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I was an exec at a smaller company acquired by Salesforce and met a few of the C-level and President level people a few times (not Marc). All impressed me with their intelligence and humility.

Parker just felt like a smart regular guy. He showed up at our small office (15 or so people) with his Starbucks cup, grabbed an open desk and got to work. I wasn't even sure it was him until I saw "Parker" as the name on the cup. We ended up chatting a bit and grabbing a conference room and doing both a product and technical deep dive. He grokked things quickly, asked good questions, and was super chill. I can't imagine him firing anyone.

Do you think of firing someone as something mean or unintelligent? He sounds like someone I’d love to meet but your comment interests me because I’ve never really thought of these characteristics as relevant to that kind of decision.

Yes. Firing someone should always be a last resort; generally it means either that the person is hopelessly, irredeemably unfit for the job, or that you are incompetent at leading people. If your hiring processes are worth anything, the former is exceedingly rare.

Never hiring anyone who isn't a good fit or will become a poor fit is a very high bar to set.

Regardless, Salesforce is large enough that if they're not encountering your hypothetical rare scenario every now and then then it seems unlikely that many companies on planet earth meet your criteria for good hiring processes.

Not at the VP Product level.

EVEN MORE true at the VP level because the stakes are so much higer.

I agree firing should be the last resort, but I very much disagree that "it means either that the person is hopelessly, irredeemably unfit for the job, or that you are incompetent at leading people."

This is why I say that often times the worst people to hire are those that are "just below average mediocre". Reason being that, as you point out, it is not hard to fire people who are blatantly incompetent. And of course many/most people can be coached to improve, but I've seen cases where, despite lots of coaching, people chronically underperform.

I consider it a mark of bad management when these subpar performers are only let go during layoffs. Conversations should be open, ongoing and constant, and people should be given lots of coaching, time, and plenty of heads up, but it does nobody any good to essentially string people along when folks aren't cutting it.

Yes I am struggling with this exact situation. A person on my team fits this profile. They can do the work. It's just that their output is below average except for the times when we've had serious discussions about their performance. They will improve for maybe a month or two before regressing back to their previous level.

Fire them. They are wasting your time. Their yo-yo output will be something that is noticed by the rest of the team which is demotivating for them. You gave them a chance.

Or just that the market is down, or you over hired, or your strategy has changed, or a million other reasons that you may have employees you no longer need.

There is a recognized difference between firing someone (which in common parlance means someone's employment was terminated for underperformance or other cause) vs. having a layoff, which is what you've described.

I find this a very naive view point. Hiring is exceedingly difficult, and the reality is that no matter how well intentioned your process you never know whether the person you've hired fits with your organization, or isn't an outright liar. If you hire people, you will fire people (or be stuck with people who for whatever reason don't work well).

Also, people change and might not be the same person they were a few years ago. People become jaded, among other things.

I got fired from a startup for “not learning rust fast enough.” I had more professional experience than the rest of the team combined, had built a very similar product to theirs over the previous 5 years, and the part of the product I did work on had the most complete functionality, most test cases, and most complete customer facing documentation of all the features being worked on.

In the previous 3 months there hadn’t been a peep about my productivity despite weekly 1:1s and my frequent solicitations for feedback of where I could improve.

In the exit interview, I strongly suggested they may want to look into some professional leadership training programs. The founders were both 26. I was 42.

Since their founding 8 months earlier they had hired 4 and fired 2. I told them that probably would be a bit of a red flag to their investors.

> Do you think of firing someone as something mean or unintelligent?

Unjustified firings, absolutely. I’ve seen plenty of horrible, vindictive managers fire talented folks simply because it wasn’t “one of their guys”. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a good manager let a good person go unless it was due to company mandated force reduction.

I've definitely seen good managers drop employees that made environments toxic

I guess I used “good person” as a catchall because I’m on mobile and didn’t want to type out the various criteria of people you want to work with.

  I personally don’t consider someone who makes the workplace toxic “good”.

Oh, I didn't notice the "good" selector, my bad

The article implies that the VP was fired for disagreeing with the company, and Parker didn't really give off a "my way or the highway" kind of vibe. You never know, though.

So I guess "Whistle-blower" is appropriate here, but marketing a "batch" processing system as "real-time" seems to be a bit of a nothing-burger in my mind. I think the more telling thing is he seems to have raised this multiple times to various superiors and not gotten the hint that they weren't concerned. Someone at a VP level (especially at Salesforce) should have enough corporate etiquette to get the hint. Unless he believed this would literally be hurting/killing people (and I find the hospital/care marketing laughable) it doesn't seem appropriate to not accept "I heard your concerns but we will still be launching on X." He is certainly not financially liable for an overzealous marketing department. I've certainly raised concerns from a technical perspective to be shot down in launch meetings, particularly around marketing claims. However, at a certain point you do your best and start supporting the team effort.

> However, at a certain point you do your best and start supporting the team effort.

Yeah, I don't think opting-out is the morally superior option if you know that the competition is lying through their teeth too.

At a point, the only way to improve the world is to make things better than they otherwise would have been. Complaining feels good but at the end of the day doesn't deliver more value to customers, hospital patients, or anyone in-between.

Counterpoint:

If you compromise every ethical principle (because everyone else does), I vontend you are in no better ethical standing than anyone else. Some has to maintain the height of the bar as the "unreasonable person in the room".

Remember, the only thing keeping us from an ideal world is all those filthy pragmatists out there.

That's not a counterpoint, it's just a self-inflated way of patting yourself on the back while doing nothing.

I was in a similar situation at a startup I worked for, except they are trying to get their software into the control systems in industrial refrigeration facilities. I have brought up repeatedly that their Netflix-style cloud model for control systems had caused multiple incidents and have called for an architecture discussion which other engineers supported but which the management shut down. Soon after they moved to terminate me but they failed to execute on it so I sent them a resignation notice instead and notified the investors and one customer of the issues and let them work out the whole thing.

For all intents and purposes what they tried to do was retaliation, but I think they were legally absolutely in the clear to (try to) terminate my employment. The same seems to be true of the Salesforce guy. The company had the right to fire him, and, outside of any at-employment NDAs he has the right to tell everyone what he saw. That he is suing them makes you wonder if he's doing it for the money rather than the principle.

The Salesforce-arati are out in force, I see. I don't know the context of this story, but I also know you don't make it to CTO of Salesforce by burning a few bridges. Generally, Salesforce has excellent marketing, but technically it has fallen behind in a few areas.

It seems the advertising in question was creative in its language at least. I am sure it is legally all watertight though.

It makes one wonder why this VP complained about this? It is not uncommon in larger organisations to oversell certain product features.

I'm a veteran of terrible enterprise software and Salesforce is mostly not terrible. It's overweight, complex and expensive, but it's also powerful, customizable and interoperable in all the ways you need it to be. The main value to me is that if you look at any remotely related software like automation, data integration, billing, reporting they all have a native Salesforce integration as their first listed feature. That's incumbency and clout moreso than a technical vote of confidence, but it still matters to CTOs. I'll say that nearly all their acquired products I've worked with kinda suck and barely integrate in any meaningful way (I'm thinking Tableau and Marketing Cloud especially).

> I'll say that nearly all their acquired products I've worked with kinda suck and barely integrate in any meaningful way (I'm thinking Tableau and Marketing Cloud especially).

I worked for Tableau before the acquisition and left a year or two after. It was pretty clear to insiders that there was never a good path to a smooth integration of Tableau into the SF platform. The teams have wasted years on that and are still struggling.

There is a massive amount of actual tech debt on the Tableau monolith side that just can't be overcome without huge investment. Tableau spent years trying to fix that and couldn't make a dent, SF brought an even more short-sighted planning process in and only made it worse.

Granted that Tableau could never fully commit to the efforts and the highest level of executives were only interested in making Tableau an attractive acquisition target. Exception being Francois, who still seems to care about Tableau the product.

Storage in Salesforce is super expensive. And as you said any of their acquired products barely integrate with Salesforce.

Salesforce success is reliant on lack of serious competition. Beyond that it is decades behind modern software engineering practices.

Do you seriously need a third party tool to back up the data in a SaaS application? Astonishing!

Storage cost is nuts. They announced a migration to AWS that is going to start rolling out. I'm not sure if that's going to let us utilize cloud native storage.

Probably a power struggle with another VP. VP's could care less about if a product works or not, but a common thing in FAANG is to propose a big change, do nothing, but convince everyone the project has been launched.

My guess is he was trying to call out another team for doing this, to bring headcount/priorities back to himself.

> Generally, Salesforce has excellent marketing, but technically it has fallen behind in a few areas.

I have on more than one occasion quipped that 'Salesforce' actually refers to their own marketing team rather than the software.

> It seems the advertising in question was creative in its language at least. I am sure it is legally all watertight though.

> It makes one wonder why this VP complained about this? It is not uncommon in larger organisations to oversell certain product features.

I'll bite; if any of this 'data' not being processed immediately is related to E-mail or SMS message consent (the article mentions Marketing Cloud, which can do texting,) there is a risk of messages getting sent out when a user has opted out. IF (big if) that is the case, there is a risk of hurting end-customer goodwill, or in the case of SMS messages, end-customer filing a lawsuit against Salesforce's customer.

I have a question

I am not a lawyer, but isn’t doing this (including landing pages which promise a product that doesn’t exist) technically “false advertising”, and a large company can be sued (and theoretically a small one too) for punitive damages rather than actual ones? Any lawyers in the house can chime in.

PS: I recently was reminded of this when a 24-hours gas station store was closed with a note on the door saying it’s closed at night, but with the giant 24 hour signs still on the building, and on Google it had said 24 hours. The store isn’t selling essential things. But what if it had been the actual gas station and the people ran out of gas?

salesforce has plenty of lawyers

I’m also not a lawyer, but that would clearly be false advertising, right?

One thing I’m curious about—some states have a law that stores must accept cash. It is pretty common for a gas station to require manual intervention to take cash. I wonder if this 24 hour gas, but the store isn’t always opened, gas station would fall afoul of that sort of law.

I don't have any experience with FCC false-advertising actions, but most deception laws require proof of actual deception, or at least damages based on reasonable reliance on a statement. If someone read a landing page, reasonably thought the product was available now, and then took reasonable action (maybe hiring someone to use the product and paying a salary), then there might be a valid complaint.

But the key is reasonable reliance, or actual deception. If a company says "coming soon!" for a new kind of bandage, and someone bleeds to death because they thought "soon" meant in the next 60 seconds, that's unreasonable, and nothing is actionable. Or if someone's actual damages were that they don't like when companies like Salesforce engage in test marketing before developing products, but they couldn't demonstrate that it hurt them other than annoying them, that isn't a cause of action because there's no deception.

For the 24-hour gas case, the store owner is clearly struggling, and can't afford to stay open during slow hours. They apparently can't afford to buy new signage, either, or are hoping business improves soon so they can go back to 24/7 operation. There might be a technical violation, but enforcing it would likely be the owner's last straw, meaning one fewer gas station in the community. What good would enforcement be?

Not a U.S. lawyer, but check the concept of "puffery."

They are open 24 hours, just not all in a row...

I got rid of 9 or 12 domain names because they had "Speedy" in the name. I believe some company was sued because a customer thought the company wasn't we'll speedy.

Being on Heroku and dealing with the lack transparency of the security breach by Salesforce speaks to opposite of them being truthful. How long did it take them to admit to being breached? We had to get our information from 3rd parties about the breach and that we needed to rotate secrets.

> Salesforce uses the same lean product development concepts that we espouse here. They test messages and products and then make R&D investment based on real customer demand.

The crucial difference is being honest to your customers that this is your process, versus trying to hide it so that only your most savvy long-term customers know it's a mirage.

Sounds like Salesforce has gaslit their customers into believing any bullshit their marketing department dumps.

more likely driven by their sales team (which also influences marketing), sales people love to overpromise because most of their job is done after the sale - often the idea is that they’ll sell enough to warrant building it

When I was younger and worried about how we were going to execute on some project a veteran (ex-DEC) salesperson had sold, he pulled me aside and laid some gnomic-to-a-young-engineer sales wisdom on me…

“Look, never confuse the sales cycle with the install cycle…”

Several years later, I was enlightened.

> In this case, nobody was actually being sold a defective product. Salesforce is very careful to “safe harbour” their statements about future products and their actual customers know that.

I don't see any of that in the linked blog post by salesforce describing genie. Can you provide quotes of where they do that?

What I see is a blog post describing current capabilities of their product. They even make a point of sayong how all their customers benefit from "Genie".

> This is the enterprise equivalent of putting up a landing page and collecting email addresses.

My experience is that people who do Show HN’s like this are universally hated.

> Salesforce uses the same lean product development concepts that we espouse here.

Right, so they deliberately lie, mislead, conceal and exaggerate claims about their offerings and that’s okay because it’s in the YC guidelines?

Whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.

You will be surprised execs will go to the extent to put up a fake front end. I would put more weight on the fired employee disclosing unternal details than to based on your impressions. After all, there are way more precedence of "nice people" with Bernie Madoff as a very good poster boy for that category.

There seems to be more beneath the surface.

Given Karl’s background as a co-founder of Evergage, a CDP company acquired by Salesforce, it’s implausible he wasn’t familiar with lean development.

I suspect there were other reasons for his firing, with Parker perhaps being the messenger.

Is that the legal argument you're gonna give the jury?