<story><title>Salesforce Lays Off 8k While Paying Matthew McConaughey $10M/Yr to Sit Around</title><url>https://futurism.com/the-byte/company-paying-matthew-mcconaughey-10-million-to-sit-around</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eunoia</author><text>&amp;gt; Considering they exceeded all analyst expectations for revenue and profits in the last quarter, it&amp;#x27;s safe to say that some of their effort is working.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The fact that they also decided that 8K out of the 25K+ employees hired during the pandemic were redundant&lt;p&gt;Kinda odd how you attribute them &amp;quot;beating the street&amp;quot; more to Mathew McConaughey&amp;#x27;s presence than the work output of 8 thousand employees.  Can you elaborate on why this is so clear to you?</text></item><item><author>paxys</author><text>&amp;quot;Company&amp;quot; = Salesforce, which is a name I&amp;#x27;m sure people over here recognize, so we can swap it out in the title.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s also little value in pushing this clickbait style journalism to the front page.&lt;p&gt;First of all, it is objectively incorrect:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Per the WSJ, the company will be letting go of 8,000 members from its massive workforce&lt;p&gt;The layoffs they are referring to happened in early January. They are not laying off another 8000 employees.&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, they paid an A-list actor $10M out of their marketing budget not to &amp;quot;sit around&amp;quot; but to do a set of commercials (one of which aired at the Superbowl). Considering they exceeded all analyst expectations for revenue and profits in the last quarter, it&amp;#x27;s safe to say that some of their effort is working. Enlightened engineers don&amp;#x27;t like to admit it, but advertising works, and is a critical part of running any business.&lt;p&gt;The fact that they also decided that 8K out of the 25K+ employees hired during the pandemic were redundant has nothing to do with Matthew McConaughey.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WalterBright</author><text>The old joke is the marketing manager saying: &amp;quot;Half of all our marketing expenditures are wasted. The problem is we don&amp;#x27;t know which half.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;In my years in business, it&amp;#x27;s nearly impossible to draw an accurate cause and effect line between marketing and sales. Too many other factors at work.</text></comment>
<story><title>Salesforce Lays Off 8k While Paying Matthew McConaughey $10M/Yr to Sit Around</title><url>https://futurism.com/the-byte/company-paying-matthew-mcconaughey-10-million-to-sit-around</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>eunoia</author><text>&amp;gt; Considering they exceeded all analyst expectations for revenue and profits in the last quarter, it&amp;#x27;s safe to say that some of their effort is working.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The fact that they also decided that 8K out of the 25K+ employees hired during the pandemic were redundant&lt;p&gt;Kinda odd how you attribute them &amp;quot;beating the street&amp;quot; more to Mathew McConaughey&amp;#x27;s presence than the work output of 8 thousand employees.  Can you elaborate on why this is so clear to you?</text></item><item><author>paxys</author><text>&amp;quot;Company&amp;quot; = Salesforce, which is a name I&amp;#x27;m sure people over here recognize, so we can swap it out in the title.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s also little value in pushing this clickbait style journalism to the front page.&lt;p&gt;First of all, it is objectively incorrect:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Per the WSJ, the company will be letting go of 8,000 members from its massive workforce&lt;p&gt;The layoffs they are referring to happened in early January. They are not laying off another 8000 employees.&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, they paid an A-list actor $10M out of their marketing budget not to &amp;quot;sit around&amp;quot; but to do a set of commercials (one of which aired at the Superbowl). Considering they exceeded all analyst expectations for revenue and profits in the last quarter, it&amp;#x27;s safe to say that some of their effort is working. Enlightened engineers don&amp;#x27;t like to admit it, but advertising works, and is a critical part of running any business.&lt;p&gt;The fact that they also decided that 8K out of the 25K+ employees hired during the pandemic were redundant has nothing to do with Matthew McConaughey.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kermatt</author><text>It does seem odd that companies would pay for services from Salesforce because of a celebrity quip, instead of a determination that said services would improve the company&amp;#x27;s operations.&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps these Marketing departments are just really good at internal marketing of budget usage?</text></comment>