Marc Benioff: “I don’t work well in an office”
fortune.com
fortune.com
Salesforce is a publicly traded billion dollar company, not an early stage startup.
A CEO traveling around to meet customers isn't a bad thing. In addition, he's the co-CEO and probably left day to day operations to the real CEO.
Execs like to paint working remotely as something that is wasteful and so the common employee shouldn’t be allowed to do so, while simultaneously extolling the virtues of their remote work.
It’s reminiscent of the time I worked at one company and the chairman of the board showed up to give us a rousing speech that included the fact that he only showed up because he was going to a board meeting for another company whose board he was on in the same city. This was less than a month after one of our coworkers got shit canned after it was found out that he was moonlighting.
This is a bit ranty by the tl;dnr is that lots of jobs align with remote work and I am personally pissed that you try to frame it as ok because it’s a CEO and then in the next sentence you try to blunt the message by saying he’s just a “co-ceo” so it’s not that bad
Meanwhile, the brand of WFH HN folks want is to not leave the house and interact with real humans in person.
The only reason I said "co-ceo" is because I was responding to someone who, for whatever reason, thinks a multi-billion public company shouldn't have its CEO talk to customers.
Another commenter mentioned that people were setting up a straw man against your words but I can’t agree. You keep implying that it’s rational for c levels to be working remote and then implying that regular employees only want wfh because they are just anti social.
Your comments are heavily biased with one viewpoint and I heartily disagree with it
Why change what was said? The statement wasn't about "c levels" - it was one person who is on the road a lot meeting customers. Like a super senior sales role. That's different to team/collaboration-based roles where colocation might (just before you change this too: remember - might) well massively improve things.
If you want to season your comments about regular employees with “might” you should also do that from the get go. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt as this is hacker news and not Reddit, but opening up the position by stating
> Meanwhile, the brand of WFH HN folks want is to not leave the house and interact with real humans in person.
Doesn’t give the impression that you have a nuanced take on the matter and came off like you were categorically against regular employees working from home
I've made one comment where I did that (although of course we need to call him a CEO because that's his job title). What are you talking about?
You go looking outside offices, it turns out there’re people everywhere. Who knew?
You've made this statement a few times in this thread, have you considered this is nothing more than a strawman?
Same goes for meeting employees.
Is he firefighting? Why isnt he doing strategy, management and the other things CEOs do?
Like hiring a CMO or BD head to do all the traveling he is doing?
>Well, I’m a remote worker. I’ve always been a remote worker my whole life. I don’t work well in an office,” Benioff said. “It just doesn’t work for my personality. I can’t tell you why. I do love to go in to visit customers though. I’m on the road constantly visiting customers.”
Ah, so he doesnt need to do sales. He likes doing it. It just …works… for his personality.
Even on the less cynical side, there's something to be said for hearing from customers directly instead of filtered through 5 levels of middle management
There is a lot that happens at that size - one of which you should have a trust worthy team who does exactly that; its why they get paid - leadership.
His is a Saas firm. This argument is inappropriate as a defense. You can do this a few times, the rest of the time he needs to be in office.
Failing which - like elon said - its an excuse to slack off.
So its either
1) odd sales situation 2) weasel worded sentence 3) delinquency - a la Elon “people who wfh are slacking”
It’s great if it’s 1 and he fixes it, but then he has to get back to office. In which case his “i dont have an office personality” line works against him.
Remote work used to be an earned privilege for workers who were self sufficient and didn't need any management.
Now everyone expects it, and lazy/weak managers will just make everyone come into the office vs having hard conversations with crap employees to tell them they cant work from home.
I'm coordinating with developers in Europe, South America and East Asia. The customers are all over, but mainly North American. I'm in Europe. I've seen some of the customers once or twice in person, I see many of my European colleagues at the yearly get-together. But all the contact and all the work is over email, phone and video conferences and the usual mix of other remote collaboration tools, ticket system, git, stuff like that. When I enter our local office, only one of the 50 people working there has anything to do with that I do. My manager is 800km away. Well, there's payroll over here, but the only time I'll need to "visit" them in person is when a paycheck is late ;).
Even before COVID, the world shifted towards remote, even when you HAD to come to the local office because of reasons. COVID just showed everyone what a charade it already has been for the last decade to force people into an office just to get on phone/email/git and work remotely from the office. COVID cut out the stupid useless "going to the office" step.
In the 2000s, it wasn't like that, teams were concentrated at some offices, offshoring wasn't that much of a thing yet. And for lots of things, travelling e.g. to meet a customer was accepted and normal, far more often than it is now. A new contract was a 2-week stay at the customers'. Back then, remote work actually was a privilege. But the world had changed long before COVID, slowly, then very quickly.
WFH should be the ultimate dream of these companies, they can finally get rid of those pesky meatbags and their 'emotions' altogether.
So management wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. Everyone in an ever smaller, ever more unusable but supposedly cheaper office. Concentrate all the smaller offices in the suburbs into one huge big-city campus, making the commute a nightmare. But people have to be at their desks, or else. Remote was officially rolled back.
Unofficially, even middle management wised up and just ignored the back-to-office mandate, because they wouldn't know anyways who was in and who wasn't.
If you can reduce the office footprint you can save money. Bringing people in often means increasing the footprint post wfh.
Wfh will win where it actually succeeds because it saves money.
If it doesn't work then only companies that bring people in will succeed.
My feeling is that about 75% of the non manual non hospitality economy will go WFH
>If it doesn't work then only companies that bring people in will succeed.
This implies fair competition between the two
It's now a selling point when buying a company that the infrastructure is cloud based, even if it's IaaS that has been stable and unchanging for 15+ years - and they require the staff to maintain the servers regardless of where it's hosted.
Not that much. And I just read hacker news while sitting on the train which I was going to do if sitting at home anyway.
So only in every country in the world except USA?
> Not that much.
OK, let's assume it's not 90 minutes but only 20 minutes a day. That compounds, and it's a lot of time I could spend on what really matters to me, not work. Why should I do it, if I have a choice? Time is the most precious thing we have. I will never come back to the office, period.
Not sure where you live, that's got a 20 min commute, but most people either live in a concrete prison to reduce the commute, or spend 2 hours a day on a bus/train.
I do know this.. if you worked from home, you could get all that you've outlined, and likely spend a pile less on rent/mortgage. Others who work with you would also get to see their kids before bed.
Seems like a bike or eBike would be a faster way to go? Melbourne climate is pretty temperate, no?
I don't mind riding my bike around to the nearby shops on the weekend but usually its just most convenient to get places on foot or by PT. I only really do it for fun and fitness rather than it being the fastest way to get around.
You could WFH, get up at the same time, spend 10 minutes meditating, 10 minutes walking and you would have been healthier and saved money.
Does your firm count that 20 minutes as part of your work hours?
If not, then WFH is superior.
How you use that time is a question for you to use your agency to resolve.
Wake, coffee, walk, start work at 9. Finish at 5, put computer away, and walk for 15 min, your day is done.
It's really arrogant how you assume you understand GP's situation better than themselves.
I used to bike commute about 7 miles each way up and down some intense hills; it was part of my routine, and I had to do it. Now that I'm working from home, sure, I could go out and ride 15 miles every day, but it becomes a matter of discipline.
Same with socializing. I tend to prefer solitude, so socializing, like exercising, now requires discipline – I have to make myself do it – whereas before it was baked in, and unavoidable.
People recommending a dog aren't wrong. I do have a dog now, and walk at least 5 miles a day. My dog is an idiot so I can't really do the dog-park thing, but if you have a non-idiotic dog, there's some socialization to be gained there, too. BUT: it's a big commitment, and will have an impact on big life decisions later on like what apartment you can rent, whether you live in a city or a suburb, how easy it is to take a vacation or travel abroad, etc., so it's not like it's a no-brainer or an easy solution.
I believe employees have to start to get used to being paid less when working remote. People who work in an office or factory have to be rewarded for this commute. Some jobs cannot be made remote.
I assume a lot of people working remote also like the fact that they can do the laundry, clean the house, do some errands etc during the working day. This flexibility should also allow the salary for remote workers to be lower than for people working in an office.
Last I checked, no one paid me" for my commute time or comp'd the wear on my vehicle. If those hours* spent in traffic should have been counted on the clock, then golly gee, I have invoices yo get written!
Seriously, I get it. There should be something for it, but there never will be. Wage theft. Management will do anything possible to get unpaid time out of you.
As it's probably easier to hire someone to work remote than hire someone who has to go to the office, the salaries will probably over time be less for work from home jobs anyway (for the same type of job).
It's funny how people feel so entitled to their salaries and that management is there to rip people off. I get it for warehouse people, but for tech workers, come on.
That does not follow. I quote you a salary sufficient to warrant me to work for you. You don't get to come back and demand that you should be able to pay me less when I no longer commute when I'm still working for you. Unless the physical presence in the office is absolutely essential (which it isn't for knowledge workers in the way it is for a stocker or laborer), and the tech exists where working remote is a reasonable accommodation (which it does), then you wanting me in the office to get the job done is now something on the table for me (the employee) to charge you, the employer extra for. In no way are you, (the employer) entitled to an extra discount because I'm not driving in. Nevermind that I don't offer one of those. Though I may to have to ruminate on it.
>It's funny how people feel so entitled to their salaries and that management is there to rip people off.
It's funny how companies feel entitled to their profits and that employees are there to rip them off.
A) People are free to set the price of their time.
B) Management is explicitly there to get the absolute most out of workers with the least input. Even if that means playing dirty, (hopefully not, but I've seen a lot of it). You can say their purpose is leadership, but I've been privy to what high level management types think leadership is, and unfortunately, it ain't leadership. I know leadership. Come from a family with a lot of military background. Civillian business management theory abandoned most facets of leadership in order to cut corners, and maximize value generation. Just look at the C-Suite-to-everyone else pay disparity to see the fruits of that.
Most of the people here (and at Salesforce) are paid, in theory at least, according to their skillset and the value they bring to a company.
Why should that pay differ depending on where someone is sitting when they deliver said value?
I mainly tried to say that if we want to have people working in factories, working as nurses or doing office work that requires working as a team in person or meeting clients or what ever it might be then we have to start to pay them more compared to people who work from home.
The firm didnt give 2 bits about your commute. They pay you to be in on time. Not your commute. I know people who travel 6 hours a day. They get paid the same.
Why would any firm increase salaries, for services you were already providing?
You get maybe 12 waking hours a day, 8 working +2 commuting. Getting 2 hours back is a 16% raise.
If they then all of a sudden don't have to commute (let's say 5 hours), then why could they then not be okay with a slightly lower salary (as they save 5 hours a day).
I’m kinda jealous, the only thing that is keeping me in management roles is the fantasy that the perfect company will come along with the right product, right growth stage but that is looking unlikely in this economy.
The person posting it probably though it was helpful, but it was just showing how an hell of a place offices have become since they went the open space route.
The only thing that I disagreed with was the "we don't want to lose our stars" mentality. Your mentality should not be about pushing people as far as you can until you have retention problems. Rather, it should be to inform people and provide them with opportunities to be productive in whatever way they prefer, and cut them lose if their output is not sufficient. Make decisions by outputs - not inputs.
He seems to have some nuance and flexibility on the issue that some people lack.
TELL ME MORE
WE MUST STUDY THIS NEW PHENOMENON CLOSELY
I agree that he seems to have nuance on the topic, but the playing field seems to have already abandoned fair play.
The companies may seem to get away with it, but not because they use a particular language tactic. They have the power to back up their "opinion" by firing people. People who want to keep their job may stop arguing, not because they buy the BS framing but because they have bills to pay.
The folks who hope to take a stand in the interest of worker's rights would be better served by trying hard to stick to the facts, promote nuanced discussions and not let the companies drag them into this kind of pissing contest.
What Marc calls "work", you and I can't relate too.
He's spending a disporportionate amount of time talking to investors, talking to customers, talking to his Board.
I wouldn't be surprised if he's traveling 100 business days a year as a result.
Which if you're not at home because you're traveling for work, or if you are at home but just talking phone calls - that's a very different type of "working remote".
===
EDIT: why the downvotes? Please comment if you disagree with something I said so that we can have a health discourse.
In reality, he’s probably thinking he’d rather be on the road than stay in his SV ivory tower.
Two stories about Benioff you might find interesting; when we were selling our startup there were two bidders on the table, Google and Salesforce.
Google sent out minions, Larry and Sergey were only reachable via email/call.
Benioff flew over to wine and dine our founders, they found common ground and he charmed them with his vision of where he saw our product going. He won with a lower bid than Google.
After the acquisition closed, he flew over to London too to visit my business unit, we met with him in the office and the senior management team were again taken out for some 1:1 time with him over dinner. Any skepticism they might have had was washed away after that evening, they all came back “brainwashed” into the Salesforce way — he even gifted us one of the domain names from his personal collection to use for our product (my email was marcos@social.com for a while, which I did find really cool)
The second story, he once logged into an all hands call using a shitty satellite connection from his yacht in the middle of the Mediterranean. He could have delegated while he was on holiday, but I don’t think Benioff ever switches off, hence why working from anywhere is his default mode of operation.
>> "He won with a lower bid than Google."
Off topic: why would a company every sell to a lower bidder? If you have any investors in the company (not bootstrapped), don't you have a fiduciary responsibility to always sell to the highest bidder.
My understanding was that Google didn’t really offer us a future plan, and the competitor they ended up acquiring (Wildfire) quickly disappeared — another fun little story is that Arielle Zuckerberg was working for Wildfire at the time, so she ended up at Google — while the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is stronger than ever after more acquisitions, even where the individual products disappeared.
All in all it still was extremely lucrative for founders and investors, the official number was $689m but there were also extra bonuses and employee retention incentives and such so the real number was higher.
I didn’t really gel with the FAANG style culture at the time so I left after I vested most of my stock, but I know some people made long careers out of it.
Just like in any kind of b2b sales, the decisions are never fully data-driven.
I have a job like this (presales; previously consulting). I'm usually on the road/in the air every week and, COVID aside, have been for the last seven years. An office hasn't made sense for me in a long time.
However, the co-CEO saying this just after pushing an RTO mandate feels really out of place. Many will definitely not get the nuance.
There’s no nuance here. There is not a single way in the universe that __everyone else__ needs to be in office but his job is so special that he has to WFH.