Oracle Reviews in Boston, MA Area

Pros

Great benefits. Awesome culture. Global company with options to move.

Cons

Customers hate Oracle. Makes the job difficult and mentally stressful.

Advice to Senior Management

Get granular and understand your employees. Management seems to forget the daily challenges when they start climbing the ladder.

Pros

Great benefits, training, and name recognition.You can learn a lot very quickly and will be paid about as high as any inside sales rep you know. Lots of different products to sell, plenty of division and products to move into. Having Oracle on the resume will serve you well when you inevitably leave because you sick of it, or because they'll pay you less for a promotion than if you left to return to Oracle again. Happens all the time!

Cons

Territories are incredibly unfair. Tough sit sit next to a moron and out work them, only to watch them collect easy and enormous commissions. SR MGMT has no idea what's going on, and changes their direction daily. Very immature sales org in some product lines. Oracle has terrible internal systems, information sharing, and communication is embarrassing. They could be so much better if they hired better people, better management, and modernized their approach to sales in the 21st century.

Advice to Senior Management

Recognize talent, achievement, skills, and success based on how a deal was actually won. Not by a number on a spreadsheet in a cake territory. hire better managers. support sales with better marketing...any marketing! Come down from your ivory towers and see how tough reps jobs are.

Pros

Good pay & benefits
Some good managers - if you get lucky
Mostly good colleagues
People stay primarily for the stock options

Cons

User experience has little value
At the end of the day, engineers have all the say in the final product
Middle management and product management is terrible

Advice to Senior Management

Don't expect to get good UX hires unless you know what to do with them

Pros

Salary Continuation if you want to behind some big wig

Cons

Zero to little innovation appreciation

Advice to Senior Management

Wait till SaaS come after you

Pros

I guess it looks good on your resume. Although if you only last 6 months then it's not going to look good.

Cons

Probably the most negative corporate culture I've ever seen. I've worked temp jobs before and got to see lots of different companies from the inside - nothing was ever like Oracle.

It's incredibly micromanaged and very punative. Also, it's very political in nature. So, if you are related to a VP then you're career is unlimited.

People with MBA's and really great talent can be totally ignored.

Now that Mark Hurd is running the show, the reduction in force is coming. The handwriting is on the wall.

Advice to Senior Management

Offer advice? That's a waste of a thought.
They never listen.

Pros

Large company, different types of projects. lots of resources (computers and people). Lots of talent and get specialize on certain skills

Cons

Hard to stay focus so many tasks to complete in one day. Takes a long time for things to get completed if requests go outside of group.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to employees when they need help.

Pros

Good benefits, considerate 'open door' management, willingness of colleagues to work together, decent salary compared to other software companies, able to withstand economic downturn due to their stockpile of cash. Larry Ellison's cameo in IronMan.

Cons

Hard to get a raise, they are sometimes cheap about getting necessary development equipment. They are not upfront about when raises or bonuses come out.

Advice to Senior Management

Giving a yearly cost of living raise to their employees is something Oracle management should consider in order to promote a sense of good will within the company.

Pros

Oracle has a great brand name. Everyone will know what you do.
It's my second job out of college, so the sales experience has been helpful and I've also worked hard.

Cons

Overly political culture. Promotions based almost entirely on "who one knows".
Incredibly incompetent managers (see above - the cream doesn't rise to the top.)
Lots of busy work to create fake urgency and make everyone run around like a chicken
with their heads cut off.
Absolutely the most back stabbing, cold-blooded corporate culture that I've ever seen.

Advice to Senior Management

I know that you think you are all rock stars..."KB" especially.
But you know that we all laugh at you behind your backs.

Pros

Training on the latest software. Business management training and opportunity for hands-on practice management without losing technical skills are both excellent.

Cons

Practice managers are non-technical primarily. This results in over selling of deliverables and consequent project failure. On the other hand, they are not reluctant to back track to proven project approaches. They do not give in to the technique of the month club without a backup plan.

Pros

Stable. Expense reporting not too bad.

Cons

Coming from a company that really took care of its people, the transition to Oracle has been rough. It's big, impersonal, arbitrary. Example: the coffee is terrible. Complaints to management have been heard, and ignored. Mind you, my product/division is very profitable.
 Big push to use internal tools and tech. Things that aren't used outside. Any open source stuff has to be run up the flagpole by Legal... who may get back to you. sometime.
 Overall a very frustrating place to work if you care about delivering quality software.

Advice to Senior Management

give more autonomy locally. best people don't want to put up with this stuff.