Maybe it's just the segment I'm in, but I feel like Salesforce was hiring pretty hard up until recently. They wouldn't be the only company to go from a hiring spree to layoffs that quickly over the last quarter.<p>We really need to lock this absurdity down and increase severance requirements for large companies heavily. It's one thing to gamble risk for the company, it's something completely different to gamble employee livelihood when you're signaling job security by hiring.
I forget which podcast I heard it on (so forgive me if my memory is sloppy), but after their latest quarterly report didn't CAC payback go from 24 months to something wild like 10 years? Meaning their new ARR add rapidly fell off so quickly, before they adjusted their Sales and Marketing salaries and spending, that it immediately put their unit economics way way way way underwater.<p>So I'd expect at least a big chunk would be S&M cuts, even through of course you still need salespeople.<p>10% of a 75k company is still 7k people. From the King of SaaS. Wild times.
Whenever I look at client’s Salesforce setups, I always wonder in the back of my mind what they will do if Salesforce has a significant down-turn?<p>The lock-in to the platform appears to be very fierce. Are there viable routes to exit Salesforce if anyone ever needed to?<p>(Note: I’m not saying Salesforce is doomed or anything, just the layoffs got me thinking in that direction theorically).
Last time they did this, it was _right_ after the window that they had grandstanded and asked other companies to pledge no pandemic layoffs.<p>Benioff did a whole media tour talking about how Salesforce would do no pandemic layoffs to set some kind of example, and said that they didn't expect other companies to follow their example, but asked them to just pledge no layoffs for 90 days, even though Salesforce was going to do better than that.<p>Around 91 says later, Salesforce laid off 10% of the company, with no prior warning to the employees who were laid off. The atmosphere internally from the top down was outrage that any of the employees who were laid off would mention that they got laid off to their family/friends/coworkers, and that doing so was somehow a betrayal of "trust".<p>Brett Taylor, who was then the "co-CEO" (read: Benioff's cleanup crew and babysitter), led an all-hands a month or so later where they took no questions and referred to this as a "one-time reshaping exercise". Benioff slipped up and told MSNBC that this was an annual thing. Brett Taylor pretended not to know Benioff had said that, and acted like it never happened.<p>This all-hands was a full month after the all-hands that took place the same week as the layoffs. In that one, they took questions, but since all the questions were about the layoffs, they acted like nobody had submitted any questions and the Q&A host came up with some softball "what projects are you excited about"/"what's the biggest challenge with being a market leader" ego questions instead.<p>I didn't believe that it was "one-time" then, and today I've learned that I was right not to. I left before it became a habit, and have only been relieved to have left.<p>I wonder when the next annual 10% layoffs will happen at Salesforce? Because it's pretty much the only thing I'd trust them to do reliably at this point.
This corporate bulimia, these binge-and-purge cycles, are a remarkably unpleasant feature of 21st century employee life.<p>I hope those affected are able to find work before their severance runs out. One positive aspect is that the Salesforce ecosystem is gigantic, and there'll be work for some in the partner firms and consultancies with expertise in the platform.
But I just saw this commercial on TV where Mathew McSomethingOrOther led legions of happy looking people through the streets of a city pledging to change how the world works all because of Salesforce.com . It looked like an expensive commercial. I know I'd sign up if I could.<p>Is this the first step? How exciting.
There are over two jobs open for every layoff.<p>People haven’t realized how crazy the labor market is about to get with a collapsing workforce population over the next many decades.
Know what's odd to me? It seems like every company that did layoffs over the past 3 months overhired by 8% - 12% somehow. Why was it such a narrow range?
Heard this has affected engineering too, not just or mostly sales as people were thinking or happened before. (I remember a hiring manager years ago telling me once that there hadn't ever been any layoffs, all I could think was "yet".) For those affected, typical full systems cut-off as well, not very ohana of them to just terminate with no notice...<p>Still, not unexpected given everything else going on. Glad I'm not competing for tech jobs at the moment.
Why do CEOs claim to "take responsibility" for the hard times, but their salary is never cut because of it? If they were actually taking responsibility then they would face real consequences instead of dooming people to no longer having healthcare. Fucking rich people.
How about their future prospects? From the 4 implementations I've seen all are desperately trying to leave the platform. One succeeded so far. Is the enterprise Salesforce craze over?
Completely random engineering layoffs are happening today. Skipping management levels and firing people that are in the critical path of products about to launch.<p>Makes you wonder how "structured" are these restructuring efforts.
The frustrating part of bad economic times is that bloated companies use it as an opportunity to clean house while projecting a positive signal to Wall Street.<p>This move probably would have been just as needed two years ago but would have tanked the stock at the time.<p>It’s sucks when real people get caught up in companies just virtue signaling to Wall Street
makes sense given their employee to revenue ratio for Salesforce. They had 73,000 employees with just ~31B/year of revenue. That’s just 424k of revenue per employee.<p>Such a ratio only makes sense with high growth rates.
Layoffs suck no matter what. But from what I'm hearing they're giving some pretty good severance across the board and added time for tenure as well.<p>That said there are some bumpy things about how Salesforce seems to have handled this. In several cases managers and skip levels got no advance notice and were left scrambling in slack to see which team members no longer had active accounts. At the mass of a level it can be hard to be coordinated, but still a few hrs after there is a lot of unclarity internally to teams and what that means.<p>Within Heroku there are folks currently on call for production systems that were impacted. I feel for those impacted as well as those still there scrambling to ensure things continue to operate for customers. Seems that within the broader Salesforce org some pieces of it were done in a better fashion than some others we've recently seen, but also some pretty missteps still.
> Stock rises after company announces broad restructuring plan focused on driving ‘profitable growth’<p>Could someone explain how layoffs lead to stock rises in layman terms?
A friend of mine was hired by Salesforce in January. He worked there for six months. In that time, he did the haphazard onboarding they offered him... and that was it. Every day, he would ask his manager for work. Every day, his manager would tell him to hang in there, work was coming soon.<p>He never did a single moment of actual money-making or money-saving work for the company. They paid him about $50,000 for the privilege. Exhausted by the absurdity of the situation, he quit, and is now making substantially more money elsewhere... but also has actual work to do.<p>Nice gig if you can get it, I guess.
Has anyone who is a part of the sales org (AE or SE) been impacted as part of this layoff? I saw a huge number of post-sales/HR roles laid off but haven't heard of people as part of pre-sales that have been laid off. Not sure if more layoffs are to come at the beginning of Q1 in Feb.
Not fun. I read somewhere a year ago that there will are more than 10000 salesforce cloud related jobs available and can't be fulfilled.<p>For me it looks like Salesforce is here to stay. We'll see how it goes for them if their clients start to tank.
"and I take personal responsibility for that."<p>As usual, no accountability for it. Just responsibility. I take it boards are incapable at holding leaders accountable for bad decisioning?