The workplace policy has been in effect for many years, and was until recently an advertised perk of working for Slack. It allowed all employees access to free paid time off from 24th until the New Year (some employees like incident responders would take shifts, but even Customer Experience (their support team) ran skeleton shifts). Today they have announced this policy has ended as a result of the economy as well as making the workplace more equitable (as Salesforce employees could not access this benefit).
I mean if raising the prices made them more money they would have done it earlier. Usually prices in recessions are raised in response to supply issues, resulting in less quantity supplied to such an extent that there is less profit overall.
That's at least what a microeconomist would say. But it's clear that in this recession there's less startups, and thus less Slack customers, and so Slack's operating costs need to be distributed among fewer companies, resulting in higher per-unit costs.
Small nitpick, as it's not self-hosted but runs on their servers and bandwidth, the incremental cost is not zero. But I do think that just a single org with 10k people would probably not register as a lot.
Based on sticker price, a 10k org would only be ~$1mil in revenue for slack (maybe half that with a big org discount?). Really makes me wonder about the valuations like 30bn on total revenue of 1bn.
> It's clear that the fixed costs need to be paid among a fewer number of clients
I am sorry but it is not at all clear. Has there been a drop in the number of slack customers?
Number of people in work is up. Unless slack has become unappealing as a solution to its problem, that means number of subscribers up. If slack is unappealing as a product and people are switching to teams / google that is an entirely different issue.
It is also possible that those fixed costs have increased and they are passing on those costs, while retaining whatever margin they have, as there is inflation out there.
Inflation is going crazy and costs are going up. That's the 'bad'
in this economy right now. That's also likely why they raised prices and are having to cut benefits.
Given the availability problems and generally poor quality Slack managed before, I can’t see this going well. They’re lucky the competition is Teams, another basket case.
This comment isn’t wise. It doesn’t hold generally. That being said, Salesforce does expect to increase profits and revenues and has stated it doesn’t anticipate problems with revenues.
The raise doesn’t even start until sept and people can prepaid to delay it for another year. Companies are laying off and we charge based on active users so at best we will come out flat.
> Today they have announced this policy has ended as a result of the economy as well as making the workplace more equitable
It's too bad their hands were entirely tied on this and they had no other choice but to take it away from everyone. /s
It always amazes me when my coworkers pretend things just "are how they are" within a company. Everything can be changed, everything is negotiable, nothing is set in stone. Obviously this gets harder as the company gets bigger but the defeatist attitude I often see is so depressing. I'm sure there were some people (Salesforce employees) who heralded this a good change instead of thinking for even 1 minute about how the better change would be that everyone got it. And don't tell me they couldn't afford it, that's just bullshit.
Jealousy is a deep, natural instinct. There are tons of studies that show how various kinds of monkeys/apes will happily eat a piece of fruit or whatever, but if you give the monkey next to them a piece of candy instead, the first monkey will go ape shit and never eat the fruit again.
Many, many people think like this. I remember talking to a software engineer from MIT a while back, I don't even remember what we were talking about. But, I distinctly remember him expressing an attitude where someone else received something that he felt that he deserved, regardless of whether the other person deserved it also or not, and to him, this was just about the gravest injustice that he could imagine. He was like visibly angry clenching his teeth while talking about it. And it had nothing to do with whatever the thing was, hence why I can't remember it. To him it was a very deeply rooted idea of "fairness" defined in this sort of simple-minded, inflexible way. And he was ALL ABOUT removing the thing from the other person as opposed to trying to get compensated equally himself.
Especially because the period between Christmas and new years is the absolute lowest point of productivity. Giving everyone the holiday probably saves the company money, since then employees have the benefit of returning after the 1st refreshed. Every job I've had to work that period, the 25th through the 31st is absolutely dead and unproductive, since lots of coworkers burned their pto to take it off anyway and any external vendor is extremely unresponsive.
Similar thing to anyone who deals with China, you just expect that nothing will get done over their new year celebrations and you build schedules appropriately. Salesforce could absolutely afford to do this, they already have a good example in house. Instead of doing something that would generate positive press, they've generated negative headlines and really pissed off the employees as slack twice (once now, and once again later this year around the holidays). What a classic short-sighted MBA brain move.
Those experiments don't distinguish between jealousy and intolerance for injustice or unfairness from a third party.
In the capuchin studies, given that they usually express their displeasure at the experimenter rather than the other monkey and also spontaneously share it's reasonable to view it as the latter.
This whole crab bucket mentality of 'it's unfaaaiiir that minimum wages get raised' rather than fighting to get the benefit for everyone is a distinctly neoliberal and american mindset that you have to 'deserve' to survive or be comfortable.
I usually take these monkey studies with a pinch of salt. It shouldn’t be to hard to conduct a similar study on humans, and the fact that we are only hearing about monkey studies makes me question whether the results can be generalized.
It is not just that we are a different species and exhibit different behavior under same circumstances as monkeys, but also that the monkeys are kept under captivity all their lives which will profoundly alter their behavior (the same applies to humans).
This is why I conceal/pretend to have a lower salary than I do. People claim that sharing salaries only benefits employers. No, it also benefits the people who will have to deal with colleague jealousy.
* 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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
My sister was an RN at a hospital whose parent company gobbled up some area hospitals.
In her case, they cut her pay 25%, because it would be unfair to pay the other people less. This was right before COVID, and everyone basically quit - like a whole department of nurses en masse.
She came back as a contractor when they were hard up, at one point making $350/hr. All of the normal staff left and it became a contractor mill. When contract people didn’t show, she got $2000-3000 shift bonuses for a 4 hour work commitment to allow the ER to stay open.
I certainly hope the Slack folks do something similar.
Yep. My good friend is an RN who worked for a hospital bought up by some conglomerate and the perks slowly went away and burned a ton of loyalty/good-will. He left to do travel nursing and made a ton more.
It’s so shortsighted and ultimately defeating/self-destructive when companies act like this.
It just doesn't seem to harm the corporation enough. The requests for subsidies, the limitations of available support that put the public at risk should be negatively impacting leadership of these organizations drastically.
Nobody is really evaluated all that effectively on an individual level. I can't figure out the difference in my performance reviews between advocating, coming up with new ideas, and taking initiative vs just working on tickets and not saying a word in meetings.
In the case of a hospital and emergency room, they will usually have a monopoly in a given arena, so the losses will be felt by taxpayers and insurance premium payers. And the patients who end up getting lower quality are due to turbulence in operations. And the workers who cannot afford to or decide not to quit who have to deal with lower quality of life at work.
How is it when I fuck up at work, I get fired but when these definitely reversible decisions are made and allowed to run their course for years we dont see a mass exodus at the SVP level?
There is no legitimate SWE shortage though. Most software can run in maintenance mode with minimal staff and no feature growth. A hospital is dead without nurses.
> Most software can run in maintenance mode with minimal staff and no feature growth.
If it is well built, sure. At one of my jobs, one of the firehoses requires a messy restart every few days as it was left to decay and now everything is out of date.
Typically, not really. If a software is badly built, it isn't as simple as following a set of well-described instructions. Random stuff breaks all the time due to hidden dependencies to other servicea, and debugging it is definitely not a job to be entrusted to an intern. If it was easy to restart, you could write a cron job for it.
I work at a large public tech company with a bland product and sure you could lay off 90% of engineering and coast with no feature development for a good while (probably). The problem is when you want to staff back up, getting that 90% back won’t happen overnight and it’ll take years to get that efficiency back up. We paused hiring for just a couple months in my org once, we had something like 5% attrition during that time and it took 3x as long to get the hiring pipeline back up and it’ll take at least a year to get those people to be useful. Always Be Hiring.
Interesting math for the Hospitals. My understanding is that if they don't have enough nurses on shift, they pay high penalties to medicare. Not sure I know the details but that's my understanding.
Unions also fight to have everybody paid more. The company dropping everybody to the lowest bar instead of increasing benefits for the worst off is absolutely not something the union demanded.
As for outliers in general, sure. The whole union thing is based on collective bargaining after all. If Bob is making more than everybody else in the same position, that means there's more room for everybody else doing that job to make more.
If something like this did originate from a union complaint, it sucks now for the best-off, but it's also going to be a real strong point for all the workers to use when the contract is renegotiated.
I work in a place with a union and sometimes have a minor role in negotiation with them.
100% WFH put them between a rock and a hard place. Ultimately the power of bargaining is dependent on being able to strike. Remote weakens that as people can be anywhere. The control lost by management is also felt by labor.
The circumstances vary - if your union and circumstances get hybrid and remote work in the CBA, you’re much better as we’ve already seen “return to the office” used as a stealth layoff technique that denys unemployment and severance.
Really depends on the state. My hospital in Arizona sat me through a presentation urging me to not sign a union petition, like a lot of other companies.
Inequality in pay is what unions typically fight against unless it is based on seniority. Many union shops have underemployment problems solved by bringing in contractors - or non-union organizations that exist in states with strong labor laws, where businesses only hire a small number of FTEs and hire contractors for the majority of the rank and file work to get around strong labor laws.
registered Nurse. There are several levels of nursing certification which determine what things you are allowed to do at a hospital. CNA and LPN are lower in rank than a RN. Nurses that get paid more than RNs are specialized like surgical or labor and delivery nurses
The benefit of being a nurse is that it is a monopoly, and the hospital is also a monopoly, and neither the hospital nor the nurse pay the cost of that mishandling, but you the taxpayer do.
When I hear of something like that scenario, I can't logically see how the executive team making those initial decisions can spin it as a victory, but I can readily imagine them doing it.
"Hooray, we've reduced headcount and improved productivity!!"
"Yeah, but your wages bill is now stacked with contractors and is 10x what it was before."
"OK,OK, but how about that next exec bonus?"
Not that I support the decision, but to be fair the size of the Slack team is probably a small percentage of whole SalesForce, so applying the same benefit to everyone instead of taking it away from that small team is much harder to justify.
I’m not disagreeing that that’s probably exactly what the execs who made this decision thought, it’s just gross. But I’m sure one them will get a nice bonus for cutting this.
I went though this years ago when my coworkers at the time were complaining about some random process/internal standard.. it's like you realize we're the ones who control that right?
There are definitely people there who are relishing in this change. Such a sad mentality, but I remember reading plenty of whine posts about why it’s unfair for Heroku to not use GUS or, why does X acquisition still get to have free lunch.
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
-David Graeber
I know this reads as a gross oversimplification but it rings true all the time. Imagine if almost everyone collectively at Salesforce said, “nope, this is dumb! We are going to stop working until this benefit is handed out to everyone at the company.” It’d be changed back / expanded within 48 hours.
You don’t have to solve it. There’s not really any problem to solve to begin with. People who are happy with the changed working conditions will continue to work there. People who do not want to tolerate the change will not continue to work there. Every person can precisely choose the outcome they want, without cooperation from anybody.
That's not what I was responding to though. This is:
> Imagine if almost everyone collectively at Salesforce said, “nope, this is dumb! We are going to stop working until this benefit is handed out to everyone at the company.” It’d be changed back / expanded within 48 hours.
That's a prisoner's dilemma, people holding out for the best they can get. If enough people defect then it won't work.
The prisoners dilemma doesn’t apply to this situation, because every single individual involved can, without any cooperation from anybody else, easily get the optimal outcome for themselves.
If you define “optimal outcome” as “people who don’t like having their benefits revoked quit”, yes. But I think a lot of people would define “optimal outcome” as “people who don’t like having their benefits revoked don’t get them revoked”.
Managers can simply ignore this policy for their reports. If, at the Director level, most of the managers are still of original Slack ilk, this is very feasible. SFDC has unlimited PTO so this won't even be noticed.
I get this and people have tried to assuage me throughout my career with things like "yeah but it's up to the manager so you'll be fine" or similar. I absolutely hate manager-discretion "perks" because they aren't official ("on the books"), they can be taken away at a moments notice on the whim on your manager or if a new manager comes in who doesn't agree.
Before COVID this was the case with WFH at my last company. I was able to WFH for 2 days a week but it was impossible to get that codified in the handbook. I was even on the committee that oversaw edits/rewrites of the handbook but HR would not let us add anything about WFH other than "It's up to the manager". I had so many people tell me "I don't know why you are so bothered, you are able to WFH". Yes, today, right now, with this manager, or at least this managers current demeanor I have WFH but all that can turn on a dime, I wanted it to be official. "Of course", the company as a whole couldn't allow WFH, that would be "impossible". I left that company in late 2019 and... surprise! They went fully remote in 2020 and now are a hybrid with the majority of people WFH-ing. It was a rare case of being told it was impossible and would never work to seeing not but a few months later all their arguments to be shown for the BS they really were.
This is a nice perk that could have helped Slack and Salesforce have an edge when it comes to acquiring talent in a competitive market with a shrinking pool of talent. Holiday time is generally slower anyway, I wonder the business rationale here.
Time to move companies. This year my company gave us an extra week off in the summer (on top of no work Fridays, 10 holidays, one PTO day each pay period with yearly rollovers, every 5 year sabbaticals, 1 month of Covid sick days, and 2 weeks off at the end of December).
I've done freelancing before at 4 days a week and loved it, and have generally negotiated into 4 day workweeks at various startups. Give a shout-out to your company if they're hiring ;)
Always move companies. There's always somewhere that'll do better for you.
My company gave us more holidays off, decided to add extra days off before and after holidays that typically land on weekends, unlimited PTO and a policy of encouraging you to take time off not shame you for using 1 day for a doctors appointment, and surprisingly unlike literally everywhere else I worked, they gave me an 8% raise to account for inflation.
I don't publicly disclose my employment despite being absolutely enthralled with how great they are, but if you DM me on twitter and mention this thread, if you're looking for a job, give me your resume and if we're looking for someone like you, I'll definitely let you know and see about getting you in.
In the bad case, your PTO rarely gets approved, and you never accumulate any to be paid out. Peer pressure is used to convince people to not take time off.
In the good case, leaders lead by example by taking time off frequently, and encouraging their reports to do the same. PTO is approved more often than not. If people start "abusing" the privilege, they get spoken to personally, instead of the whole team/company being punished by changing the policy.
I've worked at a place with unlimited PTO, and it was the latter case, and it was great. I never had to budget my time - I never had to worry that spending an extra day at the beach during the summer meant that I would have one less day to spend with my family in another state during the holidays. The time I took off seemed much more worthwhile than being paid out for 3 accrued days or whatever.
Yup, and my place of employment is also the latter. Leadership takes time off all the time. Heck my direct boss who is senior engineering director just took 2 weeks off for vacation, which overlapped with a major release launch, he didn't care, his vacation personal time meant more.
Our VP of Engineering takes off quite a bit too. They all encourage us to and also encourage us to take mental health days too. Mental health is a big concern in my company and they do not take kindly to people not taking care of themselves... It sounds bad to read that way but "do not take kindly" in a good way.
Also we're a heavily remote first and ROWE company, that could also make a huge difference.
I agree, but someone here in HN mentioned a strategy that I think can really work when you are "offered" unlimited PTO as a hiring perk: Once you get the final offer, send an email to both the Recruiter and the hiring manager (shoot as high in the org-chart as you can) and mention something like the following:
"I see that the company has an 'unlimited PTO' policy. The standard PTO time I have taken in the places I work for the last 5 years is 25 days PTO a year. Would I be able to take the same 25 days per year of PTO under the Company's 'Unlimited PTO' policy?"
That way, you are establishing a written record that 25 days (or whatever time you'd prefer), and are letting them know in advance the number of days you will take. That way, you can take 25 days every year, and if they somehow hint you that you are taking "too many days", you can refer to the email showing that hey, before you started, they told you that 25 days was OK.
If it matters, September is my 1 year anniversary and since I started I've taken almost a full month off for various trips I've taken and not a single person has a problem with it. So while I would normally agree with you, in my context I cannot.
I know a few senior employees at Slack and they’re literally just waiting out their vesting period to leave the company. Golden Parachute is the only thing keeping them there.
I unshackled some golden handcuffs recently. It wasn't easy. It still isn't easy to deal with, even 2 months later! But it was the right decision (financially and otherwise)...
Do you get unlimited vacation though like Salesforce employees? When I worked there nobody worked those days anyway. Will this really have an impact on when people take time off?
Some companies offer unlimited PTO. The catch is the culture often discourages people from taking more than a few weeks off. It's been shown if the company just offers N weeks people take more time off than if it were unlimited, which seems ironic.
My company has unlimited vacation. I take time off regularly, and the CTO explicitly calls me out on it in all-hands meetings as someone to emulate.
A coworker that typically holds the heavens up like Atlas felt like he's burning out, so he's about to take 3-6 months off to do yoga in Switzerland or something. Everyone's happy for him. It sucks for project schedules I'm sure, but it's better to take a break and come back fresh than burn out and leave. Another coworker just came back from a 3 month sabbatical, and her fresh mental state will be a great productivity boost.
I just spent a week on a family vacation, then another week volunteering at a solar car race, and then another few days visiting family. I was looking forward to actually getting some focused work done this week, but now I'm out sick and only have the mental capacity to read HN and sleep. I suppose I feel about as productive as I usually do, since I can still respond to people on slack all day!
Yup, this is my experience too. The maximalist complaints about unlimited PTO being a scam seem to be a mix of:
a) sour grapes
b) people being unwilling to admit that they prefer paternalism instead of being capable of making their own decisions about how to balance work and life
(FWIW for me, making my own decision looks like "4-5 wks per year, not including a handful of ad-hoc 3-day weekends throughout the yr")
I think defined vacation plans:
1) give me a monetary benefit if my manager doesn't allow me to use my vacation
2) allow me to evaluate a job offer more concretely
3) allow me to negotiate confident that a change in manager won't wipe out my gains
Are there other benefits or forms of comp where it's preferable not to agree on amounts beforehand?
Not to imply you are, but it's certainly possible to over-analyze things. There are plenty of qualitative aspects to a workplace that will compound into financial gain. If you join a worthwhile project with a long term outlook and dedicated and supportive coworkers, then the expected value of any equity you earn will likely be higher than otherwise. My current company's leaders want everyone "doing their life's best work" and would genuinely feel bad if they were wasting everyone's time. That includes themselves, and with every year the company grows and gains more momentum.
To an extent I've been very blessed in my career, and I've always been able to accept new jobs based on my fit with the project and the team. I've also had success negotiating compensation to serve my interests. I've never seriously factored in vacation days into any sort of comparisons. I've never found myself in an environment where my manager had any expectation of proscribing when I should take time off. On the contrary, every manager I've ever had has been wholely supportive whenever I've taken time off. I think a large part of that comes down to my attitude and work ethic. I've certainly become spoiled, though. Unless my situation changes drastically, I wouldn't consider working somewhere with less flexibility than I currently enjoy. I would work for less compensation if it was the right project, though.
I find it completely plausible that some people would prefer limited PTO. My comment specifies the maximalist criticisms, which can't imagine unlimited PTO as anything but a scam.
Ive seen this a million and one times since I started working in tech, including my nontech friends being blown away by the perks of Google and concluding that they must work me like a dog (I worked a hard 35 hrs/wk at the time).
> Some companies offer unlimited PTO. The catch is
...that unlimited PTO can't be accrued, and is usually still subject to approval to use like regular limited PTO, which makes it an easy mechanism for arbitrary favoritism by managers without the fallback that if your PTO isn't approved you at least keep and accrue your balance which can be used later in your career or cashed out, and which the company then has an incentive to allow.you to use to clear the liability from their balance sheet.
Also there's no vacation accrual, so there's no payout when employees leave. Because of this I always recommend the folks on my team to be proactive about taking vacations and odd days off for personal time, and to keep the amount of vacation they've taken in mind. If they don't use that benefit, it's their loss. If they take advantage of it, I believe it's better for team and individual well-being.
FWIW, people confidently disclaiming that this is always and necessarily how unlimited PTO works are wrong (which should be obvious....). I worked at a company that was extremely intense and deadline-driven and unlimited PTO was pretty great. In the almost 4 years I was there, I took an avg of 5 wks/yr, not counting the scattered 3-4 day weekends I took throughout the year. Hell, I think there was even a policy where managers would ping employees who took less than X days/yr (this happened to me during one of the lockdown years).
Effectively, it means you have to ask current employees how much vacation you get.
The theory is you can "take what you need" so long as you're getting your work done. In practice, company culture of course dictates what's considered reasonable, and as best I can tell it is highly variable between companies.
At my "unlimited" place, it seems like 3 weeks is considered reasonable, especially if split up. But I know someone at another company who has had trouble getting more than a week for a couple years running.
If you are consistently meeting or exceeding the expectations of an engineer at your level, you can do ridiculous things like take 60 days off a year. I know I did back when I was in a FAANG sorority^W eng team!
It also means if you are not meeting expectations, you’ll probably self-select to get zero time off.
Engineering pays well because you are supposed to work magic. If you can’t produce the magic then the dark clouds gather quickly. The elite sports team analogy is a good one. Keep up an unlucky run of bad games and you’ll get benched then sacked.
I don’t condone any of the above but this is the mindset of “unlimited PTO”. More so than that which I’m seeing others describe, here.
You're just in the valley, dig deeper and you'll find the awe again. Just the things required to make networking even work are practically magic. Just the existence of error correcting codes makes me feel that way, for an example.
The magic is when you build an abstraction, then another one on top of it, and then a third one on top of that. Now you have a system which is starting to look inscrutable because of its complexity — “magic” if you will humor that language of mine — and yet you, the author, know that it is just three logically separate systems stacked on top of each other using each other’s interfaces.
Log data from each request. Map reduce it into an SQL table. Render the statistics with a JS graphing frontend. Use a pub/sub to update everything in real time. It’s all just plumbing but the overall effect is of something much more.
To an outsider, that is the magic. Software engineers know better — it’s all very well taking a design and implementing the vision but what is much harder is coming up with the design and idea in the first place. Some days you’re on fire implementing component after component without ever really having to rethink anything — you got the interface right first time, or you understood the problem well enough to keep a component small enough without it creeping into multiple areas of concern.
Some days… weeks… it is far from clear what to do next. You know you need to migrate this performance critical code that exists verbatim (copy and paste!) in these two repositories and instead turn it into a single first-class dependency which implements the compute using a GPU instead. Some of the infrastructure of the original code is written in Python. Some in bash. It was written with no thought for making factoring easier and the whole project is in use in production already.
When you’ve got a mental model of what to do you can churn through this kind of work in a week of intense coding. When you have no idea where to start things can feel very hopeless.
If you’re just programming then you’re probably very smart and able to figure these things out without breaking a sweat, or you have a tech lead
who nudges you in the right direction with calm competence that belies the fact they wake up at 4am every other night to reach for a legal pad to sketch out yet another potentially doomed idea to reduce technical debt that literally never sees the light of day.
PTO is usually at the discretion of the managers; they're more inclined to decline requests for time off when enough people are already taking off (to avoid the situation of someone on the skeleton crew getting sick and not enough people are available to handle an emergency).
It really depends on your customer's needs; slack going down for a day or two over the holidays is unfortunate but not the end of the world. Salesforce going down could, I imagine, easily cause massive financial losses.
I'd like to think it should be easy enough to put people on emergency call rather than forcing them to put 8 hours of butts in seats for no reason, but apparently that's not how Salesforce wants to roll.
If you need bums in seats the professional way to do it is to have an oncall rota.
A rota is the positive affirmation that employee X will be here to support the team versus the negative one that well person X can’t not be here, because they’re the last one to take PTO.
Hahaha. Unlimited vacation actually means vacation only when your manager feels like it - which could be less than you'd get under a fixed vacation allotment. Many such cases.
The manager themself is likely going to take advantage of it too. Of course, there are enough Salesforce or former-Salesforce people in this thread stating how things actually are there (don't expect most people to be available most of December) that we don't need to speculate about how things could be or how abuse could still happen.
1. You are correct, it's clearly just another SFDC company now.
2. Does most of the software engineering world work much over the winter holiday period? I haven't since.. come to think of it, since ever. And that's a long time, more than 20+ years in the biz.
That said, Salesforce is one of the best companies to work for if you want to get a fat paycheck for easy work. Not too many engineers slaving away for Salesforce (unless they're fools volunteering to do so).
Let's be real, Mark Benniof is a relatively generous and pretty cool person compared to the ubiquitous landscape of asshole billionaire leaders in tech you could choose to work for instead.
I worked for a non-tech manufacturing company that had holiday shutdown and 1-week summer shutdown (first week of august). It was my first real job out of college and I kinda assumed most companies were like that. Since leaving that place, I've been pretty crushed to find how rare this benefit is and can't believe I took it for granted.
for a global company it’s a bit weird to shut down for such a christian focused time of year. and a lot of roles can’t shut down. i’d rather get pto at my discretion
Apple used to give people the week between Christmas and New Years Day off (maybe they still do, I don't know).
I was was part of a startup that a number of Apple engineers went to; over half of our engineering org was from Apple, and were used to having that time off, our management chain was fine with it, and we just took it as part of our startup's culture.
The New CEO, a real sales guy, had different ideas. "I think that people can be really productive during that week." He was adamant that he wanted to see butts in seats, across the company. Engineers? Not special. (We were working until the early hours of the morning, nearly every day).
We were told by our director not to worry about it, and just not show up if we didn't want to. What was he going to do, fire half of his engineers?
I did once work that magic week at Apple. You got triple time if you did, but it had to be okayed by nosebleed levels of management.
I was tracking down one of the hardest bugs I've ever found, it took most of that week (the fix was embarrassingly simple, just swapping two lines of assembly).
I really didn't want to work that week, but the pay made it worth it.
Sounds like you had a great director who was willing to shield their org from bs top-down demands.
I didn't appreciate this skill until I had a manager who did the same for me. Having a manager who can ruthlessly prioritize, set expectations, and help navigate all of the corporate bureaucracy is a godsend.
While the corporate world is strange and toxic on many levels, being on a solid team where everyone has each other's backs (necessary because of the warring-fractions-like relationships within the same company), is a bonding and exhilarating experience.
Having once been that manager, let me just add that there is a price to pay: all the corporate BS normally reserved for a whole team now lands on one person's shoulders. Combined with some personal stuff, this broke me.
When you come across a clear occasion of crap having been deflected from landing on you, do the right thing: show some appreciation for it to your manager. It goes a long way.
It sounds like you were a fantastic manager who cared about their team, I'm very sorry to hear that. Seems like it can be a very thankless job a lot of the time.
Hopefully we can normalize showing appreciation from all directions (direct reports, sr mgrs, directors, etc.) for those who deserve it.
Not sure what org you were in but Apple engineering orgs I was in always seemed to “power down” around Thanksgiving. Trying to schedule meetings or get new things done was tough.
Tim got in the habit of giving everyone Thanksgiving week off, and while I don’t remember the specific Christmas shutdown schedule, PTO days were generous enough that you could supplement two or three and create a 2 week vacation.
It’s not very team dependent. There are a few tiger teams that work between Christmas and new years, but they are the exception (outside of retail). Those days are official shutdown days on the company holiday calendar.
the efficiency is relative; you would have a pile of defects to deal with when the dev team comes back. also it's not equitable.
as qa, I've experienced this. those bugs just get thrown in the backlog and the technical debt grows until it's crunch time and we're blamed we're not finding bugs fast enough, despite being available more on the project than the team which had a week off.
Apple also often gave Thanksgiving week off. BUT... Steve Jobs wouldn't send the E-mail telling us that until the last minute.
After several years of this happening, I decided to book plane tickets to see my family before the prices got astronomical. Sure enough... that was the one year we didn't get it off.
> I think that people can be really productive during that week.
There are some really special people with horizons till their office wall. Of course this is a huge benefit but it is also where it starts. Benefits like this allow for crunch time in times of need. If there is a constant time of need there is no need for extra work.
> He was adamant that he wanted to see butts in seats, across the company. Engineers? Not special. (We were working until the early hours of the morning, nearly every day).
He might see my butt in a seat that week, but he damn sure wouldn't see me working past 5, and I'd be looking for a new job.
I honestly don't get why CEOs would bother worrying about this stuff. How can you make the big important decisions if you allow yourself to be distracted by micromanagement?
In our startup it seemed to be a case of the CEO wanting to be "in charge".
He could have gone for showing competence, gaining the respect and trust of engineering, and being a source of understanding and compassion to a group that was working crazy hours trying to meet impossible schedules. Instead he decided to beat us up.
It did not go well. I was gone within a year, as were a number of other people. The company kept making crappy decisions, got bought for a song, and eventually my sweat equity (and real invested dollars) ended up as 17 shares of Oracle (fuck me, I hate that company).
Right, right. Slack just won't make it unless everyone works through the holidays.
I don't know about you all, but to me it's obvious that C-levels use moody economic periods as an excuse to do all the Scroogey things they would actually be more than happy to do in any economic season.
It would make just as much sense, if not more, to drastically cut their outlandish "performance" pay when the economy is down, but I don't think we'll be seeing much of that.
If I'd been getting an extra week beyond that, a long-standing perk that's used to help recruit employees, I'd certainly be annoyed and considering my options if it gets taken away.
People consider their options every single time they drive to work. No one is arguing that when perks are taken away you can be sad. But it's not like employers aren't disappointed by employees often too and still keep them for weeks, months, years longer after the disappointment.
well, when the whole company shuts down its actually a lot nicer. Do it in the summer or winter whatever, but it's nice to not miss anything and really let work stop
As a foreigner, I don't care. Holiday schedule is one out of many issues with US-centric policy and culture, but mainstream biases exist everywhere. This is about an employee perk.
Extra time off is always much appreciated, especially in the US tech sector where prestige white collar work = your life & identity. Most work overtime during the year anyway and are available outside of business hours and make countless other sacrifices for their employer every hour of every day.
Moreover, many of us celebrate Thanksgiving and July 4th anyway, because, well everyone else is (ie the same reason as most Americans).
Yeah sorry but that excuse “because of the economy” feels like a half finished sentence. What exactly “the economy” do they mean? The sentence would make just us much sense if they said “because the moon”
This is exactly what it is. I feel "management" is just another word for "psycho lunatic sadists". Just do stuff to make people more miserable and blame it on the economy.
Firing people and making the others work twice as much? It's the economy. Take free soda from the kitchen that costs cents? It's the economy. Remove 4 days of holidays that would otherwise improve morale and productivity? It's the economy. Make employees waste hours in commute everyday? We obviously need to do it because it's the economy.
I don't know that I go so far as that take, but it certainly feels in some cases like companies had to "bite their tongues" as demand for employees and comp skyrocketed, and now that things are starting to stall, they are picking l pouncing on it to regain the power dynamic they once had through the threat of "be lucky you still have a job."
And then they wonder why people leave once conditions permit.
In some ways it's almost like the economic change is _welcomed_ because it puts downward pressure on comp (for companies that can weather the storm at least).
Yeah. Place I was working did a massive layoff at the start of COVID, and immediately began hiring again for the vacated positions. Except now the hires were contractors in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe rather than FTEs in the US.
I mean no offense to any posters from those locales. You are a human, I respect you and your skills, most of you are probably better at tech than I am. I am glad you have jobs.
The point is the company said "OH NO, THE ECONOMY, WE HAVE TO DOWNSIZE, CANNOT AFFORD THIS HEADCOUNT" out of one side of its mouth. While backfilling those vacated spots as fast as it could from lower cost regions. It was a cowardly, calculated move that they had been praying for an excuse to execute.
Where I’ve worked, I’ve seen it less as giving people off to celebrate Christmas and New Years and more, “This is the by far the slowest time of the year for our business and is the easiest opportunity to shut down without dealing with a bunch of hassle.”
That leave is essentially everyone collectively sacrificing to allow humanity to continue on. It’s not really anything close to a vacation for the new parents, and their colleagues still have to pick up any slack. The end result is more humans to keep the world moving.
An equivalent for someone not having kids would be taking time off to volunteer somewhere.
Benefit based on a life choice has been found discriminatory in other situations.
Your second point makes sense, but many don't offer that. Some do, some don't. Often volunteering is seen as a thing one gets compensated for (donation to charity) for work you do outside work time.
Need to apply this to the C-suite. Publicize every single C-Suite benefit not being passed on to the entire company. Name the individuals. Being equitable is a bomb and management just lit the fuse. Idiotic is an understatment.
Salesforce has "unlimited PTO", which is what it is. I'm not a fan of such a policy and depending on team, it is probably better than Amazon's 10 days of PTO.
Acquisitions (depending on how they are handle) go through a period of autonomy and then absorption. Saw this when I was with MSFT and Skype.
Honestly this post sounds a bit whiny and lacking reality in how acquisitions go about.
My God Amazon's PTO policy is terrible. I made the assumption that it would be quite good, but even an O&G company I used to work for had better than that.
They have that if you’re SMTS (L7) and above. You can actually use it, but you have to have a good manager and advocate for yourself to take the benefit that is in your job description, otherwise it’s just a nice benefit on paper and probably saves the company money.
True, but surviving that first year. Also - vacation and tenure in industry is often disconnected. I have and know others that have negotiated time off as a benefit when at small companies.
I think with Amazon, there is the added element of taking time and team expectations. I have not worked there, just from friend's experience.
That's literally half of the legal minimum here in the Netherlands. I keep being surprised at how people in the US allow themselves to be worked to death.
> Honestly this post sounds a bit whiny and lacking reality in how acquisitions go about.
I think you’re reading more into the post than is actually there. It’s three sentences written in a pretty matter-of-fact voice, giving context on the old policy and management’s messaging on the new one. As someone following the labor side of the tech industry, I found it to be an interesting data point.
Keep in mind that a lot of Slack’s employees —- especially early ones —- are Canadian, and Canadians don’t get unlimited PTO (by law, I think). So they are being told when they should be using some of their PTO days.
Personally, I think most of the "western world" has a more healthy idea of PTO than the US. Some companies here are better than the norm, but a lot are not really great.
Wanting to retain a benefit you had for years is whiny? What are the execs giving up in exchange for asking their employees to work harder? Way to punch down, dude.
Even Slack previously had shifts where people would be on-call or actively monitoring as necessary. PTO isn't closely tracked within the company (usually) so I'd wager there's nothing stopping this from happening as usual, unless somebody has already used 4+ weeks of PTO in the year.
Not a current Salesforce employee and never worked for Slack, but from my POV when I was there, I can tell you Salesforce is effectively in the same state during this period every year, so I dont know what Slack employees will be missing out on.
I'm a current employee, this is still accurate; teams get absolutely no work done in the final 2 weeks of the year outside of extremely critical fixes.
If you aren't interested, why take the time to write a complainey reply which adds nothing to the conversation? Seriously, it's annoying for other members of the community to read, and several superior options exist:
- Simply ignore it and move on with your life
- Press the "hide" link that HN generously includes for every story
The US based startup I am working with used to give 1 additional holiday each month on last Monday as Mental Health Day since we had to move to WFH after pandemic.
Last year it got acquired by a listed company of UK. The first thing they did was to cancel this saying it was not in their policy.
Most people did not mind loosing 1 day holiday per month but all of us felt that new company did not care about it's employees.
I was working for a friend's company acquired by Salesforce. They didn't bring him on board. I left after one day. My buddy working next to me left after one month. Others after him. It was a small company. Maybe disrupting a culture isn't so great an idea.
Not making any normative judgments on this policy change, but fwiw I expect that the note below is the real issue:
"making the workplace more equitable (as Salesforce employees could not access this benefit)"
If you're a long-time Salesforce employee, you watch a bunch of people from Slack walk through the door with tons of cash from their acquisition _and_ they get additional holidays that you don't. I'm not saying that this is some crazy injustice (life isn't fair), but I could see it logically putting a lot of pressure on the morale of other Salesforce teams.
I haven't seen this yet, so I just wanted to add -
Hours worked does not equal productivity nor revenue.
If Salesforce gives everyone at the company this benefit, I suspect there would not be any dip in productivity, and possibly an increase after the break.
Decades ago I worked with a guy from Yorkshire. He would talk about the "adding 2pence to the price of chips* at the cafeteria" syndrome. He explained that when times got tough at the mill, the managers would debate what to do, and invariably decide to add 2 pence to the price of chips at the works cafeteria (something that has nothing to do with the actual business). The workers knew this was a sign it was time to look for another job.
20 years ago I was at a company that had gone from small start-up to acquired by a company with more than 100k employees globally. At a site all-hands a year or so after the acquisition, someone from HR briefed us on a change of insurance benefit providers and plans, taking our per-check cost from ~$10 to ~$150 and cutting in-network physician lists dramatically.
Naturally, people complained, and the HR person speaking, at that point a bit flustered, yelled "look, the good news is that this is saving [the company] a lot of money!"
It didn't help, but it was the truth. They were doing it because they could and because the decision-makers didn't care that they were effectively giving everyone massive pay cut. They'd weighed the downsides and done the math. The real impacts are hard to quantify, though, as the employees that leave will be the ones who can, leaving the company biasing towards employees unable to leave. It's how companies slowly bleed out.
Nothing happens between XMass and New Years, the 'double holiday' + 'holiday season' means people are distracted.
The rule should be: work on what you want to but nothing is expected.
I would definitely 'get a few things done' during that time, but otherwise, not let it interfere with doing stuff, or 'nothing' after the tiring holidays.
It's a real benefit for everyone in the company to be 'down' at the same time. It's a better holiday knowing nobody is going to bother you for anything.
This is a bit misleading as management literally told us to take time off during that time and we have unlimited PTO. I miss being able to save up PTO and get paid out but it is what it is. Also are we just not gonna mention that we get wellness days every month which is another 2 free weeks of PTO? I’m not happy with things but I’d much rather see a pay bump than this.
Even more proof that salesforce buys up and then ruins companies. Want to know my work performance during these days after Christmas and before New Years? Near zero just like most people. Who is this benefiting?
Seems like yet another way to force attrition by creating a shitty and depressing work environment. Seems to be all the rage these days so they get out of paying when they lay people off
No one does any work between the Xmas eve and NYE anyway. Watch the Slack people stay online on Slack as they enjoy their holidays “working” from home.
Salesforce is where good companies go to stagnate and die. Slack selling to them was just giving up for an easy exit. Can’t blame the founders for cashing in I guess (though I wouldn’t want to work for them), but why bother staying as an employee in that environment? Go to a company with its own destiny.
As tech workers we might realize that the pendulum has swung in our direction for some time now: remote work, higher salaries with better benefits, driven by lots of liquidity and high valuations. Even the notion of a 4-day workweek is creeping in. Now, as valuations regress, you have Google’s CEO saying workers should be more “entrepreneurial” and Facebook saying do more work with less and under more intense scrutiny, widespread layoffs and hiring freezes, it’s clear the pendulum is starting to swing in the other direction. You may reject the pendulum analogy but you can’t deny the inherent cyclicality in these things.
As for holiday shutdowns,
I think these actually benefit the company more than the employee. If you give people a week off they were most likely going to take some or all of anyway, they tend to accept less floating PTO and then it just nets out to coordinated PTO. This prevents clever folks from taking those 5-7 days during peak periods and working the relaxed time when so many people are out of office you can’t really deliver on anything significant anyway.
"Salesforce employees could not access this benefit"
I think Salesforce does not have the same definition of the words "can not" than I do, since I'm pretty sure there is no God that told Salesforce they can't give all employees that same perk, or whatever they want.
That said, who could possibly be surprised that when a company is sold to another company, the sold has to adopt the policies of the buyer? The moment the sale was announced, everything about the purchaced company is out the window, or could be at any time, you now work for the other company, and it doesn't matter how longstanding or beloved your traditions were. Your bosses sold you to other bosses with other ways.
The term equity is always used in the context of equal outcomes though. It has nothing to do with "lifting all boats" it's just ensuring all outcomes are equal.
