4 ms·

There's two revelations here: * big companies have entire teams (internal and consultants) advising them on large changes in the name of productivity, cost red

There's two revelations here: * 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.

mushufasa 4y ago
> 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. 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.
- ben_jones 4y ago
  I'd counter its not "committees of experts" but "committees of stakeholders and powerbrokers" with equally misaligned incentives not worth replicating.
weatherlite 4y ago
Yes it's called capitalism, if they could get away with it they would pay us nothing. In good times the stock gets so high you can get away with super high salaries, over staffing and perks. But in worse times the stock starts to get a hit, the multiples don't look good and to retain earnings you have to cut costs. The biggest cost is wages...
- HFguy 4y ago
  This is just what we have in the USA today. Capitalism can work, but what we have is lopsided in terms of power balance. Workers should have more power and leverage but that has been eroded over time. 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.
  - weatherlite 4y ago
    Capitalism can work and has worked well for the last few decades but I personally think we are in "late stage" capitalism or whatever you wanna call a system that starts to crush the middle class and younger generations, create unsustainable debt and wreak havoc on the environment. We'll see how it all plays out, will be interesting for sure...
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    > Capitalism can work, but what we have is lopsided in terms of power balance. 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.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > Yes it's called capitalism, if they could get away with it they would pay us nothing It's called capitalism because it's the only system where they can't get away with it.
  - weatherlite 4y ago
    How so? They've been offshoring and automizing everything they can and this will only increase. Yes there's still a high demand for workers but it doesn't mean they're not trying to eliminate us slowly but surely. Us techies still have a few good years left but we're in no way immune to what's coming.
jollybean 4y ago
Those are not the 'revelations'. 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.
- zrobotics 4y ago
  Eh, I'm unconvinced that they aren't making an extremely dumb move here. Nobody is very productive during that period anyway, and this just aggravates one portion of the company without making everyone else much happier. Dev hiring is still tight, so this won't help them with retention & recruitment. I wouldn't be surprised that they could save money by extending this bebefit to everyone, or at bare minimum do it fairly cheaply.
  - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
    I agree, it's probably a bad move. 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.
    - jollybean 4y ago
      You're missing the bigger picture. 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.

mushufasa 4y ago

> 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. 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.

ben_jones 4y ago
I'd counter its not "committees of experts" but "committees of stakeholders and powerbrokers" with equally misaligned incentives not worth replicating.

weatherlite 4y ago

Yes it's called capitalism, if they could get away with it they would pay us nothing. In good times the stock gets so high you can get away with super high salaries, over staffing and perks. But in worse times the stock starts to get a hit, the multiples don't look good and to retain earnings you have to cut costs. The biggest cost is wages...

HFguy 4y ago
This is just what we have in the USA today. Capitalism can work, but what we have is lopsided in terms of power balance. Workers should have more power and leverage but that has been eroded over time. 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.
- weatherlite 4y ago
  Capitalism can work and has worked well for the last few decades but I personally think we are in "late stage" capitalism or whatever you wanna call a system that starts to crush the middle class and younger generations, create unsustainable debt and wreak havoc on the environment. We'll see how it all plays out, will be interesting for sure...
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > Capitalism can work, but what we have is lopsided in terms of power balance. 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.
robertlagrant 4y ago
> Yes it's called capitalism, if they could get away with it they would pay us nothing It's called capitalism because it's the only system where they can't get away with it.
- weatherlite 4y ago
  How so? They've been offshoring and automizing everything they can and this will only increase. Yes there's still a high demand for workers but it doesn't mean they're not trying to eliminate us slowly but surely. Us techies still have a few good years left but we're in no way immune to what's coming.

jollybean 4y ago

Those are not the 'revelations'. 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.

zrobotics 4y ago
Eh, I'm unconvinced that they aren't making an extremely dumb move here. Nobody is very productive during that period anyway, and this just aggravates one portion of the company without making everyone else much happier. Dev hiring is still tight, so this won't help them with retention & recruitment. I wouldn't be surprised that they could save money by extending this bebefit to everyone, or at bare minimum do it fairly cheaply.
- MattPalmer1086 4y ago
  I agree, it's probably a bad move. 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.
  - jollybean 4y ago
    You're missing the bigger picture. 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.