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Great place to work; slow promotion

Senior Director of Engineering
Former Employee
Worked at Oracle for 4 years
October 3, 2015
Redwood Shores, California
4.0
RecommendsNeutral OutlookNo CEO Opinion
Pros

Very smart people. Lots of support for new ideas. Bureaucracy is manageable, not onerous. Interesting projects to work on, and you can have a big impact on revenue. Actual utilization of your software is quite low. Enterprise software, including cloud, requires a lot of integration and configuration, which takes customers a long time to do because they often rely on consultants. Easy to form strong relationships, and you can have an outsize impact if you bring energy to the position.

If you are a technical manager, you can be very successful. If you are just a manager-manager, your progress will be limited.

Cons

For better or worse, literally every small detail, down to the smallest purchase, must be approved by the president. This means you often have to present status and progress to the president multiple times during development. Projects aren't "approved," but rather "approved for now with further reviews at regular intervals where your project may be summarily cancelled if you don't demonstrate a good plan."

Advice to Management

Delegate authority to good technical managers. Remove managers who are not technical, as their leadership is often wrong. If a manager has not written and shipped software at some point in their career, they are not technical, period.

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