Company: Oracle
Date: 2016-05-17
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former

Innovative and cutting-edge company for the 1990s
Pros: The scale and reach of the company was impressive. If you want to scale a product to sell anywhere in the world, then this is the company to do it. The sales team is the best out of anywhere I've worked. Everybody I've met was top-notch. Even though our product flat-out didn't work, the sales rep would still be able to sell it. 

Some of the managers were great too - even though turnover was high.

Good company to learn about global business and how to compete. Very competitive culture.
Cons: You're one of 130,000 people. It's like working in Congress. Everybody is smart, has their own mandate and agenda, but has to make it look like whatever they're doing is the most important thing in the world.

In our work group, we had a stacked-ranking performance management system where every year, all your teammates are stacked ranked and the lowest performer gets fired. This led to team meetings with people yelling at each other. "I did most of the work on this project, you didn't do sh*t!" Or "This is what I do, that is what you do, stay out of my way."

Larry Ellison has a saying. "It is not sufficient that I succeed. Everyone else must fail." Whenever Salesforce missed their quarterly earnings or had a service outage, people would pop champagne and send congratulatory emails to each other - piling on and gloating.

Nothing really gets done because of all the approvals that have to take place and anybody can veto your project. You work for months creating a presentation, lining up approvals, present it to thousands of people, but some VP doesn't like the color of your slides so your project gets stopped and sent back to square one.