Company: Oracle
Date: 2019-07-31
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Flexibility is great; pay is stagnant, no raises, expect monotony and a misuse of your talents
Pros: There is wonderful flexibility as far as time; no stock clocking in or out which is wonderful, your lunch breaks aren't monitored and as long as you're on time for your meetings and also get your work done, it is a wonderful atmosphere. I am not sure if this is just in the San Antonio Center, however from the other reviews it appears this is true to Oracle culture.
Cons: At my center within the LAD (Latin America) organization there is a lot of blatant favoritism and lack of strong managerial leadership which amounts to swaths of displeased and un-engaged employees. This can be seen by amount of people we have had leave the organization just within 2019 alone. 

Oracle as a whole seems to invest alot of their money into certain sectors of the company, such as sales; but at my center, which hosts Business Ops, Deal Management, and Finance for both NAMER and LAD, what I and others notice is that work is monotonous, pay is stagnant, and the ever-so cherished FOCAL is far and very few in between. Very few people receive FOCAL and this is at the sheer discretion of management and upper management (make of that what you will) - it is expected on an annual basis but after two years of being here at Oracle I have only witnessed it come and go once, so it is rare as I stated.

Expect to have a very slow start. Oracle notoriously pays below market average if you research certain job roles which can be found at my center. Furthermore, like most major companies they hire based on "market inflation" meaning regardless of your prior experience, your wave could all have a starting salary of 45K and then the next wave could have a starting salary of 50K despite having no comparable or comparable experience to you, and despite both of you completing the same amount of work, or perhaps you completing more work due to your being at Oracle longer. Oracle does not do anything to leverage the starting salaries of comparable employees hired at different waves due to "market inflation". This tidbit of info is the most discouraging aspect of being an Oracle employee; you may find yourself working just as hard or twice as hard as other coworkers while experiencing less pay than them, across the board. As I said, many major corporations do this. I am not excusing Oracle, but I am pointing out that is a huge issue with most major corporations, and a disservice to the employees they say they are attempting to maintain.

If you attempt to apply to another organization, the standard is to have completed 12 months at a role before moving within Oracle. However HR plays the wonderful game of subjectivity by adding a sidebar to that clause which states, "however, this is at the discretion of each manager". Laughable. This means that even though I had completed 12 months at my Contracts Specialist role, it was possible for my manager and her senior manager to choose to hold me back from entering a different team with no real concrete reasoning behind the hold. Unfair. Holds employees back. Demoralizing and demotivating.

Furthermore, mine and my colleague's experiences with hiring managers and recruiters has been bleak. I want to have hope and say there are excellent recruiters out there, however our experience was that recruiters rarely reached back out to us, albeit taking the steps per Oracle's tools to find a recruitment mentor. More often, we had to do the leg work of reaching out to hiring managers and recruiters to little or no avail only to find out last minute after no communication on their end that "there is a hiring freeze" or "this job has been moved to Q2" - things that should be of importance for an employee to know. Unprofessional and, again, highly demotivating.

If you are a young employee looking to start a career, I recommend going into Oracle with a plan in mind, and a full understanding of the injustices that can entail.