Salesforce and Slack to pause all hiring in technology and product | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce and Slack to pause all hiring in technology and product

fortune.com

48 pointscpeterso34 comments

I get the impression that like everything else, executives are strongly influenced by herd psychology. They see a few headlines and then that gives them the idea that they will be able to copy the other companies and reduce costs. And no one will be able to accuse them of doing the wrong thing if everyone else was doing it. Whereas if sales continue to be poor and they are one of a minority of companies that did not do layoffs, then the executive gets blamed for lack of profits due to inaction.

So, in short, executives are people too.

Perhaps people that should be managing a McDonalds and not a company whose main assets are software and IT systems.

most of the people in powerful position at big companies (including the FAANG) are there because they got there early - not because they're good. That includes a ton of management & ICs. It's eye-opening, once you see it

It's also herd psychology (and greed) on the part of investors. If a company does layoffs its competitors' investors go "if they can survive and increase profits after a 10% layoff why can't we?"

And executives can't really answer this because they know they can lay a lot of people off without immediate impact to the business. It's no secret that every tech company is way overstaffed.

If your competition can get away with 10% lower quality-of service so can you. Almost nobody competes on quality so it’s a race to the bottom

> “Remember, we won’t ask you to do the same amount of work with fewer people, so adjust plans accordingly.”

fascinating that some individuals can lie this blatantly and then sleep like babes.

Do I read that correctly? A significant percentage of Slack/Salesforce's employees were doing literally zero work?

Why jump to conclusions like that? The simplest answer is that there will be less product development.

They won't ask you to do the same amount of work....they'll ask you to do more work. See, it wasn't a lie! j/k

Lying by omission is still lying.

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

I left Salesforce exactly _because_ this was a lie 4ish layoffs ago, and I have no reason to believe it's less of a lie now.

They cut my engineering group into 1/3rd its size, put the other 2/3rds on a greenfield project, and gave us a couple of weeks to complete handoff such that the remaining 1/3rd had to maintain/finish/handle-support-for everything that the 2/3rds group used to own. This all happened in the _middle_ of one of their three yearly waterfall-planned release cycles, so that meant we were also on the hook for delivering everything the original teams had planned.

It was a dumpster fire. From what I gather, things have mostly gotten worse since. They could never pay me enough to go back (well, okay, they could pay me millions per month, and I'd consider going back and then quitting after like a month or two).

Slack was pretty much a perfect product 7 years ago. What have they added besides huddles that is actually useful? How many engineers are needed for maintaining an already really good product? Is it really a complex enough system to be hiring indefinitely?

Slack sold to salesforce and became a corporate product suite. The purpose is to do integrations with as many things as possible so that you get locked in, and easy billing between your company and salesforce. It is a business angle not a product for users, like almost anything when the users are not the ones directly paying for the product.

Thirteen. Instagram had thirteen employees when acquired by Facebook.

I’m sorry, but most tech companies are clueless when it comes to management. Cost analysis as it relates to the actual activities of an engineering labor force are brushed to the side as overhead, which makes no sense since these are direct costs.

What’s the cost of a poorly specified product? What’s the cost of a meeting? What’s the cost of involving engineers in the hiring process? What’s the cost of multiple programming languages? What’s the cost of having separate teams for front-end, back-end, operations? What’s the cost of adding another engineer to a team?

I’ve never seen any effort put into any of the above. This is underpants gnomes territory:

1.) acquire new engineers

2.) ?

3.) profit

Hence massive overhiring with unaccounted for costs that lead shortly to layoffs and hiring freezes.

The more I learn about managerial accounting (thanks dad!) the more dysfunction I see at most organizations.

Apparently Oracle does attempt to uncovers these costs, but I can’t find the case study.

All of this has an incredibly large impact on financial reporting, hence rosy projections based on EBITDA followed by the sobering realizations when those projections are not met. Most tech firms actually base internal management on EBITDA! This is borderline insane internally and borderline fraud externally.

You couldn't build a true Instagram clone today with 13 people. The Instagram of the time was more akin to Flickr than the modern Instagram with live streaming, stories, video content, messaging, groups, recommendations, creator tools and localization.

TikTok, an Instagram competitor, had over 1,000 people working on it in 2020 (grown 130x since).

Sure, but the product was incredibly well marketed, designed and implemented with just those original 13 employees and sold for $1 billion.

Those features you’ve listed were added in the 11 odd years since. I think that the original set of employees could have implemented every aspect of the application since the date of sale!

Implementing a feature is only a small part of the story. It doesn't scale that way. The more features and users you got, the more people you need to maintain it. 13 won't do the trick on insta scale.

I don't think so. Let's take just one slice of what I mentioned -- video content. Dailymotion, a relatively small competitor, has over 200 employees. Vimeo has over 1,000. That's a single feature.

Could 13 people clone Instagram's featureset at the time of the sale? Yeah, it could probably be done by 3 people in a weekend. But you'd need thousands to emulate their current featureset.

So, all the junk that made Instagram worse.

When Instagram was acquired they had 30m MAU, no monetization, and were being crushed with scaling problems that were too much for the small team to bear. Whatever the number is, it's a lot higher than 13.

I agree. However, in a winner-takes-all situation, this essentially leads to an endgame of 13 engineers build something. Investors take 95% of the winnings. 20 people get a lot of money and everybody else sits on the sides.

If we don't undo the winner-takes-all nature of tech (by forcing open protocols and mandatory interoperability) then tech will continue being a dystopian situation of take-all-never-innovate while relying on the difficulties of the network effect to prevent millions of brilliant ideas to never see the light of day.

> Thirteen. Instagram had thirteen employees when acquired by Facebook.

But then Instagram was mostly just a simple photo editor app without the social graph complexity. Sure you can still build and maintain such an app with thirteen people.

> What have they added besides huddles that is actually useful?

I really like the new Canvas feature they have. I realize it's more updated version of posts that they already had but seems to work much better than posts IMHO.

It's a bit surreal that not trying to grow inifintely is considered perverse. It's a competely normal behavior of normal companies. Especially Slack has a product with a pretty clear scope, already good feature set. There's no need to expand it in a major way.

Your model of commerce is outdated by well over a century. You clearly don't understand how the stock market and financialized economies work. Furthermore, it's very naive to think capitalism could ever be sustainable with or without these things.

I can see that outdated model of commerce everywhere around me. My local bakery doesn't shoot for infinite unicorn growth, and I think that's quite fine.

The model is fine for explaining how some bakeries work; not now the overall economy works. I bet you could have figured this out on your own.

A very large majority of companies don't target infinite unicorn growth.

https://archive.is/cL4Oi

My company also still is doing a big savings year and i don't get it.

If they really believe in capital, they need to show investment, need to be oppimistic and announce spending money to pull every other 'struggling' industry with them.

You can start out by presuming they have reasons to choose a difficult path. Probably it’s anxiety inducing so they aren’t forthright about it but it’s not necessarily the wrong decision from their point of view. If you have the chance you could ask them what they perceive the financial picture looks like going forward.

To generalize without knowing your situation, right now people feel that no financing is coming for a long time if ever again unless you are a top quality company. So getting disciplined on cash flow positivity may be their focus for good reasons.

I’m not sure what Slack engineers do all day. It’s a 50-50 shot of audio (either mic or speakers) working during huddles on Mac.

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