Company: Oracle
Date: 2008-07-14
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current

Oracle a great place to work if you're in the right team.
Pros: Oracle offers excellent benefits including: life, accident, medical, vision, dental and LTD insurance; discounts at many retailers and with most auto manufactures.  Oracle allows teleworking within many organizations.  It is generally well inclined towards maintaining a positive work/life balance by allowing flexible work hours depending on role and a substantial allocation of vacation time, starting with 3 weeks and moving up to 4.5 weeks after 3 years of service.  Additionally Oracle provides up to $6000 annually in tuition reimbursement for those seeking college degrees relevant to their jobs roles.

Depending on the organization, Oracle can be a very positive place to work with exposure to excellent peers and management.  The wealth of industry experience is very broad and it's a pleasure working with professionals that really know their stuff.  Many teams have a great deal of autonomy and are able to do things their own way as long as the job gets done.
Cons: Oracle is very slow to change at a fundamental level.  Despite the many acquisitions, the culture has changed very little and in most cases it has changed for the worse.   There is very little opportunity for career growth for most management as the majority of new roles appear to go to senior and executive level management from each of the acquisitions.  There is a major problem with the "out of sight out of mind" mentality, as the vast majority of promotions that do occur tend to happen to staff and managers based at HQ.  There's also many "Little Larrys" at Oracle, executives who tend to micro manage to a level so far beneath their station that it often gums up the works.   There's also a lot of vaporware internally within Oracle in terms of projects and management frameworks that have failed to deliver anything of real value to internal employees.  There are many little empires within Oracle, which tend to waste resources through significant redundancy of work that could be done far more efficiently in a shared environment.