There's also little value in pushing this clickbait style journalism to the front page.

First of all, it is objectively incorrect:

> Per the WSJ, the company will be letting go of 8,000 members from its massive workforce

The layoffs they are referring to happened in early January. They are not laying off another 8000 employees.

Beyond that, they paid an A-list actor $10M out of their marketing budget not to "sit around" 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's safe to say that some of their effort is working. Enlightened engineers don't like to admit it, but advertising works, and is a critical part of running any business.

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.

EDIT: Okay, economy hasn't technically crashed, but valuations are down, funding is down, and layoffs are up. Tech companies have a very different view of money now than they did 8 months ago.

Sales force believed their business will do better with Matthew Mcconaughey as opposed to those 8k employees. They may be wrong, but it’s for them to figure out if they’re wrong.

I understand the argument that workers should not be disposable, and workers shouldn’t be fired at will, even with at-will contracts, and companies have responsibilities towards their workers. In fact, that argument is popular enough that most countries, including the U.S. until recently, gave workers and their unions privileges that wouldn’t be afforded in a different scenario. And if you want to argue that workers rights have been diluted far too much in with you.

My problem is instead of making this straightforward argument, when you’re trying to compare the firing of workers to spending on a completely different situation. There’s no possible way for an outsider to know what the value of having McConaughey sit around is, what the contractual details are, what the cost, both monetary and otherwise of splitting from him, etc is.

My response to this headline isn’t to be more sympathetic to the workers. It’s to wonder what the hell McConaughey getting contractually paid has anything to do with the poor treatment of workers by Salesforce.

So the question is: can 40-50 people bring more value than one person who can get the attention (for whatever reason) of large customers' CFOs?

I'm not one to defend the actions of corporate leadership most times, but it does look like Salesforce is doing what the market is asking for: bringing up profits.

And if we assume an average TC of around 250k per engineer, that's 40 employees of 8,000 laid or half a percent of the employees could have been spared by letting go of McConaughey instead. In case they're mistaken it seems a lot easier to hire 40 $250k engineers again then get McConaughey back after breaking a contract.

Meanwhile the company I'm at is just learning that publicly traded companies can't live off runway alone and that they need to become profitable (something they've never done) and please investors. The "leadership"'s failure to act is causing increasing stress in the company, and personally I'm finding it more and more clear they don't really know how to run a public company.

There are so many companies that look like what I described I'm not remotely worried about anyone de-anonymizing me over this info.

I would much rather be at a company like Salesforce right now. At least there's some evidence the layoffs were effective and anyone surviving, after the recent earnings, is probably already starting to feel more assured about their job. When layoffs do eventually hit me where I'm at now, even if I survive I'm not going to have much confidence in the future.

For example spent 54 million on commercials talking about supporting local businesses... provided local businesses 100,000.

https://i.redd.it/3vks4w3nddh81.jpg

Seems like so much in our society is smoke and mirrors these days.

I'm not defending the layoffs -- though I think all of us have known that the ever-increasing TC wars amongst big companies was unsustainable and that tech companies over-hired. And none of that is the people who were laid off's fault. At all. These were bad decisions on the part of management. But framing it as "chose to layoff X people instead of paying out a contract to Matthew McConaughey" is misguided.

The bottom line is that Matthew McConaughey did a better job of negotiating his contract than rank and file employees did and that's why he still has a contract. Obviously, he is in a position to argue better terms than rank and file engineers, but that's how this works. If his contract was renewed or reupped on, that would be one thing (and ultimately, that would be something for the board or shareholders to weigh in on), but we don't know the details about how long the contract was for and what the deliverables are, or what the ROI is.

Framing this in "this versus that" terms just doesn't make sense.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

"Big Tech" could not maintain that forever.

Would at least not be objectively false, unlike the current title.

I’m surprised this got upvoted on HN.

https://investor.salesforce.com/press-releases/press-release...

This is businesses reacting to activist investors and trying to quash workers asking for better compensation. To the extent that the economy lags it’ll be due to layoffs affecting people who circulate their income more effectively than shareholders.

It'll take a while for a consensus narrative to emerge explaining the widespread tech layoffs.

Usual suspects are: post-pandemic hangover (over hiring), C-level & boards are feckless lemmings (copycats, groupthink), another round of revanchist Capital sticking it to Labor, profit taking by institutional investors, and macroeconomic stuff (end of cheap capital, blah blah blah consumer confidence, and so forth).

My personal theory: The MBAs couldn't think of anything else to do. They're admitting their growth has ended.

Cost cutting, including layoffs, happens in the absence of strategery [sic], plans for the future. So there's nothing to invest in. So they "return monies to their investors".

What's Meta's plans? Social networking and digital advertising have entered the top plateau of the S-curve. And it's not yet clear they can monetize their pivot to 3D porn (the Zuck's "megaverse").

What's Amazon's plans? It's now "Day 2". AWS is on autopilot and will continue to print money. If the rest of the conglomerate disappeared tomorrow, the share price would increase. There's nothing left in the B2C space to do.

As a counter point, Apple definitely has plans. IIRC They keep increasing their R&D. (And they didn't over staff.) So no layoffs.

You clearly buy into the idea that because salesforce has, within our current economic system, managed to gather to itself substantial economic resources, then it should be the entity that gets to decide how to deploy those resources.

If Salesforce is wrong (and there's a very, very good chance that they are), they have mis-allocated resources, but will face little if any penalty for it other than some opportunity costs that are of their own making.

> There’s no possible way for an outsider to know what the value of having McConaughey sit around is, what the contractual details are, what the cost, both monetary and otherwise of splitting from him, etc is.

The actual question is whether there is actually any way for an insider to know this either, and what penalties would be face if they make a mistake.

I'm fine with companies making a profit (I think). But I want them taxed in a way that removes their control over the bulk of these resource allocation decisions. Salesforce might (or might not) be very good at what they do, but they, like every other corporation (and essentially all individuals) have no demonstrated competence at resource allocation that benefits all of us. US$10M might not seem like a lot if it is roughly your annual salary, but there are huge numbers of people and communities that would be substantially aided via US$10M.

Though I think there is something to be said about companies spending money imprudently. It's never just that they're giving McConaughey $10M/year. Often times there's a slew of vanity expenses that aren't justifiable. I'm not saying that's necessarily the case with Salesforce, but companies spend a lot of money on things that have dubious ROI.

For example, GE advertised their smart electric grid technology during the Super Bowl and licensed the Wizard of Oz for it. That's a lot of money for an ad with very dubious ROI. Who is buying smart electric grid technology? A very small handful of companies who are going to have a competitive bidding process and are already going to be aware of their options. What was the point of this commercial? To me, the most likely explanation is executive vanity. They want their friends and peers to be impressed by their company and by extension themselves. If they're working on something invisible and behind the scenes, they aren't going to get the same recognition and acclaim.

Companies sponsor sports stadiums and sometimes you can't even really buy their product. Highmark sponsors the Buffalo Bills stadium, but most people get their insurance via their employer and don't have a choice. Xcel Energy sponsors the NHL stadium of the Minnesota Wild and most of their business is as the monopoly electric/natural-gas transmission provider in the area. Are they trying to convince people "you don't want to live off the grid! Life is better with electricity and heating!" And yes, these companies do have some amount of business that is consumer choice, but given how much of their business has zero consumer decision-making, it seems like their ROI on advertising and sponsorships would be terribly low. Consumers do decide on many things - what soda brand to buy, what smartphone to use, what clothes to wear, what car insurance to get, etc. However, we see companies spending lots of money on things that have really dubious justification - beyond the vanity of executives.

I don't know much about Salesforce and what they're spending money on, but I do think there's a reasonable question of whether McConaughey's $10M is part of a larger trend of imprudent, potentially vanity-driven spending.

If that is already sunk money and they paid it to him before the layoffs than the article is off base.

But why is he at $10M not replaceable by some other celebrity who might do the work for 10x or 100x less? He has no special credibility around anything to do with Salesforce, CRM, or anything in tech.

It's more likely Benioff has a man crush on him and like the fact he gets to hang out with a famous movie star and pretend he's friends with him or something and can conveniently ignore that he's kind of buying a famous friend for $10M.

A really well executed ad campaign with a less famous, less expensive star might be far more effective.

The labor theory of value[1] is still a very popular belief. Even though it doesn't work very well if you poke it at all.

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

Without knowing what any of them did, it’s obvious that none of them, nor in aggregate, brought any near the value to Salesforce as did one aging celebrity.

Anecdotally, I’ve never seen anything associating the actor with Salesforce in any capacity. Even those I know at the company didn’t know he advertised for them. (But capitalism!)