All Slack Employees Forced to Spend a Week Getting Salesforce Certifications

> Not surprisingly, the Ranger status requirement has been met with some disdain from employees at Slack. Two sources told Fortune that many Slack engineers have found workarounds via scripts, code that can be quickly built to automate a task, to click through the modules for them.

> “There’s no mandate [on] what modules people take so people are posting lists of the easiest ones and are speed running them,” a source said.

Respect

  > According to a screenshot viewed by Fortune, there are six ranks prior to achieving Ranger status, which requires 100 badges and 50,000 points. Each module varies in points earned towards this goal, for instance, there’s a “Fearless Teaming” module which teaches staff “how psychological safety and courage help create high-performing teams,” that earns a user 300 points and takes 45 minutes to complete, the screenshot revealed.

Is this company run by the Boy Scouts?

> "WFH is unproductive. Everyone RTO!"

> "Hey everyone! The execs and I came up with this great idea. Let's shut the whole company down for a week, and during that time you all can take these totally relevant learning modules!"

mfw

> We really are canceling all meetings next week to facilitate this heads-down time, even 1:1s.

I can't image a worse time to cancel 1:1s than when pushing through some unpopular top-down decision.

Oh, they went ahead and made that mandatory? I heard all sorts of rumors about that for a while before I left.

When I was there, you just had mandatory security trainings (fine) and the Orwellian "Corporate Message Certification", where every team in the company — including engineers — were supposed to memorize the Corporate Message (a 15-slide-long sales-pitch deck) and be able to recite it to each other, that came paired with lots of preamble about how this was so that you could be adequately prepared to evangelize Salesforce to your friends, loved ones, fellow transit passengers, and other random bystanders.

Definitely not a cult or anything though. Totally.

(and none of the teams I was on ever bothered to memorize that crap; we just booked a meeting, expensed lunch, skimmed through the slides so we could say we did it, and kept running counts of how often each stupid buzzword was used).

Man, I'm _so_ glad to be gone from that place.

> The goal is for Slack’s employees to reach Trailhead’s Ranger level, a feat that requires roughly 40 hours on the learning platform, whose modules include topics like “Learn about the Fourth Industrial Revolution” and “Healthy Eating.”

At which Trailhead level do they tell you about Xenu?

This is approximately the point in a company's growth where I start looking for greener pastures.

Doing some math on the example courses (300 points for a 45 min course) and the requirement of gaining 50 000 points, that's a whopping 333 hours of just courses.

Jesus Christ.

Can they instead spend the week rolling back their insanely bad UI revamp

Yup, software development is the new factory work.

So fucking stupid.

Do any of the courses teach employees how to write memory efficient native apps instead of bundling an entire web browser to run an IRC client?