Company: Oracle
Date: 2013-04-30
Overall rating: 5/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Fantastic so far. Great colleagues, loads of training, cool technology.
Pros: Working with bright, enthusiastic people
Gorgeous offices in Reading and London
Professional approach
Loads and loads of training. 
Cool technology. 

I've been here almost a year and so far it's simply one of the best companies I've worked for. Oracle is a very big place, and your experience will very much depend on your direct line manager and their manager. Luckily enough my direct manager is excellent, and his manager (responsible for Europe) is also a superstar. There's a lot of passion for what we do, the developers are great (and really helpful if you need a bit of custom work doing to prep for a demonstration). Investment is being ploughed into the product and further acquisitions are being integrated at a massive rate of knots. A huge amount of training is available to you, including cross-product training if you can charm your manager into agreeing it! 

Work/life balance - I work from home or on site most of the time but I speak to my manager nearly every day by phone. I go into the office about once a week, and feel just as welcomed as the desk jockeys! The restaurant is great - food is delicious, but it's not particularly cheap. Lots of people bring lunch in anyway so it's up to you. 

Teamwork: Oracle is very big on teamwork. And that generally means working with people who you may have only just met (or not even met yet via phone/web), often on big deals, and often internationally. I'm regularly amazed and grateful for how helpful people are. Recently a colleague needed help on a very short notice, high-value deal. Our whole team dropped everything else and for 48 hours we all worked on it. So, a real sense of teamwork. It is absolutely vital to build your own personal network of friends and allies across different areas of the business as it makes finding your way around/getting extra resources loads easier. 

Career opportunities: Honestly, it's too soon for me to tell, really as I haven't had my first appraisal yet. But I will say there are stacks of training courses for all sorts of things (not just products but business skills etc) so on that basis I'm going to say pretty good so far. 

Benefits: Super flexible. You are allocated a certain number of points, and you can basically spend the points on whatever is best for you. Extra holidays (up to 43 days!), health insurance, dental cover, childcare, critical illness insurance, a fancy car, there are lots of options. Pension scheme is generous. Reasonably good car leasing scheme - or you can just go and purchase your own car and any unspent benefit points are paid out as cash instead so it sort of functions as a car allowance.  
Also, Oracle pays for a concierge service, lots and lots of corporate discounts for all sorts of goods/services, and you can drop your dry cleaning off in any of the main buildings in Reading and a company will clean and return it. Not free, but very reasonably priced. If I was office based I'd probably use it. 

Transport: Free bus service running between Thames Valley Park and Reading town centre which is very handy, especially for the train station. Loads of car parking at the main Oracle campus. 

Expenses: If you submit a claim on Monday (assuming your manager approves it quickly) you could well have the cash in your bank account by Thursday. This is the fastest of any company I've ever worked for, and I appreciate it a lot - working in the field for Oracle means running up a substantial expense bill, and they pay each claim individually rather than making you wait for it to appear in payroll, so you can claim every week if you want. Very cool.
Cons: It's a very, very big company. It's mainly up to you to find your own niche, and the self service automated admin, HR and IT processes can really grind you down. It's my single big moan - got a problem with your payroll calculation, the team is in Dublin/Romania etc. Onboarding is painful because of this (although of course you have great colleagues to help you out), there is sooo much admin to get done at first. Once you're through this stage though, it just becomes one of those things you have to deal with occasionally. 

Heavy responsibility - you need to be self-driven here. Oracle trusts you to get on and be awesome, which is great because they don't breathe down your neck, but on the other hand it can be a bit daunting. However the culture here is that you just ask for help if you need it, and people will absolutely get involved and add their strength to yours. Oracle often has big teams on deals which could be up to 10 or more people across different areas of the organisation and internationally, regularly a deal team is 4-6 people. You just have to get over it - mostly the people here *are* awesome and they don't let geographical and/or business division separation stand in the way too much. You will spend a lot of your life on conference calls, unfortunately. If you speak any extra languages I imagine that could win you a LOT of friends :)

Communication - there is so much of it in the form of corporate emails, newsletters, Town Hall meetings, 'event days' etc., that eventually you begin to tune it out, which is a shame. But there's a point where you learn what you can and can't ignore, mostly. Apparently we even have a TV studio lurking somewhere on the premises but I have no idea where or what it's for...! 

Overall, though, these are not massive issues. They're probably not avoidable in such a large organisation, and are very much surmountable. 

If you like to operate as a lone wolf, if you like tons of flexibility and don't like adhering to a job description, you probably won't enjoy it here. People are very much cogs in the machine, but quite honestly it's a lot of fun being a cog in this machine.