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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

#321
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…

Salesforce is giving a minimum of 5 months severance to affected people. That's not too shabby.

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).

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

#322
A friend of mine was hired by Salesforce in January. He worked there for six months. In that time, he did the haphazard onboarding they offered him... and that was it. Every day, he would ask his manager for work. Every day, his manager would tell him to hang in there, work was coming soon.

He never did a single moment of actual money-making or money-saving work for the company. They paid him about $50,000 for the privilege. Exhausted by the absurdity of the situation, he quit, and is now making substantially more money elsewhere... but also has actual work to do.

Nice gig if you can get it, I guess.

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

#323
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Out of curiosity, what do SFDC data export costs currently look like? Not my area, but I was under the impression Salesforce was trying to pinch continual-export by jacking up prices on bulk data exports.

The APIs are convoluted and weird and have rate limits and daily quotas all over the place but no service costs to syphon data out afaik.

Perhaps increased limits are bundled into other license costs.

Their pricing and permissions models are both hard to understand too :)

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

#324

A friend of mine was hired by Salesforce in January. He worked there for six months. In that time, he did the haphazard onboarding they offered him... and that was it. Every day, he would ask his manager for work. Every day, his manager would tell him to hang in there, work was coming soon. He never did a single moment of actual money-making or money-saving work for the company. They paid him about $50,000 for the pr…

Not sure what is the point of this anecdote. In any company of 7k people, regardless of how lean it's run, you'll definitely find at least one person in that situation. I think you're trying to say that Salesforce did the right thing to lay off 10% of its workforce, which would be quite insensitive in this context.

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

#325
post #2

Heard this has affected engineering too, not just or mostly sales as people were thinking or happened before. (I remember a hiring manager years ago telling me once that there hadn't ever been any layoffs, all I could think was "yet".) For those affected, typical full systems cut-off as well, not very ohana of them to just terminate with no notice... Still, not unexpected given everything else going on. Glad I'm not…

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

#326
post #10

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…

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.

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

#327
post #131
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. Romans invented stacked ranking.

It’s a bit more ironic than that —- at least according to to Wikipedia, they drew lots (I.e randomly) for the individual who was killed.

I think the reasoning behind decimation was that it was supposed to be an equivalent bloodbath defeat. Historically, a rout typically resulted in about 10% casualties. Decimation reduced the calculus of a Roman soldier to 'stay in the fight, and risk a 10% chance of death' versus 'run, and risk a 10% chance of being killed at random by your tentmates'.

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

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seems like the low performers would have been taken care of already from the battle.

That's not how the legions worked. The men assembled three ranks deep. The first rank was comprised of those with middling experience, who had seen combat before. The rear rank was the senior veterans. The cherries with no experience went in the middle, both to be reassured by the E4 mafia laying skunion in the front rank, and to be prodded on by the very experienced guys behind them.

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

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like the low performers would have been taken care of already from the battle.

Not necessarily. Cowardice is a viable individual survival strategy.

Where would a Roman run? To somewhere in Gaul?

"Ave! Auxilium requiro."

"Oxnychz navar werun dosh? [laughs in extinct language]"

"Quid?"

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

#330

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).

There are no viable alternatives. Their business model is monopolistic vendor lock-in.

If you don't like it, administer your own database.

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