Company: Oracle
Date: 2016-09-01
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Very frustrating place to work as a manager
Pros: Great benefits, pay for new hires is OK, nice offices, great subsidised restaurants and coffee bars.  Flexible work arrangements, WFH.  Lots of offices around the UK.  You pay to travel to your local office but can claim expenses to travel to other offices in London (where in most cases is where its happening) or elsewhere if not your local office.   Great products, great focus on the cloud.  Very good promotion from within - I was very impressed with how this s done in Sales.  Generally people are treated well and fairly.

Generally a friendly place to work and some good quality nice people.
Cons: PEOPLE Lots of people who have worked for Oracle for a long time.  So much so that there are a lot of people who don't really know anything else.  That includes most of the management.   The quality of people is patchy - it obviously varies for different parts of the org.  There are a few very good people.  There is a bit of "In the land of the blind man the one eyed man is king" syndrome.  

CULTURE  It doesn't feel like a very dynamic culture.  There are very few young people around.  Most people are in the late 40s or 50s (average age around 46).  At individual contributor level there seems very little feeling of empowerment or room for creativity or innovation.  Things move so slowly and it takes so long to do something and there are so many rules a lot of things get filed under "too hard".  This is apparent in the attitude and moral of the people.

OPERATING AS A MANAGER As a a manager it feels like a very hierarchical organisation.  Distinct lack of empowerment.  Even at VP level.  Everything moves very slowly.  Processes are cumbersome and often don't work (fall over).  I guess its OK if you are not trying to change much and if you do you don't want to move quickly.  

It appears that there is no budget for pay rises AT ALL.  GET A GOOD DEAL WHEN YOU JOIN because it won't change for a long time.  The majority of my team have not had a pay rise in 5 years, many for 10 years or  more.  This creates huge frustration and bad feeling.  It is incredibly hard to get individual pay cases (where a top performer is paid well below their peers for example).  A common sense one off pay rise in this instance is almost impossible.  

When I joined my impression of my management peers was one of weeriness and now I can see why.