Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

I'm a former sales rep from Oracle's "tech" side of the house (i.e. database, middleware, OCI, etc), so I can't speak specifically for ERP - that said, I can comment on the overarching culture within Oracle sales.

• Compensation is just flat-out awful. Oracle's base salaries are pretty pitiful across the board. I k-d you not, there are some field reps at Oracle - those who got promoted from BDC to OD (inside sales) to field - making a lower base salary than BDC's (called LDRs) at AWS.

• Promotions and raises are an absolute non-starter at Oracle, unless you blow out your number. The problem with this is...

• Oracle loves to give unattainable compensation plans, especially in recent years as there is a growing disconnect between what management thinks the numbers should be vs. what the numbers actually are. My FY21 comp plan was so astronomical and absurd that I would have needed to sell 10x the amount of existing cloud consumption in my territory to hit my number. I committed to leave the company the day I received this comp plan, because there is no universe in which I could have succeeded professionally or financially with this comp plan.

• To make matters worse, Oracle took three whole months - an entire quarter of FY21 - just to issue comp plans for my org. So I wasted three months of my life trying to sell OCI in vain only to be given a comp plan that 1) was basically an unattainable f- to me, and 2) was riddled with errors and miscalculations around the existing cloud in my territory (which was used to calculate my FY21 targets).

• Another key thing to point out is that - at least for the org I was in - a minority of reps were able to hit their numbers. The vast majority of reps were nowhere near their quotas, and many reps were putting up goose eggs. This isn't because they are bad reps, but rather due to a myriad of reasons (dead territories that simply hate Oracle, cloud reps losing out on business to the onprem reps, broken comp plans which punish reps for lost cloud renewals even if it isn't the rep's fault, etc). A properly functioning sales org should at least have a majority of reps hitting quota - my org, at least, was nowhere near that.

• When sales numbers for the org are low (which they frequently are in recent years), the micromanaging picks up fast. They'll start probing into your call/email (i.e. interaction) metrics logged in their atrociously buggy CRM, occasionally leading to all-hands calls where they put up each rep's interaction metrics for everyone to see as a public call-out.

• Oracle can and will find sneaky and creative ways to avoid paying reps on their deals. I lost out on multiple commission checks because of technicalities and vague phrasing in the comp plans that the company intentionally never clarified until the moment where the comp analyst was denying my commission request.

• One last thing: since Oracle support is so unresponsive, customers will often contact the sales reps to do customer service, even if those sales reps aren't even aligned to the product pillar in question. It can get really stressful really quickly when a customer is reaching out to you about a critical SR for a product line you don't even support because the support rep isn't being responsive enough, and you somehow have to fix it.

I would strongly advise you to avoid Oracle sales - it's just not worth it.

LE was the sales guy when the 3 founded Oracle. He was technically weakest but best at selling. He still thinks he is the best salesman and thus his treatment of salespeople is toxic. At the same time, he is CTO. Go figure what good parts there are except LE's cookie jars.

No.........

That being said, I haven't seen much about where the GOOD parts to be in Oracle are.

There ARE NO GOOD PARTS. You should not work at Oracle. Most people there are trying really hard to get out.

is Oracle the perfect company to work for? No, but then which companies offer it all and will employ you?

Oracle cloud ERP seems to be a brighter part of the organisation, it's not as if rivals have a far better offering.

In short, as far as selling an Oracle Service is concerned, ERP cloud is at least a very competitive offering. But given that, take a look at this post someone else wrote a couple of days ago: @1uar+1agsiz2o It's about how culturally, LE's narcissistic personality poisons the rest of the org. It's actually really true, and furthermore, though I thankfully don't know LE, I have heard that one of the reasons the sales org was always so dysfunctional was because he viewed sales folks as subhuman, i.e., he hates them, is happy to pit them against one another, and loves watching them all stab one another in the back. Hence, of all the orgs within Oracle sales (regardless of tech or apps) is the worst. There's only one exception to this - the National Security sales org (don't remember the exact name) is impossibly even worse.

So my advise to you is don't go there unless you absolutely need the paycheck, in which case go ahead - just don't expect to be loving the place, and make up your mind beforehand that whatever role you take is only a short-term, stop-gap thing.