Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

It doesn't have to be anonymous.

Feel free to put down your name so we know how smart you are.

Asking an irrelevant question in an anonymous posting site does not deserve an answer.

Answering a question with a question to deflect the question?

A passive aggressive response. Who could it be from ?

@NFewSEp-5pee and @NFewSEp-5lrd

And you are?

3cxg so is clueless oracle HR, the thing is these people don't realize they sound like HR drones trying to limit the damage. Laughable

The last post sounds like PR doing damage control and defending the toxic environment.

To original poster,

I read your detailed post. it filled in a lot of the gaps.

I am sorry to hear you were treated this way.

I had similar experience. Whenever they told me something material to my proj verbally. I would immediately email them back a confirmation and cc myself and store everything in a folder for easy retrival. It didn't matter if they responded, it was recorded. You do not need to be as paranoid as some naysayers make it out to be with your recording habits. You know who the bad apples are and you can anticipate what's going to matter and what's not. trust the gut feeling. I don't spend much time doing this Evidence gatheting stuff. But it has came in handy when needed.

If there was a issue and the other party isn't responding, I would esxalate to their manager, director, PM, etc. They always ask you for status at Program meetings, and I push it as a stopper blocking my progress to the PM. I push it in my own status reports. So a few sentences here. A meeting minute there is all you need. Over the long haul, you will have amassed a trove of documented ammunition should you need it.

90% of the time, the problems resolves here. The smart Asswipes will go away. For the really stubborn ones, I ratchet up the documentation and the response as appropriate. Its easier if you have a track record with the team and PM and leads. You need alliances not in the form of ole boys network, but ppl who are dedicated to seeing the project through and pushing it out of the rough spots. One time the sh-- hit the fan with claims about me not delivering abc. I opened email and forwarded my last email confirmation with the asswhole about his POR request to deliver def to him and the entire project staff in the middle of the status meeting which was attended by all directors and higher ups all saw the email in real time. He then turned to me and said but I get so many emails i can't be expected to read them all. That was his lame excuse. He was crucified by the end of that meeting and got the blamed and I never saw him again after that proj. there are other similar stories but you get the gist.

I've been at O for a while now. I worked with A lot of good ppl. We act professionally towards each other. There are always a few bad apples, a few who use others as stepping stones, but never get to the point oF your experience.

I am not discounting your story, but also don't want others looking in to throw the bb out with the bath water. While corporate is absolutely indefensible, and I will not even try, There are many good and talented ppl left at O's many divisons and LOBS, not all of them are sadists and evil. Many are great ppl who I have personal friendships with. And like it not many of them has to remain at O. for whatever reasons. I see so many negative comments targeting O. and ppl working here that its absolutely infurating. Venting is fine, but a lot of the comments are way offbase and target the innocent ppl working here. I support the troops who work and slave away everyday at this place to keep the lights on.

Anyway, its good to know you got out of this place and has been helped by a therapist. Thanks for sharing your experience and I hope it can be water under the bridge for you someday.

Well, anyway.... I am the original poster. I actually posted this somewhere else and someone else posted it here as the beginning of a thread. Several people then said they had gone through the same thing.

The bully here seems to have gone off the deep end, but perhaps I can share some information.

I thought I would point out a few tricks the people I was working with were using, for anyone who might find themselves in this place.

I went to a therapist who pointed out the term "gaslighting". Something I had never heard of before this happened. This comes from an old movie call "Gaslight".... they actually had me rent and watch the movie. Very interesting. Sometimes spouses use this type of tactic, apparently.

For instance, one spouse will hide the other spouse's car keys. Then, they will "help" them find them and suggest that their spouse just can't remember anything these days. Over time, the other will actually accept that, since they trust what they are being told, and they are not really keeping track of things that closely. The other person can begin to doubt themselves.

For me, the second manager would do the following. He would write an email to me stating something on the project would now be done in a certain way. I would reply back and say "OK".

Then, sometime later he would contradict what he had written in the email, but do this over the phone. We were having meetings everyday, so lots of things were decided over the phone and I really didn't know that I should have been recording everything. Who would do that?

So, I go on and do what he says over the phone. Then sometime later he pretends to notice that I did the wrong thing. I say, No, you said to do that. He pulls up the only email on the topic that was sent quite some time ago, and I have by that time, literally forgotten about the original email. And says, No, you agreed to do this, SEE. Then, he opens the email in the meeting and he and the other person (his girlfriend), swear that they never said anything different.

At first I wasn't sure, it can be a small thing, that you may just assume you don't remember correctly, but there were other larger things that I remember explicitly being changed. It just didn't occur to me that they would do something like that. Then, it also occurred to me, one time, that even though the email was old, when he opened it in our shared meeting, that email was already scrolled to the middle of the screen. Prepared. He didn't have to search for it, he knew exactly where it was and the whole thing was staged.

This is a form of gaslighting, trying to get the person to doubt what they remember. It can be used in other ways, just by changing what you are telling someone, from time to time, and then insisting that you are correct and the other person does not remember.

There were other things like this where the manager would say different things at different times. I would ask a question about something and he would change his answer. If I repeatedly asked, he would blow up and tell me that I was "obsessed" with the question. Clearly, he wasn't going to answer anything.

I complained to my original manager, who I thought was helping me with the situation, but he was not. I thought that my back was covered and it was just the people in the other group that were doing odd things.

I had no way to prove what they had been doing by then, as I had not recorded anything. They were building an email trail to say that I was not doing what I was asked to do, which was not true. I was doing exactly what I was asked to do.

There was a developer on the other team, I believe this person was the manager's girlfriend, although I did not know that at the beginning. I believe she was sabotaging the code along the way, but there is no way to prove that. She didn't respond to emails, which I could have cracked down on, but in the end, what is the point.

I was also being told that the code had to be done by a certain time and was working literally, night and day and weekends to meet certain goals. I was excited about the project, it was really cool, I thought I would get credit for it, but I suspect that they were keeping my part in it quiet. But, it also had been many months and I was exhausted.

By the end of the project, I was explaining to my manager all of the sabotage and lies that were going on. I was complaining about the person moving the code around and the fact that she didn't respond to emails. In the last couple of months I had been working only with the manager and his girlfriend.

They were doing other things over the phone, criticizing things, being sarcastic, being general a--holes. They were saying they wanted me to continue helping them and then behaving like a--holes so that I wouldn't want to. So, the emails say things like they are looking forward to having me work more with them and then they behave like a--holes on the phone. So, when I then say that I don't want to work with them anymore, because they are a bunch of a--holes, the emails say the opposite.

So without recordings, it looks like I am the a--hole who just won't help them anymore. It was set up that way. They knew what they were doing, they thought about it long before and they had done this before. They were not amateurs.

My manager was not an amateur either.

I had been placed in his group without ever meeting him first. It appears I was just put there by spreadsheet. Some idiot above looked at the list of senior engineers and I would guess, salaries, and moved me into his group. I was told that the reason was that this manager did not have many senior engineers. No real reason..... I think they just look at an org chart and then go eeny-meeny-miny-mo or something.

I thought the guy was OK. My expertise was not in his area, that's why I was farmed out. But, I didn't fit in his group. It's a sh--ty way to do something like that. This guy also had a lot of thugs in his group. I saw them make fun of other people along the way. I think they rule by terror. I thought it was odd that the manager seemed so friendly and the employees there were such a--holes. That should have been my first warning that the manager was not who he seemed to be.

Anyway, the manager was a thug, too. When I started complaining about what was going on in the other group, his response was.... Oh, so you can't work with anyone. Complaints I had about the lying and code sabotage were just not things I could document after the fact.

If there was any piece of advice I would give, it's to record everything.

At the end of this my manager was trying to get me to write more emails, I had written some, about the people in the other group. But, he wanted more. Then, he continued to harass me to make sure that I left without giving the other group any documentation on what I had done.

I think that he was really trying to get the new application into his group. So, he sets me up to write a new app for them, they sabotage it, I refuse to work on it anymore, and he attacks me so that I leave them no documentation, knowing they don't have the js skillset to support what I wrote.

The group had a couple of devs from India working in it. My manager was Indian with a lot of Indian developers and he would ask me about who the Indian developers were in the other group. I think he was looking to take the project after I wrote the code for it, then discard me and transfer the project to his devs in India.

Or something like that. It was intensely stressful. I didn't want to leave the project, I just had no choice. Honestly, being a good developer, I expected to be appreciated and have a chance to work on the project for a while. I was sabotaged by both sides at once. There was no where to go but out.

Some of it may have been because the manager's themselves didn't trust one another. There could have been a lot of other things I was not aware of.

It's hard to summarize several months of lies and deceit in a few lines of text.

I would say to the bully here. You think you know everything, but you don't. It's much more complicated than you can imagine.

Oh... and when someone forwards you an email, do you ever check to make sure they haven't changed the text when they forward it to you?

Do you record all your conversations?

Nobody expects to have to do that. This was not office politics, this was far beyond that. I haven't even begun to list everything they were doing. They knew what they were doing.

oracle is hiring? I thought they are laying people off.

Wow! The victimized cannot voiced out without being harassed with names calling and dignity trampling.

I can now make up my mind on that job offer from Oracle.

Clearly, this board is filled with paid trolls working for PR or HR departments of competitors. All these talks about women being taken advantage of sound a lot like fake stories. The way IQ scores and employee awards brought up to prove one's own worth are wordings used exclusively by PR and HR staffs. Not only that they completely missed the point, they also completely missed the mark because the bar is much higher than 140 IQ among piers. Morons don't know 170 IQ is necessary to be averagely good.

Being laugh at behind is a fake narrative. If you sell more than pier, why are you afraid to leave? If you solve problems other's can't solve, what are you afraid of interviewing? Or is it that others can also solve problems you can't solve or understand? Or if you can both solve the same problem in different ways, and if your superior solution isn't used, then chicken will come home to roost pretty darn soon and you will be proven right time after time again. Who gets the last laugh then?

The narrative about others claiming your good work is also fake, only your boss can claim your work. Morons, don't know the existence of VCS clearly prove they are PR staffs.

@NFewSEp-1wio, consider you are lucky didn't need to do those BS reviews for 3 years, it just waste everybody time and useless, you won't get a dime even you get 5 out of 5.

@NFewSEp-1ewc I feel for you because I know what you were saying. I used to be strong and a damn f----- in striking back when someone tries to bully me or my friends. In my case, I fought back like a tiger but it was against a sly and crafty manager with a pack of Indians wolfs and hyenas who will surround you and strike from all directions. Wolf will attack you openly. Hyenas will come to you smiling then take a bite on one of your limbs to hold you down so others can take big bites of you. To those who call us pussies, I doubt you can hold up any longer than us unless you are one of those office bullies.

I am a female engineer. I was in the fusion middleware area, I no longer work at Oracle.

I was sabotaged by my manager, excluded from meetings, told to do things that would waste my time, given ridiculous requirements and then laughed at behind my back by the "guys".

There is not a woman in sight in this area of Oracle, consequently it is intensely corrupt. They will do anything to make sure to keep that woman in her place. They NEED to make sure that all women look incompetent. Such intensely fragile egos.

Some of the guys, I think, would be OK, if they were in another company, but the lead guys have serious problems and even the reasonably decent men say nothing. They just go along, so they won't be attacked by anyone themselves.

I have an IQ of 140, at my previous company I received an excellence award. At Oracle I was given really difficult tasks, things that my manager thought were impossible, but I took them as challenges and I did them, one after the other. After a few years though, when you are excluded from all information it becomes more and more difficult to function.

There was another woman that passed by briefly. I saw a demo from her.... the manager, who was also my manager was talking to her in baby talk during the demo she was doing..... "Oh, isn't that nice."

Never saw her again.

There are good companies out there. I have had better success at smaller companies or those that really rate employees on performance. At Oracle, I did not receive any reviews the last 3 years I was there.... same manager that did the baby talk.

Very sick and twisted people in this organization.

This post is really helping me a lot, knowing that what I'm feeling is shared by others who went through the same thing. My boss called me mid-May to say I was gone as of June 1. Instead of feeling upset (other than the fact that I didn't deserve to be let go), I felt relief.

I'm a middle-aged female who sold Enterprise Core Tech. In 5 years, I've had 8 managers and only 2 other women on my team, neither of whom stayed for even a year. Core tech sales is the opitomy of an old boys club. I don't know what I would've done if not for my SCs (all male) who were my lights during some very dark days. I've been propositioned, harassed and lied to by my managers, left out of meetings and continuously given the worst accounts in the area to match some of the highest quotas in the group.

Think about that. People like to say you sck if you don't make quota, but no one ever discusses that all quotas are not created equal. Managers are given a number to meet that they divide between their reps. So, give an extra $M to your 'boys' which might cause them to leave or give it to the 'girl' with the sold out territory? Why make 5 reps unhappy when you can just scrw one rep? Besides, she's a girl. She's expected to fail. No one will question when she can't live up to the job.

So why didn't I just leave? Because O was my first Fortune 100 tech job and in sales, you'll never get another job until you can talk about exceeding quota. So I had to stay until I did that. Which I did. But then the next problem occurred; I actually cared about my accounts. I've had accounts who joked about making voodoo dolls of my predecessor so they could stick him with pins, or previous reps who had verbally abused them or were caught in lies. These accounts deserved better from O. And from the calls I've gotten, sometimes years later, from old customers asking how to get me back, I know I've done well by them.

So what did my management do to reward the positive impact I'd had in my accounts? I actually had a manager who decided he wanted to tell an account that my job was on the line if they didn't spend $Ms on a new contract. He said "they really like you a lot and I bet they'd sign rather than cause you to be fired."

So was I let go for underperforming? Yes and no. Yes, because I didn't make quota. A quota that was 2x what my (brand new to me) accounts had bought for the previous 5 years COMBINED. Only one account had a Cloud agenda, for which they hired a new C-level exec from a Cloud competitor. My Cloud deal came from the only account I brought with me as part of an on-Prem SW renewal. Prior to my last day in the group, I was the ONLY rep who had closed a Cloud deal, along with business in 3 of the last 4 quarters. I had more revenue than any other rep in my group and a sizable PaaS deal for a new logo. Yet I was the one released.

I'm not worried about getting another job. Early in May I talked with a MS manager about Cloud technology (the job I want most) and he would like to hire me, once he understands what their new fiscal year will bring. But I just haven't been able to muster up the energy to start applying to other jobs. I have lots of friends in other companies waiting for my resume so they can help me get a job, but I'm just too worn out right now. I'm not depressed, just very, very tired. And very cynical that every place will just be like O.

Here's what the bottom line is:

Competent employees, no matter what department they are in, are busy doing their jobs. They don't want to deal with watching their back all the time and try to figure out who might be lying to them.

Competent employees NEVER have to sabotage anyone, they can do the work. Consequently, they are completely unskilled in all the latest sabotage techniques.

If Oracle wants to have competent employees, they need to crack down on the incompetent thugs who spend 90% of their day thinking about new tricks to play on the competent employees.

It's that simple. Internally, people have begun to think of this thug activity as normal. When that happens, there are no more competent employees.

That's why everything is a mess. You can't be a thug and competent employee at the same time. The 2 groups are mutually exclusive.

Manager inciting and manipulating employees to directly, indirectly, openly or covertly attack a high performer empoyee have been happening even in S-- . It does not just happen in O-----. It happens everywhere.

It has to do with the people you are working with. It is not the organization.

It is simply call office bullying.

S-xual harassment and HR is a joke, I know a director s-xually harassing a guy, he reported to HR, then the guy got move to other team and got layoff.

Some of you didn't take the s-xual harrassment course. The relationship between K and S is completely legit as long as they are not directly reports. The thing about T and S is not pure speculation. T and S has no relationship.

LE cannot stand the idea that somebody could be smarter than he is so he hires dummies and it flows on from there. Just look at Trump for a more public display of a stupid egomaniac

1st grade people never fear to hire another 1st grader; 2nd graders will always hire 3rd graders. If you don't know what 3rd graders will hire, you should go to Oracle and see it yourself.

Do not understand why Oracle fears talented individual contributors. They prefer mediocre employees- I suppose they consider everyone disposable.

This amazingly describes exactly what happened to me in the TK group downline. Unbelievable and I do think I have suffered some PTSD as well as this was and is not normal - sun, meditation, love, rest, swimming, using mind to replace prior positive life experiences over the O stuff and acceptance and finally forgiveness - FORGIVENESS is the only way I am healing up - doesn't mean I am a patsy just means forgive yourself for being caught up in such a sh--hole - your first instincts years ago were spot on ...

@NFewSEp-xfq 'The lack of women in the company in the fusion middleware/ics cloud area breeds a certain kind of corruption.'

Genderwise I experienced the opposite in middleware cloud support, the women running it are promoting their breed, the backstabbers, in our case a couple of US Indian engineers who's only skill is twisting the knife in the back. It seems impossible to fix as it became a metastasized problem within Oracle. It happened to IBM, HP and Yahoo, all caused by many sunny days, no respect for promotions and then the good employees either left or turned on the leeches now running the company, thus the company itself.

Oracle HR is the worst, much more than complicit in covering things up

It is a shame. I was there for a very long time. The HP crowd came in and ruined the company

I am the original poster.

I will move on eventually, but this should NOT be happening to people. You should NOT underestimate the psychological stress that this causes. I was in a PTSD state for several months.

You can look up the term "mobbing" on the web, which is what this is called. Coordinated sabotage of a high-performer by a group of thugs.

There was a brilliant man on the runtime side that I believe was also attacked in this way. There were things I was told that lead me to believe this.

The company suffers because of this. If you are looking at engineering from the outside and you wonder why all the great people are leaving. This is a large part of it. It's not just co-workers attacking other co-workers.... it's managers attacking employees, too. Some inciting co-workers to attack people for them.

The information here does not begin to describe what I witnessed. The lack of women in the company in the fusion middleware/ics cloud area breeds a certain kind of corruption. I also think that the overwhelming presence of Indian management exacerbates discrimination against women and also abuse.

There was a manager T (male) with an employee S (female). These two people were obviously connected. I was asked to make "special" tasks for S, because she didn't have to work with the rest of the people in the group, she got to do what she "wanted" to do.

Even though S had this special status, T regularly yelled at S and put her down in front of others. S was always trying to please T. This was an abusive and manipulative relationship. S got a divorce somewhere in the middle of this.

Enter director K (male). T wants something from director K and he is willing to manipulate S to do something for K that I won't state here, but you can guess what that was.

I worked for K and there was a lot of wink-wink-nod-nod going on. I'm pretty sure that S did what she was manipulated to do. Some women just don't recognize how they are being used or are SO desperate to have someone, ANYONE, to be attached to that they will do literally anything.

If you're out there, S, you should take a good long look at T.

K has been moving up the ladder, gaining power, and even though T and S are incompetent, they will NEVER be on the layoff list, because of you-know-what.

More women in the power structure would help prevent this kind of intensely corrupt activity from happening.

What did HR say? They said they had investigated and they were sure nothing was going on. HR is complicit in keeping the corruption static in the company. The other people in T's group are being cheated, S is being manipulated and used, K is corrupt and the company suffers because of that.

This is engineering, not sales or marketing.

Agree with all. Horrible place to be.

I spent 11 years that the company, I left in 2012. It took me about four years to recover. I'm still working on it.

Yeahh I agree. One of the most toxic places to work in. Everything that happened to you guys happened to me too. We got merged split taken over backstabbed so many times that me and my team were wrecks by the time it was over.

People got away with the most atrocious things over here. If you did something great despite all the negativity you got pulled down because other people wanted to steal your idea. This place should be boycotted by any decent engineer especially if you have a moral compass as well!

If you're as talented as you say you are, then you shouldn't have trouble finding work. Try a startup. They would appreciate your talent.

Absolutely agree - it has taken me a good period of time to "reset" my life back to pre-Oracle and I am becoming a much better human being in thought and deed and with my family and friends. Where have you been? It's good to see you again...

I can't add more on specifics as you did a great job summarizing my situation almost to the T.

Take care -

Yes, am glad to be out of that outdated technology stuff . Learning so much now in my prep for new job . The world has moved ahead and hopefully soon I will be part of it.

I totally agree with you, Oracle is sick and unhealthy. I came from Sun and since that time also any raise or promotion has stopped they try to force you to leave making the work environment worse every year. No more training's, travel bans etc.. just to not having to give you any leave package.