I wonder what sort of uptake this sort of Patronization-As-A-Service tool gets w/ Salesforce customers. Maybe it comes free with their other products, and you have to pay to turn it off.
Learning modules are useful when they fulfil some need. There’s no specific regulatory or business need being fulfilled here, near as I can tell, it sounds like they’re stopping everything for a week to pad a vanity metric.
What the article describes is more or less org-wide contempt for this initiative, which is as close to the bottom of the scale for “alignment” as you can get before people start quitting. This sounds like a morale nightmare, and cancelling 1:1s (where managers could do some damage control) just compounds the problem.
no because they've either only dealt with crappy software, or think a single mediocre piece of software is better if it's cross platform, and anyone who disagrees with them is wrong.
I've also seen plenty of people who talk about how great electron is while also complaining about modern software requiring more disk space, more ram, more cpu time, or their laptop batteries dying as if always on wasteful software isn't the bulk of the reason.
Seriously for most electron apps you could have a twenty+ year old machine capable of running all of them without breaking a sweat if they were native apps, that can't open them all at the same time as the crappy electron apps they are today.
If you find the UI tools from web tech easier for your business purposes then make a web app, but stop forcing shitty perennially out of date copies of chrome on everyone. I guarantee you aren't pushing out updates as rapidly as google is, and that means you're missing security fixes. This last point is something I'm serious on: if you cannot push out a chromium update for your app within within say 24 hours of google shipping a chrome update you should not be shipping an app built on it.
Programmers/companies use it to save time and costs. Sure.
(Poor Slack has profits of 300m$/year; they cannot possibly do this better!)
But endusers? They don't care about the tech, so if you ask them; 'how about a non laggy version that doesn't eat all your memory and cpu?' You think they would go 'no no, please let me use Electron'?
It's the opposite, writing software that's any good on a native stack is hell. Electron is easier to write _and_ better, in every way except for memory (and the tendency to write slow stuff in JS... but that's fixable.)
Probably something to do with remembering when machines with double-digit MHz clocks would render a vaguely complex UI literally instantaneously and that feeling of irritation that comes from experiencing consistent and frustrating UI lag on a machine with literally 5000x the poke
I mean it is. I’m contesting it. So unless you have some quantifiable data it is in contention.
I like ICQ. I used it. But I really just don’t agree it had “more” features. It had _different_ features. And those features are just kinda wildly different because of how business and the internet had changed. I just really do not think it is a useful point to try and imply is a weakness of slack somehow.
I don’t understand why you feel the need to defend Slack? Half the time I start a huddle the sound doesn’t work. That was a solved problem in clients in the 00s. File uploads? Better be JPG or it’s a 50/50 shot of it uploading correctly (HEICs? Good luck). The new design moves everything around and somehow makes it harder to find huddles. Discord on the other hand, also an electron app, has pretty much flawless audio/video calls.
And? I prefer this over Slack having six different ways to log in, having access to my email address to spam me, and then still not letting me see which servers I belong to in aggregate.
I find myself continuously blessed to run slack on a daily basis and literally never encounter an issue with it being an electron app. My laptop must be magic or something!
There's so much hate in the dev world for their app. I have yet to experience this horrifying performance or whatever in 10 years. Can someone please explain to me why it's so darn bad and why I should care about 100mb?
> "Hey everyone! The execs and I came up with this great idea. Let's shut the whole company down for a week, and during that time you all can take these totally relevant learning modules!"
How conflicting it must be to produce a technology designed to help companies collaborate and work remotely, but not allow your own company to collaborate and work remotely. If the VPs and executives had any self awareness they might be embarrassed.
> Not surprisingly, the Ranger status requirement has been met with some disdain from employees at Slack. Two sources told Fortune that many Slack engineers have found workarounds via scripts, code that can be quickly built to automate a task, to click through the modules for them.
> “There’s no mandate [on] what modules people take so people are posting lists of the easiest ones and are speed running them,” a source said.
I worked at a place that 'required' this, but when I asked what would happen if I didn't there were no concrete actions. So I never did them and I lived happily ever after. Well, I left the place because people that 'require' nonsense usually don't limit themselves to elearnings.
Doing some math on the example courses (300 points for a 45 min course) and the requirement of gaining 50 000 points, that's a whopping 333 hours of just courses.
> According to a screenshot viewed by Fortune, there are six ranks prior to achieving Ranger status, which requires 100 badges and 50,000 points. Each module varies in points earned towards this goal, for instance, there’s a “Fearless Teaming” module which teaches staff “how psychological safety and courage help create high-performing teams,” that earns a user 300 points and takes 45 minutes to complete, the screenshot revealed.
Oh, they went ahead and made that mandatory? I heard all sorts of rumors about that for a while before I left.
When I was there, you just had mandatory security trainings (fine) and the Orwellian "Corporate Message Certification", where every team in the company — including engineers — were supposed to memorize the Corporate Message (a 15-slide-long sales-pitch deck) and be able to recite it to each other, that came paired with lots of preamble about how this was so that you could be adequately prepared to evangelize Salesforce to your friends, loved ones, fellow transit passengers, and other random bystanders.
Definitely not a cult or anything though. Totally.
(and none of the teams I was on ever bothered to memorize that crap; we just booked a meeting, expensed lunch, skimmed through the slides so we could say we did it, and kept running counts of how often each stupid buzzword was used).
> The goal is for Slack’s employees to reach Trailhead’s Ranger level, a feat that requires roughly 40 hours on the learning platform, whose modules include topics like “Learn about the Fourth Industrial Revolution” and “Healthy Eating.”
At which Trailhead level do they tell you about Xenu?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadI can't image a worse time to cancel 1:1s than when pushing through some unpopular top-down decision.
What the article describes is more or less org-wide contempt for this initiative, which is as close to the bottom of the scale for “alignment” as you can get before people start quitting. This sounds like a morale nightmare, and cancelling 1:1s (where managers could do some damage control) just compounds the problem.
I've also seen plenty of people who talk about how great electron is while also complaining about modern software requiring more disk space, more ram, more cpu time, or their laptop batteries dying as if always on wasteful software isn't the bulk of the reason.
Seriously for most electron apps you could have a twenty+ year old machine capable of running all of them without breaking a sweat if they were native apps, that can't open them all at the same time as the crappy electron apps they are today.
If you find the UI tools from web tech easier for your business purposes then make a web app, but stop forcing shitty perennially out of date copies of chrome on everyone. I guarantee you aren't pushing out updates as rapidly as google is, and that means you're missing security fixes. This last point is something I'm serious on: if you cannot push out a chromium update for your app within within say 24 hours of google shipping a chrome update you should not be shipping an app built on it.
(Poor Slack has profits of 300m$/year; they cannot possibly do this better!)
But endusers? They don't care about the tech, so if you ask them; 'how about a non laggy version that doesn't eat all your memory and cpu?' You think they would go 'no no, please let me use Electron'?
Because it's forced on them, really.
I'd gladly use slack through some kind of bridge (it used to be possible).
https://whyisthisinteresting.substack.com/p/why-is-this-inte...
You just kinda had to be there. It was ever changing but snappy.
I like ICQ. I used it. But I really just don’t agree it had “more” features. It had _different_ features. And those features are just kinda wildly different because of how business and the internet had changed. I just really do not think it is a useful point to try and imply is a weakness of slack somehow.
But then again, i'm using a 3500 euros, company-issued macbook pro (m1 pro, 32gb). Working well on this kind of hardware is an incredibly low bar.
> "Hey everyone! The execs and I came up with this great idea. Let's shut the whole company down for a week, and during that time you all can take these totally relevant learning modules!"
mfw
> “There’s no mandate [on] what modules people take so people are posting lists of the easiest ones and are speed running them,” a source said.
Respect
Jesus Christ.
When I was there, you just had mandatory security trainings (fine) and the Orwellian "Corporate Message Certification", where every team in the company — including engineers — were supposed to memorize the Corporate Message (a 15-slide-long sales-pitch deck) and be able to recite it to each other, that came paired with lots of preamble about how this was so that you could be adequately prepared to evangelize Salesforce to your friends, loved ones, fellow transit passengers, and other random bystanders.
Definitely not a cult or anything though. Totally.
(and none of the teams I was on ever bothered to memorize that crap; we just booked a meeting, expensed lunch, skimmed through the slides so we could say we did it, and kept running counts of how often each stupid buzzword was used).
Man, I'm _so_ glad to be gone from that place.
At which Trailhead level do they tell you about Xenu?
Also, it costs $14 million in "donations".