"Company" = Salesforce, which is a name I'm sure people over here recognize, so we can swap it out in the title.<p>There's also little value in pushing this clickbait style journalism to the front page.<p>First of all, it is objectively incorrect:<p>> Per the WSJ, the company will be letting go of 8,000 members from its massive workforce<p>The layoffs they are referring to happened in early January. They are not laying off another 8000 employees.<p>Beyond that, they paid an A-list actor $10M out of their marketing budget not to "sit around" but to do a set of commercials (one of which aired at the Superbowl). Considering they exceeded all analyst expectations for revenue and profits in the last quarter, it's safe to say that some of their effort is working. Enlightened engineers don't like to admit it, but advertising works, and is a critical part of running any business.<p>The fact that they also decided that 8K out of the 25K+ employees hired during the pandemic were redundant has nothing to do with Matthew McConaughey.
For what it's worth, this deal was almost definitely signed long before the economy crashed. And he was paid to create / star in ads (I'd assume the money went to his production company, not him specifically), which I don't think is particularly unique... a lot of large billion dollar businesses hire celebrity spokespeople.<p>EDIT: Okay, economy hasn't technically crashed, but valuations are down, funding is down, and layoffs are up. Tech companies have a very different view of money now than they did 8 months ago.
I don’t get this line of argument.<p>Sales force believed their business will do better with Matthew Mcconaughey as opposed to those 8k employees. They may be wrong, but it’s for them to figure out if they’re wrong.<p>I understand the argument that workers should not be disposable, and workers shouldn’t be fired at will, even with at-will contracts, and companies have responsibilities towards their workers. In fact, that argument is popular enough that most countries, including the U.S. until recently, gave workers and their unions privileges that wouldn’t be afforded in a different scenario. And if you want to argue that workers rights have been diluted far too much in with you.<p>My problem is instead of making this straightforward argument, when you’re trying to compare the firing of workers to spending on a completely different situation. There’s no possible way for an outsider to know what the value of having McConaughey sit around is, what the contractual details are, what the cost, both monetary and otherwise of splitting from him, etc is.<p>My response to this headline isn’t to be more sympathetic to the workers. It’s to wonder what the hell McConaughey getting contractually paid has anything to do with the poor treatment of workers by Salesforce.
Bad optics, but even if they could break the contract (which presumably includes work/performance already done) and reallocate the funds to save jobs they’d still be laying off about 7,950 people to reach budget parity.
This title makes it sound as though the $10M would pay for all those employees. It might pay for 40-50 of them, which is basically a rounding error of 8000.<p>So the question is: can 40-50 people bring more value than one person who can get the attention (for whatever reason) of large customers' CFOs?
Their profits and stock price are both up. Seem like they're making fairly sane financial decisions.<p>I'm not one to defend the actions of corporate leadership most times, but it does look like Salesforce is doing what the market is asking for: bringing up profits.<p>And if we assume an average TC of around 250k per engineer, that's 40 employees of 8,000 laid or half a percent of the employees could have been spared by letting go of McConaughey instead. In case they're mistaken it seems a lot easier to hire 40 $250k engineers again then get McConaughey back after breaking a contract.<p>Meanwhile the company I'm at is just learning that publicly traded companies can't live off runway alone and that they need to become profitable (something they've never done) and please investors. The "leadership"'s failure to act is causing increasing stress in the company, and personally I'm finding it more and more clear they don't really know how to run a public company.<p>There are so many companies that look like what I described I'm not remotely worried about anyone de-anonymizing me over this info.<p>I would much rather be at a company like Salesforce right now. At least there's some evidence the layoffs were effective and anyone surviving, after the recent earnings, is probably already starting to feel more assured about their job. When layoffs do eventually hit me where I'm at now, even if I survive I'm not going to have much confidence in the future.
Reminds me of Domino's talking about supporting local businesses, fixing roads and deploying electrical vehicles. Long story short Domino's spent exponetially more on commercials advertising their "good" deeds than on the deeds themselves.<p>For example spent 54 million on commercials talking about supporting local businesses... provided local businesses 100,000.<p><a href="https://i.redd.it/3vks4w3nddh81.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.redd.it/3vks4w3nddh81.jpg</a><p>Seems like so much in our society is smoke and mirrors these days.
The framing here is off. I understand the impulse, but it's different business decisions and conflating them just isn't reasonable. It is certainly reasonable for employees to question why one area of business was prioritized over others, but framing this as "paying someone $10m to sit around vs 8,000 people who did real work" is still disingenuous.<p>I'm not defending the layoffs -- though I think all of us have known that the ever-increasing TC wars amongst big companies was unsustainable and that tech companies over-hired. And none of that is the people who were laid off's fault. At all. These were bad decisions on the part of management. But framing it as "chose to layoff X people instead of paying out a contract to Matthew McConaughey" is misguided.<p>The bottom line is that Matthew McConaughey did a better job of negotiating his contract than rank and file employees did and that's why he still has a contract. Obviously, he is in a position to argue better terms than rank and file engineers, but that's how this works. If his contract was renewed or reupped on, that would be one thing (and ultimately, that would be something for the board or shareholders to weigh in on), but we don't know the details about how long the contract was for and what the deliverables are, or what the ROI is.<p>Framing this in "this versus that" terms just doesn't make sense.
The tech hiring build up in 2021 and 2022 was all about political appeasement.<p><a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=%22big%20tech%22" rel="nofollow">https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...</a><p>"Big Tech" could not maintain that forever.
Gross. If your company uses sales force, try to encourage them to use something else. Don’t recommend it for anything new. Don’t go work for them. Don’t do anything that would be good for salesforce. Do your best to bring them down any way you can.
Alternate title: I don’t understand why businesses have marketing budgets<p>Would at least not be objectively false, unlike the current title.<p>I’m surprised this got upvoted on HN.
Maggie Harrison (who is definitely not Hawaiian) appropriating Hawaiians’ prerogative to define the bounds of acceptable cross-cultural interaction with their group is actual, destructive appropriation. It’s a white person with a platform co-opting a minority group’s ability to decide how it interacts with the majority group.
This is just a natural reality of capitalism. Some "workers" produce much more value than others. A coder making 150-200k is completely replaceable, a widely recognized public figure is not. Shouldn't be shocking, whats shocking is that people don't understand this and arent honest with themselves about the value they bring to the workplace
Is it so crazy to assume McConaughey may enable more business through his influence than 8,000 employees combined?<p>If true, then it is justified by the argument Benioff put forward and that this article seems to also agree with.