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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Considering that the CEO is pushing for "back to the office" mentality and against remote work, I'd say it's pretty clear that this is just elimination of Slack. Slack is a key tool in remote work, it basically stands against what they're pushing for.
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
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Given how much remote work depends on Slack, is it a risk to manage that Salesforce could use their leverage on the product to undermine the viability of remote work in general, or become a gatekeeper for it? They literally bought the key remote work platform for about 1/3 less than Musk paid for Twitter.
Standing up a competitor may be a challenge given the regulatory requirements of enterprise environments that use it.
Imo, the most urgent play for Twitter may be to launch some features that would be a viable Slack competitor for startups and some part of that private chat market. What Twitter has that Slack doesn't is a foundation to become an identity provider. I've spent years in the identity space, and what stops them is they can never produce something anyone actually wants, and all their solutions need to be imposed, whereas turning twitter handles into identity tokens is some trivial hacking. I could beta it with a team of 5 devs and an engineering manager with a good relationship with devops in 8mos.
Slack may become the next Outlook mail, which is the thing everyone hates but it's too integrated to switch from, and it's an anchor on pretty much everything.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] stareatgoats|3 years ago|reply
“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|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] LapsangGuzzler|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anon2358|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WhyNotHugo|3 years ago|reply
Considering that the CEO is pushing for "back to the office" mentality and against remote work, I'd say it's pretty clear that this is just elimination of Slack. Slack is a key tool in remote work, it basically stands against what they're pushing for.
[+] [-] imwithstoopid|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] indymike|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] user3939382|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] loloquwowndueo|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MuffinFlavored|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bloblaw|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] funstuff007|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jcadam|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] altacc|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ryanSrich|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] davidgerard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] te_chris|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jrochkind1|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] softwaredoug|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digdigdag|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] goodoldneon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madboston|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zainhoda|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barbazoo|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DogLover_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a13o|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grogenaut|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motohagiography|3 years ago|reply
Standing up a competitor may be a challenge given the regulatory requirements of enterprise environments that use it.
Imo, the most urgent play for Twitter may be to launch some features that would be a viable Slack competitor for startups and some part of that private chat market. What Twitter has that Slack doesn't is a foundation to become an identity provider. I've spent years in the identity space, and what stops them is they can never produce something anyone actually wants, and all their solutions need to be imposed, whereas turning twitter handles into identity tokens is some trivial hacking. I could beta it with a team of 5 devs and an engineering manager with a good relationship with devops in 8mos.
Slack may become the next Outlook mail, which is the thing everyone hates but it's too integrated to switch from, and it's an anchor on pretty much everything.
[+] [-] lotsoweiners|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malermeister|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmspring|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] speakfreely|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samwillis|3 years ago|reply
That's not to say it was then neglected by them later on!
[+] [-] j-bos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] flappyeagle|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flappyeagle|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CameronNemo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] purple_ferret|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scottdevries|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malermeister|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btbuildem|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] 6451937099|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] 6451937099|3 years ago|reply
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