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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

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Including accelerated RSU vesting?

The letter doesn't explicitly say (I'll way to hear from friends at CRM to get actual details) but their SEC filing mentions stock-based compensation as an associated cost of the layoffs, so it sounds like accelerated vesting might be happening.

I read that they will technically be on payroll until late March. If that's the case, it's not so much accelerated vesting as it is vesting while not being "employed".

So same result, to some extent.

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you like the current status quo where employers are not reluctant to hire, and they're just as likely to lay folks off? Where's the efficiency for employee or employer?

I like it. Employment should be easy to find, switch and end. More like dating than marriage.

Nah, the average human being wants a career. Not everyone is like SWE who feel comfortable hopping jobs every two years and never really settling in.

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

#263

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

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?

"Deprecate" is a great example of this. Everyone gets it wrong, but no one seems to care.

Deprecate means "to continue supporting but to discourage its use." 99% of people believe it means to end support.

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

#264
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this 9 months of full pay? How long was your wife's tenure if I may ask?

Yeah, that's what it sounds like to us. She had been there about 6 years.

I didn't think anyone gave that sort of severance any longer in the US even for someone who has been at a place a middling long time.

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

#265
post #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…

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.

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

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you like the current status quo where employers are not reluctant to hire, and they're just as likely to lay folks off? Where's the efficiency for employee or employer?

I like it. Employment should be easy to find, switch and end. More like dating than marriage.

Sure, if we roll out some sort of socialized medical coverage. At least for my family, stability of medical coverage is a major impediment to changing jobs.

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

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like it more than the (admittedly extreme) situation in France. There could be a happy medium, but going far enough down the road to making it hard to fire makes it hard to get hired.

I feel like there's a fairly big difference in effects between: - "If we hire this specific person , we might be stuck with them for a while" and - "If we build out this entire department, we can't close it down on a whim"

I think where a lot of companies find themselves is "[last year] we think we're going to grow 20% next year and need to hire 15% to cover that business growth; [this year] oops, we only grew 5%, meaning we should have only grown headcount by 2% and now need to layoff around 10% of our staff to keep our financials sound and protect the jobs of the other 90%"

I think that's a lot of repeated applications of the former case.

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

#268
post #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…

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.

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

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"Deprecate" is a great example of this. Everyone gets it wrong, but no one seems to care. Deprecate means "to continue supporting but to discourage its use." 99% of people believe it means to end support.

Really? I see that word used correctly more often than not, but I guess it depends on what projects you work with.

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

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% literally use literally wrong though.

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

I would consider the converse of "literally" to be "figuratively".

"Literally" literally means "literally", but figuratively now means "figuratively".

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