Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

My sister was an RN at a hospital whose parent company gobbled up some area hospitals.

In her case, they cut her pay 25%, because it would be unfair to pay the other people less. This was right before COVID, and everyone basically quit - like a whole department of nurses en masse.

She came back as a contractor when they were hard up, at one point making $350/hr. All of the normal staff left and it became a contractor mill. When contract people didn’t show, she got $2000-3000 shift bonuses for a 4 hour work commitment to allow the ER to stay open.

I certainly hope the Slack folks do something similar.

Yep. My good friend is an RN who worked for a hospital bought up by some conglomerate and the perks slowly went away and burned a ton of loyalty/good-will. He left to do travel nursing and made a ton more.

It’s so shortsighted and ultimately defeating/self-destructive when companies act like this.

It just doesn't seem to harm the corporation enough. The requests for subsidies, the limitations of available support that put the public at risk should be negatively impacting leadership of these organizations drastically.

Maybe not enough people know what's really happening with those companies.

Nobody is really evaluated all that effectively on an individual level. I can't figure out the difference in my performance reviews between advocating, coming up with new ideas, and taking initiative vs just working on tickets and not saying a word in meetings.

The people who make the cuts see a small immediate gain. The losses of the company as a whole as people leave take at least some months.

In the case of a hospital and emergency room, they will usually have a monopoly in a given arena, so the losses will be felt by taxpayers and insurance premium payers. And the patients who end up getting lower quality are due to turbulence in operations. And the workers who cannot afford to or decide not to quit who have to deal with lower quality of life at work.

This is my frustration.

How is it when I fuck up at work, I get fired but when these definitely reversible decisions are made and allowed to run their course for years we dont see a mass exodus at the SVP level?

Just wanted to say I love this. Happy for your sis and also thankful for her and all the other medical staff for going through what they went through

As great as it is for her... This dumb shit ended up being $$$ on a bunch of people's medical bills.

Absolutely, and hospitals are to blame for that, not RNs.

There is no legitimate SWE shortage though. Most software can run in maintenance mode with minimal staff and no feature growth. A hospital is dead without nurses.

> Most software can run in maintenance mode with minimal staff and no feature growth.

If it is well built, sure. At one of my jobs, one of the firehoses requires a messy restart every few days as it was left to decay and now everything is out of date.

Yea but an intern could keep that going for a few months if they had to, you don’t need senior engineers.

The point is that stagnation/KTLO is way easier than expansion and needs way less talent.

Typically, not really. If a software is badly built, it isn't as simple as following a set of well-described instructions. Random stuff breaks all the time due to hidden dependencies to other servicea, and debugging it is definitely not a job to be entrusted to an intern. If it was easy to restart, you could write a cron job for it.

> A hospital is dead without nurses.

So are the patients :p

I work at a large public tech company with a bland product and sure you could lay off 90% of engineering and coast with no feature development for a good while (probably). The problem is when you want to staff back up, getting that 90% back won’t happen overnight and it’ll take years to get that efficiency back up. We paused hiring for just a couple months in my org once, we had something like 5% attrition during that time and it took 3x as long to get the hiring pipeline back up and it’ll take at least a year to get those people to be useful. Always Be Hiring.

Interesting math for the Hospitals. My understanding is that if they don't have enough nurses on shift, they pay high penalties to medicare. Not sure I know the details but that's my understanding.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/42/482.23

Aren’t most nurses unionized though? This sounds like a union problem or at least something a union should prevent.

Outliers being paid more than their peers is the exact thing that unions fight against. I wouldn't be surprised if this originated as a union demand.

My friends Union recently fought against work from home for desk jobs because the field workers could not enjoy the same benefit.

Corporate leadership negotiated against the Union, but the union prevailes so there is no work from home

Unions also fight to have everybody paid more. The company dropping everybody to the lowest bar instead of increasing benefits for the worst off is absolutely not something the union demanded.

As for outliers in general, sure. The whole union thing is based on collective bargaining after all. If Bob is making more than everybody else in the same position, that means there's more room for everybody else doing that job to make more.

If something like this did originate from a union complaint, it sucks now for the best-off, but it's also going to be a real strong point for all the workers to use when the contract is renegotiated.

I work in a place with a union and sometimes have a minor role in negotiation with them.

100% WFH put them between a rock and a hard place. Ultimately the power of bargaining is dependent on being able to strike. Remote weakens that as people can be anywhere. The control lost by management is also felt by labor.

The circumstances vary - if your union and circumstances get hybrid and remote work in the CBA, you’re much better as we’ve already seen “return to the office” used as a stealth layoff technique that denys unemployment and severance.

I'm curious how it is used as a stealth layoff. If your role location requirement changes, you should be eligible for layoff UI.

Really depends on the state. My hospital in Arizona sat me through a presentation urging me to not sign a union petition, like a lot of other companies.

Inequality in pay is what unions typically fight against unless it is based on seniority. Many union shops have underemployment problems solved by bringing in contractors - or non-union organizations that exist in states with strong labor laws, where businesses only hire a small number of FTEs and hire contractors for the majority of the rank and file work to get around strong labor laws.

No, most nurses aren’t unionized.

The benefit of being a nurse is that it is a monopoly, and the hospital is also a monopoly, and neither the hospital nor the nurse pay the cost of that mishandling, but you the taxpayer do.

When I hear of something like that scenario, I can't logically see how the executive team making those initial decisions can spin it as a victory, but I can readily imagine them doing it.

"Hooray, we've reduced headcount and improved productivity!!" "Yeah, but your wages bill is now stacked with contractors and is 10x what it was before." "OK,OK, but how about that next exec bonus?"

Jealousy is a deep, natural instinct. There are tons of studies that show how various kinds of monkeys/apes will happily eat a piece of fruit or whatever, but if you give the monkey next to them a piece of candy instead, the first monkey will go ape shit and never eat the fruit again.

Many, many people think like this. I remember talking to a software engineer from MIT a while back, I don't even remember what we were talking about. But, I distinctly remember him expressing an attitude where someone else received something that he felt that he deserved, regardless of whether the other person deserved it also or not, and to him, this was just about the gravest injustice that he could imagine. He was like visibly angry clenching his teeth while talking about it. And it had nothing to do with whatever the thing was, hence why I can't remember it. To him it was a very deeply rooted idea of "fairness" defined in this sort of simple-minded, inflexible way. And he was ALL ABOUT removing the thing from the other person as opposed to trying to get compensated equally himself.

So... give the benefit to everyone??

And don’t forget other benefits like salary.

How can a multi-billion dollar company afford to let employees enjoy the holidays? /s

Especially because the period between Christmas and new years is the absolute lowest point of productivity. Giving everyone the holiday probably saves the company money, since then employees have the benefit of returning after the 1st refreshed. Every job I've had to work that period, the 25th through the 31st is absolutely dead and unproductive, since lots of coworkers burned their pto to take it off anyway and any external vendor is extremely unresponsive.

Similar thing to anyone who deals with China, you just expect that nothing will get done over their new year celebrations and you build schedules appropriately. Salesforce could absolutely afford to do this, they already have a good example in house. Instead of doing something that would generate positive press, they've generated negative headlines and really pissed off the employees as slack twice (once now, and once again later this year around the holidays). What a classic short-sighted MBA brain move.

Those experiments don't distinguish between jealousy and intolerance for injustice or unfairness from a third party.

In the capuchin studies, given that they usually express their displeasure at the experimenter rather than the other monkey and also spontaneously share it's reasonable to view it as the latter.

This whole crab bucket mentality of 'it's unfaaaiiir that minimum wages get raised' rather than fighting to get the benefit for everyone is a distinctly neoliberal and american mindset that you have to 'deserve' to survive or be comfortable.

I usually take these monkey studies with a pinch of salt. It shouldn’t be to hard to conduct a similar study on humans, and the fact that we are only hearing about monkey studies makes me question whether the results can be generalized.

It is not just that we are a different species and exhibit different behavior under same circumstances as monkeys, but also that the monkeys are kept under captivity all their lives which will profoundly alter their behavior (the same applies to humans).

This is why I conceal/pretend to have a lower salary than I do. People claim that sharing salaries only benefits employers. No, it also benefits the people who will have to deal with colleague jealousy.

Doing the opposite works too. If there are people in your org you don't like, insinuate that you make a lot.

Of course doing such a thing is incredibly petty and should only be reserved for special cases, as it were.

Studies, studies, every where,

And nor the apes did think,

Studies, studies, every where

But naught to drop a link.

Ah! well a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young!

Instead of lolz, the Albatross

About my neck was hung.

There's two revelations here:

* big companies have entire teams (internal and consultants) advising them on large changes in the name of productivity, cost reduction, whatever. These teams contrive metrics, KPI, and correlations, between what they do and the success of the business. These teams are paid bonuses, promotions, etc., based on these metrics they themselves contrive.

* small companies blindly do what the big companies do because surely these big companies know what they're doing

And everyone suffers. Except the people who implement this stuff. They probably have celebrations.

> big companies have entire teams (internal and consultants) advising them on large changes in the name of productivity, cost reduction, whatever. These teams contrive metrics, KPI, and correlations, between what they do and the success of the business. These teams are paid bonuses, promotions, etc., based on these metrics they themselves contrive.

definitely some misaligned incentives.

do you have an alternative you recommend? Big institutions typically make decisions via "committees of experts" because the alternative decision making in big groups of people is often dictated by a single or cadre of leaders, or total stasis. And small groups of leaders don't scale to the amount of decisions to be made at big groups.

I'd counter its not "committees of experts" but "committees of stakeholders and powerbrokers" with equally misaligned incentives not worth replicating.

Yes it's called capitalism, if they could get away with it they would pay us nothing. In good times the stock gets so high you can get away with super high salaries, over staffing and perks. But in worse times the stock starts to get a hit, the multiples don't look good and to retain earnings you have to cut costs. The biggest cost is wages...

This is just what we have in the USA today. Capitalism can work, but what we have is lopsided in terms of power balance. Workers should have more power and leverage but that has been eroded over time.

The volatility you describe is part of economic systems in general and hard to get away from. While it seems like a lot, it is actually far, far less than we had in the 1800s and prior to that.

Capitalism can work and has worked well for the last few decades but I personally think we are in "late stage" capitalism or whatever you wanna call a system that starts to crush the middle class and younger generations, create unsustainable debt and wreak havoc on the environment. We'll see how it all plays out, will be interesting for sure...

> Capitalism can work, but what we have is lopsided in terms of power balance.

This is incoherent. Capitalism is the assigning of power and capital to those who have power over capital. It is fundamentally opposed to a balance of power.

Assigning power to the collective or to workers is definitionally not capitalist. Mixed systems can work fine, but they are just that. A mixture of capitalist and other systems of organization.

> Yes it's called capitalism, if they could get away with it they would pay us nothing

It's called capitalism because it's the only system where they can't get away with it.

How so? They've been offshoring and automizing everything they can and this will only increase. Yes there's still a high demand for workers but it doesn't mean they're not trying to eliminate us slowly but surely. Us techies still have a few good years left but we're in no way immune to what's coming.

Well, no. You can have capitalist economies supported by slave labour. Capitalism on its own does not guarantee individuals freedom.

That is not the definition of capitalism.

Those are not the 'revelations'.

Salesforce was in a pickle. It's 'very bad' for a group of people over here to get a benefit, and for others not to get it. It's unfair. So they either have to give the benefit broadly, or take it away.

It's a non-standard benefit, so the easy thing to do would be to align holidays with the parent company.

If Slack was truly it's own entity, they likely should just allow them to have it as they operate totally independently, but that may not be sustainable.

That said, it's really hard to take people's benefits away as well. There's a social cost there.

Eh, I'm unconvinced that they aren't making an extremely dumb move here. Nobody is very productive during that period anyway, and this just aggravates one portion of the company without making everyone else much happier. Dev hiring is still tight, so this won't help them with retention & recruitment. I wouldn't be surprised that they could save money by extending this bebefit to everyone, or at bare minimum do it fairly cheaply.

I agree, it's probably a bad move.

I remember one company I was at. We all worked hard, when it came to bonus time, everyone in dev got bonus as we hit all the deadlines. Nobody in professional services did as the sales team hadn't got new customers, although they had worked hard on existing accounts.

So professional services complained it was unfair. The company decided being "unfair" was terrible, so tried to take the bonus away from dev as well. At which point pretty much all of us started looking for another job. They eventually relented and paid everyone in dev and ps the bonus.

You're missing the bigger picture.

The 'bad move' is to have different packages on different teams, which is completely untenable.

It will cause chaos among the ranks just as you indicate.

Therefore, it has to even out one way or another.

It's a big deal to give everyone else in the company an extra week off.

So they pulled the bandaid.

It would have been interesting for them to contemplate the extra few days, but their move put them in line with 99.9% of other companies so it's not unreasonable.

They should have figured out a sneaky way to give the Slack folks something else on the down-low though.

Oh, I agree that having different packages can cause discontent, and makes it harder overall for the company to manage. Merging companies is hard.

But equally, taking away benefits, particularly ones that employees really care about, is also a recipe for discontent.

I remember when IBM bought Lotus. For a long time people thought that spelled the end, as IBM had a long run of buying companies and destroying all the value in them. They tried a different approach with Lotus. As a result, the Lotus employees had significantly better benefits in some ways than the IBM employees. My friend who came from Lotus drove a Jaguar. His manager from IBM had a low end BMW, as the car allowances were different. Pension provision also different. This situation persisted right up until IBM sold Lotus stuff to HCL a couple of years back.

So it is possible to merge even big companies and maintain different benefit systems. For 20 years!

> The 'bad move' is to have different packages on different teams, which is completely untenable.

This already happens with compensation and other benefits, so it should be fine.

I believe that Salesforce could give every single employee a handful of extra vacation days, and overall it will cost them less than what they spend in unnecessary benefits for their higher ups.

Instead, it seems that they have decided to play a sort of reverse Robin Hood.

I blame a particularly macho form of management which takes "tough" decisions regardless of the impact on their employees. Every time I have encountered this style of management (most recently in my last role), it has led to an exodus of talent, both in the short term (expected) and the longer term.

Three years later, the few people I know who still work there say the culture is now irretrievably damaged. What was an attractive, fun place to work is now an unhappy place. They are struggling to recruit good people where before their reputation was an asset.

But the manager concerned remains, has no doubt hit her goals of cost reduction or efficiency or whatever. And has hired more of her kind.

I can relate. My previous role was at a company acquired by a large telecom, and like clockwork, two-three years after the whole thing is in disarray, only the terrible middle management remains, and most new people are juniors who have a hard time finding seniors that would mentor them.

It is not tough to save money or squeeze more out of your vendor. Macho would be increasing wages and benefits, as then management would have to answer to the board with commensurate results.

I agree it's tougher to argue things the board doesn't like to hear.

By "macho" I just meant that they seem to pride themselves on taking decisions which don't make them popular with people under them.

Good managers can make unpopular decisions and retain the support of staff under them. I've seen people take pay cuts temporarily, work longer hours, all kinds of extra that comes with good will.

Ultimately it's about respect. Good managers have it. Bad managers seem to revel in not having it.

Totally agree they should have found a way to sweeten it for the Slack employees though.

I currently work in a place that hands out fairly large bonus cheques to sales reps quarterly in, and I'm not joking here, in a secret awards ceremony that devs and others hear nothing about. Only reason I've any knowledge about it at all was because I used to date someone in that department and they spilled the beans.

I'm surprised that sales reps getting bonuses is a secret in your organisation. That's pretty much how sales are compensated everywhere. Their base salary is often only a small part of their compensation if they're any good.

It's also not uncommon for the bonus amounts awarded to be private.

> without making everyone else much happier

This is actually a really good point. It probably just replaces the topic-du-jour to whine about and has no actual benefit whatsoever.

“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

-David Graeber

I know this reads as a gross oversimplification but it rings true all the time. Imagine if almost everyone collectively at Salesforce said, “nope, this is dumb! We are going to stop working until this benefit is handed out to everyone at the company.” It’d be changed back / expanded within 48 hours.

You'd have to solve the prisoner's dilemma though, and that's something Graeber certainly hasn't managed to crack.

Why would you need to solve it? Because the prisoners dilemma suggests everyone should hold out for the holiday.

The reason the dilemma is of any interest is because people do defect.

You don’t have to solve it. There’s not really any problem to solve to begin with. People who are happy with the changed working conditions will continue to work there. People who do not want to tolerate the change will not continue to work there. Every person can precisely choose the outcome they want, without cooperation from anybody.

That's not what I was responding to though. This is:

> Imagine if almost everyone collectively at Salesforce said, “nope, this is dumb! We are going to stop working until this benefit is handed out to everyone at the company.” It’d be changed back / expanded within 48 hours.

That's a prisoner's dilemma, people holding out for the best they can get. If enough people defect then it won't work.

The prisoners dilemma doesn’t apply to this situation, because every single individual involved can, without any cooperation from anybody else, easily get the optimal outcome for themselves.

If you define “optimal outcome” as “people who don’t like having their benefits revoked quit”, yes. But I think a lot of people would define “optimal outcome” as “people who don’t like having their benefits revoked don’t get them revoked”.

The distinction is unimportant, and if you care about it very much then you’re just losing on purpose.

Not that I support the decision, but to be fair the size of the Slack team is probably a small percentage of whole SalesForce, so applying the same benefit to everyone instead of taking it away from that small team is much harder to justify.

I’m not disagreeing that that’s probably exactly what the execs who made this decision thought, it’s just gross. But I’m sure one them will get a nice bonus for cutting this.

"your employment is very important to us, please hold..."

I'd like the Kevorkian disconnect please.

Seems like we're on a slow burn to a crappy Slack product.

What should we be switching to instead...Teams?

This was my first thought, there goes the product (eventually ofc)

I went though this years ago when my coworkers at the time were complaining about some random process/internal standard.. it's like you realize we're the ones who control that right?

There are definitely people there who are relishing in this change. Such a sad mentality, but I remember reading plenty of whine posts about why it’s unfair for Heroku to not use GUS or, why does X acquisition still get to have free lunch.

"Due to the bad economy we can exploit you even more than normal!"

Managers can simply ignore this policy for their reports. If, at the Director level, most of the managers are still of original Slack ilk, this is very feasible. SFDC has unlimited PTO so this won't even be noticed.

In the United States. Other counties have limits.

I get this and people have tried to assuage me throughout my career with things like "yeah but it's up to the manager so you'll be fine" or similar. I absolutely hate manager-discretion "perks" because they aren't official ("on the books"), they can be taken away at a moments notice on the whim on your manager or if a new manager comes in who doesn't agree.

Before COVID this was the case with WFH at my last company. I was able to WFH for 2 days a week but it was impossible to get that codified in the handbook. I was even on the committee that oversaw edits/rewrites of the handbook but HR would not let us add anything about WFH other than "It's up to the manager". I had so many people tell me "I don't know why you are so bothered, you are able to WFH". Yes, today, right now, with this manager, or at least this managers current demeanor I have WFH but all that can turn on a dime, I wanted it to be official. "Of course", the company as a whole couldn't allow WFH, that would be "impossible". I left that company in late 2019 and... surprise! They went fully remote in 2020 and now are a hybrid with the majority of people WFH-ing. It was a rare case of being told it was impossible and would never work to seeing not but a few months later all their arguments to be shown for the BS they really were.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com