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I cant help but feel sorry for Salesforce engineers who will have to work on figuring out how to integrate the monolith with Slack and figure out the user permi

by Bhilai 5y ago

I cant help but feel sorry for Salesforce engineers who will have to work on figuring out how to integrate the monolith with Slack and figure out the user permissions and access control nightmare.

zippergz 5y ago
I can't help but feel sorry for the Slack engineers who are used to working at a nimble and innovative company, and now will be beaten down by bureaucracy only rivaled by large governments.
- Bhilai 5y ago
  Based on my experience, Salesforce does leave acquisitions to do their own thing for a long period of time - Heroku, Tableau and Quip are examples of that. But yes, its a big bureaucracy and things can move at a glacial pace.
  - nevir 5y ago
    It sounds like they kinda ran morale for Tableau folk into the ground; and a bunch have/are jumping ship
    - xena 5y ago
      This happened at Heroku too.
      - Mandatum 5y ago
        MuleSoft too.
- kaidon 5y ago
  Speaking from experience, getting absorbed as a small nimble company into a behemoth is akin to slowly boiling a frog alive. Things usually start out as business as usual for quite a while, at least for engineering; other departments are heavily impacted immediately. Then... the beuracracy creeps and grows and soon you have some corporate IT nonsense on your machine that blocks DNS lookups to github.com so you don't "leak intellectual property" and now you can't build your software any more and your manager is a plant.
- trasz 5y ago
  What’s innovative in Slack? From my - purely user - point of view it’s just IRC, only worse in terms of functionality.
  - spiderice 5y ago
    The idea that Slack is strictly worse than IRC in functionality is laughable. Maybe IRC does some things better, but Slack certainly offers improvements as well.
    - u801e 5y ago
      Slack and Teams have always been laggy for me, meaning there's a perceptible delay between the time you press the keys on the keyboard and when the text appears on the screen. This isn't an issue with GUI IRC clients or many of the older chat platforms that were in use in the early 2000s. The UI issues, at least for me, are the problem.
      - anthk 5y ago
        Kopete. We could do everything Slack did (even with inline Youtube videos, LaTex and video chat) under an AMD Athlon XP and 256 MB of RAM. And with KDE3 in the background. cc /u/spiderice
      - trasz 5y ago
        They are laggy, their logging and search support is a joke, they are non-interoperable, lack scripting support, and the UI is less responsive than MIRC on a 90 MHz Pentium. I’m certain they do have some advantage though, apart from marketing. I’d love to find out what.
        anthk 5y ago
        Maybe lack of signing-in everywhere, but Jabber solved that and with Bitlbee or any CLI tool you could IM from that 90MHZ Pentium.
        Revery42 5y ago
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  > nimble and innovative company Given slack has barely changed at all in the past... 6 years, I would hardly call it "nimble and innovative" any more.
mpeg 5y ago
Not actually as hard as you'd think; almost every new product in the Salesforce suite was once a separate company and they managed to integrate it just fine. When the startup I was working for was acquired, we first integrated with Salesforce's SSO which was very easy, and kept having our clients use it as a separate product. Then, we rebranded the UI to look and feel like Salesforce, and changed the product name to fit. Only after all that did we start looking into moving to their url and fully integrating into the product suite.

by Bhilai 5y ago

I cant help but feel sorry for Salesforce engineers who will have to work on figuring out how to integrate the monolith with Slack and figure out the user permissions and access control nightmare.

zippergz 5y ago

I can't help but feel sorry for the Slack engineers who are used to working at a nimble and innovative company, and now will be beaten down by bureaucracy only rivaled by large governments.

Bhilai 5y ago
Based on my experience, Salesforce does leave acquisitions to do their own thing for a long period of time - Heroku, Tableau and Quip are examples of that. But yes, its a big bureaucracy and things can move at a glacial pace.
- nevir 5y ago
  It sounds like they kinda ran morale for Tableau folk into the ground; and a bunch have/are jumping ship
  - xena 5y ago
    This happened at Heroku too.
    - Mandatum 5y ago
      MuleSoft too.
kaidon 5y ago
Speaking from experience, getting absorbed as a small nimble company into a behemoth is akin to slowly boiling a frog alive. Things usually start out as business as usual for quite a while, at least for engineering; other departments are heavily impacted immediately. Then... the beuracracy creeps and grows and soon you have some corporate IT nonsense on your machine that blocks DNS lookups to github.com so you don't "leak intellectual property" and now you can't build your software any more and your manager is a plant.
trasz 5y ago
What’s innovative in Slack? From my - purely user - point of view it’s just IRC, only worse in terms of functionality.
- spiderice 5y ago
  The idea that Slack is strictly worse than IRC in functionality is laughable. Maybe IRC does some things better, but Slack certainly offers improvements as well.
  - u801e 5y ago
    Slack and Teams have always been laggy for me, meaning there's a perceptible delay between the time you press the keys on the keyboard and when the text appears on the screen. This isn't an issue with GUI IRC clients or many of the older chat platforms that were in use in the early 2000s. The UI issues, at least for me, are the problem.
    - anthk 5y ago
      Kopete. We could do everything Slack did (even with inline Youtube videos, LaTex and video chat) under an AMD Athlon XP and 256 MB of RAM. And with KDE3 in the background. cc /u/spiderice
    - trasz 5y ago
      They are laggy, their logging and search support is a joke, they are non-interoperable, lack scripting support, and the UI is less responsive than MIRC on a 90 MHz Pentium. I’m certain they do have some advantage though, apart from marketing. I’d love to find out what.
      - anthk 5y ago
        Maybe lack of signing-in everywhere, but Jabber solved that and with Bitlbee or any CLI tool you could IM from that 90MHZ Pentium.
      - Revery42 5y ago
madeofpalk 5y ago
> nimble and innovative company Given slack has barely changed at all in the past... 6 years, I would hardly call it "nimble and innovative" any more.

mpeg 5y ago

Not actually as hard as you'd think; almost every new product in the Salesforce suite was once a separate company and they managed to integrate it just fine. When the startup I was working for was acquired, we first integrated with Salesforce's SSO which was very easy, and kept having our clients use it as a separate product. Then, we rebranded the UI to look and feel like Salesforce, and changed the product name to fit. Only after all that did we start looking into moving to their url and fully integrating into the product suite.