>10% is easily handled through attrition over the course of one year and without the anxiety leading to wide-spread disruption. I'll never understand how terrible decision makers rise to the highest ranks of leadership.

I think it has to do with the psychology that people want to know they're having some sort of impact on a finished product or the operations of a business. Even if it's this kind of "trim the fat" decision that layoffs tend to entail.

As a content writer/strategist, I've seen so many stakeholders give edits to things they think has some sort of value when a lot of changes are really six of one, half a dozen of the other. People just want to feel like they're contributing something to the conversation, especially when their ego won't let them off the hook in that way.

Honestly, so much of middle management is such a joke. They sit in strategy meetings to pass information, as well as the buck to technicians and contributor-level employees. And for what? To put lipstick on a bacon balance sheet. It is what it is. So much of what we humans do is a waste of time. But then again it's all a waste of time.

It's especially stupid since I'd expect a lot of their revenue is from a large volume of contracts so they should have fairly stable ARR

Why will salesforce ruin slack.

For those wondering why 10%, Neutron Jack Welch probably magicked this number up in the 80’s and managers have used it ever since:

“DAVIES: Manager of the century - wow. You know, apart from closing plants that he deemed too expensive or moving operations overseas, he had an idea that even with the workforce that you have, you should regularly rank them and cull the bottom what, 10%, right?

GELLES: He had a euphemistic name for this practice. He called it the vitality curve, but it was known internally and more broadly in the public as stack ranking or, even more sharply, rank and yank. And the idea is this. Managers, he said, needed to rank their employees. Twenty percent get an A grade. Seventy percent get a B grade, and 10% get a C grade. And if you're in that 10%, you're out of the company. He did that for 20 years inside GE, which led to thousands and thousands of layoffs. And it became, because he was so influential, dogma in corporate America.”

From NPR’s Fresh Air: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/short-term-profits-and-long-term-consequences-did-jack-welch-break-capitalism

> 10% is easily handled through attrition over the course of one year and without the anxiety leading to wide-spread disruption. I'll never understand how terrible decision makers rise to the highest ranks of leadership.

Well, they've had a hiring freeze for about six months already, so the real target was much higher than 10%. This layoff is on top of half a year of attrition.

Slack has sucked for some time. I'll never forgive them for fronting with web/eng standards and acting like they were going to be the IRC dev friendly one, then they go and join the Oracle mafia Ellison/Benioff style enterprisey shite and killed that whole idea.

Some of there best people in EMEA have already left and have seen this coming since mid last year.

> If you're in a position to, let your local HR and recruiting teams know that there is talent available.

TBH Salesforce is famous for being a rest-and-vest place so candidates might have a hard time shaking that image off.

>I'll never understand how terrible decision makers rise to the highest ranks of leadership.

It is because they are good at networking and flattering people in order to manipulate them. Then once one person like this gets into management, then they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.

The scary thing is, the number of people who have no leadership skills being in a position that requires it.

In the end their only rally cry is to "add value" because that's all they rely on. The constant growth technique. Meanwhile you want to keep adding and adding, yet what you added doesn't work properly. And instead of fixing the problem you just add more "value" as a workaround.

Honestly the sales reps for software companies must be great at their jobs.

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