I have had some really bad managers at Oracle. I'd like to hear from others what their experiences have been.
9 replies (most recent on top)
Yes, I expect it is difficult to be a manager also. But, I don't see why the decent ones can't band together some to get rid of the c-appy ones.
Someone else told me their manager was constantly under attack and was the target of some dirty tricks by other managers.
I wonder if the solution to this is to hold managers accountable for specific actions. That would give them less time to fight among themselves. There were never any real directives coming from upper management and when deadlines were missed nothing ever happened to the management, no matter how bad they were.
Oracle really should clean house in the management area. So many dishonest and crooked managers. Layers and layers of them, doing nothing useful. Pare it down to where they each actually have real work to do, and a lot of the c-ap they spend their time on would go away.
Based on my own experience, and only expressing my personal point of view: You cannot be a good manager in a company which has 50 layers of management, any decision going through 10 people who have overlapping responsabilities and workflows designed by operations managers who have never done any field job. Everything comes down to internal politics and mediocracy > shut up and you'll be fine, USSR style. True leaders cannot truely lead, decide, be creative or innovate at Oracle. This is the main reason why employees are unhappy and customers do not feel valued.
in my 30 years working in IT, the worst exec I ever worked under was someone at Oracle. Narcissist to the extreme. He is now over at Veritas.
@1soa+15ouePPU Is absolutely correct. Coming in from an acquisition is the worst. They really don’t want you, the worker or manager. They acquired your company because they wanted the IP, the customer base, or both the IP and the customer base. The technical people are systematically trained to brain dump their knowledge and STFU. I stayed way too long afterwards, and found something 1000% better.
Oracle completely deserves its sh|tty reputation as an employer.
What a bunch of whiners post here. Big Blue is having a true mass layoff, in the tens of thousands, and yet there is only a fraction of the bitterness and vitriol found here on their page.
All of this is true. I worked at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in Seattle for nearly three years until I was laid off to give a senior manager's favorite do-boy my job. My direct manager, and his manager, were absolutely the worst managers I have experienced in over 20 years in the tech industry. ORCL managers see it as their responsibility to pick favorites, then actively work to destroy and remove everyone else who reports to them so they can be replaced with docile foreign workers or inexperienced recent graduates. The OCI annual review process makes this really easy – it's based on totally anonymous feedback that can be given by anyone at the company, or simply made up out of whole cloth. The feedback is never checked or vetted, and the reviewed employee never knows it's been given. Want to get rid of someone you don't like? Just send an anonymous email to their manager and complain about them, then they'll be given a 2 or 3 rating at their annual review, then RIFed.
ORCL managers are the most sleazy, scummy, back-stabbing, incompetent cretins I've ever experienced.
Most of the management appears to me to be lying up the management chain. Just look at the email from TK that was in a post a while back. TK keeps telling the people under him that the UI needs to change and it never does. There's a lot of management covering up things and lying about what needs to be done.
At one point I was trying to point out an issue from the development level. Things were a huge mess and there was a specific issue that the mess was causing. The management wanted to keep me quiet. They held a meeting where they had another guy who I did not know, who first said he agreed with me, and then said he had changed his mind. He needed prompting from the others in the meeting to speak, and I think it was all staged and the guy was being coerced into lying. The point being to get me to give up in arguing for change.
It appeared that the management was in deep sh– and one more problem escalated up the chain would be one too many for them, or at least that is what they thought. But the issues then just go on and get worse day-by-day. It's a sad, sad business.
I suppose that a lot of the management has been promoted into positions that they have no business being in. When you are incompetent, with a title that is above your skill set, then lying ensues and must continue to cover your incompetence.
Sad, sad place to work. The other groups like marketing and support blame the developers themselves, but this is not where the problem is. When you are in marketing or support and you talk to a manager, the basic lie is that the manager just has terrible developers who won't do what they are told. The reality is, the management is lying to cover their own asses. They have to blame someone, so they blame the developers. Really the developers are all manipulated by the management to not take responsibility for anything. They keep them quiet with all types of tricks and lies about what is important.
As a developer I was told to do the wrong thing on several occasions. And then later I find out that is not what was wanted by whoever was requesting a change. I strongly suspect that the manager was deliberately telling me to do the wrong thing and lying to others and saying they just could not get me to do the right thing. I have dealt with people in support and marketing that seem to be very irritated towards me for no reason. I believe that my manager was lying to people about who I was and what kind of work I did.
My impression is that good developers are harassed and lied about, while the bad developers are often willing to lie for the managers and get rewarded for that.
Middle managers have a lot of control. They can lie to their direct reports and tell completely different lies to their bosses and to others outside of development. It becomes a game of keeping everyone separated and talking only to them. That way they have the control, and the only thing you know is what they are lying to you, but the problem is you don't know they are lying.
in my many years there, I have circled back to this one poor manager a number of times.
- Does not lie to you, but hides the truth, or plays dumb
- All decisions are based on what his KPIs are
- Interprets corporate policy to suit whatever his needs of the day are, and uses that interpretation to his advantage, and usually your disadvantage
Good management is not valued at Oracle. Look at the executives: Larry, Safra, TK (now at Google). I was shocked by several things (well, many things!) when my company was acquired by ORCL:
1) Poor communication to the employees from the execs in terms of announcements, etc. No effort to "rally the troops."
2) Employees expected to be seen and not heard – no one cares about your opinion. Where at other companies, you were not doing your job if you saw something wrong and didn't speak up, at ORCL you are punished for speaking out.
3) All the decisions are made at the top, so managers are powerless.
4) No training for new managers/no coaching/mentoring (some useless online training).