Salesforce is shuttering Slack’s remote work research group Future Forum
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
“The problem has been, there’s no incorporation of the Slack culture into the Salesforce culture, and unless there is some element of that, then it’s not integration in any sense. It’s just the elimination".
It seems like the process of populating the top tiers in large orgs routinely sifts out people who know how to cooperate, and promote the people who only know how to dominate.
This is an inherent trait of our modern result-driven system. Being able to dominate is a key trait for a successful executive in this culture, and anyone saying otherwise is just trying to sell books.
As egalitarian as we might think our modern work culture is, the idea that leading by cooperation just isn't true. Successful executives at big companies are able to make it look like they lead by cooperation (and sometimes do cooperate in the process) while fully maintaining control. And many don't even try to pretend to be cooperative.
Is being result-driven modern?
I don't think it's that simple. As you move up, you lose touch with those below you because the problems that can get you fired come from your other executive peers and the C suite. Most of these problems are really hard to explain because they are kind of stupid. Someone's sleeping with the CEO and wants something. Another VP promised the company would do X for an investor who will withold investment if X doesn't happen. Everyone is terrified of a lawsuit because someone got liquored up and said something to the media at a conference. Our rock star, investor-placed, infallible CFO made a mistake and we have one third the cash we thought we did. And your job as executive is to make it happen even if it is stupid. So it comes across as domineering and very political:
"We're not doing that, Dave. We're doing this. Because I said so."
If the executive took time to explain:
"We're not doing that, Dave. I had to make a deal with CMO Schmidt (who referred me to the CEO for my job and is married in to the owner's family) because he committed that we would be ready to release feature X at convention Y at last week's investor meeting. So, that integration with Z that will make us a bunch of money isn't going to happen. I know, it's stupid. But we're doing the stupid. And yes, that guy who makes 3x what I do is an absolute idiot."
This is why I much prefer to work in companies where the owners are still working in the business and the whole team is "dealt in" on outcomes (i.e. in a startup, has options) and executives are looking to increase the valuation of options/shares instead of trying to max out some badly designed "multi-dimensional, goal-aligned incentive structure".
This is incidentally why stock based comp exists
Results tend to come from cooperation and collaboration.
What you might be looking for is that were in an attribution-driven system and culture?
he had the same experience with Yahoo buying Flickr so its not like any of this should have surprised him...he still consented to the acquisition of Slack
no difference here from the WhatsApp guys who took a ton of money and then pooped on Facebook...be happy you got the money and understand that you agreed to be acquired
Slack failed to compete with Microsoft and then the CEO sold it to one of the worst possible acquisition companies in the industry (maybe only behind oracle?) not unlike his flicker sale, it’s not the same. I have a lot lower opinion of him (to the point I’d be less likely to join a company he’s running).
I dont know that is a fair characterization, by most accounts Slack is a better product, however Microsoft has a vertical integration and with the strong push to bring most orgs on to Microsoft 365 it is hard to compete with "free" in the sense that Teams is included in the suite products you are already going to pay for anyway....
I highly doubt it Microsoft would have made Teams a stand alone product each company had to buy per user that it would have gotten anywhere near the adoption it did.
Perhaps but it doesn't seem customers value it very much.
> I highly doubt it Microsoft would have made Teams a stand alone product each company had to buy per user that it would have gotten anywhere near the adoption it did.
To me the fact that people would pay for a chat app was an oddity in the first place. Skype (the consumer version) was mostly free.
Webex, Zoom, Teams, GoToMeeting, etc etc etc
Then if you add in other communications tools you can include many many other things businesses pay for
1. Encryption made WhatsApp inherently more resistant to being polluted by Facebook. They still get access to highly sensitive metadata about contacts and groups, but they can't do the kind of things they did to rape and pillage Instagram.
2. He took his money and his free time, and has invested heavily in supporting Signal. While Meta lets WhatsApp rot and slowly becomes Yahoo, Signal is solidly on its way to become the OpenStreetMap/Internet Archive/Wikipedia of social communication apps.
The way it goes: 1.Company with great leadership gets investment (angel, VC, government, etc.) to do something great. 2. Great leadership takes the time and effort to a - understand what is needed and how to recognize talent in those areas and b - gets that talent onboard, even if it's expensive and time consuming to align their desires with the companies 3. A great team, with great leadership, does great things. 4. Great things are profitable, so the company is sold to a big soulless company, or becomes a big soulless company over time 5. Many of the people with true passion and skill leave because they can. They generally leave because the toxic environment in big soulless companies hurts them and takes away what makes them individually so great. 6. Company is left with a shell. They manufacture and sell a product, but all the people who made that product from first principles, the people who can do it again, have been alienated,insulted, or otherwise fell victim to the toxic culture and had to leave to preserve their humanity.
Source: I've been through this cycle 3 times, one with a company that went IPO and is big now, one time with St. Jude/Medtronic and one time with J&J.
Edited to correct a spelling error
Will try to shoehorn acquired business into mega corps core competencies and remove whatever made it uniquely successful.
Once all your meetings turn to this you have to leave, or lobotomize yourself
Considering that the CEO is pushing for "back to the office" mentality and against remote work, I'd say it's pretty clear that this is just elimination of Slack. Slack is a key tool in remote work, it basically stands against what they're pushing for.
The irony in this is that Salesforce literally set sales free from the office back in the late 90s and early 00s. When 9/11 hit, I didn't miss a beat: I did presentations with WebEx (we did the voice part with a conference call) and logged everything in my through-the-browser CRM at blazing ISDN speeds. But it worked well enough that at least enterprise software sales evolved to a have-laptop-will-travel culture.
Slack was a huge part of the work from home revolution of 2020.
Bay Area commercial real estate right now is like holding a bunch of jumbo mortgages in 2007.
I'm not sure about this particular case, but in similar situations with other corporations, a key detail was that management had investments in office real estate, so the push to "back to the office" was more about personal pockets than anything else.
According to Wikipedia they only existed for 10 months in the 90s. I don’t remember hearing about them until like 2005. Were they really that well known that early?
How far we've come:
Nowadays every single click on sales force takes a painfully long amount of time - sometimes several seconds but it compounds into making it feel like you’re wading through molasses.
Salesforce “lightning” has got to be the most ironically-named product in history - it’s a slow, painful clusterfuck which makes me miserable every time I have to use it.
They are not now, and never have been, and engineering focused company. The creation of the Salesforce platform itself is (or was) based entirely on Oracle tech...and it was SOLD extremely well because it solved business problems.
Salesforce has failed to innovate outside of releasing the CRM as a SaaS product back in 1999...which is why they have bought innovation, and then integrated it poorly...see Heroku, Slack, Mulesoft, Tableau, Quip, Demandware, ExactTarget, etc.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2019/06/18/sale...
I worked there for a short bit. Most frustrating experience of my career. It was the epitome of rest and vest well before COVID.
Extreme lack of urgency, little attention to quality, and a huge focus on sales and marketing.
Salesforce will print money for a few more years until someone makes a less awful CRM solution and just crushes their business...so long as Salesforce can't buy that company, integrate it badly, and disillusion all the employees that made it great.
This statement undervalues the lock-in Salesforce has. One should probably make migrate-from-Salesforce tool and sell to all the new VC funded CRM shops. You could be selling shovels during a gold rush.
Hundreds, if not thousands.
Same as Oracle, SAP, etc.
There’s a formula for this it seems: get deep lock in in an area that is very boring and very essential.
I’m not an evangelist, but I’m now a few years into using it at the startup where I’m CTO and it’s great at what it does and there isn’t really anything else that does it.
I've personally never met anyone who has had anything nice to say about Salesforce. I've never heard anything especially bad, but I've heard so many complaints (especially from folks who have had to touch the API). From what I can see, Salesforce only has an advantage because they're the biggest, so everything and everyone works with it (in the same way that every tool that touches email integrates with Gmail).
I feel like that applies here.
modern php is nice.
if you had said C++ then I would've labelled you a pragmatic masochist.
My commentary is on the company culture and focus on sales over quality. I just don’t think this is a company that knows how to organically innovate or integrate purchased innovation…and I think that makes them vulnerable to being overtaken by a competitor that solves the same business problems in a different way than they do now.
They’ll be around for decades. Just like many other formerly innovative companies hang around for a long time.
A lot of companies start with an engineering culture and transition out of it as they grow (actually, this is almost always the case) - examples: HP, Boeing, et al.
Why wait until the end of your first day? This is a great question to ask in an interview.
Sales people had complete free reign to promise everything under the sun to potential customers. It caused a lot of havoc in our product development and burned out most of the engineers pretty quickly.
I’m one of a handful of people with Salesforce experience in my company and we have a small usage of it. I’m brought into new projects thinking of using it as a counterpoint to the SF sales team, who promise the world and then disappear to be replaced by an implementation team that has to explain that things aren’t as easy, simple or cheap as the sales team promised.
I’ve been hearing this for nearly a decade. There are VASTLY better CRMs out there. They don’t make a dent in SFCD’s business. That says a lot about the market.
Which, of course, should suggest you don't want some of those features, but people don't seem to want to hear that.
Or, hear me out, maybe it's a reflection of the fact that the pandemic was a truly enormous disruption to people's lives and psyches and society as a whole, and that people living through generational disruption to their lives and communities have much lowered productivity? And that this indeed may take a while to recover from? Crazy to suggest?
Another possibility is that he doesn’t know how to measure productivity in the new environment and the whole thing is sampling error.
Multiple years on from the widespread proliferation of WFH, I still see a large contingent of people who are completely unwilling to even consider that physical colocation brings something to the table that can’t be replicated online, even during onboarding where building that sense of social cohesion is most important, and a management style that would otherwise be considered ‘’micromanagement’ is more justifiable.
Ultimately it seems like people (on all sides) aren’t willing or able to separate “I prefer this” from “this makes me a better worker”. Don’t get me wrong. Remote work has its advantages. I say this all as someone that works remotely. But I also say this as someone managing a remote-first team.
Working online and communicating through slack & zoom seemed very natural to me because I've used slack/discord/irc through jabber/trello/mumble/ts3/custom forum software throughout my teenage years. Continuing that into working in an online-only environment feels very natural.
Some guilds literally have HR people that contact you when you first join to make sure you can login to the documentation (usually a mediawiki setup) and see the guides for setting up auth for all the services. They have been practicing onboarding people remotely for all of their existence.
2021-onwards was better.
This was not at Slack, of course, but I imagine every company basically was this.
Then a few months in, the warning signs begin. New HR documents to sign. New benefit schedules. Then there's some turbulence from above -- talks of upper management getting reshuffled. New org charts.
A few months after that, there's new customers to support, new SLA guidelines, new meetings for us to attend. _Then_ it's your organization that starts getting sacked.
It's all just a cynical dog whistling to get people to stay complacent and continue turning the cog while they pull the rug out from under you.
Thankfully I've become adept at the skill of jumping ship when I see the first leaks, if you know what I mean.
unless you see truly greener pastures elsewhere, getting acquired is one of the best gigs in IT
some other suckers like myself, we need something more out of our jobs; it sucks to be like this; it makes us easier to exploit.
And again no data, no evidence whatsoever. I'd expect the companies making such big decisions like RTO to be more data driven and transparent.
Can you product be great if you’re cycling employees due to burnout in your shitty company?
I’d argue since everything revolves around people at the end of the day, taking care of your people in an absurdly generous way is the best possible business strategy.
Standing up a competitor may be a challenge given the regulatory requirements of enterprise environments that use it.
Imo, the most urgent play for Twitter may be to launch some features that would be a viable Slack competitor for startups and some part of that private chat market. What Twitter has that Slack doesn't is a foundation to become an identity provider. I've spent years in the identity space, and what stops them is they can never produce something anyone actually wants, and all their solutions need to be imposed, whereas turning twitter handles into identity tokens is some trivial hacking. I could beta it with a team of 5 devs and an engineering manager with a good relationship with devops in 8mos.
Slack may become the next Outlook mail, which is the thing everyone hates but it's too integrated to switch from, and it's an anchor on pretty much everything.
That's not to say it was then neglected by them later on!
Once K8s got wide adoption Heroku was over. Selling Heroku to IT was a huge pain in ass as the key decision makers mostly make résumé-driven buying and engineering decisions.
Did Salesforce neglect Heroku or allow it to operate independently? It’s a matter of point of view.
The reality is that Heroku saw itself more and more irrelevant vis à vis its competitor and without the funds to compete. It’s only hope for survival is to become more and more relevant to Salesforce customers while largely out-competed but the big 3 for everyone else.
it also provides 99% of the functionality most orgs actually care about
I maybe spent fifteen minutes a month on upgrades
- No SSO
- No way to enforce MFA, restrict logins to trusted devices and IPs, etc...
- No message / audit logs
I like discord for personal use, no way I would use it professionally
Give new users a very short window, or not able to use until their hardware key, phone enclave, etc is registered for MFA.
You could even go as far as to send pre-registered hardware keys by mail, or have them picked up from HQ upon hire.
Certainly would have solved some of the recent "who actually works in infra at Twitter" debacle, now that I'm thinking about it.
Those are not very different than slack in terms of UX and much less capable in many ways that matter (integrations etc)
It’s almost time for something actually new
Something that makes remote work better than in person by existing. It has to be so good that people stop talking to each other at the office once they have this tool.
Slack itself did this in my experience.
I lost respect for our CEO entirely when he decreed the new RTO policy (justifying it with, and I paraphrase, "because I said so"). The company "promotes innovation", and their idea of moving forward is to "go back to how things were". It's pathetic.
They didn't even dare to do layoffs when everyone else was slashing staff, because they have such a hard time hiring anyone. It's good to see that the rank and file understand this, and (at least in satellite offices) mostly ignore the RTO decree, calling the C-suite's bluff.
I can't edit but it looks like the comment was flagged, so hopefully it's buried/invisible.