Salesforce is in talks to buy Slack
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Their chat api expects headers that they do not include in cors allowed headers, we had to write a proxy just for this.
Salesforce as a company is a terrible experience.
Had many incidents because of their bad practices or lack of knowledge or incompetency.
It's hard to tell if Salesforce has been a positive for Heroku for keeping it alive, or a negative for mismanaging the company, since we don't know what they would have done if they stayed independent and had to actually compete. But I'm pretty sure if they were still independent and had to compete in the market with only the features they have right now, they would likely be out of business. There's very little reason to choose Heroku these days, and I say that as someone who has code running in production on Heroku's platform.
The product is stable, there's a ton of new features (like pipelines), and can't imagine starting a serious project and not using Heroku.
Heroku still doesn't have any data hosting options. You have to go to a third party for this.
Heroku doesn't have any static site hosting options. You have to go to a third party.
But the biggest problem I have with Heroku's model is how much I need to pay. I've been a Heroku customer for years and I'm still not exactly sure what a dyno is. And if I get it wrong, I can have auto-scaling... but only if I'm paying a minimum of $250 per month. Now that's not a lot to big companies, but for bootstrappers that's insane. And I only get 2.5GB of RAM for that $250/mo? And if I'm using microservices, every service costs me a minimum of $25/mo, $250/mo if I want auto-scaling on those services.
Like I said, Heroku is great and I use it in production and pay them money every month, but man if it's not stuck in 2015. Luckily so is my application so I don't have too many issues except for the ridiculous cost even as EC2 is dramatically cheaper now than it used to be (does Heroku support Graviton? I don't think it does), but PaaS in general is "the old way of doing cloud" and Heroku is becoming less relevant every day.
When you codify your business processes, actual code is going to be needed as well. Enter Apex and heroku.
Slack is a way for SFDC to codify another part of your business processes—communication.
That said, SFDC does a lot of things that fairly give it a bad rap. Their developer experience is really bad, their apps are not that great, and lightning is still not adopted at many companies years after its release.
Are there no better ways to automate sales and marketing?
Once you start using Salesforce, do all of your leads get stuck in the platform, or can you export them and do your own analytics queries? How deep is their lock-in?
> Slack is a way for SFDC to codify another part of your business processes—communication.
It feels too freeform to be automated. It's just chat with a so-so search interface.
SFDC has one of the most robust APIs I've seen...you can export pretty much everything. I actually really enjoy working with the soql rest API, because it's simple, effective, and discoverable.
The lock-in is instead in their integrations. It is almost guaranteed that there won't be another platform that has all of the integrations you need, so you stick with SFDC. You add more integrations over time and the lock-in deepens.
To some extent, as a business owner or CRO, you want the data to be stuck in Salesforce. The price of Salesforce is small compared to the cost of salespeople maintaining their own relationships directly with clients -- and then potentially walking away.
The developer experience is sadistic, but Lightning is the worst. It takes forever to load basic information because it all has to cycle through JS callbacks. Try opening a link (or a bunch!) in a background tab: it doesn't load anything until you're actually looking at the tab.
I don't understand what this means at all. Let's say I make pies. My sales process is I go to grocery stores and try to get them to carry my pies. My marketing is I buy commercial time on the local tv station. How do I codify this into a SaaS product?
Salesforce is a SaaS because it’s in the cloud. The first company to take a big het on the Cloud, in fact.
If you’re still confused, then spend an hour or so reading their marketing literature and kicking the tires in their free Developer Orgs. Simple as.
The reason I don't call it a sales lead tool is that is about 10% of their use case now. They've expanded significantly and companies use them for just about everything.
Every time someone at your company uses your phone system to call a customer, it is auto-logged in Salesforce. Every email is logged. Every sale, every transaction, every interaction.
Now when "Bob the amazing Sales Guy" leaves you have a central repository of every contact he's made in every company he's worked with on your behalf. This means you build institutional knowledge instead of tribal knowledge.
So now lets say a couple years have gone by, and you want to publish a white paper on pie consumption, so you hand the project off to your research and analytics team. Thanks to Salesforce they have knowledge of every person your company has ever contacted about pies, and therefore have a great jumping off point to start with interviews for the whitepaper.
Along they way they've bought a ton of companies that do various enterprisey things. Now they're a one stop shop to run everything a business might need.
Suppose that we said that Salesforce (or JIRA) itself is fine, except for those sites that have implemented it poorly. Would that be an example of the One True Scotsman fallacy?
(I mean the question honestly. I'm not 100% I properly understand that fallacy's definition.)
If there’s something missing all you need is either time or budget to have it built.
An integrated Slack and Quip product could be a decent competitor to Microsoft Teams, especially for the large amount of customers who already pay for either Salesforce, Quip, or Slack separately. It would probably be a lot easier for existing customers to add new features to what they are already paying for than it would be to switch to Microsoft Teams.
While I've already kind of fallen out of love with Slack, I do appreciate that they are independent. I do understand why smaller companies do this, but generally it results in a crappier product. Skype is a perfect example of a good product left to rot on the corporate vine.
The software world would be so much richer if there were more difficult for bigger companies to suck them up and turn them into corporate goop. I'm not necessarily suggesting regulation here. Just wishful thinking.
What are reasons it's unlikely?
(I like Zulip btw)
The structural reason is that we're intentionally not taking VC funding, which does more or less inevitable lead to that outcome.
Less structural but just as important is that my personal priority is in creating great open source software for the world, not personal enrichment.
This thread may be useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23105031.
* 100% of the software we write is FOSS.
* We intentionally haven't taken VC funding despite plenty of opportunity to do so, to ensure we can remain an independent, values-focused company.
* Most features are built by our open source community, not fulltime employees.
* Zulip was a distributed company pre-pandemic (while we did have a SF coworking space walking distance from my home, I as the founder only went in about once every week or two, and essentially all collaboration was over Zulip or GitHub).
They acquired the original Zulip startup in 2014. Then they open-sourced the code, and Zulip since 2016 is backed by a new company which is the one tabbott is describing above.
2020: Slack (messaging)
2021: Zendesk? (CS)
Slack is such a horrible financial Titanic that post acquisition it'll destroy most of Salesforce's already mediocre profitability. Salesforce generated $463m in operating income in its most recent fiscal year; Slack lost $330m in operating income over the prior four quarters.
Slack's growth prospects are bad to make matters worse. This deal will result in a giant writedown in the not very distant future. It'll eventually be considered a bad joke that someone paid ~$25 billion for Slack.
For Slack's part, it's a brilliant exit. Get out while they can still fetch an extreme bubble multiple. Their stock had performed so poorly post IPO (while everything else cloud & remote zoomed) because the market knows their prospects are not great.
In 2016 Salesforce was getting a valuation of about 10-12 times sales, before this latest mania really lifted off, with a market cap similar to or lower than what eg Snowflake is getting today (with Snowflake now doing around 1/9th the sales that Salesforce was back then, ha). Slack is getting 30-35 times sales on its exit with no evidence they have a great business that will endure (versus a mere product that Microsoft will forever be squeezing the financial life out of by making the segment inhospitable territory). It's not just a product? Sure it is, that's why it's about to end up in the belly of Salesforce as a really dumb acquisition mistake typical of later stage bubbles.
Of course there is nothing SV companies seem to like to do more than bail each other out!
Not anymore!
You must be using a different version of slack to me.
Damn good exit though. Who woulda thought a chat utility could be worth billions
Now please explain to me, how Salesforce would have ruined it?
Rocketchat if you want full control (open source).
(Mattermost is great)
I can't stand being in long video meetings where everyone waits around smiling and one person talks forever. I also deeply miss the easy chats we used to have in the office, when we didn't have to schedule meetings just to talk. But I don't want to dedicate my time to sitting in a discord-like audio channel while I'm doing work.
So, heysync is the answer to my own problems. It has a similar feature set to IRC or to Slack, because I love those products, but it's built with asynchronous audio communication in mind, in a way a Slack app just couldn't provide.
You just talk, and heysync transcribes the message and stores the audio for easy playback. Your colleagues can either read or listen to what you just said. They can listen live, or later, so you can seamlessly talk even if the person you're talking to isn't there, or is multitasking.
(edit: I was downvoted pretty hard for contributing this -- if anyone wants to share why, here or via email at carss.w@gmail.com, I would love to learn how to do so better.)
If the GGP had said "I hate Zoom meetings where everyone waits around smiling and one person talks forever", the post would have made more sense to me. Or, if the GP's product can also function as a more basic Slack replacement, their post should have led with that.
It just also allows you to speak via audio, and captures that audio inline with the chat, in both audio and text form, which is the key selling point. It is visually and in terms of day to day use very similar to Slack, or IRC. My desire to build heysync is literally borne out of frustration that this featureset is not possible within Slack itself, which I use daily.
This has been a problem ever since email: many people reply to the last mail they have from a list, sometimes changing the subject, and then get surprised when the mail is threaded under the mail they replied to.
I've seen this occasionally on Zulip instances, but a reminder and a suggestion that the topics are like email thread subjects or forum thread subjects tends to help.
Given that you mention a big public server, it's likely caused by an issue specifically related to that server's scale/usage patterns, and I'd like to make sure we investigate it.
Google's erratic roadmap, less than stellar enterprise support, and shady privacy practices from their ad tech side just drive me away
Tell that to Windows phone owners...
Most of them were Microsoft employees
And MS paid for their phones
When Microsoft bought GitHub, all of the "Developer Evangelist" / "Open Source" evangelist crowd made all of those noise about how "Microsoft is great for our community! They ARE an open source company! Everything is wine and roses!"
Blech. I can't do business with evil companies.
[2] https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed...
...but those are among the three organizations I would trust the least with such a choice.
It would be like recommending a housing strategy implemented in San Francisco, or a public transportation strategy implemented in New York.
So many inconsistencies in the UI. Almost non-existent keyboard navigation. Typing notifications and read receipts on by default (supposed to be a privacy focused chat). Handling unread messages. Lack of threads. I could go on...
Salesforce also has Heroku. Someone mentioned Salesforce owning Tableau. There hasn't been much going on between Slack and Atlassian, if we could see a cohesive integration going on there's definitely a chance they could become dominant within this ecosystem but for now it seems all so fragmented still.
I don't think their corporate culture let their product make the leap from "cute chat app used by Silicon Valley startups because it has emojis" to Enterprise-level support and functionality.
-2024 Stewart Butterfield announces new MMORPG, "Cology"
-2025 Butterfield reluctantly shutters Cology after failing to attract playerbase
-2026 Butterfield announces public release of collaborative VR design tool first built for Cology, "Devival"
-2027 Devival passes 3 million DAUs
-2028 Devival announces IPO
-2029 Devival sold to Adobe for $35b
-2032 Stewart Butterfield announces new MMORPG, "Breviariam"
(I have quite a few friends who have some fondness for what Glitch-the-game was trying to do. Always appreciated that they open sourced the art from it: https://www.glitchthegame.com/public-domain-game-art/)
It reeks of different services consolidated via acquisition (or one-off services kitbashed together), and adding slack to the mix will just add yet another variation to the existing APIs.
I commend those devs that work with Salesforce on a daily basis!
I've heard decent ones are handsomely paid, so at least they have that going on for them.
Medium to large business will easily pay $200k-$400k for Salesforce implementation projects.
Still feel like the business sales industry is waiting for its iPhone disruptor.
Salesforce has listings of recommended Salesforce development and implementation companies. You’ll need to get training first and prove expertise.
You could look for companies that have job listings for Salesforce administrators and then see if they are open to contract work.
Attend Dreamforce to get a feel for everything is also a good idea.
API quality varies from product to product. Base APIs object retrieval are excellent because tons of people use them so they received incremental improvements even after launch. More niche APIs like Communities or Chatter unfortunately don’t get as much love or attention.
Documentation, on average, is great. Light on practical examples, perhaps, but Salesforce has made huge investments into education materials for the tech side of their products. If you think THEIR docs are bad, I urge you to share what big company (Netflix? FB?) with regular users as the dominant customer has docs that do are think are better.
I can not think of any other logical explanation for why it is so bad.
Of course these opinions are my own, I don’t currently work at Salesforce, and I can only tell a tiny part of the story from my own perspective, and it’s probably unfair to people who did a lot of good work.
(Incl Steve Jobs just a little bit others might find it interesting to know)
> It reeks of different services consolidated via acquisition (or one-off services kitbashed together), and adding slack to the mix will just add yet another variation to the existing APIs.
That's not how this usually works. Heroku is still running just fine and isn't a messy bunch of APIs since they were acquired. SFDC will likely just sell Slack into their enterprise clients and let it be.
It's my theory once a well-crafted enterprise application becomes very successful it bloats up until design-by-committee is necessary.
From that point on it becomes an unusable disaster.
“Hey we got $so_many million dollar client who wants to use our product but they want to auth with their AD and can’t use our three other SSO options.”
And thus was born the company’s pluggable directory over VPN connector and auth strategy.
Still, salesforce can sell and that's how it got where it is.
You're right, if I'm using something as simple as Zoho, Streak, Insightly, Close, Pipedrive, etc.
But thats precisely my point - the greater the complexity of the application the more of the "nightmare of an API/UX". Have you ever worked with DynamnicsCRM? NetSuite CRM?
Slack has many alternatives including using email
They're alternatives, but they are far from being usable alternatives.
It has to be comments like this that drove someone to create n-gate.
WebEx had 324,000,000 users running 73,000,000 meetings in March of this year [0]. As of April, Meet was adding 3,000,000 users per day with 100,000,000 users attending meets per day. [1]
You're obviously right though, they're clearly utterly unusable.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cisco-systems-webex-idUSK...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/28/21240434/google-meet-thre...
It’s also possible for something to have many users and have them casually brought up as unusable. The OP doesn’t literally mean unusable. They are exaggerating for effect.
Because of the same qualities that made it successful in the corporate world!
• Zoom is for one thing—it doesn't try to also sell you on a new service for managing documents, calendars, or VR bitcoins.
• Zoom is extremely easy for new users to set up and quickly enter a video call. It works even on very old hardware and operating systems.
• Zoom's audio quality is unmatched in calls with lots of participants. It's relatively adept at dealing with poor network quality and audio equipment.
I really think there's a lot of lessons here for other companies.
Ah, I see you haven't been following the recent updates (in which Zoom wants to gradually try to replace Slack and become your default client for your calendar and third-party integrations)
I mean I think Slack uptake would benefit companies that have been forced into WFH, but shrug maybe that's not happening or doesn't seem like that's moved the needle on the stock price.
Presumably he is another big force in SF outside Benioff and would love Quip to get the addition of Slack to really give it a chance to take off.
Advertising does work!
It'll be so cool when literally everything I do in life is basically owned by one company. Get paid in company scrip, buy food at the company store, live in company housing, talk to my family and coworkers over the company intercom, genuflect to the picture of the CEO in the mornings and before bed.
salesforce revenue 20b
are they really going to pay 40b for something that makes 400m a year? I get they're paying in stock but forgive me for not understanding the synergies here
It could certainly be a mistake, though.
even in the cross-sell case, 'slack doubles the value of salesforce' is a stretch
I suppose slack has way more customers so if even a few of them convert, salesforce grows tremendously? but the downside is this pushes SF into the freemium market.
'we're buying slack to help us grow our free tier' isn't ultra compelling.
if salesforce has a substantially more developed marketplace for plugins, SF can help slack get there too; not sure how rev-share works for slack plugins today.
Slack is missing doc management/creation. Quip is missing a good chat solution. It’s almost like PB&J.
One of the Quip founders is President and COO of SF too.
Before I thought Perhaps Atlassian and Slack would merge in a mostly stock deal. Was looking at their recent partnerships. Atlasssian’s market cap is 3x bigger. Only big enough if both were on board.
JIRA is a 22MB download any time I go to look at my tickets and the whole experience is grindy slow.
Every time I look at a ticket its like the 4th or 5th thing I check, its such useful information and they've allowed themselves to be so far removed from their principal use-cases its extraordinary.
Unless maybe it was my org that foolishly decided to configure it away?
I don't even think Jira is specifically bad. If someone was only using it for basic project managment and ticketing, it'd be acceptable.
However, occupies the same niche as SAP or Oracle businessware.
First, Take a service that must be ergonomic because people rely on it all day to do their job. Next, make the primary requirement the ability for managment and finance to run reports. Then, outsource it to a company that wants to add custom web frameworks on top of a decades old project. Finally, graft on decades of customizations done by different generations of contractors.
If you can admin your own Jira instance and keep the fields and plugins to exactly what you need, it's pretty nice. I keep going back to it for the customizable workflows and fine-grained access control.
Unfortunately, every corporate Jira instance I've ever worked with has been overrun with every possible field possible, an unnecessary and constantly shifting mishmash of plugins and horribly slow access. You're paying the price for all of that cruft that you don't need and which can't be removed because "maybe someone wants it."
I've seen multiple different fields for the same value, each of them created for their specific team. The instance is slow AF most of the time due to the bloat and often I can't even assign a sprint to a JIRA because the field doesn't load anymore.
My company had resisted the urge to bolt on additions more than most. We recently migrated from Cloud to on-prem Server as a result of being acquired, and it is amazing how much zippier our project is compared to some of the peer projects that have accumulated cruft.
Growing at that rate at this point in your company's lifecycle is pretty extraordinary. So not sure why you would consider them to be a cautionary tale.
As for what has happened to them. They have been on an acquisition binge the last few years e.g. Trello, StatusPage, OpsGenie, Mindville etc. And as mentioned above they have been rewriting their UI in a new React framework called Atlaskit.
I also used to think Atlassian was a pretty poorly run company but then you look into it and actually the opposite is true. Although they did let Github, Gitlab, Slack dominate them.
Next few years will be interesting as Gitlab is moving very fast into their space.
Slack is the new Sharepoint, everyone uses it but no one really wants to and it doesn't really fit the bill but everyone else is doing it so companies adopt it.
Microsoft Teams Chat UI is garbage. It uses a lot of space, i can't just have a list of channels, no i need groups etc.
It even doesn't matter to me if its slack or hipchat or matrix or whatever. I don't know why we migrated to slack.
I don't get why Teams doesn't provide a lightweight chat typical UI. I would just switch to Teams. After all video calls are much better on Teams and more stable.
But then Slack integrated Teams and Zoom. They clearly don't want to compete in this area and i also don't get why.
And yes, Atlassian did drop the ball. We'll see the fallout in five years, I don't see how they can save the company now.
Heroku, on the other hand has been a hassle-free solution for my company over the past 7 years, and short of a few outages (which were actually the fault of AWS from what I remember), it has been absolutely reliable.
We've worked hard to incorporate reliability lessons learned from building the platform at scale especially as we've grown [1], and I hope you'll give us another chance. If I can do anything else to help, my email is my HN handle at render.com.
[1] https://www.tfir.io/more-than-100000-services-created-on-zer...
The components were mostly handed down to us from a company-wide UI team whose main design goals were to bring commonality across all Atlassian products. This is a worthwhile goal, no one thinks that it makes sense that Atlassian has different editors and even markup languages between (and even within) products. But the result was dog-slow overweight components like the Atlassian editor which tried to be everything to everyone. So when you need to bring in a monolithic highly-customisable 12mb+ component for every text edit field then things spiral out of control quickly. One cool thing, though, is that these components are open source[0]. And it looks like some performance/payload work has been done since I left, thank god.
In my new job I use Jira Server which hasn't been infected with the updated UI, and it's a shame because other than that terrible UI there have been big meaningful updates in Jira. But I'm dreading our inevitable migration to Cloud.
Sometimes with Jira updates, I have to ask myself “What WERE they thinking?” It’s good to hear that actually some people (well, at least one!) inside the org ask this too.
If I was in Atlassian's situation this would be the last thing to focus on.
a) This is the biggest ever rewrite of their most important products. In this situation maintaining feature set compatibility is always going to be priority A, B to Z.
b) Their paying customers are mostly in the enterprise space who have very fast internet and stable environments i.e. payloads are quickly cached.
2) They are in the middle of a complete UI rewrite and I've only briefly used it but it's definitely much better than the previous versions. I imagine the Trello acquisition is also going to help them here.
For my other team members, they enjoy Confluence more than Jira, because Jira feels a bit difficult.
The not being able to type fluidly has to be the worst though.
Our team has as well at least brought up the idea of potentially trying other products.
Some of it's probably me not really wanting to get involved with JIRA in the first place (who wants to manage tickets), but in the interest of being a better employee I've been trying to make sure I'm squaring out my work properly for tracking, etc.
And there's certain things, that I'm sure are there, but I just can't find sometimes. Like... how to add an epic easily. There's at least three different views for each ticket (when you create it, when you click it open into the modal, and the full screen view), and things are apparently in different places on those different views?
I'll take some of the blame, but it's a mess.
c) Pushing folks to their cloud offering, partly by
d) doubling the cost of on-prem.
The surprise price bump really pissed off people here; that, combined with doubts about their long-term commitment to on-prem put evaluating alternatives on the list for next year.
Being a tool no one loves is a bad place to start changing a bunch of stuff at once.
Things have been improved with the recent addition of pinned ticket fields, but they still have a long way to go.
the issue here isn't the goal itself, it is that such highly visible efforts - "common platform", "common UI", etc. which are very complex technically to do right - invariably bring up to the top and into the deciding positions those "drivers of cross-organizational/functional/etc. change" style people whom you'd really want to be staying far from such important and complex technical issues...
I worked with Jira in 2012-13, it was appallingly slow. Making it even slower is an achievement.
Good to hear that there’s at least one person involved with it that sees the problem with this. I imagine how the use of whitespace to organize the layout probably looked very simple and attractive in Sketch or Figma at some point. Then reality crept in, and that whitespace was gradually carved up into more and more incoherent pieces. And as that was the only indicator of hierarchy and relationships there was to start with, there’s now no organization left at all. Many screens are just a bunch of words, all imperceptibly different shades of dark gray, strewn out randomly over a solid white background.
To make things worse, they all seem to be implemented in slightly inconsistent ways (you can tell when an h1 is wrapped in ten (10) layers of nested divs, each just containing the next div) so things that should align are all off by a pixel and have slightly different behaviors.
I wonder if people like this stuff? I mean are there people who mindlessly scroll through this crap and like it?
For this particular website I think the design is obstructing the functionality. "Good design is unobtrusive - Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression."
In the future, when cursing the developers who are responsible for this, I'll bear in mind that sometimes no matter how good the individuals in the team… it's sometimes impossible to salvage a good product.
It's a shame they are killing off the server products to push everyone into the cloud.
as long handle being wholly dependent on a third party whose API access could be pulled anytime .
For one large web app I worked on, we had a setup where browser loading time would always print out in the dev tools console. We had no hard requirement for UI changes to stay under a certain threshold, but seeing that loading time with every refresh during development was enough to keep us mindful of payload.
I didn't comprehend how someone thought it would be a good idea to move the button for a new ticket away from the main screen to that sidebar thing where it took an additional click to do so.
Yes lets add another click to the most used function in my workflow...
THANK YOU (sorry for shouting). That's my biggest pet peeve with the new UI.
I feel like I'm using some mix of Mac OS X UI and a child's toy. Everything is so big and spread out, there's barely even space for longer text areas.
Don't even think about putting windows side-by-side with JIRA taking half a screen, it's unusable.
Jira is a tractor trailer. It's big, it's powerful, it's a bit slow to get moving, but (1) it can carry just about anything (2) once it gets moving, it tends to stay moving. There's a lot of value in having a "do it all" project management system.
That being said, there's also value in alternatives that are more tailored towards specific needs.
Way faster, way better design and the searchbar was amazing.
Look, Atlassian is a growth-by-acquisition operation, chaos is inevitable
We did the same at one company I worked for. It was a terrible decision.
RxJS is one of those things that is fun to play with until you look down and it's cutting off your legs before you even felt it. Instead of simple AJAX calls when needed in places that are logical, your app turns into this hydra of events flowing everywhere and never knowing why anything is happening or where it's happening. RxJS is what happens when a Jenga tower makes love with a Rube Goldberg machine.
And don't get me started on those damn marbles. We're writing goddamn CRUD webapps!!! We don't need marble diagrams for this. It's like that Mitch Hedberg joke about donut receipts. We don't need to introduce complexity into our simple life.
And the Award for Metaphor of the week goes to ...
Secondly, it's great that they're involved and passionate on social justice issues, however I wouldn't lead with that as the landing page gives no idea what the company actually does, offers, or makes.
Thirdly, when you click over to their team, it should identify their role instead of just letting you click to their socials.
^ just my quick first impressions!
Some young woman was on stage demanding that all males need to apologize to women in tech. There were other incidents.
Not a community I want to be involved in.
[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g4oh2GGZOsucZfT1YJ5wjDUS...
Say I'm installing a toilet, I need to go out and buy one from the hardware store, remove the old toilet, install the new one, and finally test that it works. It's a linear process that could easily be constructed via a series of async/awaits, and I wouldn't use RxJS to model the behavior.
Now, say I'm building a bathroom. You have a shower head, a sink, a toilet, light fixtures, power outlets, tiling, a door, and a window. You have a bunch of contractors. Now you're dealing with N number of sources, N number of tasks that can possibly done in parallel, and N number of possible things you could do in that bathroom depending on how much the bathroom is finished (for instance, if just the plumbing, floor and sink are complete, I can wash my hands)
This was always a hard problem, and not one that is especially appreciated, but I can tell you from experience that attempting to just use promises or async/await is not a scalable pattern.
I appreciate your expanation of th Atlassian dev process. I've always wondered how they managed to make JIRA so slow.
Except going to https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlaskit/src/master tells you to go to https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlaskit-mk-2/src/master/ which then tells you:
> Unfortunately, that code no longer resides here as it’s all been moved to a new closed source location.
The breadcrumb to get to it is a bit crazy, but https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/design-system-mirror/src/mas... is the old mirror, which has a link in the readme to the new mirror: https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlassian-frontend-mirror/sr...
That’s scary in a few ways I have a hard time imagining.
(and yes, you could water, i dunno, facebook down to that, but still, these are... trouble ticket systems..? what am I missing? Scaling?)
- Workflows
- Access control over fields
- Custom fields
- Release management
- 3P plugins and integrations
- API access
I am far from being a fan of Jira but they do have a rather large set of features. Every time I evaluate the hottest new issue tracking and/or project management solution, there is something lacking as compared to Jira.
I don't think anybody really sets out with the intent of using the one reputedly cumbersome tool that can do anything - but after growth and pivots and new requirements and new teams and special workflows... you end up needing a combination of features that is literally impossible to get with any other tool, and who wants to fracture into multiple tools?
So you get JIRA. And it just does it all, and even if nobody is overjoyed, nobody feels like they lost, either. There's value in that.
This is because the information in these tools is business critical and needs to be consumed by almost everyone in the company. Moreover, different people need access to the same information in different forms of presentation, with aggregation and emphasis of different data. In contrast it's easy to make a work tracker just for developers - GitHub and GitLab have pretty much solved that problem. Making a ticket tracker which works as a single source of truth for all members of an organization who need access to the tickets is much more difficult.
Developers, PMs, VPs, support staff, data scientists and designers all need access to overlapping information which is ideally stored in the form of tickets. But each of those roles needs something different from the tickets, both individually and in aggregate. You can't just target a single group here, because then you're trying to get the company to adopt separate repositories of work (it's already an additional complexity that work is split between e.g. GitHub and Jira, for example).
So to obtain the critical mass of adoption they need for product market fit and growth, these tools organically evolve to become everything to everyone in an organization. And suddenly your tracking tool is stuffed with metrics, integrations, feeds, dashboards, reports, etc.
The other thing is that these tools become especially bloated by integrations and plugins. A brand new instance of any tracker or project manager feels clean and fast. A few years in, it feels slower and more crowded by all the custom/third party additions rolled into it.
I realize this would be a lot of work, but I would be really interested to see some examples of "the ticket the developers want", "the ticket the VPs want", "the ticket the designers want", etc.
What happens is that a new field gets added, and whoever's adding it claims it's really "important" and needs to be seen by everyone. It'll invariably set as mandatory to be filled in too.
2 years later and some integration breaks because the integration doesn't set that field and you end up looking at that really important field and every single project has it set to exactly the same value.
Repeat ad nauseum.
The other thing I've seen a few times is when assessments or a bonus depends on some field so they make it visible to everyone. Then the bonus scheme changes, but they never hide the fields that no-one cares about any more.
Ugh, this reminds me of a mess I inadvertently participated in..
A certain employee, on an unrelated team to mine, decided to to go down the route of becoming an agile/scrum master/evangical and somehow got "reduce instances of X" as their personal KPI/development goal one year. Soon after this, they're pinging myself and other team leads on slack whenever X field is filled out on JIRA and demanding justification. Eventually because of this harassment I just stop filling out the field, leaving it as the default value and just verbally communicating the fact to whomever needed to know. Later on I find out that I wasn't the only one that took this route,And guess what happened next! The scrum master is promoted to a management position, in part due to their stellar KPIs! Excellent work all around!
They need to absorb things so their sales team can say "oh we have X feature" regardless of its actual implementability and just leave it to the consultants to struggle and somehow implement a half baked solution that doesn't work in the end.
Oh but that's how they make money also. More products, more features, more crappy integrations = more service contracts, more consulting work, etc.
All a huge scam that enterprises are forced into because they don't want to be "left behind in the digital economy."
Returns aren’t as good if acquisition is high, like slack will be.
They are a pretty notable company in startup history since they were the first to be hugely successful at using the self-service model for enterprise sales.
A lot of small(ish) firms are making reasonable money doing this sort of thing; I'd count them as enterprise sales ;)
One central high quality HR Team can scale easily in a big org while the same amount in small companies need spend more on HR.
And its not just HR of course.
I wouldn't even trust small companies to build a modern and secure cloud product. While big companies have their own Security Teams and are able to afford a normal security audit, for a small company that means 1. much higher cost in relation and also binding of personal they might not have.
I have worked in a very small company which basically couldn't spell security. And i'm now working in a very big company. There are plenty of people who also can't do that but there are teams only for security.
I don't have to justify now that i'm doing things securely. Thats how it is. My manager will not sign the risk away; He actually can't and people are not keen of asking upper upper management for that.
That's the sales pitch, sure.
Size scales in reverse order with security. The larger you are, the more difficult it is to make sure all the gaps are sealed - that's why the greatest of empires fall eventually - they get spread across so large a portfolio there are bound to be gaps, which are endlessly exploited, even on users of the large ERP companies.
If products were actually integrated well and deployed well all of what you say would be true. But that's just not the reality - trust me, I've been there. It's bad.
I don't know where the sweat spot is, but i don't think it is at a 10 person company. I believe its more in the range of 500 or 1000 person company.
Oh my.
But their horribly inconsistent UI and UX a big tell why it is this way. They simply serve you multiple versions of their website, each for different component. And together it's a giant mess.
> But their horribly inconsistent UI and UX a big tell why it is this way.
It's insane how the editor changes between creating a task description, to editing a task description, to writing a comment. Like three separate teams with loose guidelines created them. In reality it's probably more like 7 teams.
I hate Atlassian with a passion and the only reason I touch it is because I'm a corporate slave.
(Two super-slow things combine to make the ultimate slow thing - looks like the aquisiton makes sense after all!)
Man, that UI is such a slow resource-hog of a bloat-ball.
There's just too many ways to "agile" in JIRA, every project/program manager I've worked with turns it into a Frankenstein immediately.
We'll get there.
There's your answer.
Quick plug for the General Internet Unit podcast, they’re a good starting point for those wondering how things might be different.
We use it. Its great.
I was pretty impressed with mattermost in the brief time I used it. Shame it looks like their starter package is twice the price of Slack...
It has also an open source option you can self-host no?
It’s free for lots of use cases including basic commercial use and is open source.