relocation package they have to payback (see above in the starting at oracle). Many want to get dismissed and avoid this + get a little money while looking after new jobs. They create and kill jobs and still recruit people but there is not enough place for everybody. that's non-sense. Many people don't dare to tell to the recruiters what's going on because people feel embarassed and ashamed of being victim of such a mess, and this is probably their fault if they're not good enough to hit unrealistic targets (according to the management). Hence the name of the review: " an unconvenient truth"