6 ms·

Salesforce cut hundreds of employees Monday

55 points by Bhurn00985 4y ago

cs702 4y ago
Every company wants to cut spending on people, services, and facilities, because revenues are slowing down, costs are rising, and there's more uncertainty about the near term future. The people who lose their jobs, in turn, are forced to cut their spending, contributing even more to the ongoing revenue slowdown at companies that sell to consumers. The service providers who see their billing examined with a microscope and who are told that new projects are now on hold, in turn, find themselves forced to cut their own spending on people, services, and facilities, contributing even more to the ongoing revenue slowdown at other companies. The office buildings who are given notice of lease terminations, in turn, find themselves forced to cut their own spending, contributing as well to the ongoing revenue slowdown at other companies. The more every company and consumer cuts spending, the less money all companies and consumers earn. This unpleasant state of affairs is called a "recession." When it's really bad, it's called a "depression." It's no fun. Many unprofitable companies and many consumers without savings are at risk of financial ruin.
- cheriot 4y ago
  > many consumers without savings are at risk of financial ruin Yes. This is the reason for having a better social safety net. There's no reason a normal business cycle should "ruin" normal people that did not take excessive risks.
  - legitster 4y ago
    So long as the safety nets don't prolong or worsen the recovery. Moving people out of the labor pool shrinks the economy for everyone - making it worse off for people with and without jobs. Bad policy can turn slumps into prolonged recessions.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Having no savings is not taking a risk?
    - piva00 4y ago
      Don't victim blame. Not every person or family is able to save, think about it a bit deeper than your personal bubble...
    - theshrike79 4y ago
      It takes a _long_ time to save up enough to manage through a year of unemployment. A social safety net is always there.
    - AshleyGrant 4y ago
      It's absolutely taking a risk, but for many people it is an unavoidable risk, and thus would not be considered taking "excessive" risk, as OP mentioned.
    - fnordpiglet 4y ago
      The relative cost of health care and other benefits makes savings a lost cause for the unemployed. You live one trip to the ER away from bankruptcy and homelessness every minute of every day. It’s foolish to blame savings rates for that situation, almost no one make enough to save at a rate that prevents medical bankruptcy.
    - jrnichols 4y ago
      if you live in California, savings are a dream for so many people. skyrocketing rents, high taxes, skyrocketing gas prices, expensive health insurance, and so on. it's really hard for a lot of people to build up savings here.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Is it though? The social safety net usually doesn’t reach up to help people earning SV tech job salaries. I would prefer to see more friction when it comes to layoffs so we’d see less of tech giants doubling and halving their headcounts in a period of just a couple of years.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    pulls out soapbox > There's no reason a normal business cycle should "ruin" normal people that did not take excessive risks. And this is why I get so frustrated when I hear things like "Well business owner(s) take all the risk so that's why they get all the reward (profits, or most of it)". Bullshit. For smaller companies this is more-so true but not even then is it always true. I'm not sure how many downturns or mistakes have to happen followed by layoffs for the general public to grasp this but I don't anticipate people wising up anytime soon. In a number of these layoffs we hear about "Well we misjudged the market" or "The trends didn't continue the way we thought and we over-hired". Instead of tightening their belts (less profit for owners/shareholders) the answer is always to just jettison people until the books "balance". I own my own (side) business and I have family members who own full-time businesses, I'm well aware of the risk (and debt) we have taken on but for larger companies the top brass (and shareholders) seem nearly completely insulated from any pain. Compare that to places that have profit sharing with employees which can go down if there is a downturn/etc, this is a much better way to handle it. I'm fine sharing in the risk (which I'm doing just by working for someone, they could fire/lay me off tomorrow without warning, that's a risk) if I'm also sharing in the reward. I'm also fine with the "reward" (profit share) decreases in "bad" times versus laying off a bunch of people. Some companies do this much better than others but I really wish companies were either forced to share the rewards and/or actually feel some pain when they make bad decisions. I think we all know the people responsible for over-hiring don't actually face any repercussions for their mistakes, instead it's the people they hired then laid off. And no, paying severance or feeling bad about having to lay off people isn't really "pain" in my book. Having a "better social safety net" is sort of a way to force "profit sharing" in a roundabout way and I would greatly appreciate it if losing a job didn't mean loss of healthcare and/or a way to put food on the table, pay rent, etc. I know from personal experience that having a good safety net (aka, my parents) makes a huge difference. Not that I play fast and loose with my money (I have an emergency fund that I could run on for 6-9+ months that I've built up) but you always have a little voice in the back of your head saying "You aren't going to end up on the streets". Not everyone has that and I'd love nothing more than for everyone to experience and have that confidence, it's what allows you to take risks (sane ones ideally, like starting your own business) knowing that failure will not ruin you. puts up soapbox
  - za3faran 4y ago
    While I agree that we should have a good social safety net, these cycles should in no way shape or form be normal. Something is obviously fundamentally broken.
    - stjohnswarts 4y ago
      Waxing and waning of economies is something that happened since civilization started. No one has fixed it yet, and people a lot smarter than you and I have tried. If the human race was more altruistic than greedy, it would probably be possible, but we aren't. Until that changes, this is just what happens.
    - taylodl 4y ago
      What are you talking about? This cycle is well-known and follows a roughly 7 year pattern and has done so since the start of the industrial era 200 years ago. Even prior to that there were economic cycles in the years 1000-1700. Whether these cycles should leave ordinary people in financial ruin is a completely different matter.
- Retric 4y ago
  In theory sure, but in practice a great deal of this is driven by earlier over investments by tech companies who saw a huge surge in profits during COVID lockdowns. It wasn’t just online companies that benefited by changing consumer habits as people where stuck at home with little to do browsed social media and ordered food delivery etc. Setting up remote options across many industries had many similarities with the pre Y2K investments and a wave of modernization efforts. That followed by supply shortages which pushed massive investments to build more robust supply chains etc.
  - cs702 4y ago
    Although it will be endlessly debated, it doesn't matter that much how a recession got started, nor who deserves the most blame. Once the spending-slowdown spiral gets going, it can become self-sustaining on its own, beyond anyone's control, affecting both the guilty and the innocent.
    - fnordpiglet 4y ago
      Well - artificially inducing a recession to make people poorer so they can’t afford to buy things as a way of reducing shipping container rates and backlogs is a pretty ass backwards way to run a society. Food prices are inflating, so if we get enough people unable to afford food, prices go down. “Victory” I think you can apportion blame for stuff like that. And the guilty are insulated from the consequences of their actions, so I don’t agree they share in the pain.
      - juve1996 4y ago
        Artificially inducing and propping up an economy with cheap cash led to this. Now we have no choice. Inflation hurts the poor just as much as this does.
        fnordpiglet 4y ago
        If my income drops by $10 is that materially different than the price going up by $10 instead? In the end I have a $10 deficit. By letting supply and demand work itself out and making sure the friction for supply meeting demand is minimal (I.e., shipping and fuel costs low and capacity high), inflation would disappear as suppliers met the demand induced by any excess liquidity in the market. The world has an amazing capacity to produce, but it’s being bottlenecked by fuel costs and shipping capacity. That means if you can improve that bottleneck the excess cash you mention is consumed into production and capital investment to meet the demand. That’s expansive to the economy and generally good for everyone. The fed trying to lower shipping rates by making demand disappear is contracting the economy, is recessionary, and leads to widespread suffering. Neither path happens over night, and both inflation and a recession hurt - but the outcome of economic expansion is better for everyone than contraction. Note I’m not saying don’t deal with inflation. I’m saying inflation is caused by bottlenecks in supply meeting demand. Stimulus increased demand, and that increased demand can be met by suppliers but the cost of shipping in all dimensions is very high historically. Removing bottlenecks and expanding economic throughput also solves the inflation we see without everyone being miserable.
- manachar 4y ago
  As many of these companies base their projections on a relatively small number of outside sources, it often strikes me as a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Big business and financial firms have been signaling a belief in a downturn for a while now -- including while posting about record profits.
  - redwood 4y ago
    It's all related to taming inflation
- avereveard 4y ago
  a lot of skilled workers enter the job market at a reduced price, they have the know how to compete in the same or adjacent sector, medium company can acquire the competences at a reduced price, their profit increase their spending, etc etc economics is not a single company this is the tail of feds interest rate raise cutting down investment. it will last a while, but the economy doesn't yet seem unhealthy (well except some specific bubbles, but those have been there a while and if they pop will pop because they were bubbles, not because the secondary trigger)
  - cs702 4y ago
    Agree on everything :-) The only thing I'm not so sure about is the health of the economy. While all macro stats look great so far, they don't yet reflect the wave of layoffs we're seeing in sector after sector. We may be going through a mild recession overall and a brutal one in bubble-land. Regardless, it will feel horrible to anyone younger than 35, who has never experienced a recession since joining the workforce at most ~15 years ago.
    - avereveard 4y ago
      well there was the subprime thing, it hit harshly on south europe. heck italy was still trying to climb out of that when covid hit, and it's like still down significant % from 2008 gdp levels
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Indeed! Such a strong case for more social systems like employment insurance. Not to oversimplify but I find “government programs” to be a good answer to basically any “tragedy of the commons” problem such as spending less during a recession.
- tjixxu 4y ago
  Can anyone smarter than me explain why this is happening two years after the entire world shutdown? Is this completely unrelated to COVID?
  - legitster 4y ago
    Immediately following shutdowns, money was cheap and companies overinvested. Right now, interest rates are squeezing the market. We're seeing (hopefully) a correction to a more sustainable level of business.
  - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    The 2008 financial crisis just kinda happened. These things are hard to predict, but market economies tend to create situations where boom and bust are the most efficient for growth and happen every few decades.
  - cs702 4y ago
    I'm not smarter by any means, but I do know a little bit about this. As a response to the pandemic, the US Treasury spent ~$6T more than it collected in taxes: ~$3.2T during the Trump administration and ~$2.8T during the Biden administration,[a] and the US Federal Reserve reduced short-term rates and purchased $5T of treasury and agency bonds, flooding the market with liquidity and lowering long-term interest rates to their lowest level since WWII.[b] As always and as ever, investors flooded with treasury checks and ultra-cheap money engaged in an orgy of speculation that would make even the most shameless drunken sailor blush. Crypto is perhaps the most prominent example of it. Trading in meme stonks would be another example. Pokemon Pikachu cards trading for $5M may be the silliest example. Or maybe the silliest example was all those smart people who came up with clever narratives to justify stock market valuations that otherwise look... unjustifiable.[c] As the speculators threw money around while we all muddled through the pandemic, the world's supply chain system was hit with two massive shocks: (1) the pandemic, which is still limiting the availability of many items (e.g., iPhones made in China), and (2) Russia's war in Ukraine, which triggered a global food and energy crisis (e.g., there isn't enough grain being exported to feed the entire planet). Both shocks are fueling inflation, prompting the US Treasury to cut spending and the Fed to increase rates and withdraw liquidity from financial markets. Increasing rates and withdrawing liquidity are very painful methods for reducing inflation, but they are the only methods that have been shown to work. As money started becoming less cheap to borrow and less easy to find, businesses and consumers started spending less -- first gradually, then "suddenly." -- [a] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=WdPZ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=WdPZ [b] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=WdQ3 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=WdQ3 [c] https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe
tootie 4y ago
This is pretty small adjustment for a company their size and comes on the heels of several large acquisitions and a huge hiring spree. I'm not sure this is actually a headcount reduction or just a restructuring. They have over 3000 job openings listed on LinkedIn right now.
JDEW 4y ago
> Salesforce let go of fewer than 1,000 employees Monday, according to a person familiar with the move. > At the end of January it employed 73,541 people. “…employees Monday”, “…January” Is this grammatical? Is it coherent? Or was this generated with GPT-3?
- pwinnski 4y ago
  The author was last aware of the Salesforce headcount on or near January 31. Yesterday, Salesforce reduced their headcount. It doesn't seem difficult to parse at all.
- happytoexplain 4y ago
  I'm not picking up on what you're implying is the confusing part.
  - gamblor956 4y ago
    I think JDEW's comment was generated by GPT3 and he's asking if his own comment was coherent?
throwawaynov 4y ago
Salesforce employee here. These were mostly the account executives who couldn't meet their quota. It's unfortunate that this is happening to AEs, who are usually the hardworking people at Salesforce struggling to close deals in a tough economy. It will be interesting to see what will happen to the random 'strategy', product and engineering folks who build over engineered, over priced, marketing bullock that doesn't sell.
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
  > These were mostly the account executives who couldn't meet their quota. > account executives ...you mean "sales", right?
  - throwawaynov 4y ago
    Yes - Sales is a function/dept/team. Account executives are part of sales teams.
radiojasper 4y ago
They couldn't keep their sales force.

55 points by Bhurn00985 4y ago

Every company wants to cut spending on people, services, and facilities, because revenues are slowing down, costs are rising, and there's more uncertainty about the near term future. The people who lose their jobs, in turn, are forced to cut their spending, contributing even more to the ongoing revenue slowdown at companies that sell to consumers. The service providers who see their billing examined with a microscope and who are told that new projects are now on hold, in turn, find themselves forced to cut their own spending on people, services, and facilities, contributing even more to the ongoing revenue slowdown at other companies. The office buildings who are given notice of lease terminations, in turn, find themselves forced to cut their own spending, contributing as well to the ongoing revenue slowdown at other companies. The more every company and consumer cuts spending, the less money all companies and consumers earn. This unpleasant state of affairs is called a "recession." When it's really bad, it's called a "depression." It's no fun. Many unprofitable companies and many consumers without savings are at risk of financial ruin.

cheriot 4y ago
> many consumers without savings are at risk of financial ruin Yes. This is the reason for having a better social safety net. There's no reason a normal business cycle should "ruin" normal people that did not take excessive risks.
- legitster 4y ago
  So long as the safety nets don't prolong or worsen the recovery. Moving people out of the labor pool shrinks the economy for everyone - making it worse off for people with and without jobs. Bad policy can turn slumps into prolonged recessions.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Having no savings is not taking a risk?
  - piva00 4y ago
    Don't victim blame. Not every person or family is able to save, think about it a bit deeper than your personal bubble...
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    It takes a _long_ time to save up enough to manage through a year of unemployment. A social safety net is always there.
  - AshleyGrant 4y ago
    It's absolutely taking a risk, but for many people it is an unavoidable risk, and thus would not be considered taking "excessive" risk, as OP mentioned.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    The relative cost of health care and other benefits makes savings a lost cause for the unemployed. You live one trip to the ER away from bankruptcy and homelessness every minute of every day. It’s foolish to blame savings rates for that situation, almost no one make enough to save at a rate that prevents medical bankruptcy.
  - jrnichols 4y ago
    if you live in California, savings are a dream for so many people. skyrocketing rents, high taxes, skyrocketing gas prices, expensive health insurance, and so on. it's really hard for a lot of people to build up savings here.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Is it though? The social safety net usually doesn’t reach up to help people earning SV tech job salaries. I would prefer to see more friction when it comes to layoffs so we’d see less of tech giants doubling and halving their headcounts in a period of just a couple of years.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  pulls out soapbox > There's no reason a normal business cycle should "ruin" normal people that did not take excessive risks. And this is why I get so frustrated when I hear things like "Well business owner(s) take all the risk so that's why they get all the reward (profits, or most of it)". Bullshit. For smaller companies this is more-so true but not even then is it always true. I'm not sure how many downturns or mistakes have to happen followed by layoffs for the general public to grasp this but I don't anticipate people wising up anytime soon. In a number of these layoffs we hear about "Well we misjudged the market" or "The trends didn't continue the way we thought and we over-hired". Instead of tightening their belts (less profit for owners/shareholders) the answer is always to just jettison people until the books "balance". I own my own (side) business and I have family members who own full-time businesses, I'm well aware of the risk (and debt) we have taken on but for larger companies the top brass (and shareholders) seem nearly completely insulated from any pain. Compare that to places that have profit sharing with employees which can go down if there is a downturn/etc, this is a much better way to handle it. I'm fine sharing in the risk (which I'm doing just by working for someone, they could fire/lay me off tomorrow without warning, that's a risk) if I'm also sharing in the reward. I'm also fine with the "reward" (profit share) decreases in "bad" times versus laying off a bunch of people. Some companies do this much better than others but I really wish companies were either forced to share the rewards and/or actually feel some pain when they make bad decisions. I think we all know the people responsible for over-hiring don't actually face any repercussions for their mistakes, instead it's the people they hired then laid off. And no, paying severance or feeling bad about having to lay off people isn't really "pain" in my book. Having a "better social safety net" is sort of a way to force "profit sharing" in a roundabout way and I would greatly appreciate it if losing a job didn't mean loss of healthcare and/or a way to put food on the table, pay rent, etc. I know from personal experience that having a good safety net (aka, my parents) makes a huge difference. Not that I play fast and loose with my money (I have an emergency fund that I could run on for 6-9+ months that I've built up) but you always have a little voice in the back of your head saying "You aren't going to end up on the streets". Not everyone has that and I'd love nothing more than for everyone to experience and have that confidence, it's what allows you to take risks (sane ones ideally, like starting your own business) knowing that failure will not ruin you. puts up soapbox
- za3faran 4y ago
  While I agree that we should have a good social safety net, these cycles should in no way shape or form be normal. Something is obviously fundamentally broken.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    Waxing and waning of economies is something that happened since civilization started. No one has fixed it yet, and people a lot smarter than you and I have tried. If the human race was more altruistic than greedy, it would probably be possible, but we aren't. Until that changes, this is just what happens.
  - taylodl 4y ago
    What are you talking about? This cycle is well-known and follows a roughly 7 year pattern and has done so since the start of the industrial era 200 years ago. Even prior to that there were economic cycles in the years 1000-1700. Whether these cycles should leave ordinary people in financial ruin is a completely different matter.
Retric 4y ago
In theory sure, but in practice a great deal of this is driven by earlier over investments by tech companies who saw a huge surge in profits during COVID lockdowns. It wasn’t just online companies that benefited by changing consumer habits as people where stuck at home with little to do browsed social media and ordered food delivery etc. Setting up remote options across many industries had many similarities with the pre Y2K investments and a wave of modernization efforts. That followed by supply shortages which pushed massive investments to build more robust supply chains etc.
- cs702 4y ago
  Although it will be endlessly debated, it doesn't matter that much how a recession got started, nor who deserves the most blame. Once the spending-slowdown spiral gets going, it can become self-sustaining on its own, beyond anyone's control, affecting both the guilty and the innocent.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    Well - artificially inducing a recession to make people poorer so they can’t afford to buy things as a way of reducing shipping container rates and backlogs is a pretty ass backwards way to run a society. Food prices are inflating, so if we get enough people unable to afford food, prices go down. “Victory” I think you can apportion blame for stuff like that. And the guilty are insulated from the consequences of their actions, so I don’t agree they share in the pain.
    - juve1996 4y ago
      Artificially inducing and propping up an economy with cheap cash led to this. Now we have no choice. Inflation hurts the poor just as much as this does.
      - fnordpiglet 4y ago
        If my income drops by $10 is that materially different than the price going up by $10 instead? In the end I have a $10 deficit. By letting supply and demand work itself out and making sure the friction for supply meeting demand is minimal (I.e., shipping and fuel costs low and capacity high), inflation would disappear as suppliers met the demand induced by any excess liquidity in the market. The world has an amazing capacity to produce, but it’s being bottlenecked by fuel costs and shipping capacity. That means if you can improve that bottleneck the excess cash you mention is consumed into production and capital investment to meet the demand. That’s expansive to the economy and generally good for everyone. The fed trying to lower shipping rates by making demand disappear is contracting the economy, is recessionary, and leads to widespread suffering. Neither path happens over night, and both inflation and a recession hurt - but the outcome of economic expansion is better for everyone than contraction. Note I’m not saying don’t deal with inflation. I’m saying inflation is caused by bottlenecks in supply meeting demand. Stimulus increased demand, and that increased demand can be met by suppliers but the cost of shipping in all dimensions is very high historically. Removing bottlenecks and expanding economic throughput also solves the inflation we see without everyone being miserable.
manachar 4y ago
As many of these companies base their projections on a relatively small number of outside sources, it often strikes me as a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Big business and financial firms have been signaling a belief in a downturn for a while now -- including while posting about record profits.
- redwood 4y ago
  It's all related to taming inflation
avereveard 4y ago
a lot of skilled workers enter the job market at a reduced price, they have the know how to compete in the same or adjacent sector, medium company can acquire the competences at a reduced price, their profit increase their spending, etc etc economics is not a single company this is the tail of feds interest rate raise cutting down investment. it will last a while, but the economy doesn't yet seem unhealthy (well except some specific bubbles, but those have been there a while and if they pop will pop because they were bubbles, not because the secondary trigger)
- cs702 4y ago
  Agree on everything :-) The only thing I'm not so sure about is the health of the economy. While all macro stats look great so far, they don't yet reflect the wave of layoffs we're seeing in sector after sector. We may be going through a mild recession overall and a brutal one in bubble-land. Regardless, it will feel horrible to anyone younger than 35, who has never experienced a recession since joining the workforce at most ~15 years ago.
  - avereveard 4y ago
    well there was the subprime thing, it hit harshly on south europe. heck italy was still trying to climb out of that when covid hit, and it's like still down significant % from 2008 gdp levels
Waterluvian 4y ago
Indeed! Such a strong case for more social systems like employment insurance. Not to oversimplify but I find “government programs” to be a good answer to basically any “tragedy of the commons” problem such as spending less during a recession.
tjixxu 4y ago
Can anyone smarter than me explain why this is happening two years after the entire world shutdown? Is this completely unrelated to COVID?
- legitster 4y ago
  Immediately following shutdowns, money was cheap and companies overinvested. Right now, interest rates are squeezing the market. We're seeing (hopefully) a correction to a more sustainable level of business.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  The 2008 financial crisis just kinda happened. These things are hard to predict, but market economies tend to create situations where boom and bust are the most efficient for growth and happen every few decades.
- cs702 4y ago
  I'm not smarter by any means, but I do know a little bit about this. As a response to the pandemic, the US Treasury spent ~$6T more than it collected in taxes: ~$3.2T during the Trump administration and ~$2.8T during the Biden administration,[a] and the US Federal Reserve reduced short-term rates and purchased $5T of treasury and agency bonds, flooding the market with liquidity and lowering long-term interest rates to their lowest level since WWII.[b] As always and as ever, investors flooded with treasury checks and ultra-cheap money engaged in an orgy of speculation that would make even the most shameless drunken sailor blush. Crypto is perhaps the most prominent example of it. Trading in meme stonks would be another example. Pokemon Pikachu cards trading for $5M may be the silliest example. Or maybe the silliest example was all those smart people who came up with clever narratives to justify stock market valuations that otherwise look... unjustifiable.[c] As the speculators threw money around while we all muddled through the pandemic, the world's supply chain system was hit with two massive shocks: (1) the pandemic, which is still limiting the availability of many items (e.g., iPhones made in China), and (2) Russia's war in Ukraine, which triggered a global food and energy crisis (e.g., there isn't enough grain being exported to feed the entire planet). Both shocks are fueling inflation, prompting the US Treasury to cut spending and the Fed to increase rates and withdraw liquidity from financial markets. Increasing rates and withdrawing liquidity are very painful methods for reducing inflation, but they are the only methods that have been shown to work. As money started becoming less cheap to borrow and less easy to find, businesses and consumers started spending less -- first gradually, then "suddenly." -- [a] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=WdPZ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=WdPZ [b] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=WdQ3 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=WdQ3 [c] https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe

tootie 4y ago

This is pretty small adjustment for a company their size and comes on the heels of several large acquisitions and a huge hiring spree. I'm not sure this is actually a headcount reduction or just a restructuring. They have over 3000 job openings listed on LinkedIn right now.

JDEW 4y ago

> Salesforce let go of fewer than 1,000 employees Monday, according to a person familiar with the move. > At the end of January it employed 73,541 people. “…employees Monday”, “…January” Is this grammatical? Is it coherent? Or was this generated with GPT-3?

pwinnski 4y ago
The author was last aware of the Salesforce headcount on or near January 31. Yesterday, Salesforce reduced their headcount. It doesn't seem difficult to parse at all.
happytoexplain 4y ago
I'm not picking up on what you're implying is the confusing part.
- gamblor956 4y ago
  I think JDEW's comment was generated by GPT3 and he's asking if his own comment was coherent?

throwawaynov 4y ago

Salesforce employee here. These were mostly the account executives who couldn't meet their quota. It's unfortunate that this is happening to AEs, who are usually the hardworking people at Salesforce struggling to close deals in a tough economy. It will be interesting to see what will happen to the random 'strategy', product and engineering folks who build over engineered, over priced, marketing bullock that doesn't sell.

DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
> These were mostly the account executives who couldn't meet their quota. > account executives ...you mean "sales", right?
- throwawaynov 4y ago
  Yes - Sales is a function/dept/team. Account executives are part of sales teams.

radiojasper 4y ago

They couldn't keep their sales force.