It's hard to know what really happened here, but Butterfields comments as cited reflects an all-too-common mindset in company mergers regardless:
“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.
Exactly. Big companies can't innovate, they can't get out of their own way enough to get something all the way through.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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 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".
I see it in most companies I work at, I see the most aggressive delegation minded extroverts climbing to the top and those heads down getting shit done stepped over much of the time or even considered less important because they are not playing the social game. We need a study to see this?
That doesn't mean it's the best model. Successful in the sense of the career ladder, then maybe you're right. Successful as in productive or good for the organization or society, probably not. They are responsible for many of the biggest organizational failures.
I'm not really as pessimistic as all that. True, in the companies I've worked for there was always a tendency for the domineering types to make it to the top, but there is definitely a spectrum involved, a bell curve that could conceivably be shifted more towards cooperation than currently if the zeitgeist favored that more. Maybe after some time with more women on the boards?
The simplest explanation is that the small team of people who ran Future Forum probably just didn't want to deal with Benioff and Salesforce's bullshit anymore. Either that, or they got laid off in one of the recent rounds of cuts.
> 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.
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.
well Stewart always had the choice of going it alone and building out Slack as its own brand, but he took the $$$
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
I’ll defend Brian Acton a bit here - he refused to sell WhatsApp until it got up to a ludicrous 19B$ for 30 full time employees? Few people are tested to that amount and then it becomes a legitimate question of opportunity cost (he gave 50M$ to signal after the sale). Even with that Meta has been a decent steward of it imo despite obvious conflicts of interest. 19B$ of character is more than most.
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.
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.
There's always a number beyond which you cannot say no, regardless of your personal beliefs. Heck Stewart's investors and co-founders would have themselves overruled him if he hadn't pulled the trigger. And you have to think of all your employees whose lives you can change. $28B is a ludicrous amount of money.
Salesforce has spent an insane amount of money on real estate. I think the return to the office has nothing to do with productivity or even management style and everything to do with the big towers with SalesForce on top.
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.
> Salesforce literally set sales free from the office back in the late 90s
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?
I was in the CRM business at the time - VP of sales for a CRM integrator and Salesforce was an earthquake when it hit the market in 99. By 2001, Salesforce and competitor Upshot (which got bought by #1 CRM vendor Siebel and put out of business in a failed attempt to put the web genie back in the bottle) were gaining market quickly and their free/low cost per user/mo made it really hard to compete with using traditional software. I did really well selling the companies that had purchased installed-on-the-hard drive software from me with the new SaaS CRMs.
Thanks for the perspective. I was a freshman in high school then, my title was friends-and-family-circle computer expert. At the time my CRM knowledge was limited to recommending "Act!".
Late 90s is too early and without digging in their financials I assume the early 2000s were lean for at least a time. I most associate them with being very vocal about cloud quite early on as SaaS actually appealed to quite a few companies as opposed to application service providers of the dot-com era.
> and logged everything in my through-the-browser CRM at blazing ISDN speeds.
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.
You have a bucket of widgets, and so does everyone else to varying degrees. Each widget is really worth a dollar, but you paid $12 on average for yours because widgets were in demand at the time. Nobody really needs all their widgets right now, so there is little to no demand. You can either keep holding your widgets and keep them at a $12 valuation on your books, or sell them for an $11 write down. If enough people sell their widgets at $1 then everyone's widgets are magically worth $1 too, and everyone is fucked.
Bay Area commercial real estate right now is like holding a bunch of jumbo mortgages in 2007.
They're trying to push for this "back to the office" mentality. You can't convince other that this is a good idea and then lease out your offices if you're not using your office yourself.
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.
Salesforce is a sales and marketing company that was founded (and is led) by a brilliant sales and marketing person in Marc Benioff.
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.
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.
> Salesforce will print money for a few more years until someone makes a less awful CRM solution and just crushes their business.
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.
Yeah, aren't there already a lot of CRM products? I know Close.io is particularly useful for salespeople, but I'm not sure of any that could touch the dominance of Salesforce in the enterprise.
Absolutely. To compete with Salesforce, you need to not only do literally everything Salesforce can do, you need to be compatible with all the horrific hacked in integrations that companies have made, and do it better enough where it’s worth the complete clusterfuck that switching off Salesforce would cause.
Absolutely. Back when I worked for a bank as a junior analyst, we were one of the first to jump on the Salesforce train. The software was garbage but Salesforce bought the handful of us many four figure dinners. I don’t really give a fuck how annoying the software is when I’m eating a $90 steak with a glass of $200 wine.
Tech companies have either a sales culture or an engineering culture. As a new employee, you usually figure out which your new company has by the end of the first day.
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.
> Tech companies have either a sales culture or an engineering culture. As a new employee, you usually figure out which your new company has by the end of the first day.
Why wait until the end of your first day? This is a great question to ask in an interview.
This is my experience exactly. A few years ago, I joined a startup at 50 people that was very much an engineering culture. By the time we hit ~120 people it shifted into a sales culture due to pressure from our investors.
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.
Yep, Salesforce grows by acquisition and that really shows when you start implementing it, especially if you want to do anything more complex that use Marketing Cloud. Then you realise that it is a poorly integrated collection of distinct applications, each with its own data model, integration patterns and license fee model. You end up endlessly working out how to move data across applications and then back again.
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.
> 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.
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.
Approximately all CRM products suck. Salesforce is better than no CRM and not worse than its competitors. We use it, and it's tedious and awful in many ways but it does the job. YMMV of course.
This reads like someone who’s never used the platform. It is broad, allows you to do a lot quickly and relatively more easily than most other platforms.
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.
Out of curiosity, how many non-enterprise alternatives to Salesforce have you really, genuinely evaluated?
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 don't have any hands-on experience with Salesforce, but to me this is reminiscent of Jira. Nobody has anything nice to say about it, yet it's still the dominant player and people's go-to for project management, and no other tooling has managed to supplant it.
You're sort of saying this but Salesforce has an absolutely enormous ecosystem of partners. Dreamforce is one of the largest conferences in tech. (CES is probably bigger but there aren't many.)
The API is fine and quite flexible. There are things that are very annoying (hello deploying updates from sandboxes to the production instance), but the APIs work, are generally well documented and have lots of options to generally get what I’ve needed to get done done.
This is true, I did not use the platform as a user. I know it solves business problems and theyve built a big moat.
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.
> he wrote in the #all-salesforce Slack channel that employees hired during the pandemic had “much lower productivity.” He followed that by soliciting feedback: “Is this a reflection of our office policy? Are our managers not directly addressing productivity with their teams?”
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?
He’s not saying that everyone had lower productivity through the pandemic, but that those hired during the pandemic and working remotely had much lower productivity.
I mean, there are many possibilities here. One is that no-one got onboarded properly (possibly because the people who were meant to be doing it were busy trying to demonstrate productivity).
Another possibility is that he doesn’t know how to measure productivity in the new environment and the whole thing is sampling error.
My experience was that basically everyone hired in 2020 did not get good on boarding. This lead to people's capabilities being misunderstood, people's roles being not well defined, a lack of healthy relations between them and the rest of the company (that could rely on already-existing social bonds to weather the troubles), and just generally bad experiences for everyone.
2021-onwards was better.
This was not at Slack, of course, but I imagine every company basically was this.
Maybe it's a generational thing? I grew up using the computer in my bedroom, I have known friends for 10+ years online only and I've used to async communication from participating in guilds thoughout many games. I'm used to timezone differences through state of the guild meetings being held at awkward times and from running an in-game logistics company with important strategic deadlines due to wars.
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.
Honestly there’s a contingent of WFH-or-die tech people that are as much an unjustified stick in the mud as the elusive bums-in-seats-or-die middle management stereotype.
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.
Ten years in IT, I've been part of roughly 4 acquisitions across a few jobs. Each time the line delivered to the employees is more or less the same: "don't worry, we don't intend to change anything. It's business as usual".
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.
In the only acquisition I've been involved in, the morning after it was officially announced we came into the office and the (brand-colour) orange walls had been painted grey.
Its funny that the tools that actually allow you to work remotely are pushing their own employees to come back. The leadership sure has some vision right there (vision for more money and nothing else but that's not shocking).
Exactly. If I were in charge of Slack I would double down on 100% remote and also not allow any other third-party remote collaboration tool. The team would be forced to build out all the remote tooling they need and then eventually incorporate it into the core product.
Of course there's no data. How many companies, especially the big ones, have you heard doing surveys for employees and asking whether they prefer in-office or remote work? They don't, because they are afraid to hear the responses.
Even if the data was there. Is it worth it if employees are much happier with remote work? It should really not be a binary question whether the productivity is higher or lower.
I guess the somewhat cynical question-answer to that question is: As a business, is their mission to be productive and make great products, or to make employees happy to the detriment of the company’s productivity?
Is it productive to cut out an entire swath of talent that will never work in the office again?
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.
Sure, if you are only using thinking shortsighted. I doubt they consider what effect remote has on retention and company reputation and how those factors could affect productivity.
If you're getting acquired pay attention to whether the buyer needs your product, or your vision. That'll tell you how quickly your pre-aquisition culture will be stamped out.
I've done a few acquisitions, one of them they just couldn't believe we only wanted some ip and not their vision no matter how explicit we were. I think it's hard for some people to see themselves that way, everyone is the hero of their own story as some say. another it was a lot more obvious, esp after who we didn't keep. But I still spent some time at the pub with their leads talking and trying to pivot them mentally.
You're lucky if they want either the product _or_ the vision. Quite often they simply want the team or the void left by the market position the acquisition used to have. Of those two, the acquirer wanting the team is better but if they want nothing but the team odds are the team has little reason to stay other than golden handcuffs.
Given how much remote work depends on Slack, is it a risk to manage that Salesforce could use their leverage on the product to undermine the viability of remote work in general, or become a gatekeeper for it? They literally bought the key remote work platform for about 1/3 less than Musk paid for Twitter.
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.
This is a common meme about Heroku, but when you look at the timeframes it's not quite true. Heroku was founded in 2007, acquired by Salesforce in 2010 well before its innovation and growth began to decline. Many of their biggest products and innovations came after the acquisition.
That's not to say it was then neglected by them later on!
Heroku’s downfall had little to do with Salesforce and much to do with AWS, Google and Azure muscling in to the PaaS market.
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.
Maybe I misread, and I'm definitley being trite, but,
is the tldr that this research group consistently found evidence that remote work is good, and thus the evidence must be stopped?
A lot of people are replying with suggestions of discord, mattermost etc.
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.
we’re working on scheduled msgs currently (it’s hard because you don’t know what devices will be i the room by the time the msg sends, and so who to encrypt for)
We use Discord as a Slack alternative, and have for a couple years. It's perfect for a remote company, especially if you also run chat/messaging for customers and users.
That's how you get people to use MFA, but AFAIK there's no feature in Discord to a) federate with a directory like AD or b) force users on a server to only be able to sign in with a hw key
Discord UI is so complicated, I feel old, im always clicking the wrong buttons. Im sure you get used to it soon, and probably more powerful once you do.
What features are you looking for? I'm sure I've seen the Mattermost/Gitlab team browse here in the past and having something actionable would help them get there
I don’t know. As someone making IT decisions, I can really only look at the options on the market and compare them. Mattermost isn’t clearly better than Slack along dimensions that matter to most teams. Its product management strategy seems to be “we have the same features as slack but you can self host”.
I do not want to have a piece of undifferentiated infrastructure at my org to be tied to the employment, enthusiasm and attention of a particular engineer.
Just another CEO ghoul, captured by real estate interests, doing the board's bidding. It's fascinating that these dogs are willing to chew off their own legs for scraps from the sunken cost table.
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.
Can you please edit out swipes and personal attacks from your comments here, and also please not fulminate on HN? You can make your substantive points without any of that, and that's what we're going for here.
“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.