Company: Oracle
Date: 2016-09-21
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Manager
Pros: -work life balance, work from home
Cons: Thanks for taking the time to read my review. I have been with Oracle for over 10 years. I write this to give potential candidates a real look into the company. Someone who has been with the company 6-24 months may not have a very wide view since you are required to stay in a position for a year and people rarely leave their area. I have worked in several different areas across my time at the company. I came on board via an acquisition. Good Luck!


Training & Development – In my 10 years here, I have never witnessed any dedicated employee development. I have watched employees ask for training and development over and over and have been denied. The management strategy in the consulting groups that juggle several products is horrible. A lot of the management doesn’t really understand how software products are learned, configured and deployed, so they have no idea about training people to be proficient in them. In the past 24 months I have watched people go to customers with no training on technologies they have sold to customers. This has caused a lot of customer contempt and just embarrassment from the consulting side. With the launch of the cloud there was no strategy and no strategy for deploying applications on the cloud. The company actually gave zero education on the “cloud”. If you get into one area and you want to learn about another, forget it. In my 10 years with Oracle I have watched less than 5 people move from the area they were originally in to another area. If you do get training it will be haphazard, videos, slides, and mostly useless. On the contrary, they will actually make employees pay for the most recent training and customer training is good and expensive.

Management – there are many thick and useless layers of management. Many of them with very little technology and or real IT experience. There is also a practice of moving managers who have had their hands slapped from HR for harassing their employees. The managers are not there to develop their employees and will do whatever they have to do to pay them very little and not make a big deal regarding recognition that may result in a raise. Many managers will throw their employees under the bus because they believe their employees can’t move on or out of the group. In some of the smaller units or acquisitions, many of the managers are friends of someone who is above them and this creates a really big problem because most of the people are not qualified to work in any field in IT. It has driven moral to an all-time low for the people who are actually interested in learning different areas of tech and even for the people who actually know how to do their job and can talk “shop” because their manager is usually someone who never did the job or got the job via a friend or acquisition.

Salaries & Raises – as many have mentioned here, the lowest in the industry. Actually kind of laughable at this point. What is making things really worse is that companies that are being acquired are able to create positions that get by legal and have salaries attached and these people get the salaries when they come to Oracle. Case in point is an administrative assistance becoming an implementation consultant after acquisition with no experience. This happens all the time and then the person is in the role and comes in contact with people who have real expectations of the role and they try to talk their way out of it and end up looking foolish. I have watched people apply for a level 4 position, get offered the position and then they are told the level 4 position is no longer available, but they have to take the job because they were offered the job and their old job is not available. HR is helpless and really is not on the side of any employee. I have also witnessed situations where an employee was promoted, but actually made less money.

Work-Life Balance – I have heard this verbatim as being the most common reason people stay. I recently heard working from home as being the reason someone didn’t take a recent job offer. I’m sorry, but working from home shouldn’t be the reason you stay at a company, but I get it. That’s where the company does one thing right. People are able to work from home and really not have to put in a full week and for some, not even a full day. It has become very clear that very few at the management level are putting in anywhere close to 30 hours a week. People are just collecting a check and responding to emails here and there. For someone with drive, initiative or a willingness to just work hard, this type of life will really cramp your style. For the people who use the company as their part-time job, it’s probably the greatest thing in the world. For people who don’t care at all, it’s also probably great.

The Cloud – applications on the cloud were deployed with very little strategy or education to the employees. They will never catch Amazon. They might not even catch Microsoft. They are trying to bring programmers from both companies over by suggesting a “clean slate” cloud to develop on, but if any of them is stupid enough to leave those top tier companies, then they deserve to be here.