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Tell HN: Salesforce is mandating RTO 3 days/wk for all employee
Applies to ALL employees within 40 miles of an office.
Announced internally in what’s known as V2MOM, which is an internal top-down KPIs. All managers will be judged based on this metric.
This applies to employees at all organisations under its umbrella, including Slack. Includes engineers.
- 88913527 4y agoSeems like a good way to drive unregrettable attrition. The next question is, will this cause too many people to leave or stay? Tough to grok in advance how employees will respond, and how many people might take the chance the policy has no teeth.
- ProAm 4y agoSometimes you do this to force attrition so you dont have to do more layoffs.
- shmatt 4y agoThis pretty much sums up a lot of the layoffs going on. I can't vouch for all the random Google results but for US tech voluntary attrition seemed to be somewhere around 15% per year pre pandemic. It went even higher during the 'great resignation'. Companies hiring strategies were based off 15% or 20% of people leaving by surprise. They had to hire accordingly Now big employers are freezing or significantly slowing hiring down, some are afraid as new employees they'd be targeted in layoffs (or maybe their offers would be cancelled an hour before starting), so everyone ends up with more employees than they planned for
- oblio 4y ago> US tech voluntary attrition seemed to be somewhere around 15% per year pre pandemic. Source?
- asdff 4y agoBy doing this you are most likely to atrophy from your most senior and experienced staff who can readily find another remote job, this leads to brain drain in the organization and sets you up worse long term for perceived short term benefits which are dubious at best. I think management has doubted the degree to which people would make remote work their hill to die on in terms of job benefits.
- 88913527 4y agoLosing some key staff might be better than a 2nd, 3rd, Nth round of layoffs which could cause an increasing crisis in confidence, which would lead to proportionally more senior staff leaving.
- asdff 4y agoHonestly layoffs seem like a really fraught way to save money. They always trim at a nice even number like 10%, so you know they didn't run any analysis to suggest what an appropriate amount would be , and just did what number seemed right in the guts of boardmembers, probably just being a lemming doing a similar cut as a competitor to not spook shareholders too much. How much could payroll be, 30% of revenue? You cut 10% of payroll you are only saving 3% of revenue and stoking a lot of fear among your troops in the process. How much is an office lease obligation on the other hand versus the savings from these layoffs weighed against the potential revenue that labor could have generated had you kept them employed?
- itsdrewmiller 4y agoWhy would you assume payroll is 30% of revenue? For companies dealing with limited runway there is a good chance payroll is >100% revenue, and in general for software companies payroll is the single highest expense.
- slt2021 4y agowhy unregrettable, I think it is quite the opposite - regrettable attrition because it is the people who have the most in-demand skills on the job market can/will leave for full remote/better hybrid schedules.
- __derek__ 4y agoFWIW, it's also possible that the folks you describe have indicated a preference for more in-person/hybrid work.
- 88913527 4y agoIt's unregrettable if the company intentionally desires to downsize. Regrettable means when don't you want someone to leave, but they do. Unregrettable is the opposite: someone leaves, but you wanted them to.
- temporary22 4y agoThe best people will leave though
- slt2021 4y agoits more like only the best people will be able to interview and get jobs elsewhere for better wording conditions, and low performers will cling to their jobs and accept RTO happily where they can compensate lack of impact for facetime
- slt2021 4y agois it unregrettable if your experienced people run to competitor for better working conditions, fix their product, build feature parity and simply outexecute you?
- yellow_lead 4y agoSalesforce employees read: Update your address to a 41 mile away address. (Not legal advice)
- livinglist 4y agoI myself am not a Salesforce employee but was just curious enough to look up the distance between my home address (Sunnyvale) and the Salesforce tower in downtown SF - just a lil bit out of the requirements (43 miles), it’s about an hr and half driving in rush hours…
- polar8 4y agoThere are offices all over the bay, e.g. Palo Alto has one
- ramesh31 4y ago>There are offices all over the bay, e.g. Palo Alto has one Not much consolation to the folks in Antioch/Brentwood. That's a brutal 2hr drive in rush hour, and nearly the same via BART.
- opportune 4y agoIt would take only about 1hr and some change if you used a bike + Caltrain Baby Bullet (if you live close enough to a station). About 40-45m of that would be spent chilling on the train Though it looks like the Baby Bullets aren’t stopping in Sunnyvale currently which is a damn shame
- marblar 4y agoBaby bullets have never stopped in Sunnyvale.
- opportune 4y agoI’ll take your word for it, I used to do this commute from a different city on the peninsula and at the time I seemed to recall Baby Bullet stopping in Sunnyvale, but I am not certain. I know things have changed a lot due to the construction and such. Regardless, depending on where you are in Sunnyvale it may not be too bad hard to catch the Mountain View baby bullet
- ActorNightly 4y agoExpect this to be the case for a lot of companies in 2023. They know that due to layoffs, people are likely to stay. There is a case to be made for certain sectors definitely being more productive while at the office, especially those that are working on future products. The issue is that from a management standpoint, you can't make certain people come in while letting others who can easily do work from home stay with WFH. So generally, there will be policies mandating everyone to return to a certain extent.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- barbazoo 4y ago> Expect this to be the case for a lot of companies in 2023. Especially companies with a similar real estate lease footprint
- asdff 4y agoThe writing is on the wall. Are you really going to resign that lease on all that office space when you've proved you can do business without it? The experiment has been ran on a grand scale. The results show working from home does not lead to society ending, rather things like cleaner air. If I were a company with a big lease obligation right now, I would be trying to toss the hot potato and sublet this waste of budget as soon as possible. Seems there's plenty of business owners who would happily take on that burden themselves out of pride at least these days, "we work in the office for synergy" and all that dilbert style thinking which remains ever popular.
- RestlessMind 4y ago> The results show working from home does not lead to society ending, rather things like cleaner air. Results also show lower productivity of fully-remote teams, especially when more than half of your team is new, people haven't ramped up on complex codebases and haven't made good bonds with their colleagues.
- stevoski 4y agoCare to tell us what RTO stands for?
- kingcai 4y agoRTO = return to office
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- LazyMans 4y agoSoft layoffs
- aliqot 4y agoIt'd be stupid to go straight to layoffs and have to pay those people when you can eliminate all of the ones already on the fence without as much cost. Mark my words, I am confident they'll let go 7-10% next.
- nmstoker 4y agoInteresting approach but presumably it only makes sense if they've got little concern about who leaves, which would only be rational if they were cutting deep.
- perfecthjrjth 4y agoThe upper management doesn't care about who leaves, as their goal is to force attrition.
- busterarm 4y agoThey already did a 10% layoff in January. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/technology/salesforce-layoffs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/technology/salesforce-lay...
- toomuchtodo 4y agoTwilio is on their second layoff, it would not be surprising to see others do the same.
- dalyons 4y agoTwilio has never made a cent of profit and is losing ~1billion per QUARTER. Not comparable to salesforce in any way.
- 4y ago
- smileysteve 4y agoInteresting because Salesforce didn't have 3 days in an office as a requirement for many of their employees as far back as 2012.
- hnburnsy 4y agoV2MOM From Marc Benioff... "Success depends on constant communication and complete alignment. We’ve been able to achieve both with the help of a management process I developed a number of years ago called the V2MOM, which stands for: Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures." https://www.salesforce.com/blog/how-to-create-alignment-within-your-company/ https://www.salesforce.com/blog/how-to-create-alignment-with...
- hotpotamus 4y ago"The Conjoined Triangles of Success" from the Mike Judge show Silicon Valley spring immediately to mind.
- bin_bash 4y agoit's basically their version of OKRs
- rybosworld 4y agoMarc seems like a guy that enjoys the smell of his own farts just a bit too much.
- pwarner 4y agoFrom my past experience 50% of the time was sort of the magic amount of time to be in the office. Seemed the best blend of focus time at home and in person time in the office. Now I'm 100% remote but next job I'd look for 50 /50 mix.
- j0hnyl 4y agoPersonally I love being 100% remote and have found that I'm more productive than ever, and have more personal time than ever. I would never consider a job that required any regular time in the office unless I was desperate.
- kitsunesoba 4y agoSimilar here. So much dead time in the office, primarily after productive hours have been exhausted, can now go towards things like chores and errands so my evenings and weekends are actually mine in practice, not just in theory. I might consider coming into the office a few days a week if it's within reasonable walking distance, but that usually means living downtown which is usually a cost that exceeds the regional CoL compensation adjustments that most companies make, which means it's coming out of my pocket to be possible, and I am not going to commute unless it's East Asia style train commuting during off-peak hours, where I can actually do something while in transit.
- tmaly 4y agoI have been back in the office 3 days a week since April 2021. I would say given the lost time due to the commute, I would prefer 2 days in office vs 3 days. Being able to see people face time face gives a different dynamic you cannot replicate with video calls.
- PragmaticPulp 4y agoI'm 100% remote and do well, but I have to admit that even small amounts of in-office time were very effective at overcoming a lot of the communication issues and conflicts that show up in remote work. Having an all-remote team with people who can work well remotely is a wonderful thing. It's rare to get a department full of people who can work well remotely, though. I personally prefer companies that remove the people who can't handle remote work, but so many companies hired large numbers of unprepared people into remote jobs under unprepared managers in the past 3 years. You really have to be careful about team selection to build a fully functional remote team, but that wasn't happening during the hiring rush.
- ProAm 4y agoIsn't their main office/HQ in a really dangerous part of town crime wise?
- gkoberger 4y agoNo, it's one of the safest, cleanest parts of the city.
- ProAm 4y agoAhh am mistaken then, maybe it was Twitter HQ (maybe not even them?), I read an article where people were literally scared to go to work or leave after dark but I could not remember which company it was. It was about 2 years ago
- melvinmelih 4y agoI assume gkoberger was being sarcastic
- ProAm 4y agoAhhh, Fool me once! I was a little surprised there are nice/safe parts of SF but I only travel for work there, at most a week or two at a time. So thought maybe I just hadn't been to the nice part of town. EDIT: damn I didnt think it was this bad 938 crimes per square mile in SF [1] [1] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime
- __derek__ 4y agoMaybe you're thinking of Amazon's former Blueshift office in the old Macy's building in downtown Seattle.[1] This building is located across the street from a McDonald's that has long been a nexus for anti-social activity in the area. [1]: https://www.geekwire.com/2022/amazon-moves-employees-out-of-downtown-seattle-office-due-to-crime/ https://www.geekwire.com/2022/amazon-moves-employees-out-of-...
- 4y ago
- castratikron 4y ago"Managers will be judged", meaning if an employee does not want to relocate, it is their direct manager's problem. Sounds like a great way to ruin a working dev-boss relationship.
- sargun 4y agoWhy not just have the manager take everyone's badge, and use it every day? I wonder if the timing on RFID is loose enough to proxy it over the web.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- slt2021 4y agoinfosec will see badged people connecting to remote VPN instead of in-office wifi. Just don't cheat and fraud, easily detectable
- buildbot 4y agoIf the only way to detect this "fraud" is that VPNs are in use, then why bother returning to the office? Seems like it's only a cost center with no added benefit.
- samtho 4y agoControl. The old guard of large business cannot stand that people have their own lives away from work and how will they know that someone is actually working rather than collecting a paycheck?
- mathverse 4y agoIt is actually odd they perceive it like this. I work much harder from home than I ever did from the office. It is impossible to hide doing WFH like one can do “endlessly” collaborating with your colleagues at the office.
- aaomidi 4y agoJobs are really loving the idea that they fully own you. Wild.
- Animats 4y agoSalesforce has to justify their oversize pointy building in San Francisco. Much of the demand to return to office is driven by commercial real estate interests. But they're losing. Companies aren't renewing when leases run out.
- eduction 4y agoThey have to justify their anchor lease in the building, true, but although they got naming rights it is not owned by them, I believe it is Boston Properties. The lease (reportedly) goes 15.5 years from 2017 so they certainly have incentive to use the space but I don't think they get anything from the value of the building up or down.
- moomoo11 4y agoThey should turn it into an ultra high end mall and turn the upper floors into residential. Take all the nice high end stores out of graffiti and litter ridden areas and put them inside SF tower. I’d never go there but if it helps make downtown better I’m all for it.
- paxys 4y agoGiven San Francisco politics it will take 20 years to get all the reviews and permits to make that happen, and that is contingent on all parties actually wanting it to happen (which they won't).
- cooperadymas 4y agoI guess you haven't heard about the struggles malls are having. > I’d never go there
- moomoo11 4y agoI see rich people shopping at those high end stores though. Maybe the malls for the rest of us are struggling, but they also don't sell jackets that cost $15k lol
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- andrewstuart 4y ago"You can work remote forever" was a trend during Covid when it was hard to hire people. Like Yo Yos, Pet Rocks and fidget spinners, the fad has passed along with the leverage that developers had.
- jimbob45 4y ago"We'll go back to hiring exclusively regional/in-state employees" isn't something these companies are champing at the bit to return to. It's fun to pretend that these lazy, slovenly employees were the only winners of the remote bonanza but access to 49 other states' worth of talent was a massive boon for companies and more than likely offset their imaginary productivity losses from WfH.
- sharemywin 4y agoso about 1 hr to 1 1/2 hr extra commute time. so about 15%-20% pay cut. on a per hourly basis.
- MaxHoppersGhost 4y agoDid these people take pay cuts when they went remote because they got some time back? They did not, so they’re not taking a pay cut.
- Ancalagon 4y ago? OP is saying in effect that going remote was a pay raise…
- realworldperson 4y ago[dead]
- cm2012 4y agoHybrid is the worst of all models.
- kerpotgh 4y agoYep, if I’m fully in office I accept that that is my reality. With hybrid I dread the days I have to go in.
- Someone1234 4y agoPlus you have to pay for things as if you were going in every day. For example a dedicated vehicle and more expensive property closer to work. You save a small amount in fuel and vehicle wear & tear, but you cannot make the big lifestyle changes you'd be able to make due to full time WFH.
- RestlessMind 4y agoWhen I checked with my friends and coworkers, hybrid was the most preferred option. YMMV?
- CydeWeys 4y agoI don't like hybrid because I prefer to go in every day but a lot of my coworkers don't come into the office very often. I'd rather teams were fully WFO or fully WFH instead of hybrid. That's not really an option at my work though.
- RestlessMind 4y agoHybrid absolutely requires the days in office to be the same for everyone. Anything else is just stupidity on the management's part.
- CydeWeys 4y agoNobody is enforcing anyone coming into the office at all.
- mathverse 4y agoIve been to the office twice this year…it is both a party place and a place for work. Fridges are full of beer and fizzy drinks, there’s table tennis and games and they regularly do friday bar nights. And yet barely anyone visits the office… I WONDER WHY.
- opportune 4y agoI love these things and find them energizing when enough people show up to participate in them. Before COVID, even though a lot of people still wouldn’t ever play table tennis or stay after work for some events, you had a lot more of a real “community” at the office. When office attendance is optional and only 20-30% of people show up, these things feel so much more forced and not as fun. I know the point you are trying to make is that these are dumb distractions people don’t care about compared to WFH. But I think there is a “critical mass” aspect as well. Offices, for me, are much better to work in when there’s a community, and not just a pimped-out first-party WeWork
- mathverse 4y agoMy point was that people do not really want to hangout with their colleagues. And if they do they do it outside of working hours anyway. No amount of freebies can create that utopia where everyone is partying together at the office.
- opportune 4y agoPersonally speaking, I would happily go to the office if attendance were more like 80% instead of 30%. Right now I rarely go because the attendance is so poor. So I would say that it’s not just people who want to go vs people who don’t. There is a third category that basically doesn’t see the point if the office is “just” a working environment and doesn’t have enough actual coworkers there, which I find myself in, and I suspect many others do too.
- mathverse 4y agoI understand this point but there is no way to make people like you happy without forcing the majority to come. Also it makes no sense in a lot of scenarios. For example i am 800km away from the office.
- chasd00 4y agothe v2mom concept is pretty old school Salesforce. I guess this is the final nail in the coffin for "ohana".
- xwdv 4y agoThis is why you never work a remote job for a company that has offices near you. If they don’t want you working remotely, let them fire you and give you severance. Not mandate an insane commute.
- jbverschoor 4y agoIt's kind of funny, as Salesforce sells a remote platform.
- clpm4j 4y agoFully-remote will be a big hiring advantage that startups have over the large legacy companies.
- perfecthjrjth 4y agoYes, Apple is forcing that now, employees are given verbal notices for not adhering to 3 day RTO, based on the scoop.
- gardenhedge 4y agoOld school move by Salesforce but not that surprising. I've never thought of it as a good place to work.
- t344344 4y agoI am sort of happy. Mexico, South America and other locations were getting pretty expensive for obvious reasons. My job will be mostly unaffected, but my living expenses (as DN) will be greatly reduced.
- benatkin 4y agoLast week there was a NYTimes' The Daily podcast episode about how SF's downtown is empty. Some balance is good.
- jjcm 4y agoGiven the 40 mile radius, I do wonder at what point is this changing the requirement of the job for those on the border of this. The commute at the extremes (San Jose, Fairfield, and Petaluma are all within radius) will require ~2 hours of drive time every day. Is this supposed to be done on personal time or employee time? If it's personal, that's a significant impact/ask from Salesforce for a previously-remote job.
- jedberg 4y agoSalesforce spent billions on their building in SF. Their company value is partially based on the value of this building. If the building sits empty, the value of the building, and therefore the company, will drop. This is why they are doing this. To keep the value of their very expensive building up.
- BeetleB 4y ago> If the building sits empty, the value of the building, and therefore the company, will drop. No, this is not how commerical real estate is valued.
- jedberg 4y agoThere are many ways to value a commercial building, but the majority of those are based on rents/occupancy rates. Even the "comparable sales" method basically includes rents, because sales rates on commercial properties are very dependent on expected ROI.
- Kokichi 4y agoBut it's not their tower
- mbgerring 4y agoYou know, we tech workers really ought to organize to put a stop to this mandatory return to office nonsense.
- the_jeremy 4y agoMy friend works at Salesforce and is classified as fully remote, he hasn't heard anything regarding this.
- gabythenerd 4y agoDoes someone know if this is official at a global scale? From the little I know they were asking people's opinion on it, not mandating it per se. Disclaimer: I don't work at Salesforce.
- sharemywin 4y agoI just don't understand the mandating. This seems stupid. Most employees know what they need to get their job done. Adding unneeded and unwanted constraints is dumb. The funniest part about a lot of this is most of the layoffs are coming from the transition way from "Cloud" which is going to cause more layoffs and more tightening.
- bknight1983 4y agoElliott Management took an activist role at SalesForce recently, I suspect this is the first of many ways Elliott will look to remove people without the need of severence. This happened at athenahealth as well where the layoff date was spread about the office, resulting in a mass exodus of people. The resulting layoff was much smaller and thus less costly
- herbstein 4y agoCrowdStrike, a company touting remote working prior to the pandemic, is also returning to 40% office occupancy for anyone within ~40 kilometers.
- slenk 4y agoSo do they have to go into that falling over tower in SF? Or is that just the SF tower by name only
- birdymcbird 4y agopersonally dont disagree. at big tech productivity fell off cliff with remote work. lot of “fake” growth and fake “success” because of fed zero rate policy. but party over. especially entitled people earning $200k++ year have little room to complain about first world problem. only “innovation” especially at big company like this is more and more professional manager get hired..dont know the tech..do not understand product or they customer..just hire more and more in empire building exercise. time to work hard or find new job.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y agoWas there proof that these people earning their wages worked less hard at home?
- xeromal 4y agoI will get a mailing address just outside of an office. F all that.
- up2isomorphism 4y agoJust quit if you don't like the job.
- akmarinov 4y agoWho keeps track of where you live? Just tell them you’ve moved 40 miles away and keep working remotely.
- dev_0 4y ago[dead]
- matty22 4y agoAnd I had just started working through a Salesforce Admin certification course to pursue applying for some jobs there. Suppose I can just save that time and do something else now!
- danwee 4y ago> Applies to ALL employees within 40 miles of an office. Wonder what happens if you decide (while being employed) to move to a city that has no office. Would management just accept it?