Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

marketwatch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 355 posts

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

#241

Post by ubertaco »

prettychill wrote: post #111
ubertaco wrote: post #14

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…

The post pandemic layoff was nowhere near 10%

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.

...but was still 1,000 to 1,500 people.

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

#242

Post by ubertaco »

gedy wrote: post #160
bajirao wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Salesforce operates in a "zero-trust" environment, in that employees should place zero trust in the company, and the company places zero trust in the employees.

It's just modern security practices! /s

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

#243

Post by grantsch »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #120
grantsch wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

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.

Yes that would be one way to justify to others spending more on acquiring customers than they pay you.

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

#244

Post by dantheman »

chucksmash wrote: post #202
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that really make sense if layoffs only happen a minority of the time after hiring sprees?

If the answer to "am I likely to have to lay this person off soon?" isn't "probably not" then it's good that the company becomes more circumspect in hiring. The other side of the token is that such a guarantee would help convince more people to accept an offer. I'd personally be hesitant to switch to a less stable job right now, and getting an offer yanked or immediately laid off with minimal severance would be bruta…

Why do you want to make it harder for people to get hired?

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

#245

Post by dantheman »

mr_00ff00 wrote: post #191
Eumenes wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Severance requirements are not an entitlement. It'll make hiring harder than it already is.

It’s all about trade-offs and I think it’s worth it. I’d rather it be harder to get a job, but have higher job security when you get it.

Then choose companies that offer that, you can sign a long contract. Or avoid companies that are rapidly growing. Why should you force your preference on everyone else?

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

#247

Post by ptmcc »

willcipriano wrote: post #46

Know what's odd to me? It seems like every company that did layoffs over the past 3 months overhired by 8% - 12% somehow. Why was it such a narrow range?

Never let a good crisis go to waste. Everyone is seizing on the opportunity to clean house and cut costs while the macro narrative is bearish. Investors and shareholders are demanding it. The days of cheap money are coming to a close so just growing revenue is not enough, now these companies need to show profit.

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

#248

Post by 93po »

scrumper wrote: post #226
amarento wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the converse of "Literally" is, or should be, "Illiterally", I think, I don't know, literally.

M-x mansplain-pedant-mode It's "figuratively" or, more... literally, "metaphorically."

pretty sure it was a joke

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

#249

Post by VirusNewbie »

kirse wrote: post #240
scrumper wrote: post #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.

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…

AWS and GCP are both much better.

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

#250

Post by ubertaco »

dshah wrote: post #117
zippergz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but Salesforce didn't start out that way, and I'm willing to bet that Hubspot wants to be like Salesforce when they grow up.

I'm Co-founder/CTO of HubSpot. There are many things I admire about Salesforce. But, we decidedly don't want to become like Salesforce when we grow up. We have been committed to SMBs for 16+ years now, and not planning to change that anytime soon. They have grown through a lot of M&A, we built our platform from the ground-up for SMBs. There is room in the market for both Salesforce and HubSpot to succeed. Salesforce…

Hi Dharmesh!

I just left Salesforce a bit ago for HubSpot (see my other comment in this thread), and as someone with a bit of a "kool-aid allergy", so to speak, I've been pleasantly surprised by HubSpot's willingness to say "this is what we're good at, and we're going to stick to being really good at that", even when the alternative is potentially really lucrative (but massive pain).

There are a number of ways that life at HubSpot has been a huge improvement to me, but chief among them is that the _employees_ still matter more than the raw "maximum possible profit, screw everything else" focus that I constantly saw at Salesforce, and the "we don't have to eat every single market (poorly) just because others have tried to do so (poorly)" mentality is evidence of that, IMO.

Please keep being that!

And to the grand-parent commenter, I'm _very_ leery of anything that sounds unpleasantly familiar, and probably overly-cynical about large tech companies at this point...and so far I've found pleasant surprises at HubSpot, and I don't see desire (at least yet — it's been only 6 months for me) to be like Salesforce.

Post reply on HN