Leaked Slack all-hands meeting reveals a ‘strong culture clash’ with Salesforce | Hacker News Reader

Leaked Slack all-hands meeting reveals a ‘strong culture clash’ with Salesforce

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190 pointsmfiguiere153 comments

There seems to be a certain consensual hallucination that happens with these acquisitions. The acquirer says "you're amazing, you do great work, we don't want to change a thing, you'll still be completely autonomous, we'll just help you accelerate". And there's a good reason for it, the employees came to work for Slack, not Salesforce and if they all quit then the acquisition will have been a waste. So Salesforce makes all the same promises, but at the end of the day there's reality. The second Salesforce bought Slack, Slack ceased to exist, and all the workers now work for Salesforce. There's no culture clash between Slack and Salesforce. There's a Slack culture that once existed, and now there's Salesforce culture the company those workers now work at. You can embrace it, you can be unhappy, and you can leave. But remember, you're at Salesforce now and those other 70,000 workers - they joined the Salesforce culture, not the Slack culture and they sure as hell didn't buy you because of your culture.

And all those promises about Slack being independent and autonomous? Well sure, that was the plan, but now Slack is a part of Salesforce and Salesforce makes decisions that make sense for Salesforce, not Slack. So no, you don't get your own sales team, and no, you don't get your own customer support team. You're part of Salesforce now, it doesn't make sense. Oh and no, you aren't going to get the benefits you were getting at Slack, you don't work at Slack, you work at Salesforce, and hey! Some of those benefits may genuinely be better. Those HR reps that sorted all your perks at Slack? They're working in a Salesforce HR department now (if they weren't fired) and they're working to give you the Salesforce benefits.

It's a tough message but when someone buys the company you work for, you no longer work at the old company, you work at the new company, no matter what anyone says.

Look at how LinkedIn and Microsoft operate. The two companies have their own offices, salary tiers, office perks and lots more. Every department (including roles like marketing, recruiting, sales) is separate. Heck LinkedIn employees even use Slack rather than Microsoft Teams. It is the perfect example of independent company culture regardless of ownership.

What you said might be true for the majority of acquisitions at that scale, but it is by no means a strict rule.

A tree can grow for 300 years.

A tree can be chopped down in an afternoon.

All it takes is for the next CEO to decide to undo this and it's undone.

Same can be said about every company, acquired or not

The difference being, pre acquisition, they had their own CEO. Now they have another CEO of a different company.

It’s a fundamental change in dynamic.

Twitter wasn't merged.

Leadership, however, has changed.

(Extreme example, there are many others. Carly Fiorina's demolition of HP comes to mind.)

After sufficient time has passed, every company will need a new CEO, as no CEO lives forever. Each new iteration of CEO, whether internally or externally recruited, will bring a fundamental change in dynamic. You simply can't guarantee that the next generation will have the same values, views, and ways of working as the previous.

The CEO of a different company in charge isn't that different than an internally sourced CEO in charge.

I think the difference is that when you have lots of duplication (of systems, departments, job functions, processes, etc) like after an acquisition, there is very tempting low hanging fruit there for a CEO in a cost cutting frame of mind.

If you want to boost numbers this quarter and don't care too much about intangibles, the incentives really push towards gutting the acquisition.

A CEO of an independent company has different incentives to a CEO of an acquirer.

A company culture is a reflection of the company's leadership.

The culture of Microsoft has gone through radical changes between gates, balmer and nadella.

But a culture isn't _only_ a reflection of the leadership, it's all the interconnections of people and organizations within the whole company.

A leader can come in and make changes, and often these changes first have to break everything that's there already; without care what replaces the broken structures is just chaos; by default that chaos is the governing culture without more inputs and work from leadership.

These changes are most pronounced when 2 large organizations become one because both cultures have inertia (whole foods / amazon, slack / salesforce, etc). But yes, of course when CEOs change there's change to the corporate culture, but because there's only the force from the CEO's changes not entire cultures bashing into entire other cultures, the changes tend to be more gradual.

I am not an MBA or sociologist or really anyone with a worthwhile opinion, I've just been around the block and have the stories to tell or retell...

A tree being chopped down is only bad news if you built a treehouse in it. Be loyal to people instead of companies, sell most of your stock, and it won't be a huge problem.

Microsoft didn’t buy LinkedIn (or GitHub) to grow their business.

Linkedin was because everyone needed to have a “social” strategy back then and apart from maybe Dynamics, there’s no real synergy (I don’t like that word) between LinkedIn and Microsoft’s other businesses.

The GitHub acquisition was part of their plan to start repairing their fractured relationship with developers - almost a PR tool.

In both cases tight integration with the rest of the organisation makes less sense than Salesforce buying Slack - which is something that could be tied directly into Salesforce’s core business.

Github acquisition is a little more than this. There are VSCode and Azure linked to this acquisition, and to spin and link them together. From closely coupled to at least a little far away.

I won’t be surprised if soon you can spin your backend on Azure in 2 clicks from VSCode because your code is on GitHub. Stuff like that. Maybe it won’t be advertise on the GitHub directly. But for sure it will be there available in 2 click on the Azure and VSCode.

Exactly. Does anyone still remember Salesforce Chatter [1]?

Buying Slack was Salesforce's way of getting back into that market.

1: https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/salesforce-takes-chatter-m...

Oh I do _remember_ this pile of shit. A couple of PHB's from a sibling org are trying to push it down on us each and every year. We send them a lovely slide deck that describes how awful the software is, and that's it, we're allowed to use gitlab issues for one more year.

> The GitHub acquisition was part of their plan to start repairing their fractured relationship with developers - almost a PR tool.

I think that's a surface-level interpretation of the benefit to Microsoft. Azure and GitHub CI are a great match for using idle server compute for one and Codespaces is another.

I wouldn’t be surprised if ms bought linkedin purely (or partially) for the legal access to the user dataset.

Isn’t Yammer still a thing?

> It is the perfect example of independent company culture regardless of ownership.

The point of OP is not that the Borg will assimilate you from day one. Inertia, operational convenience and upper management laziness can delay the implementation of the hegemonic culture - why mess with a division that works? The point was that there should be zero expectation of changing the corporation's culture to match yours, they paid 27 billion so that you no longer have an independent voice on the market and be forced listen to them.

Because of how corporations operate, with strong internal diffusion of management and operational practices, the assimilation will happen, it's just a matter of speed. The old company has ceased to exist.

It will happen, sooner or later. Some key management will stay for the first years because of retainer money, then they will leave. They will be replaced by parent company executives looking at some quick success with the newly acquired company.

Culture will fade, politics will kick in, etc

Interesting. As a technical product, LI utterly sucks. It is slow, buggy, crashy, leaked passwords and so on.

I always assumed Microsoft is to blame, but apparently not!

GitHub operates the same way and doesn't suck :)

I agree with everything you're saying especially from the individual's perspective, but I think its valuable to look at the incentives from Salesforce's perspective.

They paid an incredible amount of money for Slack because of what Slack is. In my opinion, it doesn't really matter that Slack ceased to exist (which I agree de jure it did) because de facto the Slack culture still exists as a minority now. If anything, the incentives at Salesforce should be to preserve Slack, not whittle it down, because they thought Slack was worth billions of dollars. Is Slack's technology really worth that much? Maybe, maybe not. Is Slack's customer base worth that much and do they have a big enough moat that they won't start evaporating? Maybe, maybe not. More likely the value at Slack was created by the sum of its parts together, including culture.

Maybe you can make the argument that Salesforce thinks they bought a company that was worth less than the sum of its parts and that they can unlock value by making changes, but the acquisition and "culture clash" imply to me a big corporation throwing money at something they don't really understand.

The only real way that these acquisitions make sense is "synergy" (eurgh), Slack just as a normal business isn't worth more to Salesforce than market value if it's just going to run Slack as if it's an independent company, but in order to buy it they had to pay 54% premium to the pre-acquisition share price. So why did they pay 54% more than Slack is worth as an independent company? Well, now they can bundle Slack into their other services and grow Slack that way, and vice-versa they can start integrating Slack into their other CRM services and sell more CRM software into Slack's customers. That's why Slack is worth more to them than it is to the open market. It's the same business model as Microsoft getting Cloud customers by leveraging their office suite etc. Especially in these large businesses it's often an enterprise sales game anyway, and all the real winning/losing happens in the Sales/Marketing and C Suite, not the engineering team anyway.

Yup. A friend of mine worked at a small software compant that sold their product either as a standalone piece of software or as a plugin for the 3 biggest platforms in the field. One of those 3 bought them and promptly stopped developing the stand alone version and the plugins for the other platforms.

The total number of sales of their product plummeted, but the acquiring company didn't care, all they cared about was a that a large enough fraction of the people currently using the standalone version or on of their competitors platforms switched to their platform to get to keep using those features.

“Synergies” are great but many of the most profitable acquisitions are, at heart, bets that the acquiree was undervalued.

But even those are typically bets about the potential of the acquired company, rather than its current state. In other words, the acquirer typically believes that they possess a set of skills that will enable them to bring the potential of the acquired company to light, demonstrating only post-hoc that the company's original valuation was off.

As an analogy, it's like house-flipping - the acquirer needs to have a very good "eye" for potential, and then needs to put in significant work to realize that potential. As I understand, this is the model that Danaher follows with their acquisitions, but they're only able to do this because of that unique set of skills they possess internally, which sounds to me not that qualitatively different from regular synergy.

It doesn't need to be synergy, here are some other reasons:

* To prevent a competitor buying it

* Because a competitor already bundles something similar and you don't

IE, as a stop loss, rather than better growth prospects.

Many acquisitions work that way.

I'm in the midst of a similar situation to the Slack team, but on a smaller scale. Our app is a product of the people and the culture. You can't just steamroll the culture and not affect development and the end product.

I've been really surprised at how naive senior people in our parent company are on this front. Many have spent their whole careers at this one company, so they have very limited understanding of anything that doesn't align to what their company does.

Combine this lack of experience with a big dollop of hubris (they work for BigCo!) and it's easy to imagine a well-intentioned executive destroying the value of the acquired team and product.

Harsh but ultimately true. I was acquired into Salesforce and my experience matches this. Salesforce is a giant machine and you will be integrated sooner or later. When your big champion, in Slack's case the CEO, leaves you should expect the pace of integration to accelerate rapidly. This isn't the end of the world, Salesforce lets people vest in peace and then leave without hard feelings if they aren't happy with it. Those who want to embrace the Salesforce way are embraced and can have "a Salesforce career". The people who have the hardest time personally are those that try to fight the inevitable and push back against integrating. You can say a lot about Salesforce but people there are generally reasonable and not evil.

Fighting back is not always futile. I’ve worked for a company that that was spun out again (to private equity, with only arguably better results— the original company was sufficiently damaged, too many of people long gone, and new owners too unwilling to invest) in part because enough people refused to integrate and become part of a bigger whole.

I imagine it will be the same with Adobe and Figma.

That may be true in this case, but I know folks who work at GitHub and LinkedIn and apparently Microsoft has mostly been keeping hands off at these companies. I’m sure at least some functions have been merged, but they seem to have done a surprisingly good job of it.

I worked for Cisco for a long time: the integration of acquisitions in large companies (at least there) involves a calculus of size vs. current profits vs. complexity of integration. A company like Meraki or WebEx that’s making a lot of money and is larger or more complicated to integrate (because they have lots of their own systems and infrastructure) may get left alone, particularly if the former owners are aggressive about maintaining their existing culture. Cisco badges rather famously didn’t even work at Meraki offices, they were that pointed about keeping hands off. Scientific Atlanta was another one that got left alone for a long time, to the point that when Cisco people visited we all had to remember to dress up a bit because their offices were much more “casual Fridays means khakis and a polo shirt” than Cisco’s rather laid-back “it’s Friday, you’re lucky I’m wearing pants” culture. Once it suited Cisco to integrate them, though, the gloves came off and things moved much more quickly. So if the LinkedIn/GitHub leadership are aggressive about pushing a “hands off, we’re making money here” approach, Microsoft likely won’t deem it worth their time to bother as long as it’s not causing issues for the mother-ship. Much easier and cheaper to simply replace the hiring process for them and let the culture gradually acclimate to the larger company through attrition instead, while integrating the pieces that matter for now.

> A company like Meraki or WebEx that’s making a lot of money and is larger or more complicated to integrate (because they have lots of their own systems and infrastructure) may get left alone, particularly if the former owners are aggressive about maintaining their existing culture.

Thanks for this, it goes a long way toward explaining how Cisco has a software list and a written offer for GPL for their products, and Meraki has an unpublished email address (open-source@meraki.com) that they ignore for months on end.

I often wondered how Cisco, who was famously sued for GPL non-compliance after the Linksys acquisition, could repeat that blunder with Meraki.

I had similar experience at Amazon. My Amazon badge didn’t work at SF Twitch office.

After experiencing that I started to periodically write at amazons elevator whiteboards “Twitch is NOT Amazon” as little petty rebellion.

I'm pretty sure that's just how the badging system works. Amazon is orders of magnitude too big for 'everyone has access to everywhere' to make sense. When I traveled I sometimes had to talk to people (or send email) to make sure my badge was activated in a new location, even for offices in a different city but the same business unit. There were also restrictions based on whether you actually worked on a particular thing, even for non-acquisition parts of the company.

My badge was working at Amazon's SF location without anything of that. Only international travel required security contact.

Companies do this all the time. The Android team famously had their own isolated building for the longest time. Some of the newer acquisitions and bets are not accessible to Google employees. Most places have this sort of thing.

Github pre-Microsoft was an engineering-led wild west. They prioritized building tools like 3D file diff viewers (is that still around?) rather than optimizing the performance of the enterprise product and handling simple asks.

Their handling of enterprise customers is what lost them our business to Atlassian (also ugh).

Post-Microsoft, the product has been championed by the right owners. Enterprise works great, and we happily came running back. It only took five years for them to make the necessary adjustments.

Microsoft did that.

Bell Labs was an engineering driven wild west, ATT is much better now /s

Yeah, but the whole point of Bell Labs was to be an engineering driven wild west. They had so much money, they could afford throw money at PhDs and let them do cool stuff.

Tech tends to suffer from employees getting bored and wanting to do cool stuff that is totally disconnected from the business.

Which is the reason why UNIX escaped into the wild, Berkeley was eventually sued, and the Lion's commentary forbidden to keep being published.

Lion's is available to buy new now. It was unavailable for a while, but it's been back on the market for years now

I am pretty sure Github also felt the heat from Gitlab. There was a time, five or six years ago, when Gitlab was way ahead with impactful features like built-in CI and project management.

It seems that thanks to its network effect and Microsoft's guidance, Github managed to retake the lead.

I know folks who worked for at least 8 different Microsoft acquisition other than Github and Linkedin. All of them were squeezed into the 'Microsoft Way' within 3 years, with varying levels of success.

Microsoft was a large investor in Apple, Facebook, and Open.ai as well.

> There's no culture clash between Slack and Salesforce. There's a Slack culture that once existed, and now there's Salesforce culture the company those workers now work at. You can embrace it, you can be unhappy, and you can leave.

hmm, there seems to be some misunderstanding. simplifying, there are two types of acquisitions: holding and integration. for holding a company getting acquired remains quite independent. for integration the company getting acquired is integrated into the parent. how this integration happens is up to both participants. sometimes both companies have to change, other times one company imposes their culture over the other. but from what i’ve see, IT companies (especially american) definitely prefer deep integration into the parent. in other fields (and nations) holding is more popular.

Yeah, and deep integration of disparate businesses is not something humans have a very good chance of pulling off.

Trying to force two organic entities to merge into your vision. You have a very small chance of that working out. So small that, as an investor, I don't trust it will benefit me.

This is mostly true. However, there are acquisitions which managed to keep their unique identity and even different salaries (!) after getting acquired.

1. For culture difference: I have heard YouTube culture is quite different than their parent (Goog) before and after aquisition.

2. After Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn, from various anecdotes, not only their previous culture is maintained but employees salaries are different as well (salary difference not entirely due to LinkedIn presence in valley vs Seattle - when both LinkedIn's and Microsoft's office exist in a same country outside USA, the employees have different level of perks and monetary compensation).

I would be more surprised if acquisitions were fully integrated into the company. Normalizing the culture and salaries across different companies seems like a great way to piss off everyone in the acquired company, and if they leave then you've lost a significant amount of value.

This strikes me as overly cynical. A pendulum swung too far. Yes, someone who takes "we don't want to change a thing" at face value is probably overconfident. OTOH, someone who says that the old culture "ceases to exist" is underconfident, I would wager. Reality is somewhere in the middle.

Have you been apart of an acquisition before? it's pretty damn accurate and not cynical at all.

It is not cynical. It is just how organizations and social groups work. It takes few months, but culture changes. People start to behave differently.

And if you insist on not changing, you are better off to change the job entirely.

This isn't entirely true. Even at the most surface level, "buying" a company can mean almost a dozen things.

For example, a holding company can buy your company and do ... absolutely nothing, just treating it as an investment. This happens a lot too. Off the top of my head, AMC was once owned by Wanda Group based out of Dalian, Liaoning, China. Yet I'm sure that nobody who worked for AMC could tell, or even knew this was the case.

You are equating culture with power structure. While power indeed exerts heavy influence on culture, they are not one in the same. There is also a difference between explicit documented company culture (a la Netflix) and actual culture in the minds of individuals and teams.

I've worked at places that acquired companies, and aspects of the acquired companies' culture persisted and sometimes spread beyond their group.

> they sure as hell didn't buy you because of your culture.

Which is kind of wierd since the culture as reflective of a company’s emergent collective decisions are what makes the product of a company succeed. If an acquirer isn’t buying the culture, they may as well stay a customer unless they think their own culture can make a product that supplants the acquired one’s and retain the customers.

This is why 50% or more of acquisitions fail.

And it’s usually not explicit that the acquired companies culture is ‘removed’ - rather top down decisions that don’t make sense for them (due to culture differences) end up being applied, and end up mangling things and forcing prior strong culture people to leave.

You might need to define success, and fail, to quote a statistic like this.

There are multiple groups of people (old owners, new owners, sellers-employees, buyers-employees, customers), multiple assets (physical, intellectual, human, customer-base, code etc)

To ascribe failure to and acquisition I think means taking the viewpoint of they buyer - did the get what the wanted, or not? Not the viewpoint of employees or customers.

As judged by the buyer, based on post acquisition surveys.

On further consideration the thought could be summarized by reference to the parable “The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg”

"A cottager and his wife had a Hen that laid a golden egg every day. They supposed that the Hen must contain a great lump of gold in its inside, and in order to get the gold they killed [her]. Having done so, they found to their surprise that the Hen differed in no respect from their other hens. The foolish pair, thus hoping to become rich all at once, deprived themselves of the gain of which they were assured day by day."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goose_that_Laid_the_Golden...

You’re saying the acquired company needs to be assimilated into the parent company, although there are many examples where the acquired maintained its own culture. Not all acquisitions are the same.

> It's a tough message but when someone buys the company you work for, you no longer work at the old company, you work at the new company, no matter what anyone says.

It is very profitable from the engineers perspective to keep insisting you work for Slack as long as possible though. If you just immediately roll over you’ll lose your old culture and benefits immediately.

I don't really agree. Different parts of a single corporation can have different culture even if they arose entirely internally. And ownership does not imply there is no operational autonomy. It's all just people, and people make the culture and the rules and decide how to run things.

Consolidation is killing us all.

> they sure as hell didn't buy you because of your culture.

They bought the company and tech. The company built the tech the way it did because of the people, and the people found the best way they operate. If salesforce wanted to have a salesforce built product they would have done that, but they bought slack. who’s to say if slack would be successful if the people are forced to act like salesforce?

I’ve been involved in very awkward hiring situations where I apply for a job at “Salesforce,” only to be told at the last minute “you’re OK working at the ‘Slack’ team, right?”

And then I’m stuck with both “Salesforce” and “Slack” emails, and have to use “Salesforce” and “Slack” Slack channels.

Sort of yes, sort of no. If the acquired business is operating effectively and doesn't have a bad quarter or two sometimes the acquirer is happy to let it run more or less independently for a while. Sure, the writing is on the wall, but you can go years without major impact as an IC.

I just had a sudden moment of clarity where I think I grokked massive tech companies slightly more, when I tried to picture 70k employees on a single Slack server.

How does that work? I imagine they don’t all pile into one server. Do you just have zero organic connection to 99% of your colleagues?

> Do you just have zero organic connection to 99% of your colleagues?

They aren't really your colleagues in the sense you're thinking.

Companies that big get broken up into departments or business units that function pretty close to separate businesses (until you get to the top of them, then it merges back a bit). Those are your colleagues, and most of the people you interact with.

Those 70k wouldn't all be on the same channel. Even at a small company you might want to have distinct channels with different purposes - maybe #sales, #sw-engineering, #announcements. A 70k-person company might have a few large channels but most of the activity would take place in much more focused channels, of which there would be thousands or tens of thousands. A software team of a dozen people might have their own channel, for example. (Actually, in my experience we had several for distinct purposes.)

(and of course yes, there can also be big general-purpose channels with a lower signal-to-noise ratio)

Slack also has Enterprise Grid, which super-huge companies use to divide into not just separate channels, but separate Slack "servers" entirely.

When I was at IBM, they had...uh...a lot of them.

The 70,000 are all forced into #general. However it's a moderated channel of dubious utility.

sounds like you're talking about a specific company, or is this just a general Slack thing I've forgotten? by 'forced' do you mean they aren't able to create channels at-will?

I experienced 2-3k employees on a slack server. it was terrible. 99% of the traffic is noise, 1% was critically important information for me to do my job.

That’s a very accurate summary of where I work at the moment. All the nice things were said, but everything that made us what we were is being destroyed piece by piece.

> The second Salesforce bought Slack, Slack ceased to exist

I'm pretty sure it could be sold, thus it exists. Or used to exist and could exist again?

> So Salesforce makes all the same promises, but at the end of the day there's reality.

> And all those promises about Slack being independent and autonomous? Well sure, that was the plan

Do you think you and I know this pattern but the executives of Salesforce and Slack don't? It wasn't the plan, it was lies; they knew what was going to happen.

Very eloquently put.

I was part of a small startup (about 50 employees) that was acquired by a big publicly-traded tech firm about 5 years ago, and boy was that experience interesting.

Before moving to the new office, we were told that we were getting our own dedicated section of the building to ourselves so we could continue to collaborate freely and develop our product since our work was fairly niche and we had a very different tech stack from the rest of the org.

We show up on day 1 and there's no dedicated space for us. We're moved a few times over the first few months, but it was clear that zero effort went into planning our arrival. About 6 months after the move-in, our customer support team is moved to be with the rest of the parent company customer support org (something they told us would never happen). A few months after that, they tried to take away our hybrid work perk (for years, we could work from home Tues, Wed, Fri and they promised to honor this after the acquisition), relenting only after being told the change would cause attrition. For two straight years, it was nothing but lies and broken promises.

Alongside all of this, I saw an unfathomable amount of wasted effort, millions upon millions upon millions in engineering pay being lit on fire. They had a whole team dedicated to building a shitty front end component library that we all had to use to reskin our apps in order to achieve design consistency. We could've used a mature tool like MaterialUI but nooooooo, this hot mess of a component lib was our great gift to the open source community. My favorite part: we constantly ran into cases where the provided components didn't meet all of our UI behavior needs, but the development backlog for the UI team was 2 years so we had to fork the components and make our own changes, which other teams were doing as well. It was the worst of all worlds.

It boggles my mind that companies can grow to be so big, so dysfunctional internally and yet still turn a profit or appease investors. It was the first time I felt like companies were getting too big.

> They had a whole team dedicated to building a shitty front end component library that we all had to use to reskin our apps in order to achieve design consistency. We could've used a mature tool like MaterialUI but nooooooo, this hot mess of a component lib was our great gift to the open source community. My favorite part: we constantly ran into cases where the provided components didn't meet all of our UI behavior needs, but the development backlog for the UI team was 2 years so we had to fork the components and make our own changes, which other teams were doing as well. It was the worst of all worlds.

I've watched this exact story play out twice now:

Company grows rapidly. Front-end middle managers hatch a plan to make a shared component library that will solve everyone's problems. Open sourcing it becomes a goal, because the developers want something for their resume. Project turns out to be much, much harder than they expected. All of the teams trying to deliver actual work are constantly stuck behind the shared component library team's backlog. Nobody can accomplish even basic tasks because they're all blocked on the component library. Devs from every team start working on the component library in an attempt to get anything done. Clashes ensue.

it's possible to have a good component library for the company to use, of course. Carving out a separate team to do it separately from everyone else and requiring everyone to go through that team is an obvious point of failure. Yet it seems to happen over and over again for some reason.

I think our shared component library is a monster, but the only thing preventing anyone from contributing is unwillingness. PR’s can come from anywhere.

>They had a whole team dedicated to building a shitty front end component library that we all had to use to reskin our apps in order to achieve design consistency.

I feel awful for the engineers who end up working on these efforts, it's heartbreaking and ultimately a wasted endeavour. Your small team can't keep up, people start working around you (even actively undermining you) and eventually that company edict forcing everyone to adopt said library is forgotten in the name of expediency. I've seen it so many times now to the point where it's become a farce.

What I've seen, it's only the people who are have checked out and are happy to stop trying that stay. Maybe they decide they want to spend more time with their family and not worry about their career anymore, or sometimes they just wouldn't be competitive in the job market. But I think, especially when it's a big company buying a small startup, all the people who actually wanted to be in a startup leave as soon as they can

Yep.

As one who was acquired and then had all the (written) pre-acquisition promises broken, I think the really interesting question is, how do you prevent this?

The problem is that once you’re acquired, even if you have some nominal level of control, ultimately if you’re not the CEO then the CEO will do what they want and you generally can’t do anything about it, except sue for oppression; and that trick never works.

So I reckon that if I ever do this again, I’d want to fix it by structuring the contract such that the merger or acquisition is undone at their cost if the promises are broken. I guess that would show if they really believe their promises or not.

And while it wouldn’t prevent the need to go legal, it would put you on a footing that would give you something to sue for, if the acquirer breaks their promises. And the potential for that may be all that is needed to make them keep their promises in the first place.

>how do you prevent this?

Don't sell your company.

Yeah, well that’s easy to say now…

No, not really. You learn this during your first round of fund raising. Once you give up controlling equity, the company is no longer yours. It’s easy to forget that it requires money to grow your company. If it’s not your money, it’s not your company…

Well, selling a business includes the parties signing a number of written contracts and agreements which, in theory, should persist beyond completion. So it’s really not as simple as you say, and certainly not just a simple case of looking at the cap table.

When someone is handing you gobs of money they will very likely strike out terms which limit their control. It’s like why you wouldn’t accept a car loan with an early payment penalty unless the terms were excessively good for you

You have a board of directors, you are at their mercy.. not the other way around.

Not quite sure why, but large organizations are always like this.

It's one reason startups so often can outcompete them, despite the huge resource discrepancy.

too many cooks in the kitchen and usually when this happens, its not good product ideas that make the cut rather political power is the factor that decides what happens.

It boggles my mind that companies can grow to be so big, so dysfunctional internally and yet still turn a profit or appease investors. It was the first time I felt like companies were getting too big.

The power of economies of scale…

> yet still turn a profit or appease investors

They are absolutely miles away from NOT turning a profit, and investors want them to make even more money.

The ultimate "functional company" that has succeeded doesn't exist, in the survival of the fittest the dysfunctional companies have risen to the top. Perhaps the academic and armchair literature of what it takes to make it are not as accurate as they like to believe they are.

Thank you, this is a really interesting framing!

What do you think the objective function might be that gets min/maxed by being dysfunctional? Something about minimizing the harm from poor decisions?

Yes once you reach a certain size, predictability >>> everything else. This trickles down, and risk aversion becomes the name of the game even at the individual level

This sounds very much like a story that happened at a large payroll company...your company wouldn't happen to be in the payroll business would it? :/

My company is and ayecarumber, it resonates.

Thank you for this. Really illuminating to here raw stories unvarnished with a forgetful idealism.

> Alongside all of this, I saw an unfathomable amount of wasted effort, millions upon millions upon millions in engineering pay being lit on fire.

AT&T, is that you?

A similar case is when a big conservative company creates an internal “innovation lab” that promises tech startup like culture. I’ve been in places like that, and it seems more often than not the big bureaucratic processes of the parent company inevitably leak into and then consume the “startup” group.

Yes, I've been in this situation too. What at a first glance might look like the best of both worlds - low bureaucracy and solid funding - turns out to be the worst of both worlds: all of the bureaucracy of the mother company plus the risk of the whole project getting the axe every quarter because it doesn't make any profits

I've watched that happen at companies and seen the "startup" fling servers out in front of the firewall that got hacked in minutes due to default root passwords because part of the deal was completely bypassing all of the rigid bureaucratic internal IT controls.

A lot of these 'labs' just ended up as tenants for WeWork's most expensive properties. The 'innovation' had to have the highest possible visibility I guess.

Tony Fadell in his book 'Build' gave insight of the culture clash when Google acquired Nest. Not only with Nest employee, but with himself as well - he decided to vote with his feet and quit Google.

Excerpt from the (excellent) book:

..But as more Googlers joined our ranks and Nest employees started understanding what kinds of perks were typical at Google, there was a huge internal debate about what people were and weren’t getting. Why did Googlers get massages? Why did they get more buses so they could come in late and leave after lunch? Why did they get 20 percent time (Google’s famous promise to employees that they can devote a fifth of their time to other Google projects outside their regular jobs)? We want 20 percent time!

I said it wasn’t happening. We needed 120 percent from everyone. We were still trying to build our platform and become a profitable business. Once we got there, we could talk about employees using Nest money to work on Google projects, get a free massage, and end their workday at 2:30 p.m. As you can imagine, my positions weren’t popular with the new employees.

But there was no way I was going to let entitlement creep in when there was still so much left to do. I wasn’t going to parcel out more perks just because Google employees were used to them.

The experience of being a Google employee is not normal. It’s not reality.

.. And that’s why I left. Not just because Google was trying to sell Nest or because they wanted me to stop acting like a parent CEO, but as a warning to my team. I was under a gag order, so I couldn’t tell everyone that something was seriously wrong. But I could show them. ..if you’re a CEO or high-level executive and you can see the water level rising before everyone else, then it’s your responsibility to signal clear and present danger to your team. And there’s no clearer sign that something ain’t right than you walking out the door.

You can’t assume acquisition will mean acculturation. That’s why Apple doesn’t really buy companies with large teams. They only acquire specific teams or technologies, usually very early in their life cycle when they’re pre-revenue. That way they can easily be absorbed and Apple never has to worry about culture. They can also skip the inevitable duplication of functions between existing teams like finance, legal, and sales, or the painful process of integrating one large team into another.

https://www.amazon.com/Build-Unorthodox-Guide-Making-Things/...

That's one way of looking at it. Another way is that Nest built subpar products that was hurting Google's brand, and eventually its leader got pushed out.

Anyone remember the glorious video of a bunch of Nests screaming "Can't be hushed here"? Made by another Google employee. I guess, if you're used to being able to tell everyone to just work late night, having someone in your company publicly calling you out for making horrible products is not something you'd cherish.

https://www.slashgear.com/terribly-buggy-nest-protects-cant-...

> Another way is that Nest built subpar products that was hurting Google's brand

“Hurting Google’s brand” of what?

Geez. I was thinking about picking up his book, but if it’s filled with stuff like that, I’d rather not. He seems rather narcissistic. And being a great leader means walking away when nobody wanted to follow your leadership and when you didn’t want to adjust?

Honestly, the Nest is an overblown product. Did he really need 120% (how is that possible anyway) to build a product that’s effectively worse than what it replaced?

> end their workday at 2:30 p.m.

A more positive framing of the request for more buses is that some employees would like to come in early and leave early, while others would like to come in late and leave late. It is interesting that his interpretation is that employees would take the latest possible arrival and earliest possible departure.

I read his words as saying that leaving at 2:30 no matter the start time would have been unacceptable.

Fadell complains about his parent company, but he doesn't seem to be great on the other side when Nest acquired Dropcam:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11382242

Both CEOs pointing fingers at each other for the failures.

An entitled tech CEO playing childish blame games? I am shocked. Shocked I tell you :)

I think a Silicon Valley CEO would have to be pretty detached from reality to not understand what happens when a startup gets bought by a large company. No, you do not get to remain autonomous. No, you do not get to preserve your culture. You no longer determine your tech stack. Employees from the parent company join your team and infect it with the parent company's culture, and employees from your team bail and move to the parent company cause they're tired of your shit.

It sounds like Fadell is bitter because he sold out and compromised his vision for a huge fucking pile of money.

Sounds like the guy from Waze being angry at his employees not being ready to work nights anymore after Google bought them.

Fadell also just talked a bit about this on the "On with Kara Swisher" podcast : https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/peering-into-the-futur...

He says a similar thing, but the tone comes across quite different.

> The experience of being a Google employee is not normal. It’s not reality.

”Working for Apple is like being paid to go to Disneyland.”

— Guy Kawasaki, discussing how difficult it was, to hire ex-Apple employees.

I’ve heard Apple’s regimented, cog in wheel, need-to-know, follow orders…? At least for rank and file.

https://www.theonion.com/apple-employee-fired-for-thinking-d...

A guy with a net worth of $800m describes HIS workers that HE hired as "entitled" because they want decent working conditions.

It's like listening to narcissistic parents calling their own children "spoiled" because they set a boundary.

No surprises they became estranged from one another.

I'd be curious what exactly the 'cultural clashes' are? You would expect a whole article about such a thing to ah... at least list some? Like, is it longer work hours? Less pay? No free lunch? Less or more 'family friendly'? More emphasis on the customer? IDK what because nothing was brought up...

From my experience when a small company gets acquired it's often because people are no longer having the freedom they previously had.

The last company I worked at was acquired by a 100x larger company and "do whatever you want" turned into "fill out 3 different forms for each feature, plus meet with at least 3 senior people every week where you have to defend your design decisions to people unfamiliar with your domain and requirements. Also, you cannot hire new people locally, instead you need to use the offshore team from now on who have zero domain knowledge and are often only junior devs without experience".

I started at SF In the last 15 months. I was frankly surprised how primitive Salesforce’s use of Slack was when I got there. Since then there’s been a ton of workflows created but the (Slack) culture is still a bit weird. i think the workspace itself was created around the time of acquisition. Some teams were using Slack, but it was piecemeal at best. Some of those workspaces got folded into the workspace.

1. Threads for everything everywhere, always. People are practically afraid to not use a thread, even in team channels.

2. Little to no #random culture. People are afraid to meme? Maybe if you find some of the weirder channels you see it

3. Terrible GUS integration. There was no GUS integration at all when I started. (GUS is Jira implemented on Salesforce). There’s all sorts of other things I could say about GUS, but the worse thing I suppose I could say about it is that I miss Jira. GUS bot, I think, is implemented with APEX, so it’s kind of like the SDK for Salesforce I think. Not sure if this is dogfooding or it was just what the team knew. From GUS, you can create some channels in GUS for an incident, for example, but I think that’s inverted compared to how Jira sort of can do things (i.e. you should be able to look at guess and find everywhere something was discussed, but it’s not posible)

4. No integrations for internal Github

5. One workspace. Not that terrible though. Slack employees are all homed in their workspace.

6. It’s impossible to write your own Slack app to connect to. More generally, it’s hard to just run informal internal tools at Salesforce. I think people used to do that now with Heroku, but that’s sort of deprecated and I think there’s network/security reasons why.

There’s other things, but I can only guess on the Slack side they’d see some of these things and be annoyed

For some reference, I’ve been on Slack for over 8 years and came from Hipchat.

Edit:

7. Nobody uses Huddles, Google Meet is heavily used.

I think slack use culture has improved a bit. I would say it’s still very strange to see the list of Slack apps installed to be so small. I understand it’s for security reasons. I’m mostly happy at Salesforce - and most work happens on Slack.

> 2. Little to no #random culture. People are afraid to meme? Maybe if you find some of the weirder channels you see it

Some people hate us for it, but I'm pretty sure that having and preserving a strong #random culture in my (game development) team is what made us resilient and stay 100% effective when the pandemic shifted us to WFH. I had no idea how we were going to survive more than a few weeks going remote; today marks exactly 35 months since I last set foot in the office, and I can't imagine going back. Our random is set to expire in 24h and invitation-only, to mimic the privacy and volatility of water cooler chats.

> 7. Nobody uses Huddles, Google Meet is heavily used.

We're the same. Outside of engineers, I think huddle is a rarity and there's lots of people who still don't know it exists.

Threads are awesome btw :)

I also love threads. And there's plenty of memes - there just aren't channels named #random.

The only people I know who use huddles are the same people who send messages like "hey" and "you there?".

The only problem with threads in Slack is that they are broken and not integrated properly. For example the keyboard controls don't work, they don't show new messages and similar little issues. The idea is great but the execution is very poor unfortunately

> 1. Threads for everything everywhere, always. People are practically afraid to not use a thread, even in team channels.

My new(ish) employer does this and I absolutely love it. Channels are not a constant stream of interleaved noise, and when I want to dive into a particular conversation it's incredibly easy to follow.

Having swapped to workplaces recently, I terribly miss threads.

What us #random?

Hard to imagine something as loving and magical as Tiny Speck's game, Glitch, wound up getting pivoted into office productivity software acquired by a titanic mediocrity such as Salesforce.

As a former Glitch player it just makes me think of drinking bureaucratic water.

Salesforce bought slack for $27B. In the span of two years, its market cap came back to pre-pandemic levels. If slack stayed as in independent company, its worth would have been $9B. If Slack wants to impart its culture across Salesforce, it has to prove itself as a heavy profit generator.

Is Salesforce one of those Atlassian companies that just buys stuff and welds it together into some monstrosity that technically solves every problem?

Salesforce is an Oracle/Java webapp from 1999 + a whole bunch of poorly integrated acquisitions. It's a miracle it works at all.

I have never met a sales person that enjoyed the salesforce user experience. As with many of these enterprise apps, they are to shine for the people who sign the check, corporate finance. Nice reports, lots of governance, horrendous UX for the sales force. "Who cares.. they always whinge, just tell them they have to use it."

what software do they enjoy?

I don't know how it works from the culture pov, but Salesforce has a few products that can be used independently - mulesoft, tableau, heroku, and of course, slack.

Is the joke that every one of those is an acquisition?

Been in an Atlassian acquistion from a smaller startup. AMA

Tableau is suffering the same fate.

https://www.geekwire.com/2023/tumultuous-times-at-tableau-sa...

“You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody…”

— Terry ‘Tableau’ Malloy

One change guru had an often unspoken rule: -Culture follows Process (Especially the budgeting process).

Seems to me it's reflexive, eg, process shapes culture and culture shapes process, but you if you buy a company you can't per say change the culture. Not like a light switch anyway. But you can do that to processes.

Once you get processes in place, the only way to change the culture is to change the processes. By that time, usually have a HR department and it's game over...

You can change culture by hiring people with a fresh outlook, talking to people about what the culture is and what it should be, setting expectations, etc. In short, you can change culture by participating in it. I was in a meeting once where my manager said, "We aren't working evenings anymore." The visible relief that ripped through the room was something to behold. There was never a policy of working evenings, and there wasn't a policy of not working evenings afterwards. But my manager was using their leadership to make positive change in the culture regardless.

But things like that can't be quantified and so are only visible to people in the trenches. But culture isn't actually someone measurable; it exists in the space between people. An acquiring company is unlikely to be interested in such nuances. It takes time, it isn't guaranteed you'll get your way (indeed, you'll be asked to make concessions), and it's an ongoing process with no definite end where you can declare victory and check a box.

When you try to change culture through dictates instead of discussion - you may never hear about it, but people will understand that that means you don't see them as people, but as living automata to be programmed through policy. You'll lose their trust.

That said. I went of vacation just after that meeting. I came back from vacation to work on a deploy until after midnight. A regret I have was not speaking my mind, "guys, we said we weren't going to do this." (I probably did, but not vocally enough.) Not setting an explicit policy against working evenings was a mistake, because the problem wasn't just the expectation from others on the team that, if you're here I should be here too, but also that the rest of the organization didn't respect our boundaries, and would dictate timelines and such without consulting us, implicitly demanding that we work crazy hours. It is important to codify values as policy. But it should be organic and driven by the people who are involved and understand, not executives of an entirely different company who are trying to squeeze blood from a stone. This is inherently incompatible with using policy to change culture.

Does anyone know any good books/blogs about Tech M&A that describe the deal structures and post merger integration strategies?

It’s been my experience that journalists often cherry pick questions from employee Q & A to generate a story. This seems to be a series of 3 related questions from one employee.

As these companies follow the trend of trashing employee-driven cultures, which highly value employee contributions (rather than 'bossism'), there must be a supply of highly talented people who want this culture and who a company that embraces it could attract.

Many of these people may prioritize that over annual pay. And this culture has worked very well for SV - the most successful center of business in possibly generations.

In my experience the single biggest differences between company cultures tend to be caused by size and industry of the company (some industries have a great deal of regulation, others not).

I don't know what the differences are between Slack and Salesforce's "cultures" from reading the article, does anyone here?

Salesforce culture is actually pretty great. This is largely an apples-to-oranges comparison between a startup in hypergrowth and a giant in recession mode, IMO.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the exfiltrated Slack source code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34257646

No, the problem seems to be the disillusion by Slack leadership that somehow Salesforce would incorporate Slack culture rather than Slack culture slowly being morphed into Salesforce culture.

> “The problem has been, there’s no incorporation of the Slack culture into the Salesforce culture,” Butterfield said, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by Fortune. “And unless there is some element of that, then it’s not integration in any sense. It’s just the elimination.”

Not sure how anyone would think a acquisition would lead to the parent company starting to incorporate bought company's culture into their own, haven't seen that in the wild anywhere.

What’s sobering is even a prescient leader like Butterfield was snowed despite that clear evidence.

I tell everyone founder - acquisition is the death of everything you worked for. Acquisitions teams are sales teams with 0 follow on accountability, structure, or goals. They are quite literally there to tell you what you want to hear & get you to believe it’s true. With maybe the exception of Microsoft, it’s not.

McDonell-Douglas, despite being the acquired party, destroyed Boeing’s engineer-led culture and replaced it with an accountant-led one instead.

A big reason why the unimaginative 737MAX was allowed to proceed and more innovative projects like the 797 floundered or were cancelled. Even the 787, which should have led to massive Boeing orderbooks due to its prescience, was hamstrung by battery issues right out of the gate.

What's the relation between the two stories other than company name?

None, just found the proximity of events interesting.

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