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Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

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Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#121

I propose the title should be changed to “Salesforce decimates staff as part of restructuring”. :)

Absolutely, in Roman times 'decimatio' was the punishment for a poor result in battle. The soldiers were obliged to choose one of ten, and kill him.

Huh. Romans invented stacked ranking.

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

Companies without slack can’t respond effectively to emergencies. see: Southwest.

Good point. I should have scoped my comment to only target projects which primarily require software engineering.

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#123

How about their future prospects? From the 4 implementations I've seen all are desperately trying to leave the platform. One succeeded so far. Is the enterprise Salesforce craze over?

The lock-in is insane with salesforce. I think it is similar to excel at this point, sure there are competitors (google sheets, etc.) but none of them are serious threats to excel yet. Maybe in the next decade excel will start to lose significant marketshare, but not anytime soon. Salesforce seems to be similar in that it is so ingrained and people don't want to learn a new system.

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#124
post #15
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Company makes $2B/year profit with 75k employees. Company lays off 7500 people, saving ~$1.5B / year in payroll / benefits / office space / etc. Company takes one-time ~$1.5B charge for severance and other layoff costs. Investors believe company will see ~$1B more net profit in subsequent years, assuming 10% staff reduction can be absorbed with little profit impact. Share price reflects NPV of future profits, so stoc…

At my first job they would lay off employees, then systems would fail and the person who could fix it was laid off. Eventually a big customer would complain and the company would incur monetary SLA penalties for the systems being down. They would have to hire the laid off guy back as a contractor and pay some company $100+ an hour for a $30 (at the time) an hour salary employee. Eventually someone with a brain would…

It usually works, because it usually takes years for the loss of people to have an impact on revenue. By that time, investors already realized their gain and moved their money into another company, leaving someone else holding the bag.

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#125

Whenever I look at client’s Salesforce setups, I always wonder in the back of my mind what they will do if Salesforce has a significant down-turn? 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).

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 auto…

How do you run financials in SF?

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#126
post #103

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 employe…

WARN Act already exists and has state level analogs that strengthen it to some extent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retrai...

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#127

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…

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…

Go ahead, name a country that doesn't have two presidents. A boat that sets sail without two captains. Where would Catholicism be without the popes.

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#128

Whenever I look at client’s Salesforce setups, I always wonder in the back of my mind what they will do if Salesforce has a significant down-turn? 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).

> The lock-in to the platform How is this different than any other SaaS?

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.

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#130

Whenever I look at client’s Salesforce setups, I always wonder in the back of my mind what they will do if Salesforce has a significant down-turn? 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).

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 auto…

We just switched from classic to lightning and the latter is anything but lightning fast: Timeouts, white screens, and generally frustrating.
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