Oracle

Name recognition, 40% market share of the database market. High pay, good benefits. There are still some very intelligent folks working there, but see below about the departure of the real talent.

I had fourteen managers within twenty months. Some of those managers I never even met face to face.

Most managers only manage upwards; don’t expect any useful advice from your manager. In eight years, I may have had one or two managers who had a clue how to manage. Both of them were chased away.

Negative reinforcement is not a good management technique and drives away intelligent employees.

The sales reps I worked with were mostly clueless, with a few exceptions. Sales managers simply barked at those reps, causing the reps who needed coaching to flail and then fail. I cannot tell you how many sales forecast calls I was on where the managers just berated their sales reps. No help, just a beatdown.

Most sales reps have no idea what their products do, nor do they understand how to sell them.

I spent eight years at Oracle and never got a pay raise despite service above and beyond the call of duty. A friend who was a manager said that is normal. You are expected to move jobs annually to make more money.

You must keep track of what you do in fifteen-minute intervals in multiple tools. The administrative overhead is really bad.

Training is a joke; you only get the marketing slide decks, never get a chance to really use the technology you sell.

Your customers will hate you because the rep before you may have audited them and raped them so they can get a big paycheck on the way out the door.

Lots of arrogant colleagues who care nothing about their customers or coworkers make this a very challenging place to work. It's a very cutthroat, unhealthy workplace.

The work-life balance at Oracle is a joke. Burnout is rampant. I had two colleagues leave, and rather than hire replacements, I was asked to take up the slack for a year and a half. All major account executives (CADs) are divorced, in the process of getting a divorce, or are terminally single due to their personalities.

I know I have just written a lot of negative things about Oracle, but I tried very hard to make it work. After eight years’ worth of honest effort on my part, it was a frustrating experience.

My customers loved me and were shocked when I left, but they all watched what I described happen, and all of them understand how hard I tried to make it work. They are happy to work with me again for another vendor.

Stop the audit system abuse. It is alienating your customer base. Make it impossible for a rep to use the audit as a parting gift. It is poisoning your customer relationships. Oracle is synonymous with greed. This is a major cultural issue.

Stop mistreating your pre-sales architects; you are bleeding talent. Managers need to create teams, not bloodthirsty gladiators. Making your teams compete against each other makes for poor behaviors amongst your own teams. You have some serious sociopaths working at Oracle. This drives talent away; nobody wants to be around such individuals.

Learn how to lead and hire real leaders; you have a leadership problem that makes all of this much worse than it needs to be. Leaders manage up and down the chain of command. They need to recruit talent, retain that talent, and when it is time, retrain them for the next challenges. Your HR practices are abysmal.

Improve your technical support. Your engineers care more about closing cases than actually helping your customers. This behavior is legendary in the industry.