Company: Oracle
Date: 2016-08-22
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

People need to realize
Pros: -Large name brand
-Great training program
-Great work-life balance
-Great benefits
-Lots of opportunity to meet like-minded folks through the Class Of program
Cons: -Where do I even begin? Let's start off with how Oracle likes to do business. Oracle likes to believe that at the expense of customer satisfaction and customer retention, bombarding customers with cold calls/emails from every possible angle is the best sales strategy to implement. There is no sense of strategic prospecting or serious high-level customer engagement. Business Development and Account Managers are expected to make 40-50 dials a day - how exactly do you think customers feel about receiving 5-6 calls a day from different Oracle folks trying to hit this metric? That's not even mentioning the fact that when multi-product deals are on the table, the amount of bickering and backstabbing that occurs between salesmen of different product pillars. To give you a personal anecdote - I have personally brought forward a sales opportunity before regarding one product, only to have the other product pillar come in, engage the customer about something completely unrelated, and completely ruin the opportunity for everybody already involved. How is that for collaboration, something that Oracle strives to "cultivate"?

-It is a very top-down culture. There seems to be a prevailing notion that there are nine degrees of separation between employees and upper management and the way things are run around here, that is definitely the case, the most recent example being the Q4 bonus. Although bonuses are always contingent upon performances of the entire org, the cut in bonuses was addressed with no accountability by upper management, leaving people who have put in their hard work and effort for that bonus confused, disappointed, and ultimately bitter. When a company's upper management can't deliver or take accountability for measures that impact people's satisfaction here, chaos develops internally. I wonder how that chaos portrays to customers outside of Oracle. Would you be willing to invest in a company that doesn't have its internal operations organized?

-Speaking of operations, let's talk briefly about people get promoted internally. When salespeople hit their quotas, it seems upper management sees fit to promote them based on their success in sales, DESPITE their lack of history in developing managerial skills. The result? Too many managers who have no idea how to manage people. With so many people who have no idea how to manage a team, people get discouraged and want to leave the company. The worst part is that for the sake of hitting quotas and making more money, some of these managers tell their employees to do whatever it takes, cultivating a culture stressing to only seek to help yourself and destroying any sense of integrity within the sales organization. There is no shortage of cheating and lying and people who don't deserve promotions get promoted while the honest, hard-working folks get thrown under the rug for doing the right thing.

-Class Ofs are not respected here. In fact, some of the more senior folks look at them with disdain and wonder why they were even hired in the first place. Working with people who don't understand your role and don't treat you with respect is a challenge and it is difficult for people to take you seriously.