Tell HN: Salesforce has globally revoked Slack's holiday shutdown benefit
The workplace policy has been in effect for many years, and was until recently an advertised perk of working for Slack. It allowed all employees access to free paid time off from 24th until the New Year (some employees like incident responders would take shifts, but even Customer Experience (their support team) ran skeleton shifts). Today they have announced this policy has ended as a result of the economy as well as making the workplace more equitable (as Salesforce employees could not access this benefit).
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] threadSalesforce raised the prices for Slack Pro Plan as well recently. Doesn't sound like something you'd do if the economy is that bad...
And i assume Salesforce revenue is going to decline this year since the economy is that bad, huh?
That's at least what a microeconomist would say. But it's clear that in this recession there's less startups, and thus less Slack customers, and so Slack's operating costs need to be distributed among fewer companies, resulting in higher per-unit costs.
However it is software, supply is infinity and incremental cost is 0.
> But it's clear that in this recession there's less startups
Its clear thus far in this recession, that more people than ever are in employment. Thus more slack customers.
Inflation however ...
Based on sticker price, a 10k org would only be ~$1mil in revenue for slack (maybe half that with a big org discount?). Really makes me wonder about the valuations like 30bn on total revenue of 1bn.
There is a difference between marginal costs and per-unit costs.
I am sorry but it is not at all clear. Has there been a drop in the number of slack customers?
Number of people in work is up. Unless slack has become unappealing as a solution to its problem, that means number of subscribers up. If slack is unappealing as a product and people are switching to teams / google that is an entirely different issue.
It is also possible that those fixed costs have increased and they are passing on those costs, while retaining whatever margin they have, as there is inflation out there.
“Have chosen to” is the correct phrasing.
Given the availability problems and generally poor quality Slack managed before, I can’t see this going well. They’re lucky the competition is Teams, another basket case.
It's too bad their hands were entirely tied on this and they had no other choice but to take it away from everyone. /s
It always amazes me when my coworkers pretend things just "are how they are" within a company. Everything can be changed, everything is negotiable, nothing is set in stone. Obviously this gets harder as the company gets bigger but the defeatist attitude I often see is so depressing. I'm sure there were some people (Salesforce employees) who heralded this a good change instead of thinking for even 1 minute about how the better change would be that everyone got it. And don't tell me they couldn't afford it, that's just bullshit.
Many, many people think like this. I remember talking to a software engineer from MIT a while back, I don't even remember what we were talking about. But, I distinctly remember him expressing an attitude where someone else received something that he felt that he deserved, regardless of whether the other person deserved it also or not, and to him, this was just about the gravest injustice that he could imagine. He was like visibly angry clenching his teeth while talking about it. And it had nothing to do with whatever the thing was, hence why I can't remember it. To him it was a very deeply rooted idea of "fairness" defined in this sort of simple-minded, inflexible way. And he was ALL ABOUT removing the thing from the other person as opposed to trying to get compensated equally himself.
Similar thing to anyone who deals with China, you just expect that nothing will get done over their new year celebrations and you build schedules appropriately. Salesforce could absolutely afford to do this, they already have a good example in house. Instead of doing something that would generate positive press, they've generated negative headlines and really pissed off the employees as slack twice (once now, and once again later this year around the holidays). What a classic short-sighted MBA brain move.
In the capuchin studies, given that they usually express their displeasure at the experimenter rather than the other monkey and also spontaneously share it's reasonable to view it as the latter.
This whole crab bucket mentality of 'it's unfaaaiiir that minimum wages get raised' rather than fighting to get the benefit for everyone is a distinctly neoliberal and american mindset that you have to 'deserve' to survive or be comfortable.
It is not just that we are a different species and exhibit different behavior under same circumstances as monkeys, but also that the monkeys are kept under captivity all their lives which will profoundly alter their behavior (the same applies to humans).
Of course doing such a thing is incredibly petty and should only be reserved for special cases, as it were.
And nor the apes did think,
Studies, studies, every where
But naught to drop a link.
Ah! well a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young!
Instead of lolz, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
* big companies have entire teams (internal and consultants) advising them on large changes in the name of productivity, cost reduction, whatever. These teams contrive metrics, KPI, and correlations, between what they do and the success of the business. These teams are paid bonuses, promotions, etc., based on these metrics they themselves contrive.
* small companies blindly do what the big companies do because surely these big companies know what they're doing
And everyone suffers. Except the people who implement this stuff. They probably have celebrations.
definitely some misaligned incentives.
do you have an alternative you recommend? Big institutions typically make decisions via "committees of experts" because the alternative decision making in big groups of people is often dictated by a single or cadre of leaders, or total stasis. And small groups of leaders don't scale to the amount of decisions to be made at big groups.
The volatility you describe is part of economic systems in general and hard to get away from. While it seems like a lot, it is actually far, far less than we had in the 1800s and prior to that.
This is incoherent. Capitalism is the assigning of power and capital to those who have power over capital. It is fundamentally opposed to a balance of power.
Assigning power to the collective or to workers is definitionally not capitalist. Mixed systems can work fine, but they are just that. A mixture of capitalist and other systems of organization.
It's called capitalism because it's the only system where they can't get away with it.
Salesforce was in a pickle. It's 'very bad' for a group of people over here to get a benefit, and for others not to get it. It's unfair. So they either have to give the benefit broadly, or take it away.
It's a non-standard benefit, so the easy thing to do would be to align holidays with the parent company.
If Slack was truly it's own entity, they likely should just allow them to have it as they operate totally independently, but that may not be sustainable.
That said, it's really hard to take people's benefits away as well. There's a social cost there.
I remember one company I was at. We all worked hard, when it came to bonus time, everyone in dev got bonus as we hit all the deadlines. Nobody in professional services did as the sales team hadn't got new customers, although they had worked hard on existing accounts.
So professional services complained it was unfair. The company decided being "unfair" was terrible, so tried to take the bonus away from dev as well. At which point pretty much all of us started looking for another job. They eventually relented and paid everyone in dev and ps the bonus.
The 'bad move' is to have different packages on different teams, which is completely untenable.
It will cause chaos among the ranks just as you indicate.
Therefore, it has to even out one way or another.
It's a big deal to give everyone else in the company an extra week off.
So they pulled the bandaid.
It would have been interesting for them to contemplate the extra few days, but their move put them in line with 99.9% of other companies so it's not unreasonable.
They should have figured out a sneaky way to give the Slack folks something else on the down-low though.
But equally, taking away benefits, particularly ones that employees really care about, is also a recipe for discontent.
I remember when IBM bought Lotus. For a long time people thought that spelled the end, as IBM had a long run of buying companies and destroying all the value in them. They tried a different approach with Lotus. As a result, the Lotus employees had significantly better benefits in some ways than the IBM employees. My friend who came from Lotus drove a Jaguar. His manager from IBM had a low end BMW, as the car allowances were different. Pension provision also different. This situation persisted right up until IBM sold Lotus stuff to HCL a couple of years back.
So it is possible to merge even big companies and maintain different benefit systems. For 20 years!
This already happens with compensation and other benefits, so it should be fine.
I believe that Salesforce could give every single employee a handful of extra vacation days, and overall it will cost them less than what they spend in unnecessary benefits for their higher ups.
Instead, it seems that they have decided to play a sort of reverse Robin Hood.
Three years later, the few people I know who still work there say the culture is now irretrievably damaged. What was an attractive, fun place to work is now an unhappy place. They are struggling to recruit good people where before their reputation was an asset.
But the manager concerned remains, has no doubt hit her goals of cost reduction or efficiency or whatever. And has hired more of her kind.
By "macho" I just meant that they seem to pride themselves on taking decisions which don't make them popular with people under them.
Good managers can make unpopular decisions and retain the support of staff under them. I've seen people take pay cuts temporarily, work longer hours, all kinds of extra that comes with good will.
Ultimately it's about respect. Good managers have it. Bad managers seem to revel in not having it.
It's also not uncommon for the bonus amounts awarded to be private.
This is actually a really good point. It probably just replaces the topic-du-jour to whine about and has no actual benefit whatsoever.
In her case, they cut her pay 25%, because it would be unfair to pay the other people less. This was right before COVID, and everyone basically quit - like a whole department of nurses en masse.
She came back as a contractor when they were hard up, at one point making $350/hr. All of the normal staff left and it became a contractor mill. When contract people didn’t show, she got $2000-3000 shift bonuses for a 4 hour work commitment to allow the ER to stay open.
I certainly hope the Slack folks do something similar.
It’s so shortsighted and ultimately defeating/self-destructive when companies act like this.
How is it when I fuck up at work, I get fired but when these definitely reversible decisions are made and allowed to run their course for years we dont see a mass exodus at the SVP level?
If it is well built, sure. At one of my jobs, one of the firehoses requires a messy restart every few days as it was left to decay and now everything is out of date.
The point is that stagnation/KTLO is way easier than expansion and needs way less talent.
So are the patients :p
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/42/482.23
My friends Union recently fought against work from home for desk jobs because the field workers could not enjoy the same benefit.
Corporate leadership negotiated against the Union, but the union prevailes so there is no work from home
As for outliers in general, sure. The whole union thing is based on collective bargaining after all. If Bob is making more than everybody else in the same position, that means there's more room for everybody else doing that job to make more.
If something like this did originate from a union complaint, it sucks now for the best-off, but it's also going to be a real strong point for all the workers to use when the contract is renegotiated.
100% WFH put them between a rock and a hard place. Ultimately the power of bargaining is dependent on being able to strike. Remote weakens that as people can be anywhere. The control lost by management is also felt by labor.
The circumstances vary - if your union and circumstances get hybrid and remote work in the CBA, you’re much better as we’ve already seen “return to the office” used as a stealth layoff technique that denys unemployment and severance.
A nurse with a Bachelor's degree, more or less
"Hooray, we've reduced headcount and improved productivity!!" "Yeah, but your wages bill is now stacked with contractors and is 10x what it was before." "OK,OK, but how about that next exec bonus?"
-David Graeber
I know this reads as a gross oversimplification but it rings true all the time. Imagine if almost everyone collectively at Salesforce said, “nope, this is dumb! We are going to stop working until this benefit is handed out to everyone at the company.” It’d be changed back / expanded within 48 hours.
> Imagine if almost everyone collectively at Salesforce said, “nope, this is dumb! We are going to stop working until this benefit is handed out to everyone at the company.” It’d be changed back / expanded within 48 hours.
That's a prisoner's dilemma, people holding out for the best they can get. If enough people defect then it won't work.
What should we be switching to instead...Teams?
Before COVID this was the case with WFH at my last company. I was able to WFH for 2 days a week but it was impossible to get that codified in the handbook. I was even on the committee that oversaw edits/rewrites of the handbook but HR would not let us add anything about WFH other than "It's up to the manager". I had so many people tell me "I don't know why you are so bothered, you are able to WFH". Yes, today, right now, with this manager, or at least this managers current demeanor I have WFH but all that can turn on a dime, I wanted it to be official. "Of course", the company as a whole couldn't allow WFH, that would be "impossible". I left that company in late 2019 and... surprise! They went fully remote in 2020 and now are a hybrid with the majority of people WFH-ing. It was a rare case of being told it was impossible and would never work to seeing not but a few months later all their arguments to be shown for the BS they really were.
(no affiliation)
My company gave us more holidays off, decided to add extra days off before and after holidays that typically land on weekends, unlimited PTO and a policy of encouraging you to take time off not shame you for using 1 day for a doctors appointment, and surprisingly unlike literally everywhere else I worked, they gave me an 8% raise to account for inflation.
In the bad case, your PTO rarely gets approved, and you never accumulate any to be paid out. Peer pressure is used to convince people to not take time off.
In the good case, leaders lead by example by taking time off frequently, and encouraging their reports to do the same. PTO is approved more often than not. If people start "abusing" the privilege, they get spoken to personally, instead of the whole team/company being punished by changing the policy.
I've worked at a place with unlimited PTO, and it was the latter case, and it was great. I never had to budget my time - I never had to worry that spending an extra day at the beach during the summer meant that I would have one less day to spend with my family in another state during the holidays. The time I took off seemed much more worthwhile than being paid out for 3 accrued days or whatever.
Our VP of Engineering takes off quite a bit too. They all encourage us to and also encourage us to take mental health days too. Mental health is a big concern in my company and they do not take kindly to people not taking care of themselves... It sounds bad to read that way but "do not take kindly" in a good way.
Also we're a heavily remote first and ROWE company, that could also make a huge difference.
"I see that the company has an 'unlimited PTO' policy. The standard PTO time I have taken in the places I work for the last 5 years is 25 days PTO a year. Would I be able to take the same 25 days per year of PTO under the Company's 'Unlimited PTO' policy?"
That way, you are establishing a written record that 25 days (or whatever time you'd prefer), and are letting them know in advance the number of days you will take. That way, you can take 25 days every year, and if they somehow hint you that you are taking "too many days", you can refer to the email showing that hey, before you started, they told you that 25 days was OK.
https://www.betterup.com/blog/unlimited-pto
A coworker that typically holds the heavens up like Atlas felt like he's burning out, so he's about to take 3-6 months off to do yoga in Switzerland or something. Everyone's happy for him. It sucks for project schedules I'm sure, but it's better to take a break and come back fresh than burn out and leave. Another coworker just came back from a 3 month sabbatical, and her fresh mental state will be a great productivity boost.
I just spent a week on a family vacation, then another week volunteering at a solar car race, and then another few days visiting family. I was looking forward to actually getting some focused work done this week, but now I'm out sick and only have the mental capacity to read HN and sleep. I suppose I feel about as productive as I usually do, since I can still respond to people on slack all day!
a) sour grapes
b) people being unwilling to admit that they prefer paternalism instead of being capable of making their own decisions about how to balance work and life
(FWIW for me, making my own decision looks like "4-5 wks per year, not including a handful of ad-hoc 3-day weekends throughout the yr")
Are there other benefits or forms of comp where it's preferable not to agree on amounts beforehand?
To an extent I've been very blessed in my career, and I've always been able to accept new jobs based on my fit with the project and the team. I've also had success negotiating compensation to serve my interests. I've never seriously factored in vacation days into any sort of comparisons. I've never found myself in an environment where my manager had any expectation of proscribing when I should take time off. On the contrary, every manager I've ever had has been wholely supportive whenever I've taken time off. I think a large part of that comes down to my attitude and work ethic. I've certainly become spoiled, though. Unless my situation changes drastically, I wouldn't consider working somewhere with less flexibility than I currently enjoy. I would work for less compensation if it was the right project, though.
Ive seen this a million and one times since I started working in tech, including my nontech friends being blown away by the perks of Google and concluding that they must work me like a dog (I worked a hard 35 hrs/wk at the time).
...that unlimited PTO can't be accrued, and is usually still subject to approval to use like regular limited PTO, which makes it an easy mechanism for arbitrary favoritism by managers without the fallback that if your PTO isn't approved you at least keep and accrue your balance which can be used later in your career or cashed out, and which the company then has an incentive to allow.you to use to clear the liability from their balance sheet.
The theory is you can "take what you need" so long as you're getting your work done. In practice, company culture of course dictates what's considered reasonable, and as best I can tell it is highly variable between companies.
At my "unlimited" place, it seems like 3 weeks is considered reasonable, especially if split up. But I know someone at another company who has had trouble getting more than a week for a couple years running.
It also means if you are not meeting expectations, you’ll probably self-select to get zero time off.
Engineering pays well because you are supposed to work magic. If you can’t produce the magic then the dark clouds gather quickly. The elite sports team analogy is a good one. Keep up an unlucky run of bad games and you’ll get benched then sacked.
I don’t condone any of the above but this is the mindset of “unlimited PTO”. More so than that which I’m seeing others describe, here.
I thought it was because you have to pay people a lot to spend time around engineers who say things like this.
Here I am just programming… I totally skipped magician school.
Log data from each request. Map reduce it into an SQL table. Render the statistics with a JS graphing frontend. Use a pub/sub to update everything in real time. It’s all just plumbing but the overall effect is of something much more.
To an outsider, that is the magic. Software engineers know better — it’s all very well taking a design and implementing the vision but what is much harder is coming up with the design and idea in the first place. Some days you’re on fire implementing component after component without ever really having to rethink anything — you got the interface right first time, or you understood the problem well enough to keep a component small enough without it creeping into multiple areas of concern.
Some days… weeks… it is far from clear what to do next. You know you need to migrate this performance critical code that exists verbatim (copy and paste!) in these two repositories and instead turn it into a single first-class dependency which implements the compute using a GPU instead. Some of the infrastructure of the original code is written in Python. Some in bash. It was written with no thought for making factoring easier and the whole project is in use in production already.
When you’ve got a mental model of what to do you can churn through this kind of work in a week of intense coding. When you have no idea where to start things can feel very hopeless.
If you’re just programming then you’re probably very smart and able to figure these things out without breaking a sweat, or you have a tech lead who nudges you in the right direction with calm competence that belies the fact they wake up at 4am every other night to reach for a legal pad to sketch out yet another potentially doomed idea to reduce technical debt that literally never sees the light of day.
It really depends on your customer's needs; slack going down for a day or two over the holidays is unfortunate but not the end of the world. Salesforce going down could, I imagine, easily cause massive financial losses.
I'd like to think it should be easy enough to put people on emergency call rather than forcing them to put 8 hours of butts in seats for no reason, but apparently that's not how Salesforce wants to roll.
A rota is the positive affirmation that employee X will be here to support the team versus the negative one that well person X can’t not be here, because they’re the last one to take PTO.
Hahaha. Unlimited vacation actually means vacation only when your manager feels like it - which could be less than you'd get under a fixed vacation allotment. Many such cases.
When something sounds too good to be true, it is.
I wouldn’t think too much of this, if it’s that important just find a new job. Remember - it’s not Slack anymore. It’s SalesForce.
1. You are correct, it's clearly just another SFDC company now.
2. Does most of the software engineering world work much over the winter holiday period? I haven't since.. come to think of it, since ever. And that's a long time, more than 20+ years in the biz.
That said, Salesforce is one of the best companies to work for if you want to get a fat paycheck for easy work. Not too many engineers slaving away for Salesforce (unless they're fools volunteering to do so).
Let's be real, Mark Benniof is a relatively generous and pretty cool person compared to the ubiquitous landscape of asshole billionaire leaders in tech you could choose to work for instead.
I’m a strict atheist and recognize Christmas as a general “no work” time. I wouldn’t work at a company that does not also recognize that.
It really isn't.
I was was part of a startup that a number of Apple engineers went to; over half of our engineering org was from Apple, and were used to having that time off, our management chain was fine with it, and we just took it as part of our startup's culture.
The New CEO, a real sales guy, had different ideas. "I think that people can be really productive during that week." He was adamant that he wanted to see butts in seats, across the company. Engineers? Not special. (We were working until the early hours of the morning, nearly every day).
We were told by our director not to worry about it, and just not show up if we didn't want to. What was he going to do, fire half of his engineers?
Some people just don't get it.
I was tracking down one of the hardest bugs I've ever found, it took most of that week (the fix was embarrassingly simple, just swapping two lines of assembly).
I really didn't want to work that week, but the pay made it worth it.
I didn't appreciate this skill until I had a manager who did the same for me. Having a manager who can ruthlessly prioritize, set expectations, and help navigate all of the corporate bureaucracy is a godsend.
When you come across a clear occasion of crap having been deflected from landing on you, do the right thing: show some appreciation for it to your manager. It goes a long way.
Hopefully we can normalize showing appreciation from all directions (direct reports, sr mgrs, directors, etc.) for those who deserve it.
This was HIGHLY team dependent. I know people that were still busting ass 12+ hour days around the holidays due to deadlines/etc.
Tim got in the habit of giving everyone Thanksgiving week off, and while I don’t remember the specific Christmas shutdown schedule, PTO days were generous enough that you could supplement two or three and create a 2 week vacation.
as qa, I've experienced this. those bugs just get thrown in the backlog and the technical debt grows until it's crunch time and we're blamed we're not finding bugs fast enough, despite being available more on the project than the team which had a week off.
After several years of this happening, I decided to book plane tickets to see my family before the prices got astronomical. Sure enough... that was the one year we didn't get it off.
I went anyway.
There are some really special people with horizons till their office wall. Of course this is a huge benefit but it is also where it starts. Benefits like this allow for crunch time in times of need. If there is a constant time of need there is no need for extra work.
He might see my butt in a seat that week, but he damn sure wouldn't see me working past 5, and I'd be looking for a new job.
He could have gone for showing competence, gaining the respect and trust of engineering, and being a source of understanding and compassion to a group that was working crazy hours trying to meet impossible schedules. Instead he decided to beat us up.
It did not go well. I was gone within a year, as were a number of other people. The company kept making crappy decisions, got bought for a song, and eventually my sweat equity (and real invested dollars) ended up as 17 shares of Oracle (fuck me, I hate that company).
Right, right. Slack just won't make it unless everyone works through the holidays.
I don't know about you all, but to me it's obvious that C-levels use moody economic periods as an excuse to do all the Scroogey things they would actually be more than happy to do in any economic season.
It would make just as much sense, if not more, to drastically cut their outlandish "performance" pay when the economy is down, but I don't think we'll be seeing much of that.
Those aren't the biggest holidays for everyone, and it isn't even the new year for everyone
But regardless, with this move everyone loses regardless of when they would enjoy the week off.
And how true is the "whenever you like"?
Extra time off is always much appreciated, especially in the US tech sector where prestige white collar work = your life & identity. Most work overtime during the year anyway and are available outside of business hours and make countless other sacrifices for their employer every hour of every day.
Moreover, many of us celebrate Thanksgiving and July 4th anyway, because, well everyone else is (ie the same reason as most Americans).
> I read on a post somewhere that if you replace "the economy" with "rich people yatch money" a lot of headlines make more sense.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507123
If you think you're missing something it's because you are, mind you.
Its the same meme as calling morbius the most movie
Firing people and making the others work twice as much? It's the economy. Take free soda from the kitchen that costs cents? It's the economy. Remove 4 days of holidays that would otherwise improve morale and productivity? It's the economy. Make employees waste hours in commute everyday? We obviously need to do it because it's the economy.
And then they wonder why people leave once conditions permit.
In some ways it's almost like the economic change is _welcomed_ because it puts downward pressure on comp (for companies that can weather the storm at least).
I mean no offense to any posters from those locales. You are a human, I respect you and your skills, most of you are probably better at tech than I am. I am glad you have jobs.
The point is the company said "OH NO, THE ECONOMY, WE HAVE TO DOWNSIZE, CANNOT AFFORD THIS HEADCOUNT" out of one side of its mouth. While backfilling those vacated spots as fast as it could from lower cost regions. It was a cowardly, calculated move that they had been praying for an excuse to execute.
An equivalent for someone not having kids would be taking time off to volunteer somewhere.
Or taking time off to go out in order to find a partner to potentially have kids with...
Your second point makes sense, but many don't offer that. Some do, some don't. Often volunteering is seen as a thing one gets compensated for (donation to charity) for work you do outside work time.
Acquisitions (depending on how they are handle) go through a period of autonomy and then absorption. Saw this when I was with MSFT and Skype.
Honestly this post sounds a bit whiny and lacking reality in how acquisitions go about.
MSFT at least started at 3 weeks.
I think with Amazon, there is the added element of taking time and team expectations. I have not worked there, just from friend's experience.
I think you’re reading more into the post than is actually there. It’s three sentences written in a pretty matter-of-fact voice, giving context on the old policy and management’s messaging on the new one. As someone following the labor side of the tech industry, I found it to be an interesting data point.
If you aren't interested, why take the time to write a complainey reply which adds nothing to the conversation? Seriously, it's annoying for other members of the community to read, and several superior options exist:
- Simply ignore it and move on with your life
- Press the "hide" link that HN generously includes for every story
You're welcome, WatchDog.
Most people did not mind loosing 1 day holiday per month but all of us felt that new company did not care about it's employees.
"making the workplace more equitable (as Salesforce employees could not access this benefit)"
If you're a long-time Salesforce employee, you watch a bunch of people from Slack walk through the door with tons of cash from their acquisition _and_ they get additional holidays that you don't. I'm not saying that this is some crazy injustice (life isn't fair), but I could see it logically putting a lot of pressure on the morale of other Salesforce teams.