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There seems to be a certain consensual hallucination that happens with these acquisitions. The acquirer says "you're amazing, you do great work, we don't want t

There seems to be a certain consensual hallucination that happens with these acquisitions. The acquirer says "you're amazing, you do great work, we don't want to change a thing, you'll still be completely autonomous, we'll just help you accelerate". And there's a good reason for it, the employees came to work for Slack, not Salesforce and if they all quit then the acquisition will have been a waste. So Salesforce makes all the same promises, but at the end of the day there's reality. The second Salesforce bought Slack, Slack ceased to exist, and all the workers now work for Salesforce. There's no culture clash between Slack and Salesforce. There's a Slack culture that once existed, and now there's Salesforce culture the company those workers now work at. You can embrace it, you can be unhappy, and you can leave. But remember, you're at Salesforce now and those other 70,000 workers - they joined the Salesforce culture, not the Slack culture and they sure as hell didn't buy you because of your culture. And all those promises about Slack being independent and autonomous? Well sure, that was the plan, but now Slack is a part of Salesforce and Salesforce makes decisions that make sense for Salesforce, not Slack. So no, you don't get your own sales team, and no, you don't get your own customer support team. You're part of Salesforce now, it doesn't make sense. Oh and no, you aren't going to get the benefits you were getting at Slack, you don't work at Slack, you work at Salesforce, and hey! Some of those benefits may genuinely be better. Those HR reps that sorted all your perks at Slack? They're working in a Salesforce HR department now (if they weren't fired) and they're working to give you the Salesforce benefits. It's a tough message but when someone buys the company you work for, you no longer work at the old company, you work at the new company, no matter what anyone says.

achow 4y ago
This is mostly true. However, there are acquisitions which managed to keep their unique identity and even different salaries (!) after getting acquired. 1. For culture difference: I have heard YouTube culture is quite different than their parent (Goog) before and after aquisition. 2. After Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn, from various anecdotes, not only their previous culture is maintained but employees salaries are different as well (salary difference not entirely due to LinkedIn presence in valley vs Seattle - when both LinkedIn's and Microsoft's office exist in a same country outside USA, the employees have different level of perks and monetary compensation).
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  I would be more surprised if acquisitions were fully integrated into the company. Normalizing the culture and salaries across different companies seems like a great way to piss off everyone in the acquired company, and if they leave then you've lost a significant amount of value.
sgerenser 4y ago
That may be true in this case, but I know folks who work at GitHub and LinkedIn and apparently Microsoft has mostly been keeping hands off at these companies. I’m sure at least some functions have been merged, but they seem to have done a surprisingly good job of it.
- castillar76 4y ago
  I worked for Cisco for a long time: the integration of acquisitions in large companies (at least there) involves a calculus of size vs. current profits vs. complexity of integration. A company like Meraki or WebEx that’s making a lot of money and is larger or more complicated to integrate (because they have lots of their own systems and infrastructure) may get left alone, particularly if the former owners are aggressive about maintaining their existing culture. Cisco badges rather famously didn’t even work at Meraki offices, they were that pointed about keeping hands off. Scientific Atlanta was another one that got left alone for a long time, to the point that when Cisco people visited we all had to remember to dress up a bit because their offices were much more “casual Fridays means khakis and a polo shirt” than Cisco’s rather laid-back “it’s Friday, you’re lucky I’m wearing pants” culture. Once it suited Cisco to integrate them, though, the gloves came off and things moved much more quickly. So if the LinkedIn/GitHub leadership are aggressive about pushing a “hands off, we’re making money here” approach, Microsoft likely won’t deem it worth their time to bother as long as it’s not causing issues for the mother-ship. Much easier and cheaper to simply replace the hiring process for them and let the culture gradually acclimate to the larger company through attrition instead, while integrating the pieces that matter for now.
  - galkk 4y ago
    I had similar experience at Amazon. My Amazon badge didn’t work at SF Twitch office. After experiencing that I started to periodically write at amazons elevator whiteboards “Twitch is NOT Amazon” as little petty rebellion.
    - wging 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure that's just how the badging system works. Amazon is orders of magnitude too big for 'everyone has access to everywhere' to make sense. When I traveled I sometimes had to talk to people (or send email) to make sure my badge was activated in a new location, even for offices in a different city but the same business unit. There were also restrictions based on whether you actually worked on a particular thing, even for non-acquisition parts of the company.
Naga 4y ago
I agree with everything you're saying especially from the individual's perspective, but I think its valuable to look at the incentives from Salesforce's perspective. They paid an incredible amount of money for Slack because of what Slack is. In my opinion, it doesn't really matter that Slack ceased to exist (which I agree de jure it did) because de facto the Slack culture still exists as a minority now. If anything, the incentives at Salesforce should be to preserve Slack, not whittle it down, because they thought Slack was worth billions of dollars. Is Slack's technology really worth that much? Maybe, maybe not. Is Slack's customer base worth that much and do they have a big enough moat that they won't start evaporating? Maybe, maybe not. More likely the value at Slack was created by the sum of its parts together, including culture. Maybe you can make the argument that Salesforce thinks they bought a company that was worth less than the sum of its parts and that they can unlock value by making changes, but the acquisition and "culture clash" imply to me a big corporation throwing money at something they don't really understand.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  The only real way that these acquisitions make sense is "synergy" (eurgh), Slack just as a normal business isn't worth more to Salesforce than market value if it's just going to run Slack as if it's an independent company, but in order to buy it they had to pay 54% premium to the pre-acquisition share price. So why did they pay 54% more than Slack is worth as an independent company? Well, now they can bundle Slack into their other services and grow Slack that way, and vice-versa they can start integrating Slack into their other CRM services and sell more CRM software into Slack's customers. That's why Slack is worth more to them than it is to the open market. It's the same business model as Microsoft getting Cloud customers by leveraging their office suite etc. Especially in these large businesses it's often an enterprise sales game anyway, and all the real winning/losing happens in the Sales/Marketing and C Suite, not the engineering team anyway.
  - s17n 4y ago
    “Synergies” are great but many of the most profitable acquisitions are, at heart, bets that the acquiree was undervalued.
adolph 4y ago
> they sure as hell didn't buy you because of your culture. Which is kind of wierd since the culture as reflective of a company’s emergent collective decisions are what makes the product of a company succeed. If an acquirer isn’t buying the culture, they may as well stay a customer unless they think their own culture can make a product that supplants the acquired one’s and retain the customers.
- lazide 4y ago
  This is why 50% or more of acquisitions fail. And it’s usually not explicit that the acquired companies culture is ‘removed’ - rather top down decisions that don’t make sense for them (due to culture differences) end up being applied, and end up mangling things and forcing prior strong culture people to leave.
  - bruce511 4y ago
    You might need to define success, and fail, to quote a statistic like this. There are multiple groups of people (old owners, new owners, sellers-employees, buyers-employees, customers), multiple assets (physical, intellectual, human, customer-base, code etc) To ascribe failure to and acquisition I think means taking the viewpoint of they buyer - did the get what the wanted, or not? Not the viewpoint of employees or customers.
    - lazide 4y ago
      As judged by the buyer, based on post acquisition surveys.
- adolph 4y ago
  On further consideration the thought could be summarized by reference to the parable “The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg” "A cottager and his wife had a Hen that laid a golden egg every day. They supposed that the Hen must contain a great lump of gold in its inside, and in order to get the gold they killed [her]. Having done so, they found to their surprise that the Hen differed in no respect from their other hens. The foolish pair, thus hoping to become rich all at once, deprived themselves of the gain of which they were assured day by day." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goose_that_Laid_the_Golden_Eggs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goose_that_Laid_the_Golden...
throwawaylinux 4y ago
I don't really agree. Different parts of a single corporation can have different culture even if they arose entirely internally. And ownership does not imply there is no operational autonomy. It's all just people, and people make the culture and the rules and decide how to run things.
stevofolife 4y ago
You’re saying the acquired company needs to be assimilated into the parent company, although there are many examples where the acquired maintained its own culture. Not all acquisitions are the same.
paxys 4y ago
Look at how LinkedIn and Microsoft operate. The two companies have their own offices, salary tiers, office perks and lots more. Every department (including roles like marketing, recruiting, sales) is separate. Heck LinkedIn employees even use Slack rather than Microsoft Teams. It is the perfect example of independent company culture regardless of ownership. What you said might be true for the majority of acquisitions at that scale, but it is by no means a strict rule.
- cduzz 4y ago
  A tree can grow for 300 years. A tree can be chopped down in an afternoon. All it takes is for the next CEO to decide to undo this and it's undone.
  - not1ofU 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - tekstar 4y ago
    Same can be said about every company, acquired or not
    - lazide 4y ago
      The difference being, pre acquisition, they had their own CEO. Now they have another CEO of a different company. It’s a fundamental change in dynamic.
      - dingusdew 4y ago
        After sufficient time has passed, every company will need a new CEO, as no CEO lives forever. Each new iteration of CEO, whether internally or externally recruited, will bring a fundamental change in dynamic. You simply can't guarantee that the next generation will have the same values, views, and ways of working as the previous. The CEO of a different company in charge isn't that different than an internally sourced CEO in charge.
nixpulvis 4y ago
Consolidation is killing us all.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Waterluvian 4y ago
I just had a sudden moment of clarity where I think I grokked massive tech companies slightly more, when I tried to picture 70k employees on a single Slack server. How does that work? I imagine they don’t all pile into one server. Do you just have zero organic connection to 99% of your colleagues?
- tekstar 4y ago
  I experienced 2-3k employees on a slack server. it was terrible. 99% of the traffic is noise, 1% was critically important information for me to do my job.
- Kamq 4y ago
  > Do you just have zero organic connection to 99% of your colleagues? They aren't really your colleagues in the sense you're thinking. Companies that big get broken up into departments or business units that function pretty close to separate businesses (until you get to the top of them, then it merges back a bit). Those are your colleagues, and most of the people you interact with.
- wging 4y ago
  Those 70k wouldn't all be on the same channel. Even at a small company you might want to have distinct channels with different purposes - maybe #sales, #sw-engineering, #announcements. A 70k-person company might have a few large channels but most of the activity would take place in much more focused channels, of which there would be thousands or tens of thousands. A software team of a dozen people might have their own channel, for example. (Actually, in my experience we had several for distinct purposes.) (and of course yes, there can also be big general-purpose channels with a lower signal-to-noise ratio)
  - metadat 4y ago
    The 70,000 are all forced into #general. However it's a moderated channel of dubious utility.
    - wging 4y ago
adamzerner 4y ago
This strikes me as overly cynical. A pendulum swung too far. Yes, someone who takes "we don't want to change a thing" at face value is probably overconfident. OTOH, someone who says that the old culture "ceases to exist" is underconfident, I would wager. Reality is somewhere in the middle.
- dmak 4y ago
  Have you been apart of an acquisition before? it's pretty damn accurate and not cynical at all.
- watwut 4y ago
  It is not cynical. It is just how organizations and social groups work. It takes few months, but culture changes. People start to behave differently. And if you insist on not changing, you are better off to change the job entirely.
Schnitz 4y ago
Harsh but ultimately true. I was acquired into Salesforce and my experience matches this. Salesforce is a giant machine and you will be integrated sooner or later. When your big champion, in Slack's case the CEO, leaves you should expect the pace of integration to accelerate rapidly. This isn't the end of the world, Salesforce lets people vest in peace and then leave without hard feelings if they aren't happy with it. Those who want to embrace the Salesforce way are embraced and can have "a Salesforce career". The people who have the hardest time personally are those that try to fight the inevitable and push back against integrating. You can say a lot about Salesforce but people there are generally reasonable and not evil.
- dontknowwhyihn 4y ago
  I imagine it will be the same with Adobe and Figma.
- barnabee 4y ago
  Fighting back is not always futile. I’ve worked for a company that that was spun out again (to private equity, with only arguably better results— the original company was sufficiently damaged, too many of people long gone, and new owners too unwilling to invest) in part because enough people refused to integrate and become part of a bigger whole.
colordrops 4y ago
You are equating culture with power structure. While power indeed exerts heavy influence on culture, they are not one in the same. There is also a difference between explicit documented company culture (a la Netflix) and actual culture in the minds of individuals and teams. I've worked at places that acquired companies, and aspects of the acquired companies' culture persisted and sometimes spread beyond their group.
loeg 4y ago
Sort of yes, sort of no. If the acquired business is operating effectively and doesn't have a bad quarter or two sometimes the acquirer is happy to let it run more or less independently for a while. Sure, the writing is on the wall, but you can go years without major impact as an IC.
drewcoo 4y ago
> The second Salesforce bought Slack, Slack ceased to exist I'm pretty sure it could be sold, thus it exists. Or used to exist and could exist again?
kmlx 4y ago
> There's no culture clash between Slack and Salesforce. There's a Slack culture that once existed, and now there's Salesforce culture the company those workers now work at. You can embrace it, you can be unhappy, and you can leave. hmm, there seems to be some misunderstanding. simplifying, there are two types of acquisitions: holding and integration. for holding a company getting acquired remains quite independent. for integration the company getting acquired is integrated into the parent. how this integration happens is up to both participants. sometimes both companies have to change, other times one company imposes their culture over the other. but from what i’ve see, IT companies (especially american) definitely prefer deep integration into the parent. in other fields (and nations) holding is more popular.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  Yeah, and deep integration of disparate businesses is not something humans have a very good chance of pulling off. Trying to force two organic entities to merge into your vision. You have a very small chance of that working out. So small that, as an investor, I don't trust it will benefit me.
Aeolun 4y ago
> It's a tough message but when someone buys the company you work for, you no longer work at the old company, you work at the new company, no matter what anyone says. It is very profitable from the engineers perspective to keep insisting you work for Slack as long as possible though. If you just immediately roll over you’ll lose your old culture and benefits immediately.
wolverine876 4y ago
> So Salesforce makes all the same promises, but at the end of the day there's reality. > And all those promises about Slack being independent and autonomous? Well sure, that was the plan Do you think you and I know this pattern but the executives of Salesforce and Slack don't? It wasn't the plan, it was lies; they knew what was going to happen.
ehhthing 4y ago
This isn't entirely true. Even at the most surface level, "buying" a company can mean almost a dozen things. For example, a holding company can buy your company and do ... absolutely nothing, just treating it as an investment. This happens a lot too. Off the top of my head, AMC was once owned by Wanda Group based out of Dalian, Liaoning, China. Yet I'm sure that nobody who worked for AMC could tell, or even knew this was the case.
zetalyrae 4y ago
Very eloquently put.
skibidibipiti 4y ago
> they sure as hell didn't buy you because of your culture. They bought the company and tech. The company built the tech the way it did because of the people, and the people found the best way they operate. If salesforce wanted to have a salesforce built product they would have done that, but they bought slack. who’s to say if slack would be successful if the people are forced to act like salesforce?
noneeeed 4y ago
That’s a very accurate summary of where I work at the moment. All the nice things were said, but everything that made us what we were is being destroyed piece by piece.
pyuser583 4y ago
I’ve been involved in very awkward hiring situations where I apply for a job at “Salesforce,” only to be told at the last minute “you’re OK working at the ‘Slack’ team, right?” And then I’m stuck with both “Salesforce” and “Slack” emails, and have to use “Salesforce” and “Slack” Slack channels.

achow 4y ago

This is mostly true. However, there are acquisitions which managed to keep their unique identity and even different salaries (!) after getting acquired. 1. For culture difference: I have heard YouTube culture is quite different than their parent (Goog) before and after aquisition. 2. After Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn, from various anecdotes, not only their previous culture is maintained but employees salaries are different as well (salary difference not entirely due to LinkedIn presence in valley vs Seattle - when both LinkedIn's and Microsoft's office exist in a same country outside USA, the employees have different level of perks and monetary compensation).

ZephyrBlu 4y ago
I would be more surprised if acquisitions were fully integrated into the company. Normalizing the culture and salaries across different companies seems like a great way to piss off everyone in the acquired company, and if they leave then you've lost a significant amount of value.

sgerenser 4y ago

That may be true in this case, but I know folks who work at GitHub and LinkedIn and apparently Microsoft has mostly been keeping hands off at these companies. I’m sure at least some functions have been merged, but they seem to have done a surprisingly good job of it.

castillar76 4y ago
I worked for Cisco for a long time: the integration of acquisitions in large companies (at least there) involves a calculus of size vs. current profits vs. complexity of integration. A company like Meraki or WebEx that’s making a lot of money and is larger or more complicated to integrate (because they have lots of their own systems and infrastructure) may get left alone, particularly if the former owners are aggressive about maintaining their existing culture. Cisco badges rather famously didn’t even work at Meraki offices, they were that pointed about keeping hands off. Scientific Atlanta was another one that got left alone for a long time, to the point that when Cisco people visited we all had to remember to dress up a bit because their offices were much more “casual Fridays means khakis and a polo shirt” than Cisco’s rather laid-back “it’s Friday, you’re lucky I’m wearing pants” culture. Once it suited Cisco to integrate them, though, the gloves came off and things moved much more quickly. So if the LinkedIn/GitHub leadership are aggressive about pushing a “hands off, we’re making money here” approach, Microsoft likely won’t deem it worth their time to bother as long as it’s not causing issues for the mother-ship. Much easier and cheaper to simply replace the hiring process for them and let the culture gradually acclimate to the larger company through attrition instead, while integrating the pieces that matter for now.
- galkk 4y ago
  I had similar experience at Amazon. My Amazon badge didn’t work at SF Twitch office. After experiencing that I started to periodically write at amazons elevator whiteboards “Twitch is NOT Amazon” as little petty rebellion.
  - wging 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure that's just how the badging system works. Amazon is orders of magnitude too big for 'everyone has access to everywhere' to make sense. When I traveled I sometimes had to talk to people (or send email) to make sure my badge was activated in a new location, even for offices in a different city but the same business unit. There were also restrictions based on whether you actually worked on a particular thing, even for non-acquisition parts of the company.

Naga 4y ago

I agree with everything you're saying especially from the individual's perspective, but I think its valuable to look at the incentives from Salesforce's perspective. They paid an incredible amount of money for Slack because of what Slack is. In my opinion, it doesn't really matter that Slack ceased to exist (which I agree de jure it did) because de facto the Slack culture still exists as a minority now. If anything, the incentives at Salesforce should be to preserve Slack, not whittle it down, because they thought Slack was worth billions of dollars. Is Slack's technology really worth that much? Maybe, maybe not. Is Slack's customer base worth that much and do they have a big enough moat that they won't start evaporating? Maybe, maybe not. More likely the value at Slack was created by the sum of its parts together, including culture. Maybe you can make the argument that Salesforce thinks they bought a company that was worth less than the sum of its parts and that they can unlock value by making changes, but the acquisition and "culture clash" imply to me a big corporation throwing money at something they don't really understand.

SilverBirch 4y ago
The only real way that these acquisitions make sense is "synergy" (eurgh), Slack just as a normal business isn't worth more to Salesforce than market value if it's just going to run Slack as if it's an independent company, but in order to buy it they had to pay 54% premium to the pre-acquisition share price. So why did they pay 54% more than Slack is worth as an independent company? Well, now they can bundle Slack into their other services and grow Slack that way, and vice-versa they can start integrating Slack into their other CRM services and sell more CRM software into Slack's customers. That's why Slack is worth more to them than it is to the open market. It's the same business model as Microsoft getting Cloud customers by leveraging their office suite etc. Especially in these large businesses it's often an enterprise sales game anyway, and all the real winning/losing happens in the Sales/Marketing and C Suite, not the engineering team anyway.
- s17n 4y ago
  “Synergies” are great but many of the most profitable acquisitions are, at heart, bets that the acquiree was undervalued.

adolph 4y ago

> they sure as hell didn't buy you because of your culture. Which is kind of wierd since the culture as reflective of a company’s emergent collective decisions are what makes the product of a company succeed. If an acquirer isn’t buying the culture, they may as well stay a customer unless they think their own culture can make a product that supplants the acquired one’s and retain the customers.

lazide 4y ago
This is why 50% or more of acquisitions fail. And it’s usually not explicit that the acquired companies culture is ‘removed’ - rather top down decisions that don’t make sense for them (due to culture differences) end up being applied, and end up mangling things and forcing prior strong culture people to leave.
- bruce511 4y ago
  You might need to define success, and fail, to quote a statistic like this. There are multiple groups of people (old owners, new owners, sellers-employees, buyers-employees, customers), multiple assets (physical, intellectual, human, customer-base, code etc) To ascribe failure to and acquisition I think means taking the viewpoint of they buyer - did the get what the wanted, or not? Not the viewpoint of employees or customers.
  - lazide 4y ago
    As judged by the buyer, based on post acquisition surveys.
adolph 4y ago
On further consideration the thought could be summarized by reference to the parable “The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg” "A cottager and his wife had a Hen that laid a golden egg every day. They supposed that the Hen must contain a great lump of gold in its inside, and in order to get the gold they killed [her]. Having done so, they found to their surprise that the Hen differed in no respect from their other hens. The foolish pair, thus hoping to become rich all at once, deprived themselves of the gain of which they were assured day by day." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goose_that_Laid_the_Golden_Eggs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goose_that_Laid_the_Golden...

throwawaylinux 4y ago

I don't really agree. Different parts of a single corporation can have different culture even if they arose entirely internally. And ownership does not imply there is no operational autonomy. It's all just people, and people make the culture and the rules and decide how to run things.

stevofolife 4y ago

You’re saying the acquired company needs to be assimilated into the parent company, although there are many examples where the acquired maintained its own culture. Not all acquisitions are the same.

paxys 4y ago

Look at how LinkedIn and Microsoft operate. The two companies have their own offices, salary tiers, office perks and lots more. Every department (including roles like marketing, recruiting, sales) is separate. Heck LinkedIn employees even use Slack rather than Microsoft Teams. It is the perfect example of independent company culture regardless of ownership. What you said might be true for the majority of acquisitions at that scale, but it is by no means a strict rule.

cduzz 4y ago
A tree can grow for 300 years. A tree can be chopped down in an afternoon. All it takes is for the next CEO to decide to undo this and it's undone.
- not1ofU 4y ago
  [flagged]
- tekstar 4y ago
  Same can be said about every company, acquired or not
  - lazide 4y ago
    The difference being, pre acquisition, they had their own CEO. Now they have another CEO of a different company. It’s a fundamental change in dynamic.
    - dingusdew 4y ago
      After sufficient time has passed, every company will need a new CEO, as no CEO lives forever. Each new iteration of CEO, whether internally or externally recruited, will bring a fundamental change in dynamic. You simply can't guarantee that the next generation will have the same values, views, and ways of working as the previous. The CEO of a different company in charge isn't that different than an internally sourced CEO in charge.

nixpulvis 4y ago

Consolidation is killing us all.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Waterluvian 4y ago

I just had a sudden moment of clarity where I think I grokked massive tech companies slightly more, when I tried to picture 70k employees on a single Slack server. How does that work? I imagine they don’t all pile into one server. Do you just have zero organic connection to 99% of your colleagues?

tekstar 4y ago
I experienced 2-3k employees on a slack server. it was terrible. 99% of the traffic is noise, 1% was critically important information for me to do my job.
Kamq 4y ago
> Do you just have zero organic connection to 99% of your colleagues? They aren't really your colleagues in the sense you're thinking. Companies that big get broken up into departments or business units that function pretty close to separate businesses (until you get to the top of them, then it merges back a bit). Those are your colleagues, and most of the people you interact with.
wging 4y ago
Those 70k wouldn't all be on the same channel. Even at a small company you might want to have distinct channels with different purposes - maybe #sales, #sw-engineering, #announcements. A 70k-person company might have a few large channels but most of the activity would take place in much more focused channels, of which there would be thousands or tens of thousands. A software team of a dozen people might have their own channel, for example. (Actually, in my experience we had several for distinct purposes.) (and of course yes, there can also be big general-purpose channels with a lower signal-to-noise ratio)
- metadat 4y ago
  The 70,000 are all forced into #general. However it's a moderated channel of dubious utility.
  - wging 4y ago

adamzerner 4y ago

This strikes me as overly cynical. A pendulum swung too far. Yes, someone who takes "we don't want to change a thing" at face value is probably overconfident. OTOH, someone who says that the old culture "ceases to exist" is underconfident, I would wager. Reality is somewhere in the middle.

dmak 4y ago
Have you been apart of an acquisition before? it's pretty damn accurate and not cynical at all.
watwut 4y ago
It is not cynical. It is just how organizations and social groups work. It takes few months, but culture changes. People start to behave differently. And if you insist on not changing, you are better off to change the job entirely.

Schnitz 4y ago

Harsh but ultimately true. I was acquired into Salesforce and my experience matches this. Salesforce is a giant machine and you will be integrated sooner or later. When your big champion, in Slack's case the CEO, leaves you should expect the pace of integration to accelerate rapidly. This isn't the end of the world, Salesforce lets people vest in peace and then leave without hard feelings if they aren't happy with it. Those who want to embrace the Salesforce way are embraced and can have "a Salesforce career". The people who have the hardest time personally are those that try to fight the inevitable and push back against integrating. You can say a lot about Salesforce but people there are generally reasonable and not evil.

dontknowwhyihn 4y ago
I imagine it will be the same with Adobe and Figma.
barnabee 4y ago
Fighting back is not always futile. I’ve worked for a company that that was spun out again (to private equity, with only arguably better results— the original company was sufficiently damaged, too many of people long gone, and new owners too unwilling to invest) in part because enough people refused to integrate and become part of a bigger whole.

colordrops 4y ago

You are equating culture with power structure. While power indeed exerts heavy influence on culture, they are not one in the same. There is also a difference between explicit documented company culture (a la Netflix) and actual culture in the minds of individuals and teams. I've worked at places that acquired companies, and aspects of the acquired companies' culture persisted and sometimes spread beyond their group.

loeg 4y ago

Sort of yes, sort of no. If the acquired business is operating effectively and doesn't have a bad quarter or two sometimes the acquirer is happy to let it run more or less independently for a while. Sure, the writing is on the wall, but you can go years without major impact as an IC.

drewcoo 4y ago

> The second Salesforce bought Slack, Slack ceased to exist I'm pretty sure it could be sold, thus it exists. Or used to exist and could exist again?

kmlx 4y ago

> There's no culture clash between Slack and Salesforce. There's a Slack culture that once existed, and now there's Salesforce culture the company those workers now work at. You can embrace it, you can be unhappy, and you can leave. hmm, there seems to be some misunderstanding. simplifying, there are two types of acquisitions: holding and integration. for holding a company getting acquired remains quite independent. for integration the company getting acquired is integrated into the parent. how this integration happens is up to both participants. sometimes both companies have to change, other times one company imposes their culture over the other. but from what i’ve see, IT companies (especially american) definitely prefer deep integration into the parent. in other fields (and nations) holding is more popular.

datavirtue 4y ago
Yeah, and deep integration of disparate businesses is not something humans have a very good chance of pulling off. Trying to force two organic entities to merge into your vision. You have a very small chance of that working out. So small that, as an investor, I don't trust it will benefit me.

Aeolun 4y ago

> It's a tough message but when someone buys the company you work for, you no longer work at the old company, you work at the new company, no matter what anyone says. It is very profitable from the engineers perspective to keep insisting you work for Slack as long as possible though. If you just immediately roll over you’ll lose your old culture and benefits immediately.

wolverine876 4y ago

> So Salesforce makes all the same promises, but at the end of the day there's reality. > And all those promises about Slack being independent and autonomous? Well sure, that was the plan Do you think you and I know this pattern but the executives of Salesforce and Slack don't? It wasn't the plan, it was lies; they knew what was going to happen.

ehhthing 4y ago

This isn't entirely true. Even at the most surface level, "buying" a company can mean almost a dozen things. For example, a holding company can buy your company and do ... absolutely nothing, just treating it as an investment. This happens a lot too. Off the top of my head, AMC was once owned by Wanda Group based out of Dalian, Liaoning, China. Yet I'm sure that nobody who worked for AMC could tell, or even knew this was the case.

zetalyrae 4y ago

Very eloquently put.

skibidibipiti 4y ago

> they sure as hell didn't buy you because of your culture. They bought the company and tech. The company built the tech the way it did because of the people, and the people found the best way they operate. If salesforce wanted to have a salesforce built product they would have done that, but they bought slack. who’s to say if slack would be successful if the people are forced to act like salesforce?

noneeeed 4y ago

That’s a very accurate summary of where I work at the moment. All the nice things were said, but everything that made us what we were is being destroyed piece by piece.

pyuser583 4y ago

I’ve been involved in very awkward hiring situations where I apply for a job at “Salesforce,” only to be told at the last minute “you’re OK working at the ‘Slack’ team, right?” And then I’m stuck with both “Salesforce” and “Slack” emails, and have to use “Salesforce” and “Slack” Slack channels.