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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

#231

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

Decimation in a signal processing context would suggest "keep 1/10" instead ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downsampling_(signal_processin...

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

#232

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.

Established companies without slack are just zombie companies. They are dead, they just don't know it.

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

#233
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.

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

#234
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lowering costs --> higher profits.

Why not fire 100% of employees in that case?

Salesforce employee count doubled since the pandemic started. Doesn't seem unreasonable to believe some of those employees can be cut without affecting revenue too much.

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

#235

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).

Anyone unhappy with salesforce could always migrate to a SAP-based solution for all their business software needs ;)

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

#236

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…

Uhh, Oracle is the obvious counter example. They've had co-CEOs and their stock is on fire right now.

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

#237

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.

In that kind of setting I imagine the low performers would sometimes be likeliest to survive, if they broke rank to run away. I imagine the lots would come out if everyone gave an honest effort.

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

#238

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 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.

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

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 succ…

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…

Oh, I agree. For what it's worth, nobody got "cut" -- those devs are now buried in a different pile of work.

Really so much problematic SaaS (or PaaS) stuff all boils down to crude hacks to work around labor shortages.

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

#240

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.

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