Maybe it's just the segment I'm in, but I feel like Salesforce was hiring pretty hard up until recently. They wouldn't be the only company to go from a hiring spree to layoffs that quickly over the last quarter.
We really need to lock this absurdity down and increase severance requirements for large companies heavily. It's one thing to gamble risk for the company, it's something completely different to gamble employee livelihood when you're signaling job security by hiring.
I really hope that I get laid off in the first round of these layoffs where everyone gets good severance.
My current worry is that the first round of layoff at my first company will get 4 months severance, I'll miss that round, and 2 months later get laid off with only 2 months severance. This would of course mean that my severance ends at the same times as the first group but I had to work an additional 2 months.
Affected by this, and unless I'm reading the docs wrong 5 months is a bit of a PR exaggeration. Health insurance is longer but pay and vesting end mid-March.
Probably the best after Meta and Airbnb from what I've seen. Looks like most large companies have been generous with their severances with the exception of Twitter (not sure about Amazon).
There was a slide deck by Sequioa going around recently, wherein one of the points was that the companies that cut costs hard and fast at the beginning of the recession were more likely to survive to the end of it.
Either that or they see something the rest of us don't when looking at economic data (a long recession).
That's the general consensus, especially around YC companies. Didn't they send out warnings early last year suggesting people cut early and deep? I really don't think Salesforce falls into that category though. They aren't going out of business any time soon and their revenue may not even drop if there were a recession.
The people downvoting you are suffering from a sort of survivorship bias. Sure, now you'd like the comfort of knowing your employer would have to pay you a ton of money if they laid you off, but what if you were somebody who was recently laid off looking for a job and people were reluctant to hire beacuse of this requirement? It's not clear to me that it's a net win, from my perspective I'd rather be able to easily replace my employer as opposed to them paying me for a few months.
A strong labor market has been effective in rasing the real incomes of the bottom 25% or so over the past few years, it's entirely possible that a weaker labor market with stronger workers protections would've been less effective at doing so leaving the very poor worse off.
At minimum if you're gonna lay someone off then any employee benefit that required they worked there for x months/years should be immediately paid out.
My wife woke up this morning to an email sent at 3:16AM informing her that she was laid off as part of this restructuring. It's a blessing in disguise, IMHO -- the work-life boundaries expected as part of her org were non-existent (calls with India every night at 8PM or 7AM, our time in California, on top of the normal 9-5 hours).
It's definitely hard to process. Lots of feelings of anger, sadness, relief, etc.
Fortunately for her, the severance is pretty generous (paid through March, then 6 months on top). But there's also anxiety about the job market right now with so many tech workers being let go.
Very well done! Is there a word for when you use a word in the excruciatingly correct way but are guaranteed to misguide 99% of the audience who reads it?
I forget which podcast I heard it on (so forgive me if my memory is sloppy), but after their latest quarterly report didn't CAC payback go from 24 months to something wild like 10 years? Meaning their new ARR add rapidly fell off so quickly, before they adjusted their Sales and Marketing salaries and spending, that it immediately put their unit economics way way way way underwater.
So I'd expect at least a big chunk would be S&M cuts, even through of course you still need salespeople.
10% of a 75k company is still 7k people. From the King of SaaS. Wild times.
Many many software companies end up spending more money to acquire a customer than a customer will ever pay them. I tend to think this is because the demand and need for many tools is not significant enough to justify the amount of capital allocated to promote them.
Finance spreadsheet alchemists last 10 years saw big gross margins in software (overinflated by not taking into account cost to acquire user), bought into long-term incumbent dominance narrative from founders, and now they're stuck with companies that are willing to spend 10x+ lifetime customer value to acquire a user.
Everyone with a vested interest in these companies/investments always seems to say the real returns are 10 years+ once they are in a dominant position in their industry and have monopolistic pricing power.
How are we supposed to know what happens in 5 years, let alone 10+? Seems like a big carnival trick to me. What's interesting is that this mentality is so engrained that the people promoting it don't seem to even get that they're in on an act.
You could have the best tool on the planet, but if the cost to distribute it is greater than what those customers acquired will ultimately pay you, you don't have a company.
I get where you're coming from, but since the dawn of SaaS we've had rules of thumb about LTV-to-CAC, CAC payback period, etc.
Most SaaS founders know that a 3:1 ratio between LTV and CAC is ideal - and while arguments might hold water that a worse ratio is OK for a brief period, I don't think anyone involved doesn't realize that it's difficult to sustain that.
The mental magic trick to justify it probably goes like this - "Yes, we're underwater on the LTV-CAC ratio for now, but once we're in position XYZ we'll be able to launch new products ABC and increase LTV from there". Which isn't wrong. And the new CAC to upsell product ABC to existing clients is going to be very low. So in a sense, you CAN justify (at least in a 'superficially prudent way') a worse ratio with that argument.
And ironically, Salesforce is a GREAT example of this WORKING (up until now?). They have ruthlessly increased ACV and LTV for decades, through increases to pricing, growing features, launching new products, creating the app ecosystem, etc.
The general attitude I've encountered is that you do this as a whale hunting strategy, developing a reputation for passionate overinvestment in your customers because the kind of people who sign eight or nine digit contracts demand it. I don't have the right data to know whether it always works, but multiple times I've seen it produce big deals that would never have come together otherwise.
I don't know. As an anecdote, my friend has worked at salesforce in a technical capacity for the past 10 years, and their team was cut from 15 down to 10 today. I'm not sure on the seniority of the people laid off.
I have personal experience with other ERPs and Salesforce is the best of the lot in my opinion. With my current company, we have employees in Singapore, Europe, USA, and South Africa etc. who all interact with Salesforce on a daily basis. We use it for CRM, service support (VOIP with call tracking), marketing, financials (questionable decision), and analytics (Tableau). Where it shines in my opinion is that does automate 75% of business processes and if you pay the right fee, it's all seamless. The flow automation low code tool is a step in the right direction. Where it falters, is (a) its own hype machine gets in the way -- your customers are already locked-in, please stop the bullshit, SF is not easy to learn -- its data model requires experience to understand and architect properly (b) Mulesoft sucks, please stop pushing it (c) its web portal (lightning experience communities) needs work -- the security permissions model is hopeless convoluted like the fabled Gordian knot.
For data in Salesforce my company (GRAX) offers a backup product that will write data to your data lake in standard formats like Parquet.
This offers a strategy to read old SFDC data BI tools or in parallel with using a new CRM.
However the real SFDC lock-in is around business process. If your global Sales or Support team lives in SFDC it’s not easy to retrain them to another system.
My company is currently undergoing this and I have the same feeling.
But I think the business model behind it is you hire a "Salesforce consultant" to steer your integration with the understanding that you can replace a small team of developers doing a home-rolled solution with a single developer who runs your SF integration. And Salesforce slurps up 60% of the labor cost savings and you keep the 40% and declare success.
And lose in-house knowledge experts. Lose the people with buyin on projects success. Lose the people and department that had built the interdepartmental relationships to push big ambitious changes forward (because no 'consultant' is going to recreate those relationships with their seagulling). You have to be a completely shallow business when it comes to business practices for this model to benefit you. But the lost opportunity cost of not having these resources isn't immediately visible so it's ignored. Until a company that gets it comes along and eats your lunch because they are nimble and their own entity, not a Salesforce franchise posing as a business.
I had a 2021 situation where a consultant had
convinced the executive level of the non-profit I work at to move to SF with their Non-Profit Success Package. It ultimately failed to launch because it seemed like every week was a new meeting where "SF doesn't do this, but if you use Platform X it will integrate with SF."
Currently, we are moving forward with Odoo, which has its own quirks but has better functionality than Salesforce IMO. No transition is fun, but an ETL from SF to Odoo is very doable (odooable), and the feature sets are pretty equivalent.
While the lock-in is real, there are other platforms that are catching up fast. My firm does Salesforce to HubSpot migrations as part of our services, and it's getting easier and easier to switch. Still takes time to retrain and shift business processes to a different philosophy, but we almost always see better usage of the platform, better data, and happier users.
HubSpot is not a replacement for hugely complex organizations that needs to dump tens of millions or more into a Salesforce instance (software + labor), but for mid-size and below it's great.
Salesforce spends tons of money on sales people. If they'd want to make a pile if cash, they could fire them all and could still live off the existing contracts for years. As the market penetration will increase, they should technically require fewer sales people.
Just like with anything else, exit route is a function of time and budget and the migration cost is always proportional to the previous customization effort. If you pay 100k per year in license costs and spent 200-300k in 2-3 years to build current setup, you may need another 0.5-1M to get off this hook and jump to another one (which will be hard to pick). I doubt anyone seriously considers this scenario, because risks are too low and rewards are too high (it is a really good product, for which in many scenarios it is hard to find cost-efficient alternative).
Git-based SaaS has weak lock-in, unless you waded too deep into platform-specific integrations. Agile-oriented project management, while it tries to have platform specific ways of grouping, labeling, etc. is also weakly sticky because task descriptions are (or should be) what matters.
This is good, especially for small new teams at startups that want to shop different tools before having a lot of stuff to move around.
All SaaS aspires to be sticky because investors told them to be that way. Almost all SaaS with institutional investors has to make stickiness noises. But it is easier for some than others.
I the SaaS is Open Source, you can always host it yourself, or pay some one else to host it, or fork it, or any number of other solutions if the current provider does not fit anymore. Open Source is the best way to fight vendor lock-in.
If not Open Source, it should use open standard APIs and data models, with free or cheap data export.
Last time they did this, it was _right_ after the window that they had grandstanded and asked other companies to pledge no pandemic layoffs.
Benioff did a whole media tour talking about how Salesforce would do no pandemic layoffs to set some kind of example, and said that they didn't expect other companies to follow their example, but asked them to just pledge no layoffs for 90 days, even though Salesforce was going to do better than that.
Around 91 says later, Salesforce laid off 10% of the company, with no prior warning to the employees who were laid off. The atmosphere internally from the top down was outrage that any of the employees who were laid off would mention that they got laid off to their family/friends/coworkers, and that doing so was somehow a betrayal of "trust".
Brett Taylor, who was then the "co-CEO" (read: Benioff's cleanup crew and babysitter), led an all-hands a month or so later where they took no questions and referred to this as a "one-time reshaping exercise". Benioff slipped up and told MSNBC that this was an annual thing. Brett Taylor pretended not to know Benioff had said that, and acted like it never happened.
This all-hands was a full month after the all-hands that took place the same week as the layoffs. In that one, they took questions, but since all the questions were about the layoffs, they acted like nobody had submitted any questions and the Q&A host came up with some softball "what projects are you excited about"/"what's the biggest challenge with being a market leader" ego questions instead.
I didn't believe that it was "one-time" then, and today I've learned that I was right not to. I left before it became a habit, and have only been relieved to have left.
I wonder when the next annual 10% layoffs will happen at Salesforce? Because it's pretty much the only thing I'd trust them to do reliably at this point.
Co-heads is always a subtext for executive disfunction.
I don't think I've ever heard of it working out long term at any level from division co-head to co-CEO.
It's also fascinating the opposite direction is also allowed to persist - the guy who is CEO of 4 companies at once.
As a lowly high income IC, I am prohibited from almost any outside business activity and in some cases forced to divest when joining a new firm. Somehow the guy running the company who has actual ability to make conflicted decisions is allowed to moonlight? Fabulous.
> Co-heads is always a subtext for executive disfunction. I don't think I've ever heard of it working out long term at any level from division co-head to co-CEO
Don’t VC’s generally prefer that a startup has co-founders? Having such a team mate fosters better decisions, acts as cheerleader when one person is feeling down, etc.
I don’t see a material difference between that and having a co-CEO setup…
> It's also fascinating the opposite direction is also allowed to persist - the guy who is CEO of 4 companies at once.
That amount is, I think, only applicable to Elon Musk and it looks like this is going to crash sooner or later anyway - the big Tesla investors are all furious about how much wealth Elon's shitposting has cost them and I would not be surprised if they threaten him with the choice of continuing to tweet or getting ousted. In any case, even he was a paper-only CEO at SpaceX anyway, Gwynne Shotwell has run the ship for years now.
I too am wondering why Elon is only running a single digit count of companies. Think of how much faster the singularity would arrive if he was running 10+ corporations!
As an ex trailblazer I can confirm this. That all hands was unreal. Everyone was asking about layoffs on all-hands slack channel, and Mark/Brett were demoing upcoming new features in their Work.com product.
Yeah I really don't understand that style of "leadership". I'm no CEO, but even a simple blow off like this would be more effective:
"I know everyone has a lot of questions and concerns about the recent layoffs, but since emotions are strong right now, we'll collect these and discuss them next time"
What I don’t understand is why they don’t stretch it out over the whole year - less than 1% a month could be relatively easily “hidden” even if people kinda know what is going on. Average churn might be lower than that, even.
Which makes me think it’s performative and they WANT the shareholders to see it.
Yeah I agree. Something about actions being louder than words here. I will say spreading it out creates a worse environment of fear from employees. It’s like pulling a bandaid off slowly. This way, the survivors know they’re safe for some period of time and can focus on longer term things. They likely feel that they can tread water performance wise and make it through the next year too. They can also approach their personal finances from an assumption of having a paycheck for the next year at least. These things are typically to address the under-performers and misfits that come with hiring thousands of people each year. It forces the business to reevaluate its needs based on its goals on a cadence. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of Milton’s in the basement (to use an Office Space reference).
How would that work? Identify the 10% in December and then slowly remove them? Or have your management go through a 1% low performers identification process every single month? The logistics of both options are difficult to pull off. It is especially hard to keep the layoff list secret.
> less than 1% a month could be relatively easily “hidden”
If your a public company it’s not hidden. Analysts are watching everything. A one time even might hit your stock and then it starts to recover soon after, but an ongoing event would raise suspicions of a deeper problem.
My sense of scale is a bit thrown. I think at the time with all the uncertainty and the inability to trust corporate leadership, I trusted the largest number I heard as internal scuttlebutt, which was 10%. The actual number was somewhere around 1,000 to 1,500 people, which was like 5% or something of the company.
He seems like the slimiest CEO imaginable. I have no data to back this up, just his constant woke clamoring, before woke dominated the culture, and the way he looks. My gut just instantly sets off alarm bells.
This corporate bulimia, these binge-and-purge cycles, are a remarkably unpleasant feature of 21st century employee life.
I hope those affected are able to find work before their severance runs out. One positive aspect is that the Salesforce ecosystem is gigantic, and there'll be work for some in the partner firms and consultancies with expertise in the platform.
What we need is 1-5% of these 10/20/30%+ layoffs go on to start new businesses.
We've had a solid decade+ of FAANG dominance now and arguably all of these companies are comfortably milking existing cash cows with minimal innovation and increasingly degraded product experiences.
I'm trying to think of one large tech company that has a better core product today than 10 years ago. Maybe Shopify / MS? Someone help me out.
Eh, I kinda doubt your typical startup is going to sprout up and compete with FAANG. They could, and some will, but that shouldn't be the goal. I think people forget that 25-50 mil arr businesses are small potatoes to megacorps but can happily and gainfully employ lots of workers. Getting into a market that is big enough to pay the bills but small enough to not attract attention is a good place to live.
And hell, if you need ideas just look at the businesses that the megacorps discard because they're only million dollar ideas and not billion.
Plenty of new companies have popped up over the past two decades, but every single time, if they make any progress on anything that might someday make money, a mega-corp will throw $300 million at them and competition solved!
It's hard to be angry at the company for selling out, because the way capitalism works is all the money goes to the individuals who are able to effect the decision, so they get life changing amounts of money even though everyone else gets pennies, if that.
But it should be clear how detrimental this system is to a functioning and competitive market.
I think of it as a career thing. Someone gets promoted they need to hire 5-10 new people to manage. They lay off 5-10 people their career is facing a setback.
But I just saw this commercial on TV where Mathew McSomethingOrOther led legions of happy looking people through the streets of a city pledging to change how the world works all because of Salesforce.com . It looked like an expensive commercial. I know I'd sign up if I could.
In theory less people working means less demand, which means less of a need for labour. Places like Japan where you have had a collapsing working population for years have never seen similar spikes in job openings like the US is currently seeing,
The US saw a crazy spike in job openings at the start of 2021 which has only recently started to show signs of cooling. So imo what we're seeing in the US is much better explained by the $2T stimulus injection that occurred at the start of 2021 than demographics.
When this collapse in workforce population occurs perhaps firms will learn that they can survive and even thrive with much less "fluff staff" who mostly sit idle or contribute very little to the overall success of any given project. I continuously see a decent amount of what I consider staffing excess in a large fraction of the companies I've worked with. (My personal philosophy here is that companies/projects/etc are better off with fewer and much higher quality employees. The challenge is finding them, hiring them and keeping them.)
It's been echoed here often that many of the large SV firms and MAANG-type companies were just hoovering up talent to keep them away from competitors. This seems like a decent corp strategy when cheap money is raining down for 1-2 decades. However, now that we're entering into a new macro-economic climate maybe this practice will subside a bit, too.
There are, but the people aren't necessarily where the jobs are. I've got positions in Huntsville, AL that aren't remote-capable, and we cannot get people to even apply.
For a while it was fashionable to tell people who were having a hard time finding work that they needed to move. I'm wondering if people are so tolerant of suggesting it the other direction, so:
Nothing that immigration won't solve. You have hoardes of young people from South Asia, Africa that will come up and fill any money making opportunity in the states.
We haven’t been preparing for the massive retirement of the boomers. It’s tough in many cases where they spend their careers keeping younger people out of leadership.
Then they complain to national papers that workers aren’t hustling enough to get into leadership.
There will be volatility as a new generation takes over at companies. Each generation is larger and more educated than the last so demand will keep up.
Readit News
We really need to lock this absurdity down and increase severance requirements for large companies heavily. It's one thing to gamble risk for the company, it's something completely different to gamble employee livelihood when you're signaling job security by hiring.
My current worry is that the first round of layoff at my first company will get 4 months severance, I'll miss that round, and 2 months later get laid off with only 2 months severance. This would of course mean that my severance ends at the same times as the first group but I had to work an additional 2 months.
Either that or they see something the rest of us don't when looking at economic data (a long recession).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retrai...
- layoff results in fewer than 50 workers losing their jobs at a single employment site
- If 50 to 499 workers lose their jobs and that number is less than 33% of the employer's total, active workforce at a single employment site
These seem to let some* tech companies off the hook.
* Those that are highly remote or distributed.
Does "more reluctant" here = "more thoughtful"?
I'm sure you could take it too far, but I'm highly skeptical that we're in any sort of optimal situation today.
A strong labor market has been effective in rasing the real incomes of the bottom 25% or so over the past few years, it's entirely possible that a weaker labor market with stronger workers protections would've been less effective at doing so leaving the very poor worse off.
Where's the efficiency for employee or employer?
Typically there is not a hefty severance paid by most companies though. There's some restructuring costs and lots of disruption though.
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I’d rather it be harder to get a job, but have higher job security when you get it.
Depends on where it happens. They are in many places.
It's definitely hard to process. Lots of feelings of anger, sadness, relief, etc.
Fortunately for her, the severance is pretty generous (paid through March, then 6 months on top). But there's also anxiety about the job market right now with so many tech workers being let go.
Deprecate means "to continue supporting but to discourage its use." 99% of people believe it means to end support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downsampling_(signal_processin...
So I'd expect at least a big chunk would be S&M cuts, even through of course you still need salespeople.
10% of a 75k company is still 7k people. From the King of SaaS. Wild times.
Finance spreadsheet alchemists last 10 years saw big gross margins in software (overinflated by not taking into account cost to acquire user), bought into long-term incumbent dominance narrative from founders, and now they're stuck with companies that are willing to spend 10x+ lifetime customer value to acquire a user.
Everyone with a vested interest in these companies/investments always seems to say the real returns are 10 years+ once they are in a dominant position in their industry and have monopolistic pricing power.
How are we supposed to know what happens in 5 years, let alone 10+? Seems like a big carnival trick to me. What's interesting is that this mentality is so engrained that the people promoting it don't seem to even get that they're in on an act.
You could have the best tool on the planet, but if the cost to distribute it is greater than what those customers acquired will ultimately pay you, you don't have a company.
Most SaaS founders know that a 3:1 ratio between LTV and CAC is ideal - and while arguments might hold water that a worse ratio is OK for a brief period, I don't think anyone involved doesn't realize that it's difficult to sustain that.
The mental magic trick to justify it probably goes like this - "Yes, we're underwater on the LTV-CAC ratio for now, but once we're in position XYZ we'll be able to launch new products ABC and increase LTV from there". Which isn't wrong. And the new CAC to upsell product ABC to existing clients is going to be very low. So in a sense, you CAN justify (at least in a 'superficially prudent way') a worse ratio with that argument.
And ironically, Salesforce is a GREAT example of this WORKING (up until now?). They have ruthlessly increased ACV and LTV for decades, through increases to pricing, growing features, launching new products, creating the app ecosystem, etc.
ARR = Annual Recurring Revenue
S&M = Sales and Marketing
Is that right?
The lock-in to the platform appears to be very fierce. Are there viable routes to exit Salesforce if anyone ever needed to?
(Note: I’m not saying Salesforce is doomed or anything, just the layoffs got me thinking in that direction theorically).
This offers a strategy to read old SFDC data BI tools or in parallel with using a new CRM.
However the real SFDC lock-in is around business process. If your global Sales or Support team lives in SFDC it’s not easy to retrain them to another system.
Not my area, but I was under the impression Salesforce was trying to pinch continual-export by jacking up prices on bulk data exports.
But I think the business model behind it is you hire a "Salesforce consultant" to steer your integration with the understanding that you can replace a small team of developers doing a home-rolled solution with a single developer who runs your SF integration. And Salesforce slurps up 60% of the labor cost savings and you keep the 40% and declare success.
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Currently, we are moving forward with Odoo, which has its own quirks but has better functionality than Salesforce IMO. No transition is fun, but an ETL from SF to Odoo is very doable (odooable), and the feature sets are pretty equivalent.
HubSpot is not a replacement for hugely complex organizations that needs to dump tens of millions or more into a Salesforce instance (software + labor), but for mid-size and below it's great.
Why worry about the company having economic issues, unless it means degraded service or it getting shut off?
How is this different than any other SaaS?
This is good, especially for small new teams at startups that want to shop different tools before having a lot of stuff to move around.
All SaaS aspires to be sticky because investors told them to be that way. Almost all SaaS with institutional investors has to make stickiness noises. But it is easier for some than others.
If not Open Source, it should use open standard APIs and data models, with free or cheap data export.
If you don't like it, administer your own database.
Benioff did a whole media tour talking about how Salesforce would do no pandemic layoffs to set some kind of example, and said that they didn't expect other companies to follow their example, but asked them to just pledge no layoffs for 90 days, even though Salesforce was going to do better than that.
Around 91 says later, Salesforce laid off 10% of the company, with no prior warning to the employees who were laid off. The atmosphere internally from the top down was outrage that any of the employees who were laid off would mention that they got laid off to their family/friends/coworkers, and that doing so was somehow a betrayal of "trust".
Brett Taylor, who was then the "co-CEO" (read: Benioff's cleanup crew and babysitter), led an all-hands a month or so later where they took no questions and referred to this as a "one-time reshaping exercise". Benioff slipped up and told MSNBC that this was an annual thing. Brett Taylor pretended not to know Benioff had said that, and acted like it never happened.
This all-hands was a full month after the all-hands that took place the same week as the layoffs. In that one, they took questions, but since all the questions were about the layoffs, they acted like nobody had submitted any questions and the Q&A host came up with some softball "what projects are you excited about"/"what's the biggest challenge with being a market leader" ego questions instead.
I didn't believe that it was "one-time" then, and today I've learned that I was right not to. I left before it became a habit, and have only been relieved to have left.
I wonder when the next annual 10% layoffs will happen at Salesforce? Because it's pretty much the only thing I'd trust them to do reliably at this point.
It's also fascinating the opposite direction is also allowed to persist - the guy who is CEO of 4 companies at once.
As a lowly high income IC, I am prohibited from almost any outside business activity and in some cases forced to divest when joining a new firm. Somehow the guy running the company who has actual ability to make conflicted decisions is allowed to moonlight? Fabulous.
Don’t VC’s generally prefer that a startup has co-founders? Having such a team mate fosters better decisions, acts as cheerleader when one person is feeling down, etc.
I don’t see a material difference between that and having a co-CEO setup…
What do you think?
That amount is, I think, only applicable to Elon Musk and it looks like this is going to crash sooner or later anyway - the big Tesla investors are all furious about how much wealth Elon's shitposting has cost them and I would not be surprised if they threaten him with the choice of continuing to tweet or getting ousted. In any case, even he was a paper-only CEO at SpaceX anyway, Gwynne Shotwell has run the ship for years now.
It's actually worked quite well at Oracle over the decades.
Benioff, who is former Oracle, hasn't perfected it like Larry has.
What I don’t understand is why they don’t stretch it out over the whole year - less than 1% a month could be relatively easily “hidden” even if people kinda know what is going on. Average churn might be lower than that, even.
Which makes me think it’s performative and they WANT the shareholders to see it.
If your a public company it’s not hidden. Analysts are watching everything. A one time even might hit your stock and then it starts to recover soon after, but an ongoing event would raise suspicions of a deeper problem.
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...but was still 1,000 to 1,500 people.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I hope those affected are able to find work before their severance runs out. One positive aspect is that the Salesforce ecosystem is gigantic, and there'll be work for some in the partner firms and consultancies with expertise in the platform.
We've had a solid decade+ of FAANG dominance now and arguably all of these companies are comfortably milking existing cash cows with minimal innovation and increasingly degraded product experiences.
I'm trying to think of one large tech company that has a better core product today than 10 years ago. Maybe Shopify / MS? Someone help me out.
And hell, if you need ideas just look at the businesses that the megacorps discard because they're only million dollar ideas and not billion.
It's hard to be angry at the company for selling out, because the way capitalism works is all the money goes to the individuals who are able to effect the decision, so they get life changing amounts of money even though everyone else gets pennies, if that.
But it should be clear how detrimental this system is to a functioning and competitive market.
I think of it as a career thing. Someone gets promoted they need to hire 5-10 new people to manage. They lay off 5-10 people their career is facing a setback.
Is this the first step? How exciting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duJwGSUhRQA
People haven’t realized how crazy the labor market is about to get with a collapsing workforce population over the next many decades.
https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/job-vacancies
The US saw a crazy spike in job openings at the start of 2021 which has only recently started to show signs of cooling. So imo what we're seeing in the US is much better explained by the $2T stimulus injection that occurred at the start of 2021 than demographics.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/job-vacancies
It's been echoed here often that many of the large SV firms and MAANG-type companies were just hoovering up talent to keep them away from competitors. This seems like a decent corp strategy when cheap money is raining down for 1-2 decades. However, now that we're entering into a new macro-economic climate maybe this practice will subside a bit, too.
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Have you considered moving?
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Then they complain to national papers that workers aren’t hustling enough to get into leadership.
There will be volatility as a new generation takes over at companies. Each generation is larger and more educated than the last so demand will keep up.