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All Slack Employees Forced to Spend a Week Getting Salesforce Certifications
- orf 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20231005231634/https://fortune.com/2023/10/05/slack-employees-one-week-off-internal-training-ranger-status-salesforce-trailhead/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231005231634/https://fortune.c...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- CoastalCoder 3y agoThis is approximately the point in a company's growth where I start looking for greener pastures.
- linksnapzz 3y agoI wonder what sort of uptake this sort of Patronization-As-A-Service tool gets w/ Salesforce customers. Maybe it comes free with their other products, and you have to pay to turn it off.
- cyrnel 3y ago> We really are canceling all meetings next week to facilitate this heads-down time, even 1:1s. I can't image a worse time to cancel 1:1s than when pushing through some unpopular top-down decision.
- olliej 3y agofrom who's point of view? :D
- ftlio 3y agoDo people really need to check in with their manager about doing some task work?
- edwardsdl 3y agoIf your 1:1s are status updates, then you’re doing it wrong.
- ftlio 3y agoYeah not feeling like I’m going to fall out of alignment doing learning modules, but umm, ok thanks
- dackerlunghack 3y agoThe junior experiences work this way The senior wants dog walks and more pay
- pdpi 3y agoLearning modules are useful when they fulfil some need. There’s no specific regulatory or business need being fulfilled here, near as I can tell, it sounds like they’re stopping everything for a week to pad a vanity metric. What the article describes is more or less org-wide contempt for this initiative, which is as close to the bottom of the scale for “alignment” as you can get before people start quitting. This sounds like a morale nightmare, and cancelling 1:1s (where managers could do some damage control) just compounds the problem.
- callalex 3y agoDo any of the courses teach employees how to write memory efficient native apps instead of bundling an entire web browser to run an IRC client?
- ajkjk 3y ago[flagged]
- wpm 3y agoHave you tried listening to any of the myriad complaints people have with Electron?
- olliej 3y agono because they've either only dealt with crappy software, or think a single mediocre piece of software is better if it's cross platform, and anyone who disagrees with them is wrong. I've also seen plenty of people who talk about how great electron is while also complaining about modern software requiring more disk space, more ram, more cpu time, or their laptop batteries dying as if always on wasteful software isn't the bulk of the reason. Seriously for most electron apps you could have a twenty+ year old machine capable of running all of them without breaking a sweat if they were native apps, that can't open them all at the same time as the crappy electron apps they are today. If you find the UI tools from web tech easier for your business purposes then make a web app, but stop forcing shitty perennially out of date copies of chrome on everyone. I guarantee you aren't pushing out updates as rapidly as google is, and that means you're missing security fixes. This last point is something I'm serious on: if you cannot push out a chromium update for your app within within say 24 hours of google shipping a chrome update you should not be shipping an app built on it.
- refulgentis 3y agoYes
- ajkjk 3y agoLol, yes. Do you know why people use Electron, though?
- Ancalagon 3y ago> "WFH is unproductive. Everyone RTO!" > "Hey everyone! The execs and I came up with this great idea. Let's shut the whole company down for a week, and during that time you all can take these totally relevant learning modules!" mfw
- wildrhythms 3y agoHow conflicting it must be to produce a technology designed to help companies collaborate and work remotely, but not allow your own company to collaborate and work remotely. If the VPs and executives had any self awareness they might be embarrassed.
- wly_cdgr 3y agoCan they instead spend the week rolling back their insanely bad UI revamp
- benced 3y ago> Not surprisingly, the Ranger status requirement has been met with some disdain from employees at Slack. Two sources told Fortune that many Slack engineers have found workarounds via scripts, code that can be quickly built to automate a task, to click through the modules for them. > “There’s no mandate [on] what modules people take so people are posting lists of the easiest ones and are speed running them,” a source said. Respect
- brnt 3y agoI worked at a place that 'required' this, but when I asked what would happen if I didn't there were no concrete actions. So I never did them and I lived happily ever after. Well, I left the place because people that 'require' nonsense usually don't limit themselves to elearnings.
- wallmountedtv 3y agoDoing some math on the example courses (300 points for a 45 min course) and the requirement of gaining 50 000 points, that's a whopping 333 hours of just courses. Jesus Christ.
- ryzvonusef 3y ago> According to a screenshot viewed by Fortune, there are six ranks prior to achieving Ranger status, which requires 100 badges and 50,000 points. Each module varies in points earned towards this goal, for instance, there’s a “Fearless Teaming” module which teaches staff “how psychological safety and courage help create high-performing teams,” that earns a user 300 points and takes 45 minutes to complete, the screenshot revealed. Is this company run by the Boy Scouts?
- bathtub365 3y agoWorse - salespeople.
- gumballindie 3y agoYup, software development is the new factory work.
- ubertaco 3y agoOh, they went ahead and made that mandatory? I heard all sorts of rumors about that for a while before I left. When I was there, you just had mandatory security trainings (fine) and the Orwellian "Corporate Message Certification", where every team in the company — including engineers — were supposed to memorize the Corporate Message (a 15-slide-long sales-pitch deck) and be able to recite it to each other, that came paired with lots of preamble about how this was so that you could be adequately prepared to evangelize Salesforce to your friends, loved ones, fellow transit passengers, and other random bystanders. Definitely not a cult or anything though. Totally. (and none of the teams I was on ever bothered to memorize that crap; we just booked a meeting, expensed lunch, skimmed through the slides so we could say we did it, and kept running counts of how often each stupid buzzword was used). Man, I'm _so_ glad to be gone from that place.
- rsynnott 3y ago> The goal is for Slack’s employees to reach Trailhead’s Ranger level, a feat that requires roughly 40 hours on the learning platform, whose modules include topics like “Learn about the Fourth Industrial Revolution” and “Healthy Eating.” At which Trailhead level do they tell you about Xenu?
- sonicanatidae 3y agoThat's level 13, after your Thetans have been excavated, drug out to the parking lot and beaten with sticks. That's Xenu's kink, and I don't judge. Also, it costs $14 million in "donations".
- more_corn 3y agoSo fucking stupid.