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Ghost_of_P34 t1_j2x9js2 wrote

Well, it's a good thing Salesforce recently spent millions of dollars on marketing w/ celebrity endorsements. /s

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_tx t1_j2xce1o wrote

I know it feels kinda weird, but those one off costs really don't affect decisions today. The SAAS industry is extremely forward looking because for companies like Salesforce, their product is insanely sticky. Salesforce really doesn't lose many customers so the company has cash coming in. They just aren't bringing in enough new customers to warrant paying the sales staff so much money today.

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traegeryyc t1_j2xd8az wrote

>companies like Salesforce, their product is insanely sticky.

They developed an Early Warning System that tracks ~130 customer metrics. It can predict a customer about to churn with more than 95% accuracy more than 9 months out.

They are incredibly dialed in.

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_tx t1_j2xh5dm wrote

I'm sure there are others, but Salesforce and Workiva are the 2 platforms I never saw anyone leave while I was in consulting.

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BasroilII t1_j2y5c3n wrote

My company left salesforce. There were a couple reasons, but cost was the biggest.

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someguy7710 t1_j2ykuzu wrote

Its insanely expensive, we moved some stuff off it, but not entirely.

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traegeryyc t1_j2z4y5p wrote

Definitely. I promoted and championed HubSpot into my ladt couple organizations. It is an incredibly powerful, c9nnected, scalable, approachable and more affordable platform.

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tylerdotaa t1_j31jh2l wrote

Being an admin of both products in the past you cannot compare hubspot to salesforce.. hubspot is a whellbarrow salesforce is a porsche

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jade09060102 t1_j30zery wrote

SAP also very sticky

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djwm12 t1_j3190dm wrote

SAP has been pretty innovative in the past 5-10 years. Not saying they're perfect but headway is being made. Oracle, on the other hand, seems less appreciated by enterprise customers. I still can't forgive them for what they did to OpenOffice. And yes I'm aware of LibreOffice.

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ChocolateTsar OP t1_j2xllgw wrote

Yeah, I don't understand why they bring so many celebrities and famous people to DreamForce. Most people using Salesforce's software probably don't care.

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shamblingman t1_j2yf0rt wrote

It's just product awareness and is not targeted to current users. The one time advertising cost is nothing to them.

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Littlebotweak t1_j2xqhop wrote

It's just appearances, fitting in with the scene (that they helped create). I've worked with and for 'salesforce companies' and it's a lot of EBITDA focused cult-like insanity.

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ShellOilNigeria t1_j2z443i wrote

I got to see Stevie Wonder at Dreamforce about five years ago. It was great until he went on a pro-Hillary Clinton rant for about 15 minutes....

That sucked

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mrbrambles t1_j2zjzry wrote

You are telling me sales people don’t care about having celebrity addled experiences to brag about?

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esther_lamonte t1_j31k50i wrote

We all would rather they invest in making “lightning” faster than molasses. That whole platform is a shit covered snail.

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Evening-Odd t1_j35dq7h wrote

Shit covered snail is going to be my new catch phrase 🤣

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singinfaticags t1_j36bhjc wrote

I was wondering what is going to happen with Salesforce's existing customers. Are they going to receive less support because of this layoff? I personally used Salesforce and I'm planning to migrate from Salesforce to Odoo. I heard that Odoo is like SF which handles all the business aspects like accounting, project management, CRM and etc.

However, I don't want to bother to do the migration myself. I'm planning to hire an Odoo specialist from Brixxs. It is a reliable IT company based in Netherlands. You can Google them to know more about the services they offered.

I've had a great experience working with them in the past about my mobile application. They did a stellar job in developing it. And, I think they will do great too in my SF to Odoo migration.

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thought_first t1_j2x5z9a wrote

If you're in a position to, let your local HR and recruiting teams know that there is talent available. Employees won't wait to be part of that 10% and will look for change early.

I feel for those impacted in these types of decisions. 10% is easily handled through attrition over the course of one year and without the anxiety leading to wide-spread disruption. I'll never understand how terrible decision makers rise to the highest ranks of leadership.

Salesforce is going to ruin Slack.

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oceanicfeels t1_j2xcgo3 wrote

>10% is easily handled through attrition over the course of one year and without the anxiety leading to wide-spread disruption. I'll never understand how terrible decision makers rise to the highest ranks of leadership.

I think it has to do with the psychology that people want to know they're having some sort of impact on a finished product or the operations of a business. Even if it's this kind of "trim the fat" decision that layoffs tend to entail.

As a content writer/strategist, I've seen so many stakeholders give edits to things they think has some sort of value when a lot of changes are really six of one, half a dozen of the other. People just want to feel like they're contributing something to the conversation, especially when their ego won't let them off the hook in that way.

Honestly, so much of middle management is such a joke. They sit in strategy meetings to pass information, as well as the buck to technicians and contributor-level employees. And for what? To put lipstick on a bacon balance sheet. It is what it is. So much of what we humans do is a waste of time. But then again it's all a waste of time.

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feral_brick t1_j2x7th4 wrote

It's especially stupid since I'd expect a lot of their revenue is from a large volume of contracts so they should have fairly stable ARR

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Blind-_-Tiger t1_j30qw93 wrote

For those wondering why 10%, Neutron Jack Welch probably magicked this number up in the 80’s and managers have used it ever since:

“DAVIES: Manager of the century - wow. You know, apart from closing plants that he deemed too expensive or moving operations overseas, he had an idea that even with the workforce that you have, you should regularly rank them and cull the bottom what, 10%, right?

GELLES: He had a euphemistic name for this practice. He called it the vitality curve, but it was known internally and more broadly in the public as stack ranking or, even more sharply, rank and yank. And the idea is this. Managers, he said, needed to rank their employees. Twenty percent get an A grade. Seventy percent get a B grade, and 10% get a C grade. And if you're in that 10%, you're out of the company. He did that for 20 years inside GE, which led to thousands and thousands of layoffs. And it became, because he was so influential, dogma in corporate America.”

From NPR’s Fresh Air: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/short-term-profits-and-long-term-consequences-did-jack-welch-break-capitalism

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GMRealTalk t1_j2zlrw0 wrote

> 10% is easily handled through attrition over the course of one year and without the anxiety leading to wide-spread disruption. I'll never understand how terrible decision makers rise to the highest ranks of leadership.

Well, they've had a hiring freeze for about six months already, so the real target was much higher than 10%. This layoff is on top of half a year of attrition.

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drawkbox t1_j2ybf3q wrote

Slack has sucked for some time. I'll never forgive them for fronting with web/eng standards and acting like they were going to be the IRC dev friendly one, then they go and join the Oracle mafia Ellison/Benioff style enterprisey shite and killed that whole idea.

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SoMuchTehnique t1_j2z717g wrote

Some of there best people in EMEA have already left and have seen this coming since mid last year.

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TheGoodBunny t1_j30y3mb wrote

> If you're in a position to, let your local HR and recruiting teams know that there is talent available.

TBH Salesforce is famous for being a rest-and-vest place so candidates might have a hard time shaking that image off.

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Hand_Banana_0082 t1_j32f8n1 wrote

>I'll never understand how terrible decision makers rise to the highest ranks of leadership.

It is because they are good at networking and flattering people in order to manipulate them. Then once one person like this gets into management, then they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.

The scary thing is, the number of people who have no leadership skills being in a position that requires it.

In the end their only rally cry is to "add value" because that's all they rely on. The constant growth technique. Meanwhile you want to keep adding and adding, yet what you added doesn't work properly. And instead of fixing the problem you just add more "value" as a workaround.

Honestly the sales reps for software companies must be great at their jobs.

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gardenpartytime t1_j2xxtsw wrote

Hire employees and get a tax break. Fire them, and get a bailout or tax loss carryforward. Isn’t it fun being a pawn?

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DeathIIAmerikkka t1_j2yck4k wrote

Well, they spent all that money getting the location from Everything, Everywhere, All at Once so Matthew McConaughey could talk to us in a powder blue suit.

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ApocolipseJ t1_j2ye8fb wrote

Is this an AI constructed sentence? It feels very 2017

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Jabbajaw t1_j2yvqix wrote

A guy I know would constantly brag about how much he made working for them.

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biggerbetterharder t1_j2zfm3k wrote

In sales? How much?

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Jabbajaw t1_j2zncbu wrote

He was/is a developer. Worked remotely and claimed to be making 110,000-115,000 per year. This guy pretty much sat on his ass all day every day and from what we could figure didn't do a damned thing. I have zero proof of what he was making but he was annoying as fuck I can tell you that.

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happyman91 t1_j2zp7vk wrote

Salary is easily believable, in fact on the low end if he is a decently technically capable salesforce dev

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M1ntyFresh t1_j2zv7rx wrote

Yeah for a dev that’s on the lower end for a experienced engineer. For reference, I make 160k with about 7 years experience

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Skellum t1_j2zvr4z wrote

Thats easy senior dev with 2 years experience in a good number of softwares.

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bakgwailo t1_j30lrit wrote

> Worked remotely and claimed to be making 110,000-115,000 per year.

I mean thats pretty junior dev level at this point salary wise. probably had stock and bonus on top. If $110k was his total comp must have been right out of college/not in the US.

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WalkerBRiley t1_j3200is wrote

I like how the CEO says "I take responsibility" and yet he knows his salary and position are in no danger.

Wanna take some responsibility? Resign alongside the 7k people you just put out of work.

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eDave1009 t1_j2zejmc wrote

The IT company I work for is laying off 10% as well. Started rigtht at the holidays. Suddenly, my team members are not attending meetings only to find out they were laid off.

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Jerrymoviefan3 t1_j3101of wrote

The expanded employment 30% since the pandemic began so the will still be 17% higher than the start.

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plopseven t1_j2yk45l wrote

If only they could cut the height of that eyesore tower by 10%…or more.

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