Maybe it's just the segment I'm in, but I feel like Salesforce was hiring pretty hard up until recently. They wouldn't be the only company to go from a hiring spree to layoffs that quickly over the last quarter.
We really need to lock this absurdity down and increase severance requirements for large companies heavily. It's one thing to gamble risk for the company, it's something completely different to gamble employee livelihood when you're signaling job security by hiring.
I really hope that I get laid off in the first round of these layoffs where everyone gets good severance.
My current worry is that the first round of layoff at my first company will get 4 months severance, I'll miss that round, and 2 months later get laid off with only 2 months severance. This would of course mean that my severance ends at the same times as the first group but I had to work an additional 2 months.
It could always be worse. I got laid off last month with 2 1/2 weeks of severance. And of course there are plenty of industries outside of tech where severance itself is an alien concept.
And of course there are plenty of industries outside of tech where severance itself is an alien concept.
Absolutely. People in tech don't realize how good they have it.
The first time I lost a job I found out when my company phone started showing alerts on a Saturday night that it couldn't connect to the e-mail server. It turned out that my entire department was canned.
The second time, I came to work on a Thursday only to discover the door locked, and a couple of coworkers lingering around. Eventually, we decided we had the day off. Same story Friday. In the Sunday newspaper there a small note that the company has been bought. So Monday morning, it was off to the Unemployment office.
For 99% of American companies, you're lucky to get notice before you get laid off, let alone severance pay.
My first full time programming job I got laid off (or terminated anyway, they got rid of 25% of the small staff) at 90 days, and my severance was being paid to finish the project as a contractor. I took the offer of course.
Affected by this, and unless I'm reading the docs wrong 5 months is a bit of a PR exaggeration. Health insurance is longer but pay and vesting end mid-March.
Interesting. Somewhere else in (this or another thread on HN) someone mentioned that their wife was affected and would have pay & benefits into March, and then 5 months severance after.
My hope for folks affected (and, as a former SFDC employee, I know several affected) is that it's pay & vesting for the WARN period, with the severance period following that.
You're correct, I 100% misread my docs. My package appears to be the same and really is quite generous (and makes me feel a bit better about sfdc, which is nice)
Overall will probably be a good change - as much as I liked our product, the sfdc transition was rough. For better or worse the layoffs don't seem to have been totally random: most of the affected folks I know had larger than normal equity packages
The letter doesn't explicitly say (I'll way to hear from friends at CRM to get actual details) but their SEC filing mentions stock-based compensation as an associated cost of the layoffs, so it sounds like accelerated vesting might be happening.
I read that they will technically be on payroll until late March. If that's the case, it's not so much accelerated vesting as it is vesting while not being "employed".
FWIW, I was laid off earlier in the year, and was put on garden leave for 60 days. My vesting stopped immediately, even though I was still employed for 2 months.
Probably the best after Meta and Airbnb from what I've seen. Looks like most large companies have been generous with their severances with the exception of Twitter (not sure about Amazon).
There was a slide deck by Sequioa going around recently, wherein one of the points was that the companies that cut costs hard and fast at the beginning of the recession were more likely to survive to the end of it.
Either that or they see something the rest of us don't when looking at economic data (a long recession).
That's the general consensus, especially around YC companies. Didn't they send out warnings early last year suggesting people cut early and deep? I really don't think Salesforce falls into that category though. They aren't going out of business any time soon and their revenue may not even drop if there were a recession.
Typically, revenue suffers if either clients downgrade or stop their contracts. Or go out of business. Is Salesforce in a position or niche where that doesn't apply?
The people downvoting you are suffering from a sort of survivorship bias. Sure, now you'd like the comfort of knowing your employer would have to pay you a ton of money if they laid you off, but what if you were somebody who was recently laid off looking for a job and people were reluctant to hire beacuse of this requirement? It's not clear to me that it's a net win, from my perspective I'd rather be able to easily replace my employer as opposed to them paying me for a few months.
A strong labor market has been effective in rasing the real incomes of the bottom 25% or so over the past few years, it's entirely possible that a weaker labor market with stronger workers protections would've been less effective at doing so leaving the very poor worse off.
I like it more than the (admittedly extreme) situation in France. There could be a happy medium, but going far enough down the road to making it hard to fire makes it hard to get hired.
I think where a lot of companies find themselves is "[last year] we think we're going to grow 20% next year and need to hire 15% to cover that business growth; [this year] oops, we only grew 5%, meaning we should have only grown headcount by 2% and now need to layoff around 10% of our staff to keep our financials sound and protect the jobs of the other 90%"
I think that's a lot of repeated applications of the former case.
Sure, if we roll out some sort of socialized medical coverage. At least for my family, stability of medical coverage is a major impediment to changing jobs.
I continue to not understand the position that the default provider of health insurance has to be either your employer or the government. What makes it fundamentally different from housing, food, or transportation, where you just pay money and there's assistance for people who can't afford it?
This was a mistake the US government made in World War II—they made it illegal for wages to change in response to actual shortages of workers, so employers competed by offering health insurance and other perks instead of more pay.
Companies have leverage due to size that individuals do not. Private insurance for worse coverage than I have now (and mine is good) is almost 2x what I and my employer pay.
So why can't you and a thousand of your closest friends get together and organise private health insurance for you as a collective? Then you get the size leverage. You would also be able to pay off the risks that one person might face, because although some of you will have high health care demands, chances are some of you won't. Isn't that how it's supposed to work? By competition, arbitrarge, etc?
No matter where you work in any major city in the US, whether you are working for a major tech company or your run of the mill enterprise shop, you should be making at least twice the median household income of your local area if you have at least three years of experience. If people making half of what you make can manage to survive and it be homeless or go hungry, you should be able to save enough “to live in a position of f%%l you” (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI).
You may not be able to put little Timmy in private school and he may have to gasp go to a public college.
That you should save money and not be dependent on the generosity of your employer or the government to make sure you can continue to have food and shelter.
Please tell me what the purpose of living in a society is? Also, be sure not to use the words "firetrucks", "military jobs program", or "I pay my taxes for this exact purpose, in the event I need these services"
Well, you can either live in your idealistic world and starve and be homeless unless you can live off of unemployment or live in the real world and save your money.
Or do you expect the government to replace 100% of a tech employees compensation?
If the answer to "am I likely to have to lay this person off soon?" isn't "probably not" then it's good that the company becomes more circumspect in hiring.
The other side of the token is that such a guarantee would help convince more people to accept an offer. I'd personally be hesitant to switch to a less stable job right now, and getting an offer yanked or immediately laid off with minimal severance would be brutal for many. A company providing "we changed our mind" insurance would retire a lot of risk for job seekers - and, if things are going well, it costs them essentially nothing to do.
I've laid out my thinking above, which part was unclear?
Many people taking a job are leaving some other job or passing up on other offers to do so. Imposing a cost on employers when they pull a "whoopsie daisy" and rescind offers or immediately lay off a new employee seems like a reasonable trade off to me.
At minimum if you're gonna lay someone off then any employee benefit that required they worked there for x months/years should be immediately paid out.
Then choose companies that offer that, you can sign a long contract. Or avoid companies that are rapidly growing. Why should you force your preference on everyone else?
"My preference is the current state of things so I pretend that it wasn't forced on people in just the same way I accuse others with different preferences of doing."
Welcome to "government is the means by which a group of people make collective decisions about the way we want our city/state/country to work." When striving for liberty, the thing we actually want, anarchy is just as much a preference as order.
Yeah, liberty is totally defined by draconian policies on employers/companies to give hand-outs for lay offs. If that's the case, we need to mandate employees give 3 months notice, for the employer to backfill the position properly. Its only fair.
Literally nothing could be considered a handout to your own employee. By definition they’re selling their labor to you for a public contract called “legally being an employee” which comes with obligations on the part of the employee and employer.
Everything else is haggling over the specific details. If we decide that one of those employer obligations is to provide guaranteed runaway for employees in the case of termination then that’s that. If we decide that one of the employee’s obligations is providing 3 months of notice then that’s also that. But the two things aren’t at all related except in your mind.
Right now today with no change in policy whatsoever you have to make the choice as to weather you are willing and able meet your obligations as an employer before taking on employees and you have as much say and the same votes as everyone else to decide what those obligations are.
Fairness informs but does not ultimately decide the employer employee relationship. The only thing we get for sure if the system works is that over time it tends toward what is considered fair by the current working citizens.
Yeah but majority of employment contracts are 'at-will', so either party can say bye-bye anytime they want. I work, you pay me - pretty simple, lets keep it that way. If job seekers want extra perks/fringe benefits, ask for them in the job offer process. If employers want to offer them, be my guest. But keep the government out of this. We need less bureaucratic BS, not more.
>>I’d rather it be harder to get a job, but have higher job security when you get it.
If you were out of work, 3 months behind on your mortgage, and wondering if you have enough money saved to keep your kids fed until you get another paycheck - I doubt you would make the same statement.
If I'm fired/laid off, I want free money too, but come on - companies already fund unemployment programs. The government should keep their dirty hands off severance and stop regulating employment within tech/software biz. Alot of these companies have given out very generous packages. These aren't low wage factory workers. These are highly paid/well compensated white collar workers, probably making 2x the median US income. They'll be okay.
Look into how hard it is to fire someone in Germany post trial period (Probezeit).
My wife woke up this morning to an email sent at 3:16AM informing her that she was laid off as part of this restructuring. It's a blessing in disguise, IMHO -- the work-life boundaries expected as part of her org were non-existent (calls with India every night at 8PM or 7AM, our time in California, on top of the normal 9-5 hours).
It's definitely hard to process. Lots of feelings of anger, sadness, relief, etc.
Fortunately for her, the severance is pretty generous (paid through March, then 6 months on top). But there's also anxiety about the job market right now with so many tech workers being let go.
It sounds like their job was pretty toxic and pushing through their work-life boundary. (This has happened to me before).
When that happens regularly, and you get used to being woken up in the middle of the night to respond to a technical outage or needy management, the lightest phone buzz can shock you awake.
Given the described situation, I'm not surprised they woke up to an unexpected phone notification :(
Yeah -- definitely toxic! There were really no boundaries. We have two kiddos as well. So it ended up conflicting with bedtime at night or getting ready for school in the morning. Managers were just not sympathetic at all.
To clarify, we woke up at our normal time and saw the email.
I sometimes just wake up randomly in the middle of the night and use the restroom and check my email in the process. I know it’s dumb but I feel like punishing myself.
Very well done! Is there a word for when you use a word in the excruciatingly correct way but are guaranteed to misguide 99% of the audience who reads it?
I think the reasoning behind decimation was that it was supposed to be an equivalent bloodbath defeat. Historically, a rout typically resulted in about 10% casualties. Decimation reduced the calculus of a Roman soldier to 'stay in the fight, and risk a 10% chance of death' versus 'run, and risk a 10% chance of being killed at random by your tentmates'.
That's not how the legions worked. The men assembled three ranks deep. The first rank was comprised of those with middling experience, who had seen combat before. The rear rank was the senior veterans. The cherries with no experience went in the middle, both to be reassured by the E4 mafia laying skunion in the front rank, and to be prodded on by the very experienced guys behind them.
In that kind of setting I imagine the low performers would sometimes be likeliest to survive, if they broke rank to run away. I imagine the lots would come out if everyone gave an honest effort.
I forget which podcast I heard it on (so forgive me if my memory is sloppy), but after their latest quarterly report didn't CAC payback go from 24 months to something wild like 10 years? Meaning their new ARR add rapidly fell off so quickly, before they adjusted their Sales and Marketing salaries and spending, that it immediately put their unit economics way way way way underwater.
So I'd expect at least a big chunk would be S&M cuts, even through of course you still need salespeople.
10% of a 75k company is still 7k people. From the King of SaaS. Wild times.
Many many software companies end up spending more money to acquire a customer than a customer will ever pay them. I tend to think this is because the demand and need for many tools is not significant enough to justify the amount of capital allocated to promote them.
Finance spreadsheet alchemists last 10 years saw big gross margins in software (overinflated by not taking into account cost to acquire user), bought into long-term incumbent dominance narrative from founders, and now they're stuck with companies that are willing to spend 10x+ lifetime customer value to acquire a user.
Everyone with a vested interest in these companies/investments always seems to say the real returns are 10 years+ once they are in a dominant position in their industry and have monopolistic pricing power.
How are we supposed to know what happens in 5 years, let alone 10+? Seems like a big carnival trick to me. What's interesting is that this mentality is so engrained that the people promoting it don't seem to even get that they're in on an act.
You could have the best tool on the planet, but if the cost to distribute it is greater than what those customers acquired will ultimately pay you, you don't have a company.
I get where you're coming from, but since the dawn of SaaS we've had rules of thumb about LTV-to-CAC, CAC payback period, etc.
Most SaaS founders know that a 3:1 ratio between LTV and CAC is ideal - and while arguments might hold water that a worse ratio is OK for a brief period, I don't think anyone involved doesn't realize that it's difficult to sustain that.
The mental magic trick to justify it probably goes like this - "Yes, we're underwater on the LTV-CAC ratio for now, but once we're in position XYZ we'll be able to launch new products ABC and increase LTV from there". Which isn't wrong. And the new CAC to upsell product ABC to existing clients is going to be very low. So in a sense, you CAN justify (at least in a 'superficially prudent way') a worse ratio with that argument.
And ironically, Salesforce is a GREAT example of this WORKING (up until now?). They have ruthlessly increased ACV and LTV for decades, through increases to pricing, growing features, launching new products, creating the app ecosystem, etc.
The problem is that if LTV <= CAC -- let alone under the 3:1 ratio -- you aren't making any gross margin/profit.
LTV = the expected cashflows on a gross margin basis, for the life of the customer. If you get $100 @ 80% gross margin, you have $80 gross margin profit per year. If you lose 100% of your clients after 3 years, you expect to make $80+$80+$80 = $240 of profit. Ah but you also need to discount those future cashflows (let's use a discount rate of 10%). So you really are making $80 + ($80 x 0.9)+($80 x 0.9^2) = $217.
That's your total LTV. Your total profit from the client before ANY "operating expenses" like Sales and Marketing costs and salaries, Rent, Overheads, R&D costs and salaries, office supplies, professional services, etc.
So OK you have $217 of LTV. But you have to spend $250 of CAC (which is "total sales and marketing spending and salaries divided by total new clients added") then you are losing $33 per customer BEFORE all the money you're spending on everything else required to run the business.
Now, of course, reality isn't this simple. And it's not all VC bullshit. Maybe this LTV is dramatically underselling the value of having that client, because in Year 2, you'll have New Product Module ready to sell them for $75. And your cost to sell (CAC) that module to them is $1 - since you've already done the hard work of getting them as a client. So now you adjust your LTV calculation and it's not quite as bad.
Or... by having 100,000 customers, network effects mean that either the lifetime of a customer is actually 10 years (vs 3) or the network effects mean you can monetize something else or... lots of arguments you could make for "grabbing the real estate now".
So if VCs -- who aren't idiots even if some are morally questionable -- see a path to greater LTV, you can kind of get comfortable with a higher CAC.
BUT AGAIN - the rule of thumb is that 3:1 is healthy, since that provides gross margin profit from the get-go, and any other LTV expansion from upsells is gravy.
The general attitude I've encountered is that you do this as a whale hunting strategy, developing a reputation for passionate overinvestment in your customers because the kind of people who sign eight or nine digit contracts demand it. I don't have the right data to know whether it always works, but multiple times I've seen it produce big deals that would never have come together otherwise.
I don't know. As an anecdote, my friend has worked at salesforce in a technical capacity for the past 10 years, and their team was cut from 15 down to 10 today. I'm not sure on the seniority of the people laid off.
I have personal experience with other ERPs and Salesforce is the best of the lot in my opinion. With my current company, we have employees in Singapore, Europe, USA, and South Africa etc. who all interact with Salesforce on a daily basis. We use it for CRM, service support (VOIP with call tracking), marketing, financials (questionable decision), and analytics (Tableau). Where it shines in my opinion is that does automate 75% of business processes and if you pay the right fee, it's all seamless. The flow automation low code tool is a step in the right direction. Where it falters, is (a) its own hype machine gets in the way -- your customers are already locked-in, please stop the bullshit, SF is not easy to learn -- its data model requires experience to understand and architect properly (b) Mulesoft sucks, please stop pushing it (c) its web portal (lightning experience communities) needs work -- the security permissions model is hopeless convoluted like the fabled Gordian knot.
SF doesn’t do ERP level financials natively, but there is an industry of apps built on top of SF. Some try to turn SF into an ERP. Examples I’ve worked with in the last year:
-Rootstock
-Accounting Seed
-FinancialForce
That said, I design ERP integrations for a living. SF based ERPs are consistently the lowest quality and most limited ERPs we deal with. I would highly recommend that any finance professional seriously considering implementing a SF based ERP take the following steps:
-Burn a large pile of money
-Tell 2-5 of your finance employees to waste 30% of their work hours for 3-6 months
-Implement an non-SF based ERP
I'd like to ride along on an ERP integration some day.
I've been a part of a scaling start-up and it just feels like the kludge of tools small teams buy would be better served by a more integrated system. So I'd like to see what a big implementation looks like and figure out what pieces might be usable for small teams.
Yeah, it’s a surprisingly interesting space. ERPs are basically as complex as CRUD apps get, and because they model businesses, you learn a lot about how companies work along the way.
Wish I could take people on a ride-along, but because of the financial/business data involved it’s just not possible.
It 100% depends on the business. The ERP market is vast, and there is at least 1 ERP for every industry. I even worked with a country club management ERP once.
That said, I’m a big believer in going with what is popular. You’ll get more features, better support, better docs, and a community to ask questions to. And most importantly, more software will integrate with it. This is crucial. The last thing you want is your finance team having to manually key data from your satellite systems into your ERP.
Never ever let someone sell you on a niche ERP.
Other than industry, the big deciding factor is how big you are. SAP targets the Enterprise market. These ERPs are absurdly complex systems, and you’d only want one if you are big enough to have dedicated ERP consultants/admins.
That said, for general small businesses I would recommend:
-Quickbooks Online
-Xero
When you outgrow those, you’ll have a better idea what you want. Oracle NetSuite and Sage Intacct are pretty common next steps for digital companies.
This is a big question though. I finish with this hard-earned wisdom: enterprise software is only as good as whoever is implementing and administrating it. A good VAR makes all the difference in the world.
Not the original poster, but I noticed two things about MuleSoft. First and foremost the developer tooling - especially MuleSoft's Anypoint Studio IDE - is horrible. It could compete for the worst IDE experience out there and easily win by a landslide. It requires obscene amounts of resources (CPU/memory) and barely works with Hello World type applications. For anything midly complex than 1+1 = 2, be prepared to face constant freezes, frequent restarts and loss of developer productivity. Mule code is an XML based proprietary DSL, learning which isn't useful outside MuleSoft ecosystem. And this lock in / proprietary way is everywhere. e.g. Mule uses RAML (instead of Open API for API design) or Mule uses its own data transformation language called DataWeave which has a steep learning curve. The second and more concerning issue is the cost. MuleSoft is incredibly expensive as a product, and hiring good MuleSoft consultants is hard. It's difficult to justify it's price tag when there are better options available at lower prices (e.g. apigee/kong for api management). Other reasons include bad documentation, history of miserable support for backward compatibility (aka Mule 3 and Mule 4), treating other programming languages (python, java etc) as second class citizens in Mule etc
Everything the other poster said is correct. Every thing about Mulesoft seems designed to be endless tedium and a time suck. For example, instead of a centralized keystore, this is how developers are supposed to manage secrets. https://developer.mulesoft.com/tutorials-and-howtos/getting-...
For data in Salesforce my company (GRAX) offers a backup product that will write data to your data lake in standard formats like Parquet.
This offers a strategy to read old SFDC data BI tools or in parallel with using a new CRM.
However the real SFDC lock-in is around business process. If your global Sales or Support team lives in SFDC it’s not easy to retrain them to another system.
Thanks! Was honestly curious to hear from someone who probably spends more time in the space.
I've only been exposed to it on ad hoc projects, but I've heard customers say they limit the amount of what they stream into their warehouses for (reasons).
I wouldn't be surprised if their pricing model hits it, even obliquely. They've built a nice "Salesworld" toll-bridged garden. Everything sales needs must be transferred in. Everything sales has that everyone else needs must be transferred out. :/
My company is currently undergoing this and I have the same feeling.
But I think the business model behind it is you hire a "Salesforce consultant" to steer your integration with the understanding that you can replace a small team of developers doing a home-rolled solution with a single developer who runs your SF integration. And Salesforce slurps up 60% of the labor cost savings and you keep the 40% and declare success.
And lose in-house knowledge experts. Lose the people with buyin on projects success. Lose the people and department that had built the interdepartmental relationships to push big ambitious changes forward (because no 'consultant' is going to recreate those relationships with their seagulling). You have to be a completely shallow business when it comes to business practices for this model to benefit you. But the lost opportunity cost of not having these resources isn't immediately visible so it's ignored. Until a company that gets it comes along and eats your lunch because they are nimble and their own entity, not a Salesforce franchise posing as a business.
I had a 2021 situation where a consultant had
convinced the executive level of the non-profit I work at to move to SF with their Non-Profit Success Package. It ultimately failed to launch because it seemed like every week was a new meeting where "SF doesn't do this, but if you use Platform X it will integrate with SF."
Currently, we are moving forward with Odoo, which has its own quirks but has better functionality than Salesforce IMO. No transition is fun, but an ETL from SF to Odoo is very doable (odooable), and the feature sets are pretty equivalent.
While the lock-in is real, there are other platforms that are catching up fast. My firm does Salesforce to HubSpot migrations as part of our services, and it's getting easier and easier to switch. Still takes time to retrain and shift business processes to a different philosophy, but we almost always see better usage of the platform, better data, and happier users.
HubSpot is not a replacement for hugely complex organizations that needs to dump tens of millions or more into a Salesforce instance (software + labor), but for mid-size and below it's great.
But, we decidedly don't want to become like Salesforce when we grow up. We have been committed to SMBs for 16+ years now, and not planning to change that anytime soon.
They have grown through a lot of M&A, we built our platform from the ground-up for SMBs.
There is room in the market for both Salesforce and HubSpot to succeed. Salesforce for large enterprises (the Fortune 1000) and HubSpot for SMBs.
I just left Salesforce a bit ago for HubSpot (see my other comment in this thread), and as someone with a bit of a "kool-aid allergy", so to speak, I've been pleasantly surprised by HubSpot's willingness to say "this is what we're good at, and we're going to stick to being really good at that", even when the alternative is potentially really lucrative (but massive pain).
There are a number of ways that life at HubSpot has been a huge improvement to me, but chief among them is that the _employees_ still matter more than the raw "maximum possible profit, screw everything else" focus that I constantly saw at Salesforce, and the "we don't have to eat every single market (poorly) just because others have tried to do so (poorly)" mentality is evidence of that, IMO.
Please keep being that!
And to the grand-parent commenter, I'm _very_ leery of anything that sounds unpleasantly familiar, and probably overly-cynical about large tech companies at this point...and so far I've found pleasant surprises at HubSpot, and I don't see desire (at least yet — it's been only 6 months for me) to be like Salesforce.
I forget where I am sometimes! Of course you're on here. Good job on the product - at my last place the sales people were very keen on it, and kept it extremely up to date. At some point IT forced them to transition to Dynamics, and they were not happy :)
Salesforce spends tons of money on sales people. If they'd want to make a pile if cash, they could fire them all and could still live off the existing contracts for years. As the market penetration will increase, they should technically require fewer sales people.
Just like with anything else, exit route is a function of time and budget and the migration cost is always proportional to the previous customization effort. If you pay 100k per year in license costs and spent 200-300k in 2-3 years to build current setup, you may need another 0.5-1M to get off this hook and jump to another one (which will be hard to pick). I doubt anyone seriously considers this scenario, because risks are too low and rewards are too high (it is a really good product, for which in many scenarios it is hard to find cost-efficient alternative).
Git-based SaaS has weak lock-in, unless you waded too deep into platform-specific integrations. Agile-oriented project management, while it tries to have platform specific ways of grouping, labeling, etc. is also weakly sticky because task descriptions are (or should be) what matters.
This is good, especially for small new teams at startups that want to shop different tools before having a lot of stuff to move around.
All SaaS aspires to be sticky because investors told them to be that way. Almost all SaaS with institutional investors has to make stickiness noises. But it is easier for some than others.
I the SaaS is Open Source, you can always host it yourself, or pay some one else to host it, or fork it, or any number of other solutions if the current provider does not fit anymore. Open Source is the best way to fight vendor lock-in.
If not Open Source, it should use open standard APIs and data models, with free or cheap data export.
Last time they did this, it was _right_ after the window that they had grandstanded and asked other companies to pledge no pandemic layoffs.
Benioff did a whole media tour talking about how Salesforce would do no pandemic layoffs to set some kind of example, and said that they didn't expect other companies to follow their example, but asked them to just pledge no layoffs for 90 days, even though Salesforce was going to do better than that.
Around 91 says later, Salesforce laid off 10% of the company, with no prior warning to the employees who were laid off. The atmosphere internally from the top down was outrage that any of the employees who were laid off would mention that they got laid off to their family/friends/coworkers, and that doing so was somehow a betrayal of "trust".
Brett Taylor, who was then the "co-CEO" (read: Benioff's cleanup crew and babysitter), led an all-hands a month or so later where they took no questions and referred to this as a "one-time reshaping exercise". Benioff slipped up and told MSNBC that this was an annual thing. Brett Taylor pretended not to know Benioff had said that, and acted like it never happened.
This all-hands was a full month after the all-hands that took place the same week as the layoffs. In that one, they took questions, but since all the questions were about the layoffs, they acted like nobody had submitted any questions and the Q&A host came up with some softball "what projects are you excited about"/"what's the biggest challenge with being a market leader" ego questions instead.
I didn't believe that it was "one-time" then, and today I've learned that I was right not to. I left before it became a habit, and have only been relieved to have left.
I wonder when the next annual 10% layoffs will happen at Salesforce? Because it's pretty much the only thing I'd trust them to do reliably at this point.
Co-heads is always a subtext for executive disfunction.
I don't think I've ever heard of it working out long term at any level from division co-head to co-CEO.
It's also fascinating the opposite direction is also allowed to persist - the guy who is CEO of 4 companies at once.
As a lowly high income IC, I am prohibited from almost any outside business activity and in some cases forced to divest when joining a new firm. Somehow the guy running the company who has actual ability to make conflicted decisions is allowed to moonlight? Fabulous.
If anything, Buffett/Munger proves the rule: on the org chart, there's no question that Munger reports to Buffett. In practice Buffett isn't trying to call shots day to day, so Munger is functionally in charge of the org, and when he succeeds to the Chairman & CEO title, nothing will really change, but the fact that he's not fighting for a Co-CEO title is a positive sign.
> Co-heads is always a subtext for executive disfunction. I don't think I've ever heard of it working out long term at any level from division co-head to co-CEO
Don’t VC’s generally prefer that a startup has co-founders? Having such a team mate fosters better decisions, acts as cheerleader when one person is feeling down, etc.
I don’t see a material difference between that and having a co-CEO setup…
Even with co-founders, one of you is still the CEO.
You need an executive function to set direction and unblock stupid territory squabbles. Someone whose decisions are final. If you have two actual CEOs, you don’t have that.
The one time I've seen this situation has been as a board member of a small non-profit. This was ages ago but, as I recall, there were two well-qualified candidates for an editor-in-chief position. It seemed a case where if we appointed one, the other would walk. So we made them co-editors and it didn't go well.
But I can imagine circumstances when it can work with the right people and circumstances.
VC also strongly suggests that it is made clear one person is the CEO, so when push comes shove, some one can make a decision and things can be resolved.
I remembered reading it is better to have 51/49 rather than 50/50 equity for that reason. Though to be honest I am not sure if I read that in the “good advices you should follow” or the “shitty toxic advices you should avoid”. Hard to differentiate sometimes.
> It's also fascinating the opposite direction is also allowed to persist - the guy who is CEO of 4 companies at once.
That amount is, I think, only applicable to Elon Musk and it looks like this is going to crash sooner or later anyway - the big Tesla investors are all furious about how much wealth Elon's shitposting has cost them and I would not be surprised if they threaten him with the choice of continuing to tweet or getting ousted. In any case, even he was a paper-only CEO at SpaceX anyway, Gwynne Shotwell has run the ship for years now.
Sure, and Jack Dorsey was Block/Square & Twitter at same time and we see how that worked out. Also Bluesky which is like a Decentralized Twitter, the thing he just helped sell to Elon? All while being a big BTC pumper..
So, I think you can replace "4" with "N where N>1"
I too am wondering why Elon is only running a single digit count of companies. Think of how much faster the singularity would arrive if he was running 10+ corporations!
Every rule has an exception, and maybe Larry has perfected something there or has a very well managed ego.
Most Co-head situations I see are either higher-ups setting up a power struggle between 2 newly appointed co-heads, or an existing head pretending to step back by appointing someone as their co-head who they can sabotage in real-time.
Their first non-German leader (Anshu Jain, who didn't speak German) was made Co-CEO with an older German hand Jürgen Fitschen from the board.
They pushed out Jain after 3 years, brought in a Brit John Cryan (who spoke German!) to co-CEO with Fitschen. Fitschen stayed on another year after which they finally let the non-German, Cryan run the place as sole CEO for 2 years before replacing him with another German as sole CEO.
So in total there were 4 years of non-German co-CEOing with a German, 2 years of a non-German actually being sole CEO, and then back to a German again like the rest of their 153 year history.
As an ex trailblazer I can confirm this. That all hands was unreal. Everyone was asking about layoffs on all-hands slack channel, and Mark/Brett were demoing upcoming new features in their Work.com product.
Yeah I really don't understand that style of "leadership". I'm no CEO, but even a simple blow off like this would be more effective:
"I know everyone has a lot of questions and concerns about the recent layoffs, but since emotions are strong right now, we'll collect these and discuss them next time"
Salesforce operates in a "zero-trust" environment, in that employees should place zero trust in the company, and the company places zero trust in the employees.
What I don’t understand is why they don’t stretch it out over the whole year - less than 1% a month could be relatively easily “hidden” even if people kinda know what is going on. Average churn might be lower than that, even.
Which makes me think it’s performative and they WANT the shareholders to see it.
Yeah I agree. Something about actions being louder than words here. I will say spreading it out creates a worse environment of fear from employees. It’s like pulling a bandaid off slowly. This way, the survivors know they’re safe for some period of time and can focus on longer term things. They likely feel that they can tread water performance wise and make it through the next year too. They can also approach their personal finances from an assumption of having a paycheck for the next year at least. These things are typically to address the under-performers and misfits that come with hiring thousands of people each year. It forces the business to reevaluate its needs based on its goals on a cadence. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of Milton’s in the basement (to use an Office Space reference).
How would that work? Identify the 10% in December and then slowly remove them? Or have your management go through a 1% low performers identification process every single month? The logistics of both options are difficult to pull off. It is especially hard to keep the layoff list secret.
Department A, in January we need you to cut the lowest performing 10% of your employees because we're raising the bar of excellence.
Department B, in February we need you to cancel the lowest-ROI 10% of your projects as part of a strategic realignment to focus on our core goals.
Department C, in March we need you to lower your ongoing costs by 10% by whatever means you think is best, to ensure we're on a stable footing financially.
Department D, in April we need you to chase the last Widget Classic users onto Widget Cloud and wind up the team working on Classic.
> less than 1% a month could be relatively easily “hidden”
If your a public company it’s not hidden. Analysts are watching everything. A one time even might hit your stock and then it starts to recover soon after, but an ongoing event would raise suspicions of a deeper problem.
maybe they could start to move to more 'contract/project' folks, vs 'employees'. rotating short term contractors would be similar amount of 'churn' but might be seen as more strategic/focused investments vs having to grow headcount only to want/need to do layoffs regularly.
My sense of scale is a bit thrown. I think at the time with all the uncertainty and the inability to trust corporate leadership, I trusted the largest number I heard as internal scuttlebutt, which was 10%. The actual number was somewhere around 1,000 to 1,500 people, which was like 5% or something of the company.
He seems like the slimiest CEO imaginable. I have no data to back this up, just his constant woke clamoring, before woke dominated the culture, and the way he looks. My gut just instantly sets off alarm bells.
This corporate bulimia, these binge-and-purge cycles, are a remarkably unpleasant feature of 21st century employee life.
I hope those affected are able to find work before their severance runs out. One positive aspect is that the Salesforce ecosystem is gigantic, and there'll be work for some in the partner firms and consultancies with expertise in the platform.
What we need is 1-5% of these 10/20/30%+ layoffs go on to start new businesses.
We've had a solid decade+ of FAANG dominance now and arguably all of these companies are comfortably milking existing cash cows with minimal innovation and increasingly degraded product experiences.
I'm trying to think of one large tech company that has a better core product today than 10 years ago. Maybe Shopify / MS? Someone help me out.
Eh, I kinda doubt your typical startup is going to sprout up and compete with FAANG. They could, and some will, but that shouldn't be the goal. I think people forget that 25-50 mil arr businesses are small potatoes to megacorps but can happily and gainfully employ lots of workers. Getting into a market that is big enough to pay the bills but small enough to not attract attention is a good place to live.
And hell, if you need ideas just look at the businesses that the megacorps discard because they're only million dollar ideas and not billion.
Plenty of new companies have popped up over the past two decades, but every single time, if they make any progress on anything that might someday make money, a mega-corp will throw $300 million at them and competition solved!
It's hard to be angry at the company for selling out, because the way capitalism works is all the money goes to the individuals who are able to effect the decision, so they get life changing amounts of money even though everyone else gets pennies, if that.
But it should be clear how detrimental this system is to a functioning and competitive market.
I think of it as a career thing. Someone gets promoted they need to hire 5-10 new people to manage. They lay off 5-10 people their career is facing a setback.
But I just saw this commercial on TV where Mathew McSomethingOrOther led legions of happy looking people through the streets of a city pledging to change how the world works all because of Salesforce.com . It looked like an expensive commercial. I know I'd sign up if I could.
In theory less people working means less demand, which means less of a need for labour. Places like Japan where you have had a collapsing working population for years have never seen similar spikes in job openings like the US is currently seeing,
The US saw a crazy spike in job openings at the start of 2021 which has only recently started to show signs of cooling. So imo what we're seeing in the US is much better explained by the $2T stimulus injection that occurred at the start of 2021 than demographics.
When this collapse in workforce population occurs perhaps firms will learn that they can survive and even thrive with much less "fluff staff" who mostly sit idle or contribute very little to the overall success of any given project. I continuously see a decent amount of what I consider staffing excess in a large fraction of the companies I've worked with. (My personal philosophy here is that companies/projects/etc are better off with fewer and much higher quality employees. The challenge is finding them, hiring them and keeping them.)
It's been echoed here often that many of the large SV firms and MAANG-type companies were just hoovering up talent to keep them away from competitors. This seems like a decent corp strategy when cheap money is raining down for 1-2 decades. However, now that we're entering into a new macro-economic climate maybe this practice will subside a bit, too.
Do you have any further news around SW collapse? From what I read (the news) slack would not have helped at all. #air issues > hey guys my luggage software crashed
Ha, I should have noted that I used the term ‘slack’ to mean % of free time available to workers who are waiting for the next crisis. Not ‘slack’ the software to hashtag issues, aha.
There are, but the people aren't necessarily where the jobs are. I've got positions in Huntsville, AL that aren't remote-capable, and we cannot get people to even apply.
For a while it was fashionable to tell people who were having a hard time finding work that they needed to move. I'm wondering if people are so tolerant of suggesting it the other direction, so:
Nothing that immigration won't solve. You have hoardes of young people from South Asia, Africa that will come up and fill any money making opportunity in the states.
We haven’t been preparing for the massive retirement of the boomers. It’s tough in many cases where they spend their careers keeping younger people out of leadership.
Then they complain to national papers that workers aren’t hustling enough to get into leadership.
There will be volatility as a new generation takes over at companies. Each generation is larger and more educated than the last so demand will keep up.
This is already happening. Elder care facilities build themselves in the middle of expensive cities, charge $12k a month for negligible care, and once you have no more estate to suck down and take ownership of, they send you to a third rate facility and charge the government, still absurd fees, but at least less stupid.
I conspiratorially believe this is an intentional move to limit wealth transferring from boomers to younger generations as it normally would in the past, by houses being passed down and grandma dying and leaving stuff to youngins, because now all that is taken by "old age homes" instead of the younger generations.
I guess it implies all. To clarify, the cohort of retirement-age workers with the means to retire is experiencing a sharp rise as predicted. That contributes some to a worker shortage that should absorb those affected by layoffs like these.
Know what's odd to me? It seems like every company that did layoffs over the past 3 months overhired by 8% - 12% somehow. Why was it such a narrow range?
The "we over hired" line is mostly made up. Many of these companies did not substantially increase their head count. This has more to do with improving P&L numbers to get their stock up, since most companies' revenue is tanking currently.
Never let a good crisis go to waste. Everyone is seizing on the opportunity to clean house and cut costs while the macro narrative is bearish. Investors and shareholders are demanding it. The days of cheap money are coming to a close so just growing revenue is not enough, now these companies need to show profit.
No Collusion! But if I was hiring a lot to keep people from joining my competitors, I’d also pay attention to competitors’ layoffs and take the opportunity to soften the labor market.
Heard this has affected engineering too, not just or mostly sales as people were thinking or happened before. (I remember a hiring manager years ago telling me once that there hadn't ever been any layoffs, all I could think was "yet".) For those affected, typical full systems cut-off as well, not very ohana of them to just terminate with no notice...
Still, not unexpected given everything else going on. Glad I'm not competing for tech jobs at the moment.
> In the U.S., affected employees will receive a minimum of nearly five months of pay, health insurance, career resources, and other benefits to help with their transition.
That minimum seems to be better than the best package I've seen so far in this layoff cycle. I got two months of garden leave plus an additional 3 months of COBRA. The garden leave was mandated by WARN act (or they would have to notify me and have me work for 60 days), so the only real severance was the 3 months of COBRA.
Of all the "big" companies I've worked for, Salesforce was the top in terms of seeming to actually care about its employees and the world.
Not terribly surprising. Salesforce sells enterprise products — the sales team is basically a necessity; overly cutting salespeople would have a big revenue impact.
Why do CEOs claim to "take responsibility" for the hard times, but their salary is never cut because of it? If they were actually taking responsibility then they would face real consequences instead of dooming people to no longer having healthcare. Fucking rich people.
Because aggressively hiring and then cutting staff when plans change is what the board wants them to do? Anyway, with tech stocks falling off a cliff this year they are taking pay cuts.
Cut? They'll take huge bonuses if they manage to fail so hard to require a government bailout, as if one should be rewarded for opening access to the federal taxpayer cookie jar.
Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Airlines requested the board cut his salary when he had to lay off people during the covid travel implosion. I think it ended up being cut 50% that year.
"As Chief Executive Officer at DELTA AIR LINES, INC., Edward H. Bastian made $12,360,420 in total compensation. Of this total $950,000 was received as a salary, $3,038,542 was received as a bonus, $4,125,062 was received in stock options, $4,125,186 was awarded as stock and $121,630 came from other types of compensation. This information is according to proxy statements filed for the 2021 fiscal year."
Salary is often one of the smallest parts of a CEO's compensation, so it doesn't mean a whole lot. It's better than nothing, though.
How about their future prospects? From the 4 implementations I've seen all are desperately trying to leave the platform. One succeeded so far. Is the enterprise Salesforce craze over?
The lock-in is insane with salesforce. I think it is similar to excel at this point, sure there are competitors (google sheets, etc.) but none of them are serious threats to excel yet. Maybe in the next decade excel will start to lose significant marketshare, but not anytime soon. Salesforce seems to be similar in that it is so ingrained and people don't want to learn a new system.
They have hundreds of thousands of customers and been growing for more than a decade, I don't think you can imply a lot from the 4 implementations you've seen.
Completely random engineering layoffs are happening today. Skipping management levels and firing people that are in the critical path of products about to launch.
Makes you wonder how "structured" are these restructuring efforts.
The frustrating part of bad economic times is that bloated companies use it as an opportunity to clean house while projecting a positive signal to Wall Street.
This move probably would have been just as needed two years ago but would have tanked the stock at the time.
It’s sucks when real people get caught up in companies just virtue signaling to Wall Street
It's the timing. For the sake of the argument here I'll give Salesforce the benefit of the doubt that this is the "Smart" thing to do.
If Salesforce does a reduction in force when the economy is strong it get spun by Wall Street as a sign of weakness and their stock takes a hit.
Do it in a down economy and it's a sign of strength and Wall Street rewards them (stock is up 3% today).
Salesforce did fine through COVID, heck the stock price basically doubled from 2020 to 2021. So they hire like crazy knowing it's unsustainable. Now their stock is at pre-pandemic prices and they start letting all those folks go when they're most vulnerable.
makes sense given their employee to revenue ratio for Salesforce. They had 73,000 employees with just ~31B/year of revenue. That’s just 424k of revenue per employee.
Such a ratio only makes sense with high growth rates.
Here is a list of (American?) companies that make the most profit per employee. You can also see the list in terms of revenue per employee: https://tipalti.com/profit-per-employee/
At the top of the list is Air Lease, generating more than $4m profit per employee.
That's how I'm feeling too and I'm in the US. Just doing some rough math, my company is at around half that and we're doing quite well at the moment. We are much smaller though.
According to Google the average Salesforce employee makes $115,000/year, so double that and it's $230,000. By those numbers labor would be almost 50% of their revenue.
According to their most recent quarterly report, they had ~$16B in operating expenses on $23B in revenue through Q322. I would imagine a vast majority of opex is headcount.
Layoffs suck no matter what. But from what I'm hearing they're giving some pretty good severance across the board and added time for tenure as well.
That said there are some bumpy things about how Salesforce seems to have handled this. In several cases managers and skip levels got no advance notice and were left scrambling in slack to see which team members no longer had active accounts. At the mass of a level it can be hard to be coordinated, but still a few hrs after there is a lot of unclarity internally to teams and what that means.
Within Heroku there are folks currently on call for production systems that were impacted. I feel for those impacted as well as those still there scrambling to ensure things continue to operate for customers. Seems that within the broader Salesforce org some pieces of it were done in a better fashion than some others we've recently seen, but also some pretty missteps still.
At my first job they would lay off employees, then systems would fail and the person who could fix it was laid off. Eventually a big customer would complain and the company would incur monetary SLA penalties for the systems being down. They would have to hire the laid off guy back as a contractor and pay some company $100+ an hour for a $30 (at the time) an hour salary employee.
Eventually someone with a brain would realize they are hemorrhaging money and hire the guy back full time and even make it look like he was never laid off for 2 years contracting so he would keep his seniority benefits. My coworkers with 20+ years said this happened over and over again. I left and everyone was laid off in 6 months…
It SOMETIMES works. You lay off 50 people and only have to contract back one or two and it’s a net savings.
But often it’s just boardroom machinations for various reasons that can change as quickly as the weather.
I know people who made a good living being the layoff/callback dude for years. Basically considered it a 3-6 mo vacation every couple years. “Oh you want me to come in to consult? I’m in the Bahamas- it’s gonna costya”
The trick is understanding when part of the company is genuinely not contributing, and since things are complicated, what other parts are entangled and need to be adjusted as part of the plan.
Just randomly laying off x% is like randomly removing x% of code to improve performance. It’s going to produce more pain than gain.
I’m pretty sure upper management just dictated cost savings amounts per org and delegated it down. Middle management met and figured out what salaries fit cost savings and saved themselves above all.
It usually works, because it usually takes years for the loss of people to have an impact on revenue. By that time, investors already realized their gain and moved their money into another company, leaving someone else holding the bag.
Ex employee here. Salesforce was the most laid back, rest and vest, coasting culture in my experience. Generous employee benefits, absolutely no work pressure. They took pride in their work life balance. Many employees (in product and marketing) were just focusing on (flavor of the day) activism - BLM, AAPI, GLBT, Homelessness in SFO. I always wondered if these employees had any 'actual job' in the company or their managers even cared what their team delivers. As an employee it was great. As an ex employee whose vested RSUs are more than 50% down from it's peak, it sucked. While I feel bad for those who are laid off, this downsizing was written on the wall.
Can you describe what changes you think should be made to that culture? How do you balance what sounds like great work/life balance and awareness of Salesforce's impact outside of strictly its business activities, which is something I'd expect from a "good" employer, with the potential downsides of (paraphrasing your words) "employees focusing on [not an "actual job"]"?
Do you think those colleagues didn't contribute anything as far as their job title?
Yeah IMO those colleagues didn't pull their weight to justify their titles (Sr. Director whatever). While Salesforce's titles are very inflated (Director at Salesforce maps to L6 in other companies), these were still senior talented folks drawing good salaries. I never saw if actually delivered something.
Salesforce ecosystem (Salesforce partners, consultants, customers etc) is great. but I am not very convinced by Salesforce's impact outside of its business activities. Their 1-1-1 pledge or stakeholder capitalism model isn't genuine. These are PR stunts where Salesforce could post some rainbow flag pictures or Matthew Mc's videos about global warming on social media. During my tenure at Salesforce it was possible to work for single digit hours per week and still be a top performer. The rest of the 'work' time was occupied by team socials, VTO activities and other shenanigans.
Having said that the number one thing Salesforce should culturally do is put more focus on what it's customers need. It is a sales and marketing organization, which it is very very very good at. But you can't just keep up by upselling stuff to customers. If you don't keep your customers happy, all this WLB doesn't really help.
Wasn't this promoted from the very top? Marc Benioff's fetishization of Hawaiian culture and the whole Ohana thing. They only slowed down with it a few years ago. But they were always awkwardly promoting a prosocial conscious image.
Yes it was absolutely promoted from the top. There was a meditation room in Salesforce tower as well as regional headquarters. We had meditation experts and monks (remember Gavin Belson's spiritual friend from Silicon Valley?) join all hands meetings. During pandemic there were biweekly wellness hours on EVERYONE's calendar where people could optionally do guided meditation for a couple of hours. Just last year I saw they announced some wellness ranch. Probably a five star holiday resort for employees I guess. (I wasn't employee then so just guessing). Employees were required to put in VTO hours every year. VTO goals were part of many team's V2MOM (just google this acronym for details). I am not sure if Salesforce bean counters considered ROI due to this PR branding when it was strictly enforced, nevertheless it wasn't contributing to improvement in quality of products, innovation, customer's experience and revenues.
I've never seen the market react negatively to layoffs themselves. As far as I can tell most traders and fund managers believe all employees are interchangeable widgets.
You guys always take it to the extreme. It's an optimization problem. The market thinks 10% is a pretty good number that will translate into higher profits, likely because they believe the people laid off are non-essential to the business.
I don't know what percentage is too much, all I know is that the stock market is not the economy, and things that tend to be good news for workers and main street tend to be bad for the stock market. For instance, in the past ~6 months the labor market continues to be strong reporting many job openings, which is good for workers as this allows them to seek higher-paying wages. But the market went down after each report because it meant that JPow would further increase interest rates, which are bad for the majority of businesses since they don't have positive free cash flows and rely on zero interest rates to continue operating with debt.
We've been living in the upside down for a while now. And gravity is coming back :)
Salesforce employee count doubled since the pandemic started. Doesn't seem unreasonable to believe some of those employees can be cut without affecting revenue too much.
Well I understand it, but the analogy I was trying to illustrate is that in theory, 10% of a workforce produces something, and while it costs something to employ them, it also costs something to lose their employment. In theory. Otherwise, why were they hired to begin with?
There are inefficiencies in every organization. It's not like 100% of the workforce is 100% productive and critical to operations. You can cut a lot more than 10% before it starts to affect the business in a meaningful way.
It suggests greater profitability due to lower ongoing headcount costs? Or decisive changes towards increased profitability?
Also, sometimes I suspect that the market moves on news -- not because the news actually affects some prospects so much -- but because some other people can make money on the movement, and the news is just an excuse/tool.
A friend of mine was hired by Salesforce in January. He worked there for six months. In that time, he did the haphazard onboarding they offered him... and that was it. Every day, he would ask his manager for work. Every day, his manager would tell him to hang in there, work was coming soon.
He never did a single moment of actual money-making or money-saving work for the company. They paid him about $50,000 for the privilege. Exhausted by the absurdity of the situation, he quit, and is now making substantially more money elsewhere... but also has actual work to do.
Not sure what is the point of this anecdote. In any company of 7k people, regardless of how lean it's run, you'll definitely find at least one person in that situation. I think you're trying to say that Salesforce did the right thing to lay off 10% of its workforce, which would be quite insensitive in this context.
It wasn't "at least one" person - it was his whole org, everyone his manager managed, his director, etc.
I'm saying that if Salesforce has employees in this situation, they are making poor hiring decisions and it's no wonder they had a spare 10% of employees to lay off. I certainly am not glad anyone got laid off, but we wouldn't be in this position in the first place if Salesforce knew what they were doing.
Is this sarcasm? Because my(and everyone I know) experience is absolutely opposite. Salesforce is a shitshow of old pseudo-Java and pseudo-SQL that lack features and proper support. It lock everything behind rate-limits that require you to swipe company credit card to achieve anything. It's slow(both UI and as a development process), hard to work with, INSANELY expensive, most issues are never resolved, or even answered on their official forums.
Has anyone who is a part of the sales org (AE or SE) been impacted as part of this layoff? I saw a huge number of post-sales/HR roles laid off but haven't heard of people as part of pre-sales that have been laid off. Not sure if more layoffs are to come at the beginning of Q1 in Feb.
Boards see this as good “decisioning”. Decisions are made by proportional controllers — money cheap, hire and grow, money expensive, fire and slow. So execs are being very prudent here, according to investors.
Yeah that's what breaks my heart. It's gratuitously meaningless language designed to soften the human blow even though everyone who doesn't rely on Salesforce employment for a paycheck ends up benefiting. So there's no check on over-hiring and then dumping once convenient.
This always gets me. Executive "responsibility" in cases like this is ballooning wealth as a result of the too-rapid growth, and then a further increase when the stock pops as a result of the layoff announcement. A stock gain of currently $2.71/share means Benioff is almost $71 million richer (in unrealized gains).
Would be great to see a CEO’s performance plan cut (options taken away or something) rather than this crocodile tear act we always see. In some industries CEOs take paycuts to keep folks employed but you don’t see that in tech.
We really need to lock this absurdity down and increase severance requirements for large companies heavily. It's one thing to gamble risk for the company, it's something completely different to gamble employee livelihood when you're signaling job security by hiring.