[HN Gopher] Salesforce is shuttering Slack's remote work researc...
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Salesforce is shuttering Slack's remote work research group Future
Forum
Author : taubek
Score : 124 points
Date : 2023-04-01 14:19 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (finance.yahoo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (finance.yahoo.com)
| madboston wrote:
| Its funny that the tools that actually allow you to work remotely
| are pushing their own employees to come back. The leadership sure
| has some vision right there (vision for more money and nothing
| else but that's not shocking).
| zainhoda wrote:
| Exactly. If I were in charge of Slack I would double down on
| 100% remote and also not allow any other third-party remote
| collaboration tool. The team would be forced to build out all
| the remote tooling they need and then eventually incorporate it
| into the core product.
| stareatgoats wrote:
| It's hard to know what really happened here, but Butterfields
| comments as cited reflects an all-too-common mindset in company
| mergers regardless:
|
| "The problem has been, there's no incorporation of the Slack
| culture into the Salesforce culture, and unless there is some
| element of that, then it's not integration in any sense. It's
| just the elimination".
|
| It seems like the process of populating the top tiers in large
| orgs routinely sifts out people who know how to cooperate, and
| promote the people who only know how to dominate.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Exactly. Big companies can't innovate, they can't get out of
| their own way enough to get something all the way through.
|
| The way it goes: 1.Company with great leadership gets
| investment (angel, VC, government, etc.) to do something great.
| 2. Great leadership takes the time and effort to a - understand
| what is needed and how to recognize talent in those areas and b
| - gets that talent onboard, even if it's expensive and time
| consuming to align their desires with the companies 3. A great
| team, with great leadership, does great things. 4. Great things
| are profitable, so the company is sold to a big soulless
| company, or becomes a big soulless company over time 5. Many of
| the people with true passion and skill leave because they can.
| They generally leave because the toxic environment in big
| soulless companies hurts them and takes away what makes them
| individually so great. 6. Company is left with a shell. They
| manufacture and sell a product, but all the people who made
| that product from first principles, the people who can do it
| again, have been alienated,insulted, or otherwise fell victim
| to the toxic culture and had to leave to preserve their
| humanity.
|
| Source: I've been through this cycle 3 times, one with a
| company that went IPO and is big now, one time with St.
| Jude/Medtronic and one time with J&J.
|
| Edited to correct a spelling error
| fatfox wrote:
| Big soulless company will fail to replicate success of
| original founders due to lack of genuine vision for the
| acquired business.
|
| Will try to shoehorn acquired business into mega corps core
| competencies and remove whatever made it uniquely successful.
| eftychis wrote:
| You can also add my personal anecdota in the pot. Same
| experience. (I know there is self selection sampling here
| that needs to be adjusted for.)
| 8note wrote:
| 4.5 the big company has different constraints that the small
| company did not have
| imwithstoopid wrote:
| well Stewart always had the choice of going it alone and
| building out Slack as its own brand, but he took the $$$
|
| he had the same experience with Yahoo buying Flickr so its not
| like any of this should have surprised him...he still consented
| to the acquisition of Slack
|
| no difference here from the WhatsApp guys who took a ton of
| money and then pooped on Facebook...be happy you got the money
| and understand that you agreed to be acquired
| fossuser wrote:
| I'll defend Brian Acton a bit here - he refused to sell
| WhatsApp until it got up to a ludicrous 19B$ for 30 full time
| employees? Few people are tested to that amount and then it
| becomes a legitimate question of opportunity cost (he gave
| 50M$ to signal after the sale). Even with that Meta has been
| a decent steward of it imo despite obvious conflicts of
| interest. 19B$ of character is more than most.
|
| Slack failed to compete with Microsoft and then the CEO sold
| it to one of the worst possible acquisition companies in the
| industry (maybe only behind oracle?) not unlike his flicker
| sale, it's not the same. I have a lot lower opinion of him
| (to the point I'd be less likely to join a company he's
| running).
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>Slack failed to compete with Microsoft
|
| I dont know that is a fair characterization, by most
| accounts Slack is a better product, however Microsoft has a
| vertical integration and with the strong push to bring most
| orgs on to Microsoft 365 it is hard to compete with "free"
| in the sense that Teams is included in the suite products
| you are already going to pay for anyway....
|
| I highly doubt it Microsoft would have made Teams a stand
| alone product each company had to buy per user that it
| would have gotten anywhere near the adoption it did.
| fossuser wrote:
| Slack had an in to expand and capture what eventually
| became 365, but they didn't do it and Microsoft caught up
| and captured it.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > by most accounts Slack is a better product
|
| Perhaps but it doesn't seem customers value it very much.
|
| > I highly doubt it Microsoft would have made Teams a
| stand alone product each company had to buy per user that
| it would have gotten anywhere near the adoption it did.
|
| To me the fact that people would pay for a chat app was
| an oddity in the first place. Skype (the consumer
| version) was mostly free.
| anon2358 wrote:
| Two more facts tilt in favor of Brian Acton here:
|
| 1. Encryption made WhatsApp inherently more resistant to
| being polluted by Facebook. They still get access to highly
| sensitive metadata about contacts and groups, but they
| can't do the kind of things they did to rape and pillage
| Instagram.
|
| 2. He took his money and his free time, and has invested
| heavily in supporting Signal. While Meta lets WhatsApp rot
| and slowly becomes Yahoo, Signal is solidly on its way to
| become the OpenStreetMap/Internet Archive/Wikipedia of
| social communication apps.
| LapsangGuzzler wrote:
| > It seems like the process of populating the top tiers in
| large orgs routinely sifts out people who know how to
| cooperate, and promote the people who only know how to
| dominate.
|
| This is an inherent trait of our modern result-driven system.
| Being able to dominate is a key trait for a successful
| executive in this culture, and anyone saying otherwise is just
| trying to sell books.
|
| As egalitarian as we might think our modern work culture is,
| the idea that leading by cooperation just isn't true.
| Successful executives at big companies are able to make it look
| like they lead by cooperation (and sometimes do cooperate in
| the process) while fully maintaining control. And many don't
| even try to pretend to be cooperative.
| stareatgoats wrote:
| I'm not really as pessimistic as all that. True, in the
| companies I've worked for there was always a tendency for the
| domineering types to make it to the top, but there is
| definitely a spectrum involved, a bell curve that could
| conceivably be shifted more towards cooperation than
| currently if the zeitgeist favored that more. Maybe after
| some time with more women on the boards?
| esja wrote:
| In my experience the women who make it to these levels are
| no less domineering than the men, and often more so.
| ResearchCode wrote:
| Don't think there's any evidence for that.
| shaneofalltrad wrote:
| I see it in most companies I work at, I see the most
| aggressive delegation minded extroverts climbing to the top
| and those heads down getting shit done stepped over much of
| the time or even considered less important because they are
| not playing the social game. We need a study to see this?
| ResearchCode wrote:
| That doesn't mean it's the best model. Successful in the
| sense of the career ladder, then maybe you're right.
| Successful as in productive or good for the organization
| or society, probably not. They are responsible for many
| of the biggest organizational failures.
| indymike wrote:
| > It seems like the process of populating the top tiers in
| large orgs routinely sifts out people who know how to
| cooperate, and promote the people who only know how to
| dominate.
|
| I don't think it's that simple. As you move up, you lose
| touch with those below you because the problems that can get
| you fired come from your other executive peers and the C
| suite. Most of these problems are really hard to explain
| because they are kind of stupid. Someone's sleeping with the
| CEO and wants something. Another VP promised the company
| would do X for an investor who will withold investment if X
| doesn't happen. Everyone is terrified of a lawsuit because
| someone got liquored up and said something to the media at a
| conference. Our rock star, investor-placed, infallible CFO
| made a mistake and we have one third the cash we thought we
| did. And your job as executive is to make it happen even if
| it is stupid. So it comes across as domineering and very
| political:
|
| "We're not doing that, Dave. We're doing this. Because I said
| so."
|
| If the executive took time to explain:
|
| "We're not doing that, Dave. I had to make a deal with CMO
| Schmidt (who referred me to the CEO for my job and is married
| in to the owner's family) because he committed that we would
| be ready to release feature X at convention Y at last week's
| investor meeting. So, that integration with Z that will make
| us a bunch of money isn't going to happen. I know, it's
| stupid. But we're doing the stupid. And yes, that guy who
| makes 3x what I do is an absolute idiot."
|
| This is why I much prefer to work in companies where the
| owners are still working in the business and the whole team
| is "dealt in" on outcomes (i.e. in a startup, has options)
| and executives are looking to increase the valuation of
| options/shares instead of trying to max out some badly
| designed "multi-dimensional, goal-aligned incentive
| structure".
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| > This is why I much prefer to work in companies where the
| owners are still working in the business and the whole team
| is "dealt in" on outcomes (i.e. in a startup, has options)
| and executives are looking to increase the valuation of
| options/shares instead of trying to max out some badly
| designed "multi-dimensional, goal-aligned incentive
| structure".
|
| This is incidentally why stock based comp exists
| parineum wrote:
| > This is an inherent trait of our modern result-driven
| system.
|
| Is being result-driven modern?
| shaneofalltrad wrote:
| I believe it's a modern version of result-driven.
| samstave wrote:
| Results drive modernity
| 8note wrote:
| I don't know if you should call that results driven.
|
| Results tend to come from cooperation and collaboration.
|
| What you might be looking for is that were in an attribution-
| driven system and culture?
| anon2358 wrote:
| The simplest explanation is that the small team of people who
| ran Future Forum probably just didn't want to deal with Benioff
| and Salesforce's bullshit anymore. Either that, or they got
| laid off in one of the recent rounds of cuts.
| a13o wrote:
| If you're getting acquired pay attention to whether the buyer
| needs your product, or your vision. That'll tell you how quickly
| your pre-aquisition culture will be stamped out.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I've done a few acquisitions, one of them they just couldn't
| believe we only wanted some ip and not their vision no matter
| how explicit we were. I think it's hard for some people to see
| themselves that way, everyone is the hero of their own story as
| some say. another it was a lot more obvious, esp after who we
| didn't keep. But I still spent some time at the pub with their
| leads talking and trying to pivot them mentally.
| bloblaw wrote:
| Salesforce is a sales and marketing company that was founded (and
| is led) by a brilliant sales and marketing person in Marc
| Benioff.
|
| They are not now, and never have been, and engineering focused
| company. The creation of the Salesforce platform itself is (or
| was) based entirely on Oracle tech...and it was SOLD extremely
| well because it solved business problems.
|
| Salesforce has failed to innovate outside of releasing the CRM as
| a SaaS product back in 1999...which is why they have _bought_
| innovation, and then integrated it poorly...see Heroku, Slack,
| Mulesoft, Tableau, Quip, Demandware, ExactTarget, etc.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/06/18/sale...
|
| I worked there for a short bit. Most frustrating experience of my
| career. It was the epitome of rest and vest well before COVID.
|
| Extreme lack of urgency, little attention to quality, and a huge
| focus on sales and marketing.
|
| Salesforce will print money for a few more years until someone
| makes a less awful CRM solution and just crushes their
| business...so long as Salesforce can't buy that company,
| integrate it badly, and disillusion all the employees that made
| it great.
| altacc wrote:
| Yep, Salesforce grows by acquisition and that really shows when
| you start implementing it, especially if you want to do
| anything more complex that use Marketing Cloud. Then you
| realise that it is a poorly integrated collection of distinct
| applications, each with its own data model, integration
| patterns and license fee model. You end up endlessly working
| out how to move data across applications and then back again.
|
| I'm one of a handful of people with Salesforce experience in my
| company and we have a small usage of it. I'm brought into new
| projects thinking of using it as a counterpoint to the SF sales
| team, who promise the world and then disappear to be replaced
| by an implementation team that has to explain that things
| aren't as easy, simple or cheap as the sales team promised.
| davidgerard wrote:
| Approximately all CRM products suck. Salesforce is better than
| no CRM and not worse than its competitors. We use it, and it's
| tedious and awful in many ways but it does the job. YMMV of
| course.
| funstuff007 wrote:
| > Salesforce will print money for a few more years until
| someone makes a less awful CRM solution and just crushes their
| business.
|
| This statement undervalues the lock-in Salesforce has. One
| should probably make migrate-from-Salesforce tool and sell to
| all the new VC funded CRM shops. You could be selling shovels
| during a gold rush.
| itronitron wrote:
| so Salesforce is like SAP but for the talkie-talkie people in
| a company
| selectodude wrote:
| Absolutely. To compete with Salesforce, you need to not
| only do literally everything Salesforce can do, you need to
| be compatible with all the horrific hacked in integrations
| that companies have made, and do it better enough where
| it's worth the complete clusterfuck that switching off
| Salesforce would cause.
|
| Same as Oracle, SAP, etc.
| dchuk wrote:
| That's not a good way to try and compete with anyone
| api wrote:
| Sounds like they really planted a deeply rooted money
| tree there.
|
| There's a formula for this it seems: get deep lock in in
| an area that is very boring and very essential.
| selectodude wrote:
| Absolutely. Back when I worked for a bank as a junior
| analyst, we were one of the first to jump on the
| Salesforce train. The software was garbage but Salesforce
| bought the handful of us many four figure dinners. I
| don't really give a fuck how annoying the software is
| when I'm eating a $90 steak with a glass of $200 wine.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Yeah, aren't there already a lot of CRM products? I know
| Close.io is particularly useful for salespeople, but I'm not
| sure of any that could touch the dominance of Salesforce in
| the enterprise.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Yeah, aren't there already a lot of CRM products?
|
| Hundreds, if not thousands.
| jcadam wrote:
| Tech companies have either a sales culture or an engineering
| culture. As a new employee, you usually figure out which your
| new company has by the end of the first day.
|
| A lot of companies start with an engineering culture and
| transition out of it as they grow (actually, this is almost
| always the case) - examples: HP, Boeing, et al.
| sithlord wrote:
| I think the show Silicon Valley does a good job of portraying
| that transition.
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| This is my experience exactly. A few years ago, I joined a
| startup at 50 people that was very much an engineering
| culture. By the time we hit ~120 people it shifted into a
| sales culture due to pressure from our investors.
|
| Sales people had complete free reign to promise everything
| under the sun to potential customers. It caused a lot of
| havoc in our product development and burned out most of the
| engineers pretty quickly.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Tech companies have either a sales culture or an
| engineering culture. As a new employee, you usually figure
| out which your new company has by the end of the first day.
|
| Why wait until the end of your first day? This is a great
| question to ask in an interview.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| > Salesforce will print money for a few more years until
| someone makes a less awful CRM solution and just crushes their
| business...so long as Salesforce can't buy that company,
| integrate it badly, and disillusion all the employees that made
| it great.
|
| I've been hearing this for nearly a decade. There are VASTLY
| better CRMs out there. They don't make a dent in SFCD's
| business. That says a lot about the market.
| te_chris wrote:
| This reads like someone who's never used the platform. It is
| broad, allows you to do a lot quickly and relatively more
| easily than most other platforms.
|
| I'm not an evangelist, but I'm now a few years into using it at
| the startup where I'm CTO and it's great at what it does and
| there isn't really anything else that does it.
| bloblaw wrote:
| This is true, I did not use the platform as a user. I know it
| solves business problems and theyve built a big moat.
|
| My commentary is on the company culture and focus on sales
| over quality. I just don't think this is a company that knows
| how to organically innovate or integrate purchased
| innovation...and I think that makes them vulnerable to being
| overtaken by a competitor that solves the same business
| problems in a different way than they do now.
|
| They'll be around for decades. Just like many other formerly
| innovative companies hang around for a long time.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Out of curiosity, how many non-enterprise alternatives to
| Salesforce have you really, genuinely evaluated?
|
| I've personally never met anyone who has had anything nice to
| say about Salesforce. I've never heard anything especially
| bad, but I've heard so many complaints (especially from folks
| who have had to touch the API). From what I can see,
| Salesforce only has an advantage because they're the biggest,
| so everything and everyone works with it (in the same way
| that every tool that touches email integrates with Gmail).
| ghaff wrote:
| You're sort of saying this but Salesforce has an absolutely
| enormous ecosystem of partners. Dreamforce is one of the
| largest conferences in tech. (CES is probably bigger but
| there aren't many.)
| MajimasEyepatch wrote:
| "There are two kinds of programming languages: the ones
| people complain about and the ones nobody uses."
|
| I feel like that applies here.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| The programming languages people complain about the most,
| are the ones I love to use. :)
| ysavir wrote:
| I don't have any hands-on experience with Salesforce, but
| to me this is reminiscent of Jira. Nobody has anything nice
| to say about it, yet it's still the dominant player and
| people's go-to for project management, and no other tooling
| has managed to supplant it.
| tikhonj wrote:
| The people who have real problems with Jira and
| Salesforce aren't the ones who decide whether to use it.
| te_chris wrote:
| The API is fine and quite flexible. There are things that
| are very annoying (hello deploying updates from sandboxes
| to the production instance), but the APIs work, are
| generally well documented and have lots of options to
| generally get what I've needed to get done done.
| malermeister wrote:
| Salesforce keeps killing everything that made Slack good.
| j-bos wrote:
| Maybe I misread, and I'm definitley being trite, but, is the tldr
| that this research group consistently found evidence that remote
| work is good, and thus the evidence must be stopped?
| [deleted]
| softwaredoug wrote:
| The eternal story of "we're going to acquire you but leave you
| alone" that turns out to almost never be true.
| digdigdag wrote:
| Ten years in IT, I've been part of roughly 4 acquisitions
| across a few jobs. Each time the line delivered to the
| employees is more or less the same: "don't worry, we don't
| intend to change anything. It's business as usual".
|
| Then a few months in, the warning signs begin. New HR documents
| to sign. New benefit schedules. Then there's some turbulence
| from above -- talks of upper management getting reshuffled. New
| org charts.
|
| A few months after that, there's new customers to support, new
| SLA guidelines, new meetings for us to attend. _Then_ it's your
| organization that starts getting sacked.
|
| It's all just a cynical dog whistling to get people to stay
| complacent and continue turning the cog while they pull the rug
| out from under you.
|
| Thankfully I've become adept at the skill of jumping ship when
| I see the first leaks, if you know what I mean.
| imwithstoopid wrote:
| why jump at the sign of a first leak? you can usually get
| another full year of slacking off at full pay while the
| parent company dithers around
|
| unless you see truly greener pastures elsewhere, getting
| acquired is one of the best gigs in IT
| livelielife wrote:
| for some people a job is just a job, and any job is
| potentially ok.
|
| some other suckers like myself, we need something more out
| of our jobs; it sucks to be like this; it makes us easier
| to exploit.
| itronitron wrote:
| I've never been more miserable than when I have been paid
| to show up and do nothing.
| throwaway8689 wrote:
| Only time I'm more miserable is if I'm told to work on
| something I know is going to get canned.
| malermeister wrote:
| That's why wfh is so great: You _don 't_ show up, you do
| nothing and you _still_ get paid.
| petepete wrote:
| In the only acquisition I've been involved in, the morning
| after it was officially announced we came into the office and
| the (brand-colour) orange walls had been painted grey.
| throwaway8689 wrote:
| Imagine the opportunities for 'insider' trading in the
| painting and decorating business.
| [deleted]
| goodoldneon wrote:
| Cisco's acquisition of Duo was pretty good. Cisco even lets Duo
| use Slack even though Cisco owns WebEx
| srhtftw wrote:
| I've also heard the Cisco Meraki acquisition went well
| because Meraki was profitable enough to remain independent.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > he wrote in the #all-salesforce Slack channel that employees
| hired during the pandemic had "much lower productivity." He
| followed that by soliciting feedback: "Is this a reflection of
| our office policy? Are our managers not directly addressing
| productivity with their teams?"
|
| Or, hear me out, maybe it's a reflection of the fact that the
| pandemic was a truly enormous disruption to people's lives and
| psyches and society as a whole, and that people living through
| generational disruption to their lives and communities have much
| lowered productivity? And that this indeed may take a while to
| recover from? Crazy to suggest?
| ntonozzi wrote:
| He's not saying that everyone had lower productivity through
| the pandemic, but that those hired during the pandemic and
| working remotely had much lower productivity.
| moomin wrote:
| I mean, there are many possibilities here. One is that no-one
| got onboarded properly (possibly because the people who were
| meant to be doing it were busy trying to demonstrate
| productivity).
|
| Another possibility is that he doesn't know how to measure
| productivity in the new environment and the whole thing is
| sampling error.
| rrdharan wrote:
| Yet another possibility is that it's an entirely credible,
| accurate and valid statement based on meaningful data.
| speakfreely wrote:
| Salesforce is a plague on every company it buys. They completely
| ruined Heroku and I expect it won't be long before Slack starts
| to suffer.
| samwillis wrote:
| This is a common meme about Heroku, but when you look at the
| timeframes it's not quite true. Heroku was founded in 2007,
| acquired by Salesforce in 2010 well before its innovation and
| growth began to decline. Many of their biggest products and
| innovations came after the acquisition.
|
| That's not to say it was then neglected by them later on!
| flappyeagle wrote:
| They had existing momentum which dwindled and was never
| recharged
| justeleblanc wrote:
| Must have been some incredible momentum, built in three
| years and lasting for a decade.
| holografix wrote:
| Heroku's downfall had little to do with Salesforce and much
| to do with AWS, Google and Azure muscling in to the PaaS
| market.
|
| Once K8s got wide adoption Heroku was over. Selling Heroku to
| IT was a huge pain in ass as the key decision makers mostly
| make resume-driven buying and engineering decisions.
|
| Did Salesforce neglect Heroku or allow it to operate
| independently? It's a matter of point of view.
|
| The reality is that Heroku saw itself more and more
| irrelevant vis a vis its competitor and without the funds to
| compete. It's only hope for survival is to become more and
| more relevant to Salesforce customers while largely out-
| competed but the big 3 for everyone else.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| At some point it will make sense to start a new slack/teams
| replacement. We're close.
| scottdevries wrote:
| We use Discord as a Slack alternative, and have for a couple
| years. It's perfect for a remote company, especially if you
| also run chat/messaging for customers and users.
| [deleted]
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I know the upsides, but what do you lose if you switch from
| Slack to Discord?
| pid-1 wrote:
| How do you deal with security?
|
| - No SSO
|
| - No way to enforce MFA, restrict logins to trusted devices
| and IPs, etc...
|
| - No message / audit logs
|
| I like discord for personal use, no way I would use it
| professionally
| DANmode wrote:
| There's no way to enforce MFA? How do you figure?
|
| Give new users a very short window, or not able to use
| until their hardware key, phone enclave, etc is registered
| for MFA.
|
| You could even go as far as to send pre-registered hardware
| keys by mail, or have them picked up from HQ upon hire.
|
| Certainly would have solved some of the recent "who
| actually works in infra at Twitter" debacle, now that I'm
| thinking about it.
| xxpor wrote:
| That's how you get people to use MFA, but AFAIK there's
| no feature in Discord to a) federate with a directory
| like AD or b) force users on a server to only be able to
| sign in with a hw key
| pid-1 wrote:
| How do you know folks are using their hw keys to log in
| discord?
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| Discord UI is so complicated, I feel old, im always clicking
| the wrong buttons. Im sure you get used to it soon, and
| probably more powerful once you do.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Discord lacks a lot of work specific features
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Anything missing from Matrix (and clients) from your POV?
| flappyeagle wrote:
| It's not better than slack in any way that matters to a
| corporate user
| malermeister wrote:
| I think Mattermost might fit the bill?
| flappyeagle wrote:
| It does not. It's basically worse slack.
| kennydude wrote:
| What does it need to become a product better than Slack?
| flappyeagle wrote:
| It needs to have better features and better support.
| kennydude wrote:
| What features are you looking for? I'm sure I've seen the
| Mattermost/Gitlab team browse here in the past and having
| something actionable would help them get there
| imwithstoopid wrote:
| its free-as-in-beer which is all 99% of orgs want
|
| it also provides 99% of the functionality most orgs
| actually care about
| flappyeagle wrote:
| You've clearly never run an org. Cost is one of many
| factors that matters. MS teams is also free as in beer
| when I'm already buying office.
| imwithstoopid wrote:
| I've run mattermost for a moderate sized team while doing
| my dev duties, it was never a bother...what specific
| problems did you have?
|
| I maybe spent fifteen minutes a month on upgrades
| flappyeagle wrote:
| I do not want to have a piece of undifferentiated
| infrastructure at my org to be tied to the employment,
| enthusiasm and attention of a particular engineer.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| I agree, perhaps they can call it something like HipChat. Has a
| nice ring to it.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| A lot of people are replying with suggestions of discord,
| mattermost etc.
|
| Those are not very different than slack in terms of UX and much
| less capable in many ways that matter (integrations etc)
|
| It's almost time for something actually new
|
| Something that makes remote work better than in person by
| existing. It has to be so good that people stop talking to each
| other at the office once they have this tool.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > "I believe this is what's best for Slack," Elliot wrote
|
| And again no data, no evidence whatsoever. I'd expect the
| companies making such big decisions like RTO to be more data
| driven and transparent.
| rwalle wrote:
| Of course there's no data. How many companies, especially the
| big ones, have you heard doing surveys for employees and asking
| whether they prefer in-office or remote work? They don't,
| because they are afraid to hear the responses.
| DogLover_ wrote:
| Even if the data was there. Is it worth it if employees are
| much happier with remote work? It should really not be a binary
| question whether the productivity is higher or lower.
| elbigbad wrote:
| I guess the somewhat cynical question-answer to that question
| is: As a business, is their mission to be productive and make
| great products, or to make employees happy to the detriment
| of the company's productivity?
| DogLover_ wrote:
| Sure, if you are only using thinking shortsighted. I doubt
| they consider what effect remote has on retention and
| company reputation and how those factors could affect
| productivity.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| I'd assume remote work greatly lowers retention. People
| are way less "attached" to their company when working
| remotely.
| cwilkes wrote:
| Counterpoint to that: if you can work remotely you won't
| leave for a company that requires your butt to be in a
| seat in the office.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Is it productive to cut out an entire swath of talent that
| will never work in the office again?
|
| Can you product be great if you're cycling employees due to
| burnout in your shitty company?
|
| I'd argue since everything revolves around people at the
| end of the day, taking care of your people in an absurdly
| generous way is the best possible business strategy.
| indymike wrote:
| Salesforce has spent an insane amount of money on real estate. I
| think the return to the office has nothing to do with
| productivity or even management style and everything to do with
| the big towers with SalesForce on top.
|
| The irony in this is that Salesforce literally set sales free
| from the office back in the late 90s and early 00s. When 9/11
| hit, I didn't miss a beat: I did presentations with WebEx (we did
| the voice part with a conference call) and logged everything in
| my through-the-browser CRM at blazing ISDN speeds. But it worked
| well enough that at least enterprise software sales evolved to a
| have-laptop-will-travel culture.
|
| Slack was a huge part of the work from home revolution of 2020.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| why can't they sell the buildings/get out of the leases/let
| them expire/don't renew them/lease them out to somebody else?
| mike_d wrote:
| You have a bucket of widgets, and so does everyone else to
| varying degrees. Each widget is really worth a dollar, but
| you paid $12 on average for yours because widgets were in
| demand at the time. Nobody really needs all their widgets
| right now, so there is little to no demand. You can either
| keep holding your widgets and keep them at a $12 valuation on
| your books, or sell them for an $11 write down. If enough
| people sell their widgets at $1 then everyone's widgets are
| magically worth $1 too, and everyone is fucked.
|
| Bay Area commercial real estate right now is like holding a
| bunch of jumbo mortgages in 2007.
| user3939382 wrote:
| > Salesforce literally set sales free from the office back in
| the late 90s
|
| According to Wikipedia they only existed for 10 months in the
| 90s. I don't remember hearing about them until like 2005. Were
| they really that well known that early?
| ghaff wrote:
| Late 90s is too early and without digging in their financials
| I assume the early 2000s were lean for at least a time. I
| most associate them with being very vocal about cloud quite
| early on as SaaS actually appealed to quite a few companies
| as opposed to application service providers of the dot-com
| era.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| > and logged everything in my through-the-browser CRM at
| blazing ISDN speeds.
|
| Nowadays every single click on sales force takes a painfully
| long amount of time - sometimes several seconds but it
| compounds into making it feel like you're wading through
| molasses.
|
| Salesforce "lightning" has got to be the most ironically-named
| product in history - it's a slow, painful clusterfuck which
| makes me miserable every time I have to use it.
| btbuildem wrote:
| Just another CEO ghoul, captured by real estate interests, doing
| the board's bidding. It's fascinating that these dogs are willing
| to chew off their own legs for scraps from the sunken cost table.
|
| I lost respect for our CEO entirely when he decreed the new RTO
| policy (justifying it with, and I paraphrase, "because I said
| so"). The company "promotes innovation", and their idea of moving
| forward is to "go back to how things were". It's pathetic.
|
| They didn't even dare to do layoffs when everyone else was
| slashing staff, because they have such a hard time hiring anyone.
| It's good to see that the rank and file understand this, and (at
| least in satellite offices) mostly ignore the RTO decree, calling
| the C-suite's bluff.
| dang wrote:
| Can you please edit out swipes and personal attacks from your
| comments here, and also please not fulminate on HN? You can
| make your substantive points without any of that, and that's
| what we're going for here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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