[MrTonyD]

I was a PM at Oracle - our team VP reported to Larry. Everybody I worked with was very experienced and very sharp. On the other hand, we regarded most of the company as "sheep" who executed our plans. Completely expendable and generally unenlightened. Obviously there were other bright people around the company, but by and large they had no clue about our strategy or direction or the way that real decisions were made (and we kept a lot of the real reasons for things secret - we didn't want competitors to know what we were really doing or why.) You don't become a business the size of Oracle by being completely stupid.

One example - since then I've worked for about 5 or 6 companies who boast about how they hired Oracle salespeople, so now they are energizing their sales. But at Oracle we spent a lot of time and effort at HQ doing things to make Sales and the Salespeople effective. So at company after company they can't figure out why hiring the "right" Salespeople isn't solving their problem. But they aren't doing any of the things that we did to support Salespeople (things throughout the rest of the company and outside the company.) We kept most of it secret from Sales, so even they didn't really know what we were doing. So are the Sales people smart? Yes. And are they sheep? Yes.

Similar arguments apply to most of the other PMs outside of core database (who companies also mistakenly hire to "turbocharge" their products), most of the Engineering groups, most of the support teams, and generally everybody outside a relatively small group of people.

[nate_meurer]

See, this just proves what I said in another comment -- that the different parts of Oracle are like completely different companies. I don't doubt what you say. But in ZFSSA QA, it was the opposite. Our director held regular all-hands meetings specifically meant to keep us all up to date on product strategy and direction. She wanted all of us to know exactly how our efforts were contributing to product revenue and to the company's strategic goals. Detailed stuff that made us (me, anyway) feel important. I've actually never seen anything like it anywhere else I've worked, even startups.

[MrTonyD]

I agree completely. If a director was meeting the company goals and running either a harsh or caring organization - well, at the higher levels of the organization nobody really cared as long as things worked. We would put up with lawsuits, employee complaints, and customer complaints all day if the business was going in the right direction. We spent insane amounts on lawsuits in exchange for getting non-disclosures signed. Like I said before - Oracle didn't grow to its size by being stupid. (I should add that I didn't like the environment. When Larry offered me control of a big organization I left. I was tired of the horrible values and what I would be expected to do. I walked away from a transition to an Executive position to go back to simple technical work. No regrets.)