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Comment by ben_jones | Hacker News Reader

There's two revelations here:

* big companies have entire teams (internal and consultants) advising them on large changes in the name of productivity, cost reduction, whatever. These teams contrive metrics, KPI, and correlations, between what they do and the success of the business. These teams are paid bonuses, promotions, etc., based on these metrics they themselves contrive.

* small companies blindly do what the big companies do because surely these big companies know what they're doing

And everyone suffers. Except the people who implement this stuff. They probably have celebrations.

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> big companies have entire teams (internal and consultants) advising them on large changes in the name of productivity, cost reduction, whatever. These teams contrive metrics, KPI, and correlations, between what they do and the success of the business. These teams are paid bonuses, promotions, etc., based on these metrics they themselves contrive.

definitely some misaligned incentives.

do you have an alternative you recommend? Big institutions typically make decisions via "committees of experts" because the alternative decision making in big groups of people is often dictated by a single or cadre of leaders, or total stasis. And small groups of leaders don't scale to the amount of decisions to be made at big groups.

I'd counter its not "committees of experts" but "committees of stakeholders and powerbrokers" with equally misaligned incentives not worth replicating.

Yes it's called capitalism, if they could get away with it they would pay us nothing. In good times the stock gets so high you can get away with super high salaries, over staffing and perks. But in worse times the stock starts to get a hit, the multiples don't look good and to retain earnings you have to cut costs. The biggest cost is wages...

> Yes it's called capitalism, if they could get away with it they would pay us nothing

It's called capitalism because it's the only system where they can't get away with it.

How so? They've been offshoring and automizing everything they can and this will only increase. Yes there's still a high demand for workers but it doesn't mean they're not trying to eliminate us slowly but surely. Us techies still have a few good years left but we're in no way immune to what's coming.

Well, no. You can have capitalist economies supported by slave labour. Capitalism on its own does not guarantee individuals freedom.

That is not the definition of capitalism.

This is just what we have in the USA today. Capitalism can work, but what we have is lopsided in terms of power balance. Workers should have more power and leverage but that has been eroded over time.

The volatility you describe is part of economic systems in general and hard to get away from. While it seems like a lot, it is actually far, far less than we had in the 1800s and prior to that.

Capitalism can work and has worked well for the last few decades but I personally think we are in "late stage" capitalism or whatever you wanna call a system that starts to crush the middle class and younger generations, create unsustainable debt and wreak havoc on the environment. We'll see how it all plays out, will be interesting for sure...

> Capitalism can work, but what we have is lopsided in terms of power balance.

This is incoherent. Capitalism is the assigning of power and capital to those who have power over capital. It is fundamentally opposed to a balance of power.

Assigning power to the collective or to workers is definitionally not capitalist. Mixed systems can work fine, but they are just that. A mixture of capitalist and other systems of organization.

Those are not the 'revelations'.

Salesforce was in a pickle. It's 'very bad' for a group of people over here to get a benefit, and for others not to get it. It's unfair. So they either have to give the benefit broadly, or take it away.

It's a non-standard benefit, so the easy thing to do would be to align holidays with the parent company.

If Slack was truly it's own entity, they likely should just allow them to have it as they operate totally independently, but that may not be sustainable.

That said, it's really hard to take people's benefits away as well. There's a social cost there.

Eh, I'm unconvinced that they aren't making an extremely dumb move here. Nobody is very productive during that period anyway, and this just aggravates one portion of the company without making everyone else much happier. Dev hiring is still tight, so this won't help them with retention & recruitment. I wouldn't be surprised that they could save money by extending this bebefit to everyone, or at bare minimum do it fairly cheaply.

I agree, it's probably a bad move.

I remember one company I was at. We all worked hard, when it came to bonus time, everyone in dev got bonus as we hit all the deadlines. Nobody in professional services did as the sales team hadn't got new customers, although they had worked hard on existing accounts.

So professional services complained it was unfair. The company decided being "unfair" was terrible, so tried to take the bonus away from dev as well. At which point pretty much all of us started looking for another job. They eventually relented and paid everyone in dev and ps the bonus.

You're missing the bigger picture.

The 'bad move' is to have different packages on different teams, which is completely untenable.

It will cause chaos among the ranks just as you indicate.

Therefore, it has to even out one way or another.

It's a big deal to give everyone else in the company an extra week off.

So they pulled the bandaid.

It would have been interesting for them to contemplate the extra few days, but their move put them in line with 99.9% of other companies so it's not unreasonable.

They should have figured out a sneaky way to give the Slack folks something else on the down-low though.

Oh, I agree that having different packages can cause discontent, and makes it harder overall for the company to manage. Merging companies is hard.

But equally, taking away benefits, particularly ones that employees really care about, is also a recipe for discontent.

I remember when IBM bought Lotus. For a long time people thought that spelled the end, as IBM had a long run of buying companies and destroying all the value in them. They tried a different approach with Lotus. As a result, the Lotus employees had significantly better benefits in some ways than the IBM employees. My friend who came from Lotus drove a Jaguar. His manager from IBM had a low end BMW, as the car allowances were different. Pension provision also different. This situation persisted right up until IBM sold Lotus stuff to HCL a couple of years back.

So it is possible to merge even big companies and maintain different benefit systems. For 20 years!

> The 'bad move' is to have different packages on different teams, which is completely untenable.

This already happens with compensation and other benefits, so it should be fine.

I believe that Salesforce could give every single employee a handful of extra vacation days, and overall it will cost them less than what they spend in unnecessary benefits for their higher ups.

Instead, it seems that they have decided to play a sort of reverse Robin Hood.

I blame a particularly macho form of management which takes "tough" decisions regardless of the impact on their employees. Every time I have encountered this style of management (most recently in my last role), it has led to an exodus of talent, both in the short term (expected) and the longer term.

Three years later, the few people I know who still work there say the culture is now irretrievably damaged. What was an attractive, fun place to work is now an unhappy place. They are struggling to recruit good people where before their reputation was an asset.

But the manager concerned remains, has no doubt hit her goals of cost reduction or efficiency or whatever. And has hired more of her kind.

I can relate. My previous role was at a company acquired by a large telecom, and like clockwork, two-three years after the whole thing is in disarray, only the terrible middle management remains, and most new people are juniors who have a hard time finding seniors that would mentor them.

It is not tough to save money or squeeze more out of your vendor. Macho would be increasing wages and benefits, as then management would have to answer to the board with commensurate results.

I agree it's tougher to argue things the board doesn't like to hear.

By "macho" I just meant that they seem to pride themselves on taking decisions which don't make them popular with people under them.

Good managers can make unpopular decisions and retain the support of staff under them. I've seen people take pay cuts temporarily, work longer hours, all kinds of extra that comes with good will.

Ultimately it's about respect. Good managers have it. Bad managers seem to revel in not having it.

Totally agree they should have found a way to sweeten it for the Slack employees though.

I currently work in a place that hands out fairly large bonus cheques to sales reps quarterly in, and I'm not joking here, in a secret awards ceremony that devs and others hear nothing about. Only reason I've any knowledge about it at all was because I used to date someone in that department and they spilled the beans.

I'm surprised that sales reps getting bonuses is a secret in your organisation. That's pretty much how sales are compensated everywhere. Their base salary is often only a small part of their compensation if they're any good.

It's also not uncommon for the bonus amounts awarded to be private.

> without making everyone else much happier

This is actually a really good point. It probably just replaces the topic-du-jour to whine about and has no actual benefit whatsoever.

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