5 ms·
Ah, the toxic env, I'm too familiar with it. Quarterly layoffs, perks gone, more RTO, but execs can still travel around lavishly.
by markus_zhang 2y ago
Ah, the toxic env, I'm too familiar with it. Quarterly layoffs, perks gone, more RTO, but execs can still travel around lavishly.
- echelon 2y agoFAANG used to over-employ not just due to ZIRP, but also in the fear that their engineers would build competing products. These companies enjoy healthy margins. Unemployed engineers can duplicate the core functionality and offer it for less.
- flashgordon 2y agoI seriously wonder why this is not happening more given all the copilots available. I guess the h1bs don't have the time/appetite to do this. Wouldn't locals have enough of a vendetta to do this?
- lazide 2y agoSalesforce is a sales driven org. It’s hard for engineers (and essentially impossible for H1B’s) to replace that.
- forgetfreeman 2y agoGiven my exposure to the product and portions of it's userbase I -want- to call it a cult more than anything else, mostly based on years spent fucking around in the back end of one salesforce instance after another trying to get it to replicate functionality that I could have gotten online in an afternoon with a 2 page training document and a couple shared Google spreadsheets. I am clearly not in the target audience as I do -not- see the value proposition and never have.
- griomnib 2y agoDreamforce is basically a cult gathering.
- GolfPopper 2y agoThe target audience seems to be whoever makes the decision to pay for it. Much like the allegations that the QWERTY layout was designed to make it easier for salesmen to type out "TYPEWRITER" quickly, I expect that salesforce's primary design goal is "stuff that will let us sell it to management" with actual performance/utility a distant second (or less).
- forgetfreeman 2y agoThat jives with my observations as well. What always had me deeply mystified was the near-religious conviction among small and medium sized nonprofits that they absolutely couldn't function without a feature complete clone of the kind of Salesforce integration that drove the ACLU, UNICEF, and International Rescue Committee websites. I'm like, y'all could cut your spend on web development by 70% if I could train someone to click a button once a week and import the resulting .csv into a spreadsheet. Crazy shit.
- lazide 2y agoIt’s a variant of ‘no one got fired for buying IBM’. Microsoft has a similar position now in their niche. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/duenablomstrom1/2018/11/30/nobody-gets-fired-for-buying-ibm-but-they-should/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/duenablomstrom1/2018/11/30/nobo...]
- flashgordon 2y agoTrue that. It I was thinking more about other products that are "lowish" scale and not ad driven. Especially SaaS products.
- throwaway83626 2y agoThe problem with "lowish" scale SaaS products is often not creating them, but selling them. I work for a SaaS that has added a lot of features during the years, but the product 2 years ago could probably easily be created by a single dev in a couple of months and could be sellable as a product to a subset of the market today. The reason why I don't create a simplified version of the SaaS and sell to customers is that the sales process itself is actually the hard part. You may get some sales from ads or phone calls, but you often need to sell it in person if you want to have enough customers to cover all the expenses. And if you want enterprise customers, the sales process is complex and time consuming
- i_love_retros 2y ago[flagged]
- jrockway 2y agoI mean, what products are even unique to Google or Meta? The cloning is already done and the cloners are established businesses. Or, Google just cloned someone else. Did they independently discover cloud computing and make GCP? I think not.
- flashgordon 2y agoThis is a fair point. After 5 failed startups (you'd think id learn and give up) building products and velocity had never been an issue. "Selling" is the one absolute North Star. Even if you built a feature-to-feature clone - as another commenter above pointed out - sales (or lack of it) has been the biggest differentiator.
- i_love_retros 2y ago[flagged]
- rawgabbit 2y agoZero interest rate policy by Federal Reserve.
- lamename 2y agoZero Interest Rate Phenomenon https://www.businessinsider.com/zirp-end-of-cushy-big-tech-job-perks-mass-layoffs-2024-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/zirp-end-of-cushy-big-tech-j...
- i_love_retros 2y ago[flagged]
- lazide 2y agoZIRP == zero interest rate policy.
- impl 2y agoZero interest rate policy, which makes borrowing lots of money almost free, which makes it easy to hire lots of people using said borrowed money.
- shadow28 2y agoWhy would you jump to assuming that all the commenters and voters are bots just from encountering an unfamiliar acronym?
- i_love_retros 2y ago[flagged]
- dgacmu 2y agoIt really wasn't, but it did assume the audience was familiar with a specific bit of discourse about, well, ZIRPs. In particular that when debt is super cheap, companies can afford to do a lot of things that would be stupid when capital comes at a higher price. Which generally seems to have been true about a lot of SV companies.
- tjpnz 2y ago>in the fear that their engineers would build competing products. Is there any evidence to support this? It would imply that even their least promising employees would still pose a threat which seems unlikely.
- cellis 2y agoWhat they really meant by this is: “Competing products [at peer companies]”. This is still in effect, however the primary competing products at peer rivals is now “foundational ai”, and they need far less people and mostly people of a very specific skill sets of ML research, Inference Scaling, Hardware R&D, AI prompt engineering research. Also the cost to play is 10 billion minimum. So Salesforce will perform rent seeking as long as their moat allows rather than gamble on foundational ai.
- pembrook 2y agoThis was always a myth and never a real thing, except for at the highest, bleeding edge talent levels. Especially for Enterprise Saas companies like Salesforce/Microsoft/Oracle/etc who know full well that their real competency isn’t actually the software…it’s distribution. Employees aren’t choosing to use those products, they get forced into them by management/IT or literal monopoly. Sales is everything in B2B software and always has been. Product-led growth in B2B has always been fantasy erotic-fiction outside of chat/notes apps.
- chii 2y agoWhile sales is true for large enterprises, in SME and lower ones, it's users' wants and value-for-money that dominate. This domination can lead to nowhere, but quite occasionally, it leaks out as users move jobs and into positions of "power" in the larger enterprise, and choose their familiar software instead of the existing/encumbent ones. Then these new startups get a foot hold, and become the dominant software, grow in size and learn how to B2B sale as well.
- safety1st 2y agoVery interesting, what are some good examples of this happening?
- ipaddr 2y agoStack, Zoom, Trello, Dropbox, Canva, Notion, AirTable.. Asana, Figma, Miro, Box, Evernote, ClickUp, Basecamp, Zapier, HubSpot, Calendly, Shopify, WordPress
- chii 2y agoatlassian is the big one - jira actually beat out basecamp (and fogbugz), despite them being quite similar at the beginning, and ousted the incumbent that is ibm rational suite and their ilk.
- 2y ago
- nielsbot 2y agotime for a union