<story><title>Leaked Slack all-hands meeting reveals a ‘strong culture clash’ with Salesforce</title><url>https://fortune.com/2023/01/05/leaked-slack-all-hands-meeting-reveals-a-strong-culture-clash-and-growing-rift-with-parent-company-salesforce/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>defnotahuman</author><text>I was part of a small startup (about 50 employees) that was acquired by a big publicly-traded tech firm about 5 years ago, and boy was that experience interesting.&lt;p&gt;Before moving to the new office, we were told that we were getting our own dedicated section of the building to ourselves so we could continue to collaborate freely and develop our product since our work was fairly niche and we had a very different tech stack from the rest of the org.&lt;p&gt;We show up on day 1 and there&amp;#x27;s no dedicated space for us. We&amp;#x27;re moved a few times over the first few months, but it was clear that zero effort went into planning our arrival. About 6 months after the move-in, our customer support team is moved to be with the rest of the parent company customer support org (something they told us would never happen). A few months after that, they tried to take away our hybrid work perk (for years, we could work from home Tues, Wed, Fri and they promised to honor this after the acquisition), relenting only after being told the change would cause attrition. For two straight years, it was nothing but lies and broken promises.&lt;p&gt;Alongside all of this, I saw an unfathomable amount of wasted effort, millions upon millions upon millions in engineering pay being lit on fire. They had a whole team dedicated to building a shitty front end component library that we all had to use to reskin our apps in order to achieve design consistency. We could&amp;#x27;ve used a mature tool like MaterialUI but nooooooo, this hot mess of a component lib was our great gift to the open source community. My favorite part: we constantly ran into cases where the provided components didn&amp;#x27;t meet all of our UI behavior needs, but the development backlog for the UI team was 2 years so we had to fork the components and make our own changes, which other teams were doing as well. It was the worst of all worlds.&lt;p&gt;It boggles my mind that companies can grow to be so big, so dysfunctional internally and yet still turn a profit or appease investors. It was the first time I felt like companies were getting too big.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>&amp;gt; They had a whole team dedicated to building a shitty front end component library that we all had to use to reskin our apps in order to achieve design consistency. We could&amp;#x27;ve used a mature tool like MaterialUI but nooooooo, this hot mess of a component lib was our great gift to the open source community. My favorite part: we constantly ran into cases where the provided components didn&amp;#x27;t meet all of our UI behavior needs, but the development backlog for the UI team was 2 years so we had to fork the components and make our own changes, which other teams were doing as well. It was the worst of all worlds.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve watched this exact story play out twice now:&lt;p&gt;Company grows rapidly. Front-end middle managers hatch a plan to make a shared component library that will solve everyone&amp;#x27;s problems. Open sourcing it becomes a goal, because the developers want something for their resume. Project turns out to be much, much harder than they expected. All of the teams trying to deliver actual work are constantly stuck behind the shared component library team&amp;#x27;s backlog. Nobody can accomplish even basic tasks because they&amp;#x27;re all blocked on the component library. Devs from every team start working on the component library in an attempt to get anything done. Clashes ensue.&lt;p&gt;it&amp;#x27;s possible to have a good component library for the company to use, of course. Carving out a separate team to do it separately from everyone else &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; requiring everyone to go through that team is an obvious point of failure. Yet it seems to happen over and over again for some reason.</text></comment>
<story><title>Leaked Slack all-hands meeting reveals a ‘strong culture clash’ with Salesforce</title><url>https://fortune.com/2023/01/05/leaked-slack-all-hands-meeting-reveals-a-strong-culture-clash-and-growing-rift-with-parent-company-salesforce/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>defnotahuman</author><text>I was part of a small startup (about 50 employees) that was acquired by a big publicly-traded tech firm about 5 years ago, and boy was that experience interesting.&lt;p&gt;Before moving to the new office, we were told that we were getting our own dedicated section of the building to ourselves so we could continue to collaborate freely and develop our product since our work was fairly niche and we had a very different tech stack from the rest of the org.&lt;p&gt;We show up on day 1 and there&amp;#x27;s no dedicated space for us. We&amp;#x27;re moved a few times over the first few months, but it was clear that zero effort went into planning our arrival. About 6 months after the move-in, our customer support team is moved to be with the rest of the parent company customer support org (something they told us would never happen). A few months after that, they tried to take away our hybrid work perk (for years, we could work from home Tues, Wed, Fri and they promised to honor this after the acquisition), relenting only after being told the change would cause attrition. For two straight years, it was nothing but lies and broken promises.&lt;p&gt;Alongside all of this, I saw an unfathomable amount of wasted effort, millions upon millions upon millions in engineering pay being lit on fire. They had a whole team dedicated to building a shitty front end component library that we all had to use to reskin our apps in order to achieve design consistency. We could&amp;#x27;ve used a mature tool like MaterialUI but nooooooo, this hot mess of a component lib was our great gift to the open source community. My favorite part: we constantly ran into cases where the provided components didn&amp;#x27;t meet all of our UI behavior needs, but the development backlog for the UI team was 2 years so we had to fork the components and make our own changes, which other teams were doing as well. It was the worst of all worlds.&lt;p&gt;It boggles my mind that companies can grow to be so big, so dysfunctional internally and yet still turn a profit or appease investors. It was the first time I felt like companies were getting too big.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tjpnz</author><text>&amp;gt;They had a whole team dedicated to building a shitty front end component library that we all had to use to reskin our apps in order to achieve design consistency.&lt;p&gt;I feel awful for the engineers who end up working on these efforts, it&amp;#x27;s heartbreaking and ultimately a wasted endeavour. Your small team can&amp;#x27;t keep up, people start working around you (even actively undermining you) and eventually that company edict forcing everyone to adopt said library is forgotten in the name of expediency. I&amp;#x27;ve seen it so many times now to the point where it&amp;#x27;s become a farce.</text></comment>