Marc Benioff of Salesforce: ‘Are We Not All Connected?’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Wow, so much to potentially unpack here! Career advice-wise, I’d love to read the details of how one joins a company (presumably as a rank and file contributor) and all of a sudden the CEO “takes notice” of them and they are working directly for the CEO! How big was Oracle at the time? I can count on one hand how many companies I worked for where I even once met the CEO, and they were all very small indeed.
Very curious what the difference is compared to the usual approach, see how it could apply in different places (here in NL).
Here’s the software referenced: https://www.mpowr.com/focus-areas/community
It’s a SaaS, but as you can see, the hard part isn’t the app development; it’s getting all the government departments and charities talking and agreeing to automatically coordinate via software.
Our city is bad at a lot of things, so I’m a bit proud we’ve actually accomplished something good that we are able to export. :)
The usual approach is to start a new case at each org which duplicates the same kind of assistance, leaving less for others and making it harder to steadily advance someone towards receiving the treatment or rehabilitation they need since they’ll bounce from place to place. When communication between agencies does happen, it generates too much paperwork and decision-making is inconsistent, time-consuming and less effective because the staff might not be up to date on the solutions or money available to treat an individual’s specific problems. Software, along with a more collaborative mindset, helps all of this.
Changes my impression of SFDC.
When I interviewed there, every single person who spoke to me talked about their 1-1-1 thing. Might be interview training though.
I do certain charitable things but I don't discuss it except with a few people who also participate.
I interviewed with a company here in Austin early this year and one of the things that bugged me was how they'd turned their charitable work into a marketing tool with slick brochures. I actually felt bad about being more interested in the actual business work than the charity work.
You have the option of using up to 7 days per year (56hours) to volunteer and you’re being paid normally for this time.
You are encouraged to volunteer and there are events setup regularly in which you can take part if you want.
If you have something you personally care about you can volunteer there.
That being said nobody is forcing you to volunteer.
You’d likely get some encouragement from your manager to do that under the auspices of volunteer time off. If you wanted to give money to a bonafide non-profit, Salesforce would match.
From my vantage point of being related to / friends with Salesforce employees, I’m continually impressed by how Salesforce comports itself—even if I don’t care much one way or the other about its actual product.
They've been trying for years to replace the Oracle database with Postgres, but it's not easy in such a large, heavily used enterprise application.
For many situations I recommend integrating with a messaging system and using the REST apis from something like Ruby.
Lightning is not bad, but it's slow compared to the front end framework competition. It is pretty fast to develop with though.
Not to say he’s a horrible person, just the corporate system we have seems destined to take more and more power away from the avgerage joe.
Wanting to unionize is something that should come from the bottom up, and in my mind, is usually a sign that there's a serious disconnect between corporate leadership and employees. A few disgruntled employees is not indicative a major problem within a company and if there's no major problem, why form a union?
Salesforce pushing for regulation on their own industry would be seriously harming their customer base, since their a service provider, not a marketing company themselves. If there was to be a call for regulation in an industry, it would be one or two steps removed from SF.
Lobbying is a fact-of-life in competitive industries. It sucks, but it's absolutely necessary to survive at the level they play at, given how much economic power they have and the legislators they have to endure.