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.
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.