Salesforce declares the 9-to-5 workday dead, will let employees work remotely | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce declares the 9-to-5 workday dead, will let employees work remotely

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75 pointsingve28 comments

Great to see this become official. I suspect many remote employees weren't working strict 9-5 anyway, especially given the lack of things to do outside the house during COVID.

How does Salesforce's culture compare in terms of respecting peoples' off time? I've worked at companies that ditched strict schedules before, but it quickly turned into an excuse to expect everyone to be available on demand, 16 hours per day, 7 days per week.

The official company position was that no one should feel obligated to respond on weekends or outside of regular hours unless it was an explicit emergency. In practice, when you get a request from your boss's boss at 9AM on a Saturday, it's hard to say "I'll get to this on Monday". Some of the more toxic teams even weaponized this, by sending out requests at odd hours and then marking their tasks as "Blocked, waiting for response from X". My heart still sinks when I hear the Slack notification sound on evenings or weekends, because for years that was a signal that several hours of my free time were about to disappear.

I firmly believe that good management can overcome these issues, but it must come from the top. Not only that, but managers who abuse the system must be visibly removed from the company for doing so. Unless there are consequences for abusing the flexibility of your employees to extract more work, some percentage of managers will take advantage of the system to get ahead.

> My heart still sinks when I hear the Slack notification sound on evenings or weekends

Just turn off Slack notifications. I did this years ago (as a founder), and my life improved considerably. Three people at the company had my personal cell number. If it really was an emergency, they'd call. It only happened twice. Both times were legitimate emergencies that I would've wanted to know about ASAP.

After a few months of turning off Slack notifications I started telling all my employees to do the same. Most did. Everyone was happier.

> I firmly believe that good management can overcome these issues, but it must come from the top.

It starts at the top but is really implemented by middle management. As a leader, you have to get middle management on board with it, or some teams will end up with the short end of the stick. I had one team lead that would Slack their employees all weekend long and explicitly wanted a reply. Once I got word of this, I started calling that manager every single Sunday until they "got it".

> Just turn off Slack notifications.

As a person sending 3AM slack messages, I NEED you to do this.

I don't expect a reply at 3AM to a message asking you if you know about $WEIRD_THING and especially not when I send something like "remind me to talk to you about $FOOBAR on Monday"

Especially frustrating on evenings/weekends when people reply back quickly, but, on mobile and they can't effectively do the thing I need and are annoyed about not being able to do it right away and/or annoyed about me messaging them, but, I didn't need them to do it right then ANYWAY. I know it 10pm and you're heading to bed that's why I prefixed my message with "can you check tomorrow ...."

It leads me to not sending messages after-hours, which results in quick-small-tiny tasks/ideas being forgotten.

If it's really urgent, I'll call you!

Why are you sending non-urgent messages to coworkers at 3AM? That's extremely unprofessional if you are @'ing them or dming them directly.

People in different time zones exist?

I've worked with people in Sydney while being in London and plenty of slack messages were sent that would have been at 3/4am their time.

The expectation is they mute slack out of hours (which they do).

I work with people in many time zones. We are on do not disturb mode outside work hours. That way I can send Slack messages that are non-urgent and not bother them. And in the extremely unusual case I want them to know, I can override the do not disturb anyway.

Isn't this setup basically the Slack default? Regardless, it's extremely easy to setup.

Ah didn't consider that, which is ironic since I worked across a +11TZ at $lastJob. Thanks for the clarification.

This seems like the natural consequence of abusing a system designed for synchronous chat as an asynchronous coordination platform. It's designed to go "ding" and grab your attention, immediately.

For comparison, email doesn't have to be explicitly muted and unmuted at the weekends.

Completely disagree.

Manage your notifications properly.

Teams messages at 3AM don't bother me and, as I said, I don't expect a reply immediately and I'm not implicitly or explicitly penalizing people for not answering in a reasonable timeframe.

Have you considered sending an email instead?

I don't like email. Much prefer chat conversations, even at high latency.

I would recommend looking into something like Gator[0] that allows you to send messages that delay delivery until the recipients morning the following workday.

[0] https://slack.com/apps/ANPGHD2F8-gator

Mostly using teams, somewhat unfortunately.

Teams has gotten better over the past 2 or 3 years and slack has gotten worse enough that I don't care anymore.

Teams integrates really well since we're an Office365 org.

> Just turn off Slack notifications.

Fully agree, if it's compatible with the company.

But the workplace I described had an expectation of quick responses. Unfortunately, it came from the top. The CEO believed that responsiveness was one of the best indicators of success, which isn't exactly an uncommon belief in tech startup circles. Ignoring Slack messages was guaranteed to damage your career path at the company.

Responsiveness isn't actually a valid signal of employee ability, especially when everyone knows exactly how the game is played. The corporate climbers made sure to respond instantly to every message received in Slack. The trick was to minimize your responsibilities and workload, so you always had time to respond ASAP. Predictably, turnover was extremely high at this company. It's the only place I've ever worked where people routinely quit before the 12-month mark, giving up their signing bonus in the process.

It sounds dumb, but I think a lot of the 'vague nuance' around considering people's availability schedules could be addressed simply by stating some reasonable guidelines and pinning it to a slack channel.

As a technical person, I roll my eyes at HR stuff, but this is at least something small and easy. At least, then it's somewhat harder to hide asshole-ish behavior behind feigned ignorance.

And if all else fails... better to explore what else is out there than stay in a bad situation if it's replaceable.

DND filters work wonders here, and help reinforce a positive culture.

During onboarding I make sure my devs set them up.

You're right though, this is a cultural thing that needs leadership from the top.

Just like "unlimited vacation" it can be abused on both sides pretty easily if you don't keep an eye on it.

What works for me is establishing firm boundaries and logged off when my workday was over.

> but it quickly turned into an excuse to expect everyone to be available on demand, 16 hours per day, 7 days per week.

If that happens, you have bad leadership. At the very least, your manager should be protecting you from this. If I get off hours emails with urgent requests, I usually just reply to my manager (with CCs intact) and say "I'm willing to do this, but I would like to be compensated 2 working hours for every hour that I work on this, because this is supposed to be my weekend and I am going to have to cancel my plans to do this. Do you want to go ahead under that arrangement?"

I like it because it's not confrontational, it just reminds them that you are a person with your own things going on. It also puts the ball in their court. If they want to come back and say "no, you must do this, and you get no compensation", that sends a very clear message, and you can do with that what you want. Whatever you do, you probably don't want to be at that company any longer than you have to at that point.

> I firmly believe that good management can overcome these issues, but it must come from the top. Not only that, but managers who abuse the system must be visibly removed from the company for doing so. Unless there are consequences for abusing the flexibility of your employees to extract more work, some percentage of managers will take advantage of the system to get ahead.

Personally, I don't think that there's a faction to explicitly blame. I think that overdrive comes from basically playing a game of telephone. VP tells director that we're not doing great on metric X. Director looks and decides that it's important for these 3 teams to work on Y features to help with metric X. Director tells managers that we must improve metric X (but won't say that really he wants to look good to his manager). Managers then tell employees that it's life or death these features ship, and the director, managers, and ICs all end up working overtime. Feel free to add more layers of distortion to match your place in the org chart. The VP works overtime too, but that's basically par for the course.

The gist is, each employee wants to do well. Even if it's not strictly to impress their manager, I don't think anyone wants to wake up and say "I'm gonna do a really mediocre job today". So when they communicate that importance to the tier below them, they increment the importance by a little bit. Tall org charts can cause this, as can high-stress environments where everyone multiplies the importance instead of incrementing it.

> If they want to come back and say "no, you must do this, and you get no compensation", that sends a very clear message,

And it's actually a crime in many (most?) jurisdictions to expect workers to work overtime with no compensation. Extra reason to put it in writing.

Most likely they'll say something like: "fine, fine, we'll ask someone else, sad that you are not a team player and not caring about the company"

and Mr non-team player has to find a new job because neither his colleagues or team members are respecting him now.

I read the whole article hope of to find out exactly what the 9-to-5 workday being dead meant, and I don’t feel like I really got an answer.

Does it mean that a parent can go pick up their kid from school in the middle of the workday, but is otherwise expected to be working from 9 to 5? The article doesn’t get any more specific than mentioning an example that sort of sounds like that.

I believe The work from home revolution is the start of outsourcing the USA software industry.

Why hire from or headquarter a company in a country where regulations are high, taxes are confusing, and a lot of your engineers are foreigners already so no expensive visa process. Why pay 150k for a software engineer in the states when you can pay 30k for a polish or Indian one.

Everyone is so distracted by how great this new benefit is that they don’t see the outsourcing effect around the corner.

I have worked in software engineering for 25 years now and every year someone talks about the threat of outsourcing work and it never transpires. In fact its the opposite, there is a constant skills gap.

Is it just me, or does the actual press release from Salesforce not back up the headline's claim that the 9-5 job is dead?

The press release absolutely doesn't come close to declaring 9-to-5 or even on-site work dead. There's a massive different between "some employees will have fully flexible remote schedules" and "all employees will have not strict schedule"

How is headline reflective of what they said ? They said employees can work remotely 2-3 days a week. I mean, 1 day WFH was already the norm. It is adding another extra day to that schedule. Far cry from death to 9-5

I heard elsewhere they are shedding real estate, so I assume the expectation is that all Flex and Remote employees will have hot desks or simply only be there for conference meetings.

Not sure if I like the hot desk model; using my own peripherals and monitor and having an adjusted space is generally more comfortable.

I could see a case where I am in the office for a longer chunk, if I have two in person meetings that are not contiguous, so would return to personal desk which would now be hot desk?

The substance of the press release doesn't remotely come close to the headline, but I wish it did. So many companies are failing to let their structure adapt to a remote-first world, by trying to maintain things like "we start our day with a 30-min zoom call to update everyone on the team with what everyone else is doing today", and requiring people to be available on slack or whatever for their 8 hour day.

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