New claim dogs Oracle: After $11m of sales, I was unfairly axed before next big deal – because I am a 64yo woman Oracle, facing US government charges that it discriminated against women by paying them less than male colleagues, has been sued yet again for gender and age discrimination by a former sales rep. A complaint – filed late last week in a federal court in San Francisco, California – claims the database biz subjected plaintiff …
The adage 'Where there is smoke there is a fire' seems rather apt here. There too many seemingly creditable claims against Leisure Suit Larry and His Minions for there not be some serious nastiness going on internally. Exactly what the nastiness is, hard to tell precisely but it seems as if Larry and the Minions do not want to pay for top talent and likes to cheat their talent out of money due them by a variety of shady means. Exactly what the fraudulent means are is uncertain but something is very rotten.
It's just SOP in their eyes, no discrimination at all as they see it. I've seen a lot of companies work like this, promise big bonuses for building sales and then when the corporate manglement see that they are actually going to have to pay the bonuses promised they reorganize the department to keep the sales and lower the promised payments. "No we're not cutting your bonus, we're just reorganizing the sales territory" ... cutting the territory in half can lower the bonus payments by about 80% ... triples all round at the next manglement meeting in Bermuda - profits are up. When you own the company then sales people are about on the same level as the cleaning staff - disposable and replaceable.
@a_yank_lurker; This is surprising?
Ellison has never- or at least not in modern history- pretended to be anything other than a dick, openly screwing over his own customers and holding them to ransom once they're locked in.
It'd be more surprising if that attitude *wasn't* the same towards his own employees when he could get away with it.
How irresponsible... do you KNOW what quotas were/are? You DONT knownfor a fact what their quotas were do you? So just because you THINK you know why their quotas are you are skeptical? That is something that is BERY easy for the court to determine... just because you think it is lownismof NO consequence whatsoever....
>You DONT knownfor a fact what their quotas were do you?
I don't.
But I do know industry norms.
I work for a company that is in the top 50 of it's industry. Big industry, but still just a medium size fish in a big pond.
We regularly inking million dollar contracts with our suppliers for hardware and software licenses. Just spent $500,000+ to build separate infrastructure to isolate Oracle on to reduce our Oracle licensing costs with the newest license model they were imposing.
$2MM in sales would be a struggling real estate agent in my area. I can't imagine an Oracle salesperson would have a quota that small -- it doesn't pass the sniff test.
NOW...I wouldn't put it pass them to assign dogs for accounts or territory and otherwise manipulate the situation so that you couldn't reach expected quotas.
(Anon because some of the details included...)
It's almost as though management has decided it doesn't matter if it lasts as long as they live, which as an old guy, starts to look like "not forever", so in the utter absence of morals, milk it for all it's worth - both customers and employees, and the consequences won't come home to roost while they are living. Looks to me like they're pushing it pretty hard, but then, it's not like as a person, where you can get killed - or at least severely beaten and/or jailed, if you anger enough people - evidently corps have significantly more rights than people, they don't hang them in Texas after all. But they sure do steal horses.
Quite possibly some of 'management' may need their expectations re-adjusted. Their expectations of how long they have left to live!
Check with the French - they no doubt have those guillotines packed away in storage somewhere!
...
I'm pretty sure, like the hydra, if you chop off ALL the heads, a corp. can still die!
If they don't there's a Medieval predecessor in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. It's called The Maiden and is set up and on display though the blade looks like it is in need of a hone and I expect the slides for it could do with some heavy duty waxing but otherwise it looks perfectly serviceable.
Kept in case we need a revolution instead of an IndRef, we may need to reinstate the sedition law first mind.
> [ ... ] management has decided it doesn't matter if it lasts as long as they live [ ... ]
Margin calls on Larry borrowing mega-moola with ORCL stock as collateral. Must be some really nasty margin calls.
Must free up cash for stock buy-backs. USD $10 BEELION of share buy-backs last quarter alone. The ORCL stock buy-back party continues.
Geez I brought in more than that in my short (4yr) tenure at IBM and that was done as sales management kept cutting my territory and doubling my quota.
At some point, you have to know when to escape the borg.
I thought she did better than that.
Sorry but senior sales reps would have done much more. Of course, we don't know her product mix and territory size.
All
You needed to post was your last sentence. The rest is conjecture and comparing your quota versus an Oracle rep in a specific division is meaningless. Saying a senior rep would have brought in more is absurd as well. You are basically slamming her saying she is a bad rep and intimating tounare a good rep but the reason you were sacked is because of bad tactics by IBM. Why is it that Oracle isn’t wromgnin your mind? VERY bizarre and narcissistic post on your part...
You misunderstood.
I was saying that having her portrayed as a senior rep who made her numbers... her numbers weren't that impressive.
Again, it depends on territory and product mix, but I do know the industry. I do know the numbers that software reps at IBM in Information Management had to bring, and she would have just been average.
(Yeah I was an overlay and I had to sit on the BUEs pipeline calls so I knew the numbers and quotas)
Does this mean she doesn't have a case?
No. Oracle is very cutthroat and they will burn and churn people. ( I have friends who worked there in sales) What my comment was is that she is being portrayed as a senior rep. (Experience not age) and that she was a major contributor. Oracle will use that against her because her numbers weren't that impressive.
Got it?
Oh and I wasn't being narcissistic. While I sold highly skilled and trained bodies, I was a senior sales specialist. It was more of amazement that for someone claiming to be a senior rep her numbers were that low. Heck my peers, her direct competitors had higher targets and quotas. As I said above, I knew the reps pipelines and quotas. (And some of those reps weren't that senior either.)
If you want to get technical... Oracle will take a look at her performance and review her pipeline and do some sales analytics.
Its not like she made club and at the same time was put on a performance review.
So her case isn't a slam dunk.
And I'm not saying she doesn't have a case. Sales is cutthroat. Shit happens. And I've seen it all.
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