“We assumed the technology was further along than it actually was,” one executive said privately
Assumed? They fired nearly half their customer service team on an assumption? Why do they get paid that much money then?
Unfortunately they've wrecked 4000 lives, but they'll take big bonuses and walk away winners.
Executives are often the most smug, overconfident, easiest to bullshit individuals. You're the easiest to fool when you believe you can't be fooled, and you're most likely to make a bad management decision when you're put in a position that says "you're allowed to decide stuff because you're incredibly smart and correct."
A company doesn't have to convince everyone who works for a company, or even just the people who are going to get fired. They just have to convince one dude who has power at the organization, and suddenly 4,000 people get fucked.
Don't forget that they're only accountable to investors who are extremely gullible, especially in the tech and sales sectors.
This was a staggeringly short-sighted and inept move by the senior management of Salesforce. But then from everything I've heard of that company, this is just par for the course.
So they fired some of the execs that made this call right? /s
Nope. Good ole boys gonna good ole boy.
They are one of the worst companies to work with, especially if you manage corporate email systems. I think RIM is the only company that caused me more pain in my career. They really are very poorly managed, and their systems are straight garbage. But they keep making money because execs gonna exec.
their systems are straight garbage
Unequivocally complete and utter garbage. I led an engineering team at a multinational energy efficiency company. My team built an extremely performant upstream and downstream intervention solution for US utilities, completely in ASP.NET and SQL Server. It was broadly used, on-prem, maintainable, extendable, and more importantly cheap to run. Single proc at every tier.
A new VP came on and had some wiry hair up his sandy ass about doing everything in Force. He refused to listen to anyone on my team about how this was a bad idea. So we built a POC and gave us 4 weeks to go live. The new solution was glacial in its performance, brittle, and expensive. I forget the numbers, but I recall that our cloud spend that first month of deployment would have bought us four more clusters of hardware and MS licenses. His response? Moar Force! You're doing it wrong.
All of us who could jump ship were gone before the second month on the new solution. He somehow survived another 3 months before he got fired, but the damage was done. Oh well. Salesforce, not even once.
Yeah that sounds about right! It’s like riding the Facepalm Express.
Someone I know at FEMA was talking about they have an old system for disaster claims that IBM wrote for them many years back, and how FEMA just signed a deal with sales force to replace it
I was like... Oh, buddy, you have a very custom fit solution and very complicated workflows...
RIM
Now that is a name I haven't heard in a very long time
I am so sorry.
More evidence that LLMs are perfectly suited to emulate the incompetence of senior executives.
or replace them,
maybe replace your DOUCHEBAG ceo.
Sales
Ah, the scourge of capitalism.
I got some snake oil in my boot to sell you.
Sucks to suck, fuckers.
Unfortunately, I don't see any indication of comprehension of the real problem on the part of the executives. To them, they just had an ooops, we should have waited a bit longer. They aren't going to rethink the strategy. They're going to throw money at it until it works. They will probably throw more money than it would have cost to keep those pesky humans, but there's a more important goal there that they're not saying out loud.
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