21 ms·

Former VP Claims Salesforce Lied About Software Capabilities: 'It Was All a Lie'

236 points by gemanor 3y ago

archo 3y ago
https://archive.is/kkVvi https://archive.is/kkVvi
lucidone 3y ago
Doesn't surprise me given Salesforce is all about squeezing their (generally) non-technical customers with arbitrary licensing restrictions and "best practices" that lead to paying for more and more.
dpeck 3y ago
The same could be said for nearly every sales call that I’ve been on the receiving end of. It doesn’t make it “right”, but (nearly?) everyone who is involved in these conversations on both the buyer and seller sides of it knows that at best it’s aspirational capabilities that are being pitched and purchased. Usually it’s pretty far from that.
- gemanor 3y ago
  IMO the main problem is the ecosystem around Salesforce. If you are the end user it is (not) ok to have latency lies, but you'll be the only one who feel it. If you aim to other developers build services on top of your product, your latency issues has exponential effect for them.
- everdrive 3y ago
  I'd sort of split this up a bit. The engineers seem to know that the promises from sales are lie. The managers and executives sort of claim to know that salesmen exaggerate claims, but the reality of it never really seems to land. Time and time again I'm working for a company who has purchased a product which they're barely making use or, or are flat out using incorrectly because they were charmed by the promises from sales, but not so charmed as to actually staff the software properly to ensure it is well configured, and maintained correctly.
- itronitron 3y ago
  I was talking with a colleague once about this and they mentioned that as long as everyone being pitched was wearing a suit then they wouldn't worry about the wild claims the sales people made about our software. But if there was an engineer in the room they'd feel obligated to nudge everyone back to reality.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    Three red lines
    - moneywoes 3y ago
      Sorry can you elaborate
      - tomnipotent 3y ago
        It's from the satirical video "The Expert" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg). It's up there with the "Microservices" Krazam video.
        gregw2 3y ago
        Funny! Thanks
  - shostack 3y ago
    I'm a technical marketer who had owned a lot of the associated infra over my career. I've historically been a major target for sales people from companies in the space. I've lost count of the times I've had sales people outright lie to me about how audience data or targeting signals work, particularly about the nuances of privacy aspects which I care a great deal about and have done a lot of work with. These days if I'm serious about something I ensure there's a competent engineer (even a sales engineer) and product person on the call and largely ignore the sales person. I'm even really upfront about it by saying something like "I'm the decision maker, I have very specific technical and product questions and I want to avoid wasting time for either party by moving quickly or getting to a quick 'no', please confirm you can have XYZ people on our first call." Usually it's been great that way. If they try to jerk me around with those people being unavailable at the last minute, I tell them I'm rescheduling until they can get their calendars in order. This all comes with a responsibility though to make sure I'm not wasting their people's time. So I make sure I've done my homework and have likely sent an agenda/list of questions in advance to discuss. Depending on the relative sizes of my and their company, this can also be an express path to getting executive leadership who can cut through the noise of the process and get some good terms for me.
- MontgomeryPy 3y ago
  Yes. So maybe this lawsuit could move the pendulum back from the truthiness state. I see a lot of 'so what' comments but maybe there's a better way.
  - liquidpele 3y ago
    It won’t move back. These issues exist for reasons, and avoiding lawsuits is already a consideration taken. At the end of the day, they embellish to an extreme because management in the customer companies are usually buying “we used X” prestige and there’s very little accountability in management for such mistakes.
mathattack 3y ago
Our old Salesforce rep is now a LinkedIn influencer. We all shake our heads as we know how useless they really were.
- steve1977 3y ago
  Well, what has changed?
bob1029 3y ago
Now, consider all of those companies that are building their solutions on top of salesforce's products. We had a customer go with a competitor who is partnered with Salesforce and the only thought I could summon was "I can't wait to read the postmortem". Even if you can make it work, the user experience is a big factor and will ultimately become a system requirement at some level. Latency is hell and requires mastery to overcome in any system of meaningful complexity. Focused, targeted engineering vs broad-spectrum tool spam is the difference between 10 and 1000 milliseconds.
RHSman2 3y ago
One word: Siebel
- trollied 3y ago
  Oh my, I'd forgotten about that. Thankfully. Is it still around?
  - meepmorp 3y ago
    Bought by Oracle, still being sold.
    - RHSman2 3y ago
      Salesforce won that war. Seems like it’s hit the same ceiling? I was a Siebel consultant.
- dexwiz 3y ago
  Many Salesforce employees are Siebel alums.
- gemanor 3y ago
  Sure, if you need 10ms rate, just spin up another instances. I personally prefer cloud product with lies here and there than pay so much.
uptownfunk 3y ago
Someone makes it to VP and then all of a sudden decides to have a conscience.
fidotron 3y ago
This is an inevitable aspect of the MVP fake-it-until-you-make-it culture that infects even established companies. They are telling themselves that if enough people come to depend on it doing what they claim it does then they'll make it do that, but not before. I've encountered people making surprised Pikachu faces when called on problems with their systems while they roll out a new version that fixes it and claim incidents never occurred. Appearances are everything in tech today.
- dbish 3y ago
  This is pushed from the smallest startup upwards as a way to make sure you’re building something people want. There are pros and cons of course, but I can understand why companies do this and why software folks think they need to. It’s related to the shipping early, fast, and iterating which is the currently taught best practice by places that have a lot of experience getting new things off the ground like YC.
  - fidotron 3y ago
    But there's a world of difference about lying about capability today and working with customers to deliver what they need. My favourite example is how ARM ended up in Nokia phones. They had a 32 bit RISC CPU core which met the performance requirements but Nokia turned them down due to the memory density of the instructions meaning it required more expensive storage than their existing solutions. On the way back from the meeting they came up with the idea of Thumb, worked out how to do it, did it, and Nokia bought it. It then took over the industry. That conversation in SV today would involve Nokia going "We love what you folks are doing" but just keeping the existing system without ever saying why, and nothing would improve.
    - to11mtm 3y ago
      Interesting to think about that. I remember the SuperH had 16 bit instructions (well, SH-5 was variable length,) I wonder whether that would have become 'our future' if ARM hadn't done Thumb back then.
browningstreet 3y ago
At two companies I’ve been the CTO at we brought Salesforce in to pitch us. They couldn’t actually tell us what their use case was given our sales and customer base. We had ecom platforms with some customer data embedded in the sales platform and Salesforce couldn’t pitch a benefit to using their system.
- zulban 3y ago
  Maybe they sent you the noob team for practice because they didn't think you were a big enough lead.
- kbos87 3y ago
  If you are looking for them to tell you what the use case is, that isn't a great sign of need or commitment, and they likely aren't going to take you very seriously.
jmacd 3y ago
This is the enterprise equivalent of putting up a landing page and collecting email addresses. Salesforce uses the same lean product development concepts that we espouse here. They test messages and products and then make R&D investment based on real customer demand. It just all happens with a massive marketing budget. In this case, nobody was actually being sold a defective product. Salesforce is very careful to “safe harbour” their statements about future products and their actual customers know that. While I was there after having sold my company to them, I launched several products and features for others. Every time we developed a concept, shopped it to early adopters and found design partners to test it. Incidentally, salesforce customers often pay handsomely for some of that engagement. That is because they know that if Salesforce is serious about the product, this is their best chance to get the functionality as a customer. Also, if you go in to a meeting with Parker Harris and you end up getting fired, I would place a bet any day of the week that YOU are the asshole. Parker is just a fantastic human being based on my experience.
- fatnoah 3y ago
  I was an exec at a smaller company acquired by Salesforce and met a few of the C-level and President level people a few times (not Marc). All impressed me with their intelligence and humility. Parker just felt like a smart regular guy. He showed up at our small office (15 or so people) with his Starbucks cup, grabbed an open desk and got to work. I wasn't even sure it was him until I saw "Parker" as the name on the cup. We ended up chatting a bit and grabbing a conference room and doing both a product and technical deep dive. He grokked things quickly, asked good questions, and was super chill. I can't imagine him firing anyone.
  - CSSer 3y ago
    Do you think of firing someone as something mean or unintelligent? He sounds like someone I’d love to meet but your comment interests me because I’ve never really thought of these characteristics as relevant to that kind of decision.
    - KerrAvon 3y ago
phpisthebest 3y ago
I am still waiting to find a software or hardware vendor that does not lie about their capabilities, that seems to be normal industry standard and not news worthy
- doctorwho42 3y ago
  Diagrams.net has been my diamond in the ruff. Small software dev who makes one of the best diagramming softwares I have ever used. It's very intuitive for tech and science people, makes handsome diagrams/workflow/etc., And it's not trying to be a billion dollar company, just a sustainable one.
  - deathtrader666 3y ago
    redirects to draw.io now
- whartung 3y ago
  Well, we didn't. We sold accounting and distribution systems. The base software was functional, but basic and pretty much always needed customization. So, we sold a lot of "we can do that" features that we didn't already have, confident that we could, indeed, "do that". And we did. There was, however, one rather spectacular disaster where the client bought really underpowered hardware for their needs. The vendor promised a more powerful machine "real soon now", but the one they had just wasn't cutting the mustard. They ended buying something much more capable from a different vendor, and then the lawsuits started happening about who said what where. We got dragged into that, but were exonerated. Like anyone else in software, we were cocky developers, and we could do pretty much anything they threw at us. And I'm certainly not going to suggest we never missed a deadline, we all know better than that. But we knew our software and knew whatever it couldn't do, we could make it do satisfactorily for the client. I was both developer and pre-sale tech that helped keep the sales guy in line. We had one client back out because we gave them, like, a 3 week schedule for a feature. "We talked to our guy and he said that's impossible." "Impossible? Really?" From some fellow who legitimately had no idea what he was talking about. We ended up demonstrating that we could do the feature, in their office, in a couple of hours to rough out the fundamentals, and they were rather impressed. Unfortunately, we got them as a client. Very toxic personalities, not fun to work with. But, we were hungry, them's the breaks. The others at the office enjoyed my manifestations of the assorted horrible tragedies I wished upon these people and their families when I returned from a visit. Really awful.
jimmychoozyx 3y ago
All industry has a degree of foul play, including government corruption, fraud, bribery & money laundering. It varies by industry and geography. I worked at a company recently who made claims about products having AI, and then I spoke with a data scientist who confirmed that the products do not have AI capabilities-- even basic statistical modeling or prediction. I suspect an astonishing proportion of businesses lie to a certain degree, on the sales, marketing, and management side of things.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- j00mz 3y ago
  I worked at a company that has AI and Machine Learning in the marketing materials. They didn't have what the industry calls AI, e.g. any machine based decisions being executed on the basis of data analysis and tuned machine learning models. What they do have is a very fast, very smart and sophisticated decision tree and rule based engine, albeit one that gives excellent results. When they actually tried hiring ML experts for "Real AI", the results from the Data Scientists were so much worse than the original engine, they ditched the Research team. I always wondered, since the product actually gave excellent value to the customer, and the customer did actually get what he was promised from the system, is this still unethical because it ultimately was rule based as opposed to ML based decisions?
rsynnott 3y ago
> The lawsuit also claimed that the CDP team "wanted to redefine the meaning of 'real-time’ I’ve always enjoyed the fact that SEPA Instant, the small-volume low-latency version of the eurozone bank transfer system, defines ‘instant’ as, in practice, 20 seconds. The UK went with slightly more conservative naming for their one, Faster Payments (in fairness, it also has much looser tail latency requirements).
rvz 3y ago
Ah yes. The Silicon Valley fake-it-until-you-make-it scam which is borderline fraud that has been taken to the extreme to the point where it is fine until a whistleblower calls it out and gets kicked out of the company. Only in Silicon Valley fraudulent wild claims and deceptive advertising is perfectly fine to get away with in order to inflate company valuations and to over-hype and grift to the general public. AI is going to certainly be the next 'fake-it-until-you-make-it' grift for so-called repackaged LLM startups seeking funding from gullible VCs.
tantalor 3y ago
This is basic product-market fit. Don't sell the product unless you have a market to sell it to. That means marketing something you don't have, but can build.
version_five 3y ago
I can't tell from far article and comments if this is a case of the company lying or the executive taking aspirational statements too literally. Though I'd expect if he's at that level he would understand the difference, ie only make a big deal out of it if it really was lying. The lawsuit also claimed that the CDP team "wanted to redefine the meaning of 'real-time,' so that it could falsely claim that the CDP operated in real-time." This sounds credible though. Not anything Salesforce specific, just seems to be the new industry playbook, redefine already popular terms to suit what you want *cough* open source *cough*
- hesdeadjim 3y ago
  I’d bet money this VP hoped he’d get retaliated against so he could file a lawsuit and get some easy cash from a company with enough of it to pay him off. He works at Salesforce, what did he expect exactly.
- SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
  Especially with terms like "real-time" that aren't tremendously well-defined in the first place. 100% of real-time systems I've seen in production defer some amount of work to out-of-band batches. In payments even parts of the critical path are reconciled once a day!
  - HenryBemis 3y ago
    But many banks' transactions do run/are realized in the end of the day. This is why (in vast majority, if not all banks) money that is deposited "today" are available "tomorrow".
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 3y ago
  In their defense, "real-time" has never been a precise term of art, even in the embedded computing space. Hence modifiers like "soft real-time" vs. "hard real-time" etc. IMHO, outside of embedded computing, it's effectively puffery, and should be treated as such.
calibas 3y ago
VP: Let's stop committing fraud. Salesforce: It's not fraud if we redefine 'real-time'. Also, you're fired.
balozi 3y ago
Often people are fired because the higher-ups simply just don't want to deal with them anymore. Although the guy's claims could be credible, his firing could come down to other factors. Maybe he communicated his concerns the wrong way. Maybe he misread the politics of the situation. In the end most people just want to get paid and go home to their family. If they think you're making work things harder for them, they will get rid of you if they can.
newobj 3y ago
How on earth did this person make it to VP of PM
- x86x87 3y ago
  Title inflation. Guess how many VPs Salesforce has.
  - smartbit 3y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37111675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37111675
SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
Honestly, after reading his complaint (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.259790/gov.uscourts.mad.259790.1.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.259...), I'm not at all sympathetic. He got acquihired into a senior role after 10 years as CEO of his startup, ended up overseeing another team's real-time efforts, and by his own account went absolutely nuclear when they didn't agree with him about what "real-time" meant. If he made any efforts whatsoever to resolve the disagreement before going around and complaining to other executives about his team, he doesn't mention it. This sounds very much to me like a story of a power-tripping ex-CEO whose technical knowledge is not as strong as he'd like to think.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bitwize 3y ago
I've long observed that there's actual real-time and there's marketroid real-time. Actual real-time has hard, typically small (milliseconds or smaller) timing windows that must be hit. Marketroid real-time generally means "faster and more responsive than previous batch-based processes" and can mean a response within seconds or a response within days. When marketroids come up to you talking about real-time this or real-time that, it's best to not quibble about definitions. They live in their bubble and consider it rude to disturb them with technical realities.
yellow_lead 3y ago
I'm surprised to not find the "well technically, it does process in milliseconds" argument here. Many many milliseconds
alberth 3y ago
Puffery Off topic: in many industry’s, like CPG, puffery is a very common marketing practice. Eg “Best Cookies in America” It seems puffery in tech is way less common. Is there a reason why? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery
kbos87 3y ago
This just reads like a disgruntled former employee grasping at straws. The advertised capabilities of enterprise software (just like every other product) should be assumed to be under best case circumstances, and there's typically a period of due diligence where both sides work to understand whether or not the vendor can match the customers' expectations in the context of the use cases they have planned. I'm not a huge fan of SFDC, but this is enterprise software buying 101.
wslh 3y ago
Is this basically a typical SEO practice?
Slava_Propanei 3y ago
[dead]
mushbino 3y ago
Standard practice in tech, especially enterprise. I've had to create all kinds of vaporware over the years that was passed off as real. Not something I've ever felt good about, but I would like to be able to pay rent. I hate it.
davesque 3y ago
I really have no idea why this story is getting so much traction. For one thing, there is often not a clear distinction between so called "real time" analytics processing and batch processing. For example, it doesn't seem unethical to me to develop a system that processes in smaller batches and call it "real time." Even if the batch processing took hours. For some customers, that might very well feel like real time. Second, it is standard practice (especially with enterprise software companies) to fudge the use of certain terminology for the sake of marketing. Again, I think this is because the meaning of those terms is often subjective as I think it is in this case. Just doesn't feel like there's a real scandal here.
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  Because it's Salesforce and people love schadenfreude, especially when it's inflicted on a villain. And Salesforce isn't exactly well loved in the industry.
  - fieldcny 3y ago
    Why not?
d883kd8 3y ago
Look if a Salesforce VP thinks this is the way to sell software I'm not gonna argue

236 points by gemanor 3y ago

https://archive.is/kkVvi https://archive.is/kkVvi

Doesn't surprise me given Salesforce is all about squeezing their (generally) non-technical customers with arbitrary licensing restrictions and "best practices" that lead to paying for more and more.

dpeck 3y ago

The same could be said for nearly every sales call that I’ve been on the receiving end of. It doesn’t make it “right”, but (nearly?) everyone who is involved in these conversations on both the buyer and seller sides of it knows that at best it’s aspirational capabilities that are being pitched and purchased. Usually it’s pretty far from that.

gemanor 3y ago
IMO the main problem is the ecosystem around Salesforce. If you are the end user it is (not) ok to have latency lies, but you'll be the only one who feel it. If you aim to other developers build services on top of your product, your latency issues has exponential effect for them.
everdrive 3y ago
I'd sort of split this up a bit. The engineers seem to know that the promises from sales are lie. The managers and executives sort of claim to know that salesmen exaggerate claims, but the reality of it never really seems to land. Time and time again I'm working for a company who has purchased a product which they're barely making use or, or are flat out using incorrectly because they were charmed by the promises from sales, but not so charmed as to actually staff the software properly to ensure it is well configured, and maintained correctly.
itronitron 3y ago
I was talking with a colleague once about this and they mentioned that as long as everyone being pitched was wearing a suit then they wouldn't worry about the wild claims the sales people made about our software. But if there was an engineer in the room they'd feel obligated to nudge everyone back to reality.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  Three red lines
  - moneywoes 3y ago
    Sorry can you elaborate
    - tomnipotent 3y ago
      It's from the satirical video "The Expert" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg). It's up there with the "Microservices" Krazam video.
      - gregw2 3y ago
        Funny! Thanks
- shostack 3y ago
  I'm a technical marketer who had owned a lot of the associated infra over my career. I've historically been a major target for sales people from companies in the space. I've lost count of the times I've had sales people outright lie to me about how audience data or targeting signals work, particularly about the nuances of privacy aspects which I care a great deal about and have done a lot of work with. These days if I'm serious about something I ensure there's a competent engineer (even a sales engineer) and product person on the call and largely ignore the sales person. I'm even really upfront about it by saying something like "I'm the decision maker, I have very specific technical and product questions and I want to avoid wasting time for either party by moving quickly or getting to a quick 'no', please confirm you can have XYZ people on our first call." Usually it's been great that way. If they try to jerk me around with those people being unavailable at the last minute, I tell them I'm rescheduling until they can get their calendars in order. This all comes with a responsibility though to make sure I'm not wasting their people's time. So I make sure I've done my homework and have likely sent an agenda/list of questions in advance to discuss. Depending on the relative sizes of my and their company, this can also be an express path to getting executive leadership who can cut through the noise of the process and get some good terms for me.
MontgomeryPy 3y ago
Yes. So maybe this lawsuit could move the pendulum back from the truthiness state. I see a lot of 'so what' comments but maybe there's a better way.
- liquidpele 3y ago
  It won’t move back. These issues exist for reasons, and avoiding lawsuits is already a consideration taken. At the end of the day, they embellish to an extreme because management in the customer companies are usually buying “we used X” prestige and there’s very little accountability in management for such mistakes.

mathattack 3y ago

Our old Salesforce rep is now a LinkedIn influencer. We all shake our heads as we know how useless they really were.

steve1977 3y ago
Well, what has changed?

bob1029 3y ago

Now, consider all of those companies that are building their solutions on top of salesforce's products. We had a customer go with a competitor who is partnered with Salesforce and the only thought I could summon was "I can't wait to read the postmortem". Even if you can make it work, the user experience is a big factor and will ultimately become a system requirement at some level. Latency is hell and requires mastery to overcome in any system of meaningful complexity. Focused, targeted engineering vs broad-spectrum tool spam is the difference between 10 and 1000 milliseconds.

RHSman2 3y ago

One word: Siebel

trollied 3y ago
Oh my, I'd forgotten about that. Thankfully. Is it still around?
- meepmorp 3y ago
  Bought by Oracle, still being sold.
  - RHSman2 3y ago
    Salesforce won that war. Seems like it’s hit the same ceiling? I was a Siebel consultant.
dexwiz 3y ago
Many Salesforce employees are Siebel alums.
gemanor 3y ago
Sure, if you need 10ms rate, just spin up another instances. I personally prefer cloud product with lies here and there than pay so much.

uptownfunk 3y ago

Someone makes it to VP and then all of a sudden decides to have a conscience.

fidotron 3y ago

This is an inevitable aspect of the MVP fake-it-until-you-make-it culture that infects even established companies. They are telling themselves that if enough people come to depend on it doing what they claim it does then they'll make it do that, but not before. I've encountered people making surprised Pikachu faces when called on problems with their systems while they roll out a new version that fixes it and claim incidents never occurred. Appearances are everything in tech today.

dbish 3y ago
This is pushed from the smallest startup upwards as a way to make sure you’re building something people want. There are pros and cons of course, but I can understand why companies do this and why software folks think they need to. It’s related to the shipping early, fast, and iterating which is the currently taught best practice by places that have a lot of experience getting new things off the ground like YC.
- fidotron 3y ago
  But there's a world of difference about lying about capability today and working with customers to deliver what they need. My favourite example is how ARM ended up in Nokia phones. They had a 32 bit RISC CPU core which met the performance requirements but Nokia turned them down due to the memory density of the instructions meaning it required more expensive storage than their existing solutions. On the way back from the meeting they came up with the idea of Thumb, worked out how to do it, did it, and Nokia bought it. It then took over the industry. That conversation in SV today would involve Nokia going "We love what you folks are doing" but just keeping the existing system without ever saying why, and nothing would improve.
  - to11mtm 3y ago
    Interesting to think about that. I remember the SuperH had 16 bit instructions (well, SH-5 was variable length,) I wonder whether that would have become 'our future' if ARM hadn't done Thumb back then.

browningstreet 3y ago

At two companies I’ve been the CTO at we brought Salesforce in to pitch us. They couldn’t actually tell us what their use case was given our sales and customer base. We had ecom platforms with some customer data embedded in the sales platform and Salesforce couldn’t pitch a benefit to using their system.

zulban 3y ago
Maybe they sent you the noob team for practice because they didn't think you were a big enough lead.
kbos87 3y ago
If you are looking for them to tell you what the use case is, that isn't a great sign of need or commitment, and they likely aren't going to take you very seriously.

jmacd 3y ago

This is the enterprise equivalent of putting up a landing page and collecting email addresses. Salesforce uses the same lean product development concepts that we espouse here. They test messages and products and then make R&D investment based on real customer demand. It just all happens with a massive marketing budget. In this case, nobody was actually being sold a defective product. Salesforce is very careful to “safe harbour” their statements about future products and their actual customers know that. While I was there after having sold my company to them, I launched several products and features for others. Every time we developed a concept, shopped it to early adopters and found design partners to test it. Incidentally, salesforce customers often pay handsomely for some of that engagement. That is because they know that if Salesforce is serious about the product, this is their best chance to get the functionality as a customer. Also, if you go in to a meeting with Parker Harris and you end up getting fired, I would place a bet any day of the week that YOU are the asshole. Parker is just a fantastic human being based on my experience.

fatnoah 3y ago
I was an exec at a smaller company acquired by Salesforce and met a few of the C-level and President level people a few times (not Marc). All impressed me with their intelligence and humility. Parker just felt like a smart regular guy. He showed up at our small office (15 or so people) with his Starbucks cup, grabbed an open desk and got to work. I wasn't even sure it was him until I saw "Parker" as the name on the cup. We ended up chatting a bit and grabbing a conference room and doing both a product and technical deep dive. He grokked things quickly, asked good questions, and was super chill. I can't imagine him firing anyone.
- CSSer 3y ago
  Do you think of firing someone as something mean or unintelligent? He sounds like someone I’d love to meet but your comment interests me because I’ve never really thought of these characteristics as relevant to that kind of decision.
  - KerrAvon 3y ago

phpisthebest 3y ago

I am still waiting to find a software or hardware vendor that does not lie about their capabilities, that seems to be normal industry standard and not news worthy

doctorwho42 3y ago
Diagrams.net has been my diamond in the ruff. Small software dev who makes one of the best diagramming softwares I have ever used. It's very intuitive for tech and science people, makes handsome diagrams/workflow/etc., And it's not trying to be a billion dollar company, just a sustainable one.
- deathtrader666 3y ago
  redirects to draw.io now
whartung 3y ago
Well, we didn't. We sold accounting and distribution systems. The base software was functional, but basic and pretty much always needed customization. So, we sold a lot of "we can do that" features that we didn't already have, confident that we could, indeed, "do that". And we did. There was, however, one rather spectacular disaster where the client bought really underpowered hardware for their needs. The vendor promised a more powerful machine "real soon now", but the one they had just wasn't cutting the mustard. They ended buying something much more capable from a different vendor, and then the lawsuits started happening about who said what where. We got dragged into that, but were exonerated. Like anyone else in software, we were cocky developers, and we could do pretty much anything they threw at us. And I'm certainly not going to suggest we never missed a deadline, we all know better than that. But we knew our software and knew whatever it couldn't do, we could make it do satisfactorily for the client. I was both developer and pre-sale tech that helped keep the sales guy in line. We had one client back out because we gave them, like, a 3 week schedule for a feature. "We talked to our guy and he said that's impossible." "Impossible? Really?" From some fellow who legitimately had no idea what he was talking about. We ended up demonstrating that we could do the feature, in their office, in a couple of hours to rough out the fundamentals, and they were rather impressed. Unfortunately, we got them as a client. Very toxic personalities, not fun to work with. But, we were hungry, them's the breaks. The others at the office enjoyed my manifestations of the assorted horrible tragedies I wished upon these people and their families when I returned from a visit. Really awful.

jimmychoozyx 3y ago

All industry has a degree of foul play, including government corruption, fraud, bribery & money laundering. It varies by industry and geography. I worked at a company recently who made claims about products having AI, and then I spoke with a data scientist who confirmed that the products do not have AI capabilities-- even basic statistical modeling or prediction. I suspect an astonishing proportion of businesses lie to a certain degree, on the sales, marketing, and management side of things.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
j00mz 3y ago
I worked at a company that has AI and Machine Learning in the marketing materials. They didn't have what the industry calls AI, e.g. any machine based decisions being executed on the basis of data analysis and tuned machine learning models. What they do have is a very fast, very smart and sophisticated decision tree and rule based engine, albeit one that gives excellent results. When they actually tried hiring ML experts for "Real AI", the results from the Data Scientists were so much worse than the original engine, they ditched the Research team. I always wondered, since the product actually gave excellent value to the customer, and the customer did actually get what he was promised from the system, is this still unethical because it ultimately was rule based as opposed to ML based decisions?

rsynnott 3y ago

> The lawsuit also claimed that the CDP team "wanted to redefine the meaning of 'real-time’ I’ve always enjoyed the fact that SEPA Instant, the small-volume low-latency version of the eurozone bank transfer system, defines ‘instant’ as, in practice, 20 seconds. The UK went with slightly more conservative naming for their one, Faster Payments (in fairness, it also has much looser tail latency requirements).

rvz 3y ago

Ah yes. The Silicon Valley fake-it-until-you-make-it scam which is borderline fraud that has been taken to the extreme to the point where it is fine until a whistleblower calls it out and gets kicked out of the company. Only in Silicon Valley fraudulent wild claims and deceptive advertising is perfectly fine to get away with in order to inflate company valuations and to over-hype and grift to the general public. AI is going to certainly be the next 'fake-it-until-you-make-it' grift for so-called repackaged LLM startups seeking funding from gullible VCs.

tantalor 3y ago

This is basic product-market fit. Don't sell the product unless you have a market to sell it to. That means marketing something you don't have, but can build.

version_five 3y ago

I can't tell from far article and comments if this is a case of the company lying or the executive taking aspirational statements too literally. Though I'd expect if he's at that level he would understand the difference, ie only make a big deal out of it if it really was lying. The lawsuit also claimed that the CDP team "wanted to redefine the meaning of 'real-time,' so that it could falsely claim that the CDP operated in real-time." This sounds credible though. Not anything Salesforce specific, just seems to be the new industry playbook, redefine already popular terms to suit what you want *cough* open source *cough*

hesdeadjim 3y ago
I’d bet money this VP hoped he’d get retaliated against so he could file a lawsuit and get some easy cash from a company with enough of it to pay him off. He works at Salesforce, what did he expect exactly.
SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
Especially with terms like "real-time" that aren't tremendously well-defined in the first place. 100% of real-time systems I've seen in production defer some amount of work to out-of-band batches. In payments even parts of the critical path are reconciled once a day!
- HenryBemis 3y ago
  But many banks' transactions do run/are realized in the end of the day. This is why (in vast majority, if not all banks) money that is deposited "today" are available "tomorrow".
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 3y ago
In their defense, "real-time" has never been a precise term of art, even in the embedded computing space. Hence modifiers like "soft real-time" vs. "hard real-time" etc. IMHO, outside of embedded computing, it's effectively puffery, and should be treated as such.

calibas 3y ago

VP: Let's stop committing fraud. Salesforce: It's not fraud if we redefine 'real-time'. Also, you're fired.

balozi 3y ago

Often people are fired because the higher-ups simply just don't want to deal with them anymore. Although the guy's claims could be credible, his firing could come down to other factors. Maybe he communicated his concerns the wrong way. Maybe he misread the politics of the situation. In the end most people just want to get paid and go home to their family. If they think you're making work things harder for them, they will get rid of you if they can.

newobj 3y ago

How on earth did this person make it to VP of PM

x86x87 3y ago
Title inflation. Guess how many VPs Salesforce has.
- smartbit 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37111675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37111675

SpicyLemonZest 3y ago

Honestly, after reading his complaint (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.259790/gov.uscourts.mad.259790.1.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.259...), I'm not at all sympathetic. He got acquihired into a senior role after 10 years as CEO of his startup, ended up overseeing another team's real-time efforts, and by his own account went absolutely nuclear when they didn't agree with him about what "real-time" meant. If he made any efforts whatsoever to resolve the disagreement before going around and complaining to other executives about his team, he doesn't mention it. This sounds very much to me like a story of a power-tripping ex-CEO whose technical knowledge is not as strong as he'd like to think.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bitwize 3y ago

I've long observed that there's actual real-time and there's marketroid real-time. Actual real-time has hard, typically small (milliseconds or smaller) timing windows that must be hit. Marketroid real-time generally means "faster and more responsive than previous batch-based processes" and can mean a response within seconds or a response within days. When marketroids come up to you talking about real-time this or real-time that, it's best to not quibble about definitions. They live in their bubble and consider it rude to disturb them with technical realities.

yellow_lead 3y ago

I'm surprised to not find the "well technically, it does process in milliseconds" argument here. Many many milliseconds

alberth 3y ago

Puffery Off topic: in many industry’s, like CPG, puffery is a very common marketing practice. Eg “Best Cookies in America” It seems puffery in tech is way less common. Is there a reason why? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery

kbos87 3y ago

This just reads like a disgruntled former employee grasping at straws. The advertised capabilities of enterprise software (just like every other product) should be assumed to be under best case circumstances, and there's typically a period of due diligence where both sides work to understand whether or not the vendor can match the customers' expectations in the context of the use cases they have planned. I'm not a huge fan of SFDC, but this is enterprise software buying 101.

wslh 3y ago

Is this basically a typical SEO practice?

Slava_Propanei 3y ago

[dead]

mushbino 3y ago

Standard practice in tech, especially enterprise. I've had to create all kinds of vaporware over the years that was passed off as real. Not something I've ever felt good about, but I would like to be able to pay rent. I hate it.

davesque 3y ago

I really have no idea why this story is getting so much traction. For one thing, there is often not a clear distinction between so called "real time" analytics processing and batch processing. For example, it doesn't seem unethical to me to develop a system that processes in smaller batches and call it "real time." Even if the batch processing took hours. For some customers, that might very well feel like real time. Second, it is standard practice (especially with enterprise software companies) to fudge the use of certain terminology for the sake of marketing. Again, I think this is because the meaning of those terms is often subjective as I think it is in this case. Just doesn't feel like there's a real scandal here.

BaseballPhysics 3y ago
Because it's Salesforce and people love schadenfreude, especially when it's inflicted on a villain. And Salesforce isn't exactly well loved in the industry.
- fieldcny 3y ago
  Why not?

d883kd8 3y ago

Look if a Salesforce VP thinks this is the way to sell software I'm not gonna argue