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.
It’s so shortsighted and ultimately defeating/self-destructive when companies act like this.
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?
"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?"
My friends Union recently fought against work from home for desk jobs because the field workers could not enjoy the same benefit.
Corporate leadership negotiated against the Union, but the union prevailes so there is no work from home
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.
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.
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of my jobs, one of the firehoses requires a messy restart every few days as it was left to decay and now everything is out of date.
The point is that stagnation/KTLO is way easier than expansion and needs way less talent.
So are the patients :p
A nurse with a Bachelor's degree, more or less
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.
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.
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.
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).
And nor the apes did think,
Studies, studies, every where
But naught to drop a link.
Ah! well a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young!
Instead of lolz, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
Of course doing such a thing is incredibly petty and should only be reserved for special cases, as it were.
* 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.
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.
It's called capitalism because it's the only system where they can't get away with it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
It's also not uncommon for the bonus amounts awarded to be private.
This is actually a really good point. It probably just replaces the topic-du-jour to whine about and has no actual benefit whatsoever.
-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.
> 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.
What should we be switching to instead...Teams?
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.
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.