- First and foremost, Oracle has not natively innovated from within for a long time. Instead, they just grow and "innovate" by acquisition of other firms, then gut the other firms' processes, and lay off most of their staff as quickly as possible.
- Oracle's corporate culture is one that is highly antiquated. Teams are siloed and walled off. Someone can easily find themselves stuck working on one niche area, with little to no hope of diversifying their skillsets here. Collaboration is discouraged, almost frowned upon as inconvenient. There is a very prevalent "it's always worked this way, so why change?" attitude about embracing change to the overall company culture and corporate processes, especially if an acquired company has a better more efficient way of doing things. Oracle will gladly take that company backwards to make them do things "the Oracle way".
- Expect miles of red tape to get anything done. The company is extremely bureaucratic. You'll be onboarded, having realized you don't have rights to even a quarter of the tools and resources you need, and no one seems to want to lift a finger to help you figure out how to get them or what you'll need. It will take you months to finally get to where you need to be, to do basic functions of your job without being blocked by privileges or rules you didn't know about before.
- Leadership waffles a lot on decisions. They will tell you one thing "confidently", and then last-second change their minds, causing total chaos for everyone. It's the ultimate sign of incompetence for any business and not sustainable.
- There is a severe lack of collaboration and internal communication between teams, due to the walls and aforementioned siloing that occurs here. You will be asked (especially if you're in an acquired company) multiple times for the same data and same information and same projects and reports by multiple teams who had zero idea another team had just asked. Sometimes multiple people on the SAME team will ask for the same things.
- Finally: Oracle observes an internal company functional technology mindset of the 1990s. Disjointed, disconnected, and frustratingly unintegrated applications that don't talk to each other, aren't unified in any way, and come from multiple vendors. A far cry from the fully unified solution Microsoft and others provide.
Understand, that for the privilege of working for a company that likes to think it's a bigger deal than it actually is, due to its Silicon Valley background, you will have to deal with the above headaches. It will NOT be some easy "walk in the park". It will be a bureaucratic red tape-laden mess. Any suggestions to change things for the better here will be met with a resounding "no and don't try to ask again." in so many words.
Based on the information above, I do not give Oracle a very bright business outlook or future ahead. They are stagnating and falling behind, their top leadership is unable or unwilling to adapt, and their internal corporate process and business model is fast becoming antiquated. I cannot recommend this company to anyone seriously looking for a tech-related career at this time. There are 100s of other companies and firms out there that can offer far more.
