Company: Oracle
Date: 2017-02-10
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Don't be deceived
Pros: There are very few pros, everything below is related to the workplace environment and not the job or company itself.

(Some) of the people were the best part of working at Oracle. We all found ourselves often bonding over how much we hated being at the company along with how terrible management within the sales org was.
Our office had free drinks, which was appreciated. Coffee wasn't very good, but it was free as well. 
The brand is well-recognized, but unfortunately, it often comes with negative associations with customers and former employees (this did work in my favor when finding a new job as all of my interviewers were aware of the various workplace challenges at Oracle).
The idea of a decent-sized On-Target Earnings (OTE / total compensation plan) is appealing; don't expect to ever achieve anything close to it in a presales role. 
The healthcare benefits are the best I've actually had through Kaiser Permanente.
There's also a gym in the office that is heavily underused, it has all the equipment you would need to be convinced enough to ditch your gym membership. There's a cafeteria too (food provided by Sodexo). It's not free but at least you don't have to go offsite if you forgot to bring your own lunch in or skipped breakfast at home.
Cons: WHERE DO I START?! Oracle is, by far, the worst company I've ever worked for. The topics that I will be covering in my review are as follows: 1) Compensation/Deception; 2) Poor Management and Leadership; 3) The Corporate Culture; 4) Dishonor to Customers and Employees.

1.	Compensation/Deception: During the interview process, you’re likely to be sold on the fact that Oracle is a large company and there will be a never-ending line of support from various resources and you’re not going to be setup to fail. These are all FALSE. First, as a Presales Engineer, you’re not going to be paid based on your aligned territory’s success but rather how Oracle’s North America sales org does. My manager implied that I would be in a good position because, “just look at Oracle’s stock! Check out their quarterly numbers!” Well, quarterly and yearly numbers posted publicly are based on Oracle as a WHOLE. North America didn’t even hit 50% of their number in my first Q4 with the company. Well, Q4 also happened to be my first full quarter with the company. Something that was not made fully clear was that you will be on a program called “ramp” which, unlike other sales companies, is the opposite of what you might think. First quarter with Oracle, you will qualify for only 25% of your bonus, second quarter you’ll qualify for 50%, third 75%, and 4th full quarter with Oracle you’ll finally get 100% of your bonus. 4th quarter is supposed to be the biggest quarter for any sales company, my assumption is that I would be getting an acceptable payout. Well, I actually only got 25% of 50% of the bonus I should have gotten. So, let’s say, for example, my quarterly bonus should have been $1,000.00. Oracle’s NA sales hit 50%, that takes my bonus to $500.00. Then I REALLY only get 25% of that, which turns into $125.00. That’s what happened in my first quarter. Second quarter, my bonus was actually worse than the first. Then in my third quarter, our compensation plan was adjusted so that we would not be recognized for any on-premises sales until we hit a certain threshold of cloud sales. Oracle Cloud is not popular, think about it. I immediately confronted my management about it and the response was something along the lines of, “we had this conversation. You knew about this.” Rewinding back to the interview, I’d explicitly asked, “historically, how well have people on our team received 100% or more of their bonus?” The short response was, “Since I’ve been their manager, every member has received 100%.” Ok, well that sounds fair. Fast forward back to the current discussion where I was confronting management, I objected to what my manager was saying to me about this conversation we had. Their response was along the lines of “it’s based on metrics. You received 100% of the 25% of 50%.” In that moment, I’d realized that we got, as one of my teammates who onboarded with me stated, “bamboozled”. I spoke with the other presales engineers who started with me and they had asked similar questions during the interview with similar responses. Our manager knew what we were asking and chose to respond in literal terms rather than give us the answer we were looking for. I suspect that their fear was that we would not have accepted the job offer had we known the truth. Expect a 65/35 split (65% base, 35% non-existent bonus).

2. Poor Management & Leadership: Unfortunately, I did not meet one inspiring leader at Oracle. My manager was an extreme hypocrite, took full credit for any initiative that direct reports took upon themselves, beyond egotistical, and micromanaged to an intrusive degree. The expectation was that we all come into the office every day. Our manager showed up to the office maybe once or twice a week (maybe) and we never saw them when they did show up. The excuse was that “traffic was too much” from where they lived. One of my peers lives 90 minutes away in another state and they made it into the office every day. I don’t see why a 10-mile drive trumps a commute from another state. How can you micromanage from afar? By forcing us to review every single thing we do with management. We were expected to enable our sales team to sell products that they did not get paid for. Every time we were expected to deliver a presentation or training, we had to go through a series of content reviews and deliveries with management where they would be critiqued to an unreasonable degree. Mind you, much of our team had strong experience and background with presenting and coaching people. We weren’t new to technology. When we did challenge management on certain practices, the response would be along the lines of “too bad, I’m the boss and this is how I run MY team.” Eventually, we started to realize that the things we were being forced to do were not to benefit our sales team or us, but rather to make our manager look like a superstar to their management. What our boss didn’t realize is that the things we were tasked to do were pushing our boundaries too far. Being paid as an hourly worker (strange for any presales position), we were only allowed to log 40 hours per week when we were doing 50-60 hours’ worth of work to meet expectations. I’ve only ever worked for sales companies where the customer comes first before all else. I’d be reprimanded if I put a customer meeting that we’d scheduled a week in advance before irrelevant Oracle training scheduled 18 hours in prior. Another thing that needs to be said is that my manager did not come from a technical background and did not understand anything about technology. How can you run a technical team if you don’t understand anything they sell?

3. The Corporate Culture: Depressing. I did not meet anybody happy to work at Oracle or passionate about the products we had to sell. I came into the office every day and everyone was miserable. Oracle has a college hire program where they recruit from top schools around the country. Some of the people I met at Oracle certainly deserved to be put in such a miserable position right out of college. But then there were others who did want to do well in sales but were put in a position to fail. There were few openings for promotion so they were expected to put in a lot of work for very little pay. I feel bad for them to not understand what it feels like to win a big deal or add value to their territory. Even over lunch, our offsite lunches were us going back and forth about how bad of a decision it was to accept Oracle’s offer for employment. Almost every member of my former team has left Oracle since I’d started (I worked at Oracle for less than a year, average tenure is around 6 months; you’re a veteran if you’ve been with Oracle for more than 24 months).

4. Dishonor to Customers and Employees: When you set your employees up for failure, they will surely fail. The metrics to achieve success are unattainable unless you cover some accounts that are seriously dependent upon Oracle with guaranteed spend. After I’d given my two-weeks’ notice, I was walked out the same day even though I was not leaving for a competitor and was told that I would be receiving pay for two weeks (pretty common practice). I spent nearly two months calling Oracle about the pay I’d been promised but not received and was ultimately told that Oracle would not honor that commitment to me. We were always told that overtime would not be approved which is why we had to only put in 40 hours in our time cards but it was impossible to accomplish any of our work without going over the 40 hours. We often had to work on undocumented hours so Oracle would save the cost of overtime. 
Many of my customers were looking to get off Oracle to migrate to MS SQL. The only thing I could do was try to sell them tools to make that possible. Why are so many customers leaving? Because Oracle, by default, has all of their (licensed) application options enabled by default. If you’re new to Oracle, you wouldn’t know better. Once their auditing team comes in and sees that you’ve been “using” options that you haven’t paid for they will force you to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars if you want to have Oracle continue support on your investment. I cannot see how Oracle will continue to grow in the future.

One final note, if you work in Applications sales then you are set up for more success than any other pillar. There’s fewer design considerations and the products are things that can be demo’d to customers. Expect a lot of struggle if you cover any other pillar.

I’ve met a handful of former Oracle employees since I’ve departed and it seems as though the negative experiences I’ve had are not specific to my team. I do not normally write reviews like this but I wish that as critical as mine existed when I’d first started to consider to work at Oracle. I was once asked if I could reach out to my professional network to see if anyone would want to be considered to work on our team… I’d said that I would not want to ever ruin a good friendship in that way. The worst career decision I’ve made is joining Oracle. If you’re in sales, don’t make the same mistake we did. Look elsewhere. Reach out to somebody you know who works at Oracle if you’ve read this and are not convinced with anything I’ve said here.