Tell HN: Salesforce has globally revoked Slack's holiday shutdown benefit

[SadSlackbot]

The workplace policy has been in effect for many years, and was until recently an advertised perk of working for Slack. It allowed all employees access to free paid time off from 24th until the New Year (some employees like incident responders would take shifts, but even Customer Experience (their support team) ran skeleton shifts). Today they have announced this policy has ended as a result of the economy as well as making the workplace more equitable (as Salesforce employees could not access this benefit).

[kabdib]

Apple used to give people the week between Christmas and New Years Day off (maybe they still do, I don't know).

I was was part of a startup that a number of Apple engineers went to; over half of our engineering org was from Apple, and were used to having that time off, our management chain was fine with it, and we just took it as part of our startup's culture.

The New CEO, a real sales guy, had different ideas. "I think that people can be really productive during that week." He was adamant that he wanted to see butts in seats, across the company. Engineers? Not special. (We were working until the early hours of the morning, nearly every day).

We were told by our director not to worry about it, and just not show up if we didn't want to. What was he going to do, fire half of his engineers?

Some people just don't get it.

[kenward]

Sounds like you had a great director who was willing to shield their org from bs top-down demands.

I didn't appreciate this skill until I had a manager who did the same for me. Having a manager who can ruthlessly prioritize, set expectations, and help navigate all of the corporate bureaucracy is a godsend.

[NonNefarious]

Apple also often gave Thanksgiving week off. BUT... Steve Jobs wouldn't send the E-mail telling us that until the last minute.

After several years of this happening, I decided to book plane tickets to see my family before the prices got astronomical. Sure enough... that was the one year we didn't get it off.

I went anyway.

[jmspring]

> Apple used to give people the week between Christmas and New Years Day off (maybe they still do, I don't know).

This was HIGHLY team dependent. I know people that were still busting ass 12+ hour days around the holidays due to deadlines/etc.

[bombcar]

the main reason you can be real productive that week is that almost everyone else is gone.

[mmcnl]

I honestly don't get why CEOs would bother worrying about this stuff. How can you make the big important decisions if you allow yourself to be distracted by micromanagement?

[prirun]

> He was adamant that he wanted to see butts in seats, across the company. Engineers? Not special. (We were working until the early hours of the morning, nearly every day).

He might see my butt in a seat that week, but he damn sure wouldn't see me working past 5, and I'd be looking for a new job.

[raxxorraxor]

> I think that people can be really productive during that week.

There are some really special people with horizons till their office wall. Of course this is a huge benefit but it is also where it starts. Benefits like this allow for crunch time in times of need. If there is a constant time of need there is no need for extra work.

[joshstrange]

> Today they have announced this policy has ended as a result of the economy as well as making the workplace more equitable

It's too bad their hands were entirely tied on this and they had no other choice but to take it away from everyone. /s

It always amazes me when my coworkers pretend things just "are how they are" within a company. Everything can be changed, everything is negotiable, nothing is set in stone. Obviously this gets harder as the company gets bigger but the defeatist attitude I often see is so depressing. I'm sure there were some people (Salesforce employees) who heralded this a good change instead of thinking for even 1 minute about how the better change would be that everyone got it. And don't tell me they couldn't afford it, that's just bullshit.

[harry8]

Need to apply this to the C-suite. Publicize every single C-Suite benefit not being passed on to the entire company. Name the individuals. Being equitable is a bomb and management just lit the fuse. Idiotic is an understatment.

[irrational]

Time to move companies. This year my company gave us an extra week off in the summer (on top of no work Fridays, 10 holidays, one PTO day each pay period with yearly rollovers, every 5 year sabbaticals, 1 month of Covid sick days, and 2 weeks off at the end of December).

[joshmanders]

Always move companies. There's always somewhere that'll do better for you.

My company gave us more holidays off, decided to add extra days off before and after holidays that typically land on weekends, unlimited PTO and a policy of encouraging you to take time off not shame you for using 1 day for a doctors appointment, and surprisingly unlike literally everywhere else I worked, they gave me an 8% raise to account for inflation.

[ilikehurdles]

I know a few senior employees at Slack and they’re literally just waiting out their vesting period to leave the company. Golden Parachute is the only thing keeping them there.

[Gunnerhead]

May I ask where you work?

[kybishop]

I've done freelancing before at 4 days a week and loved it, and have generally negotiated into 4 day workweeks at various startups. Give a shout-out to your company if they're hiring ;)

[idkman123]

Lol it’s not easy as people make it seems.

[sp332]

Or they could wait until December 23rd :)

[dboreham]

Decades ago I worked with a guy from Yorkshire. He would talk about the "adding 2pence to the price of chips* at the cafeteria" syndrome. He explained that when times got tough at the mill, the managers would debate what to do, and invariably decide to add 2 pence to the price of chips at the works cafeteria (something that has nothing to do with the actual business). The workers knew this was a sign it was time to look for another job.

*French fries.

[civilized]

> as a result of the economy

Right, right. Slack just won't make it unless everyone works through the holidays.

I don't know about you all, but to me it's obvious that C-levels use moody economic periods as an excuse to do all the Scroogey things they would actually be more than happy to do in any economic season.

It would make just as much sense, if not more, to drastically cut their outlandish "performance" pay when the economy is down, but I don't think we'll be seeing much of that.

[RpFLCL]

That reminds me of this post [1], which seems relevant to this circumstance

> I read on a post somewhere that if you replace "the economy" with "rich people yatch money" a lot of headlines make more sense.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507123

[adamparsons]

Yeah sorry but that excuse “because of the economy” feels like a half finished sentence. What exactly “the economy” do they mean? The sentence would make just us much sense if they said “because the moon”

[darth_avocado]

This is exactly what it is. I feel "management" is just another word for "psycho lunatic sadists". Just do stuff to make people more miserable and blame it on the economy.

Firing people and making the others work twice as much? It's the economy. Take free soda from the kitchen that costs cents? It's the economy. Remove 4 days of holidays that would otherwise improve morale and productivity? It's the economy. Make employees waste hours in commute everyday? We obviously need to do it because it's the economy.

[stevage]

Yep, just wait for the massive bonuses the execs take home despite "the economy".

[jdwithit]

Yeah. Place I was working did a massive layoff at the start of COVID, and immediately began hiring again for the vacated positions. Except now the hires were contractors in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe rather than FTEs in the US.

I mean no offense to any posters from those locales. You are a human, I respect you and your skills, most of you are probably better at tech than I am. I am glad you have jobs.

The point is the company said "OH NO, THE ECONOMY, WE HAVE TO DOWNSIZE, CANNOT AFFORD THIS HEADCOUNT" out of one side of its mouth. While backfilling those vacated spots as fast as it could from lower cost regions. It was a cowardly, calculated move that they had been praying for an excuse to execute.

[shostack]

I don't know that I go so far as that take, but it certainly feels in some cases like companies had to "bite their tongues" as demand for employees and comp skyrocketed, and now that things are starting to stall, they are picking l pouncing on it to regain the power dynamic they once had through the threat of "be lucky you still have a job."

And then they wonder why people leave once conditions permit.

In some ways it's almost like the economic change is _welcomed_ because it puts downward pressure on comp (for companies that can weather the storm at least).

[benatkin]

Some holidays

Those aren't the biggest holidays for everyone, and it isn't even the new year for everyone

[jmspring]

Salesforce has "unlimited PTO", which is what it is. I'm not a fan of such a policy and depending on team, it is probably better than Amazon's 10 days of PTO.

Acquisitions (depending on how they are handle) go through a period of autonomy and then absorption. Saw this when I was with MSFT and Skype.

Honestly this post sounds a bit whiny and lacking reality in how acquisitions go about.

[paulgb]

> Honestly this post sounds a bit whiny and lacking reality in how acquisitions go about.

I think you’re reading more into the post than is actually there. It’s three sentences written in a pretty matter-of-fact voice, giving context on the old policy and management’s messaging on the new one. As someone following the labor side of the tech industry, I found it to be an interesting data point.

[RSHEPP]

My God Amazon's PTO policy is terrible. I made the assumption that it would be quite good, but even an O&G company I used to work for had better than that.

[procinct]

Jesus 10 days PTO? That seems unbelievably stingy.

[all_factz]

Wanting to retain a benefit you had for years is whiny? What are the execs giving up in exchange for asking their employees to work harder? Way to punch down, dude.

[eloisius]

They have that if you’re SMTS (L7) and above. You can actually use it, but you have to have a good manager and advocate for yourself to take the benefit that is in your job description, otherwise it’s just a nice benefit on paper and probably saves the company money.

[generalpf]

Keep in mind that a lot of Slack’s employees —- especially early ones —- are Canadian, and Canadians don’t get unlimited PTO (by law, I think). So they are being told when they should be using some of their PTO days.

[Griffinsauce]

Couldn't these employees then all just take PTO around that time with the same arrangement?

[altdataseller]

"as a result of the economy..."

Salesforce raised the prices for Slack Pro Plan as well recently. Doesn't sound like something you'd do if the economy is that bad...

And i assume Salesforce revenue is going to decline this year since the economy is that bad, huh?

[cebert]

This is a nice perk that could have helped Slack and Salesforce have an edge when it comes to acquiring talent in a competitive market with a shrinking pool of talent. Holiday time is generally slower anyway, I wonder the business rationale here.

[cdf]

Not a current Salesforce employee and never worked for Slack, but from my POV when I was there, I can tell you Salesforce is effectively in the same state during this period every year, so I dont know what Slack employees will be missing out on.

[bb611]

I'm a current employee, this is still accurate; teams get absolutely no work done in the final 2 weeks of the year outside of extremely critical fixes.

[nathantotten]

Do you get unlimited vacation though like Salesforce employees? When I worked there nobody worked those days anyway. Will this really have an impact on when people take time off?

[zdragnar]

PTO is usually at the discretion of the managers; they're more inclined to decline requests for time off when enough people are already taking off (to avoid the situation of someone on the skeleton crew getting sick and not enough people are available to handle an emergency).

It really depends on your customer's needs; slack going down for a day or two over the holidays is unfortunate but not the end of the world. Salesforce going down could, I imagine, easily cause massive financial losses.

I'd like to think it should be easy enough to put people on emergency call rather than forcing them to put 8 hours of butts in seats for no reason, but apparently that's not how Salesforce wants to roll.

[jimmytucson]

As tech workers we might realize that the pendulum has swung in our direction for some time now: remote work, higher salaries with better benefits, driven by lots of liquidity and high valuations. Even the notion of a 4-day workweek is creeping in. Now, as valuations regress, you have Google’s CEO saying workers should be more “entrepreneurial” and Facebook saying do more work with less and under more intense scrutiny, widespread layoffs and hiring freezes, it’s clear the pendulum is starting to swing in the other direction. You may reject the pendulum analogy but you can’t deny the inherent cyclicality in these things.

As for holiday shutdowns, I think these actually benefit the company more than the employee. If you give people a week off they were most likely going to take some or all of anyway, they tend to accept less floating PTO and then it just nets out to coordinated PTO. This prevents clever folks from taking those 5-7 days during peak periods and working the relaxed time when so many people are out of office you can’t really deliver on anything significant anyway.

[hackitup7]

Not making any normative judgments on this policy change, but fwiw I expect that the note below is the real issue:

"making the workplace more equitable (as Salesforce employees could not access this benefit)"

If you're a long-time Salesforce employee, you watch a bunch of people from Slack walk through the door with tons of cash from their acquisition _and_ they get additional holidays that you don't. I'm not saying that this is some crazy injustice (life isn't fair), but I could see it logically putting a lot of pressure on the morale of other Salesforce teams.

[chaboud]

20 years ago I was at a company that had gone from small start-up to acquired by a company with more than 100k employees globally. At a site all-hands a year or so after the acquisition, someone from HR briefed us on a change of insurance benefit providers and plans, taking our per-check cost from ~$10 to ~$150 and cutting in-network physician lists dramatically.

Naturally, people complained, and the HR person speaking, at that point a bit flustered, yelled "look, the good news is that this is saving [the company] a lot of money!"

It didn't help, but it was the truth. They were doing it because they could and because the decision-makers didn't care that they were effectively giving everyone massive pay cut. They'd weighed the downsides and done the math. The real impacts are hard to quantify, though, as the employees that leave will be the ones who can, leaving the company biasing towards employees unable to leave. It's how companies slowly bleed out.

[carabiner]

I worked for a non-tech manufacturing company that had holiday shutdown and 1-week summer shutdown (first week of august). It was my first real job out of college and I kinda assumed most companies were like that. Since leaving that place, I've been pretty crushed to find how rare this benefit is and can't believe I took it for granted.

[ipaddr]

It shows that you don't work for Slack you work for Salesforce. Once a company is purchased it is rare for the smaller company to stay independent.

[musesum]

I was working for a friend's company acquired by Salesforce. They didn't bring him on board. I left after one day. My buddy working next to me left after one month. Others after him. It was a small company. Maybe disrupting a culture isn't so great an idea.

[idkman123]

This is a bit misleading as management literally told us to take time off during that time and we have unlimited PTO. I miss being able to save up PTO and get paid out but it is what it is. Also are we just not gonna mention that we get wellness days every month which is another 2 free weeks of PTO? I’m not happy with things but I’d much rather see a pay bump than this.

[jollybean]

Every Western company should have this policy.

Nothing happens between XMass and New Years, the 'double holiday' + 'holiday season' means people are distracted.

The rule should be: work on what you want to but nothing is expected.

I would definitely 'get a few things done' during that time, but otherwise, not let it interfere with doing stuff, or 'nothing' after the tiring holidays.

It's a real benefit for everyone in the company to be 'down' at the same time. It's a better holiday knowing nobody is going to bother you for anything.

[sdf4j]

Do you still get unlimited PTO like the rest of Salesforce? What about the monthly Friday off the company gets since the beginning of the pandemic?