Summer is just around the corner
Salesforce
The Summer ‘23 release has landed in pre-release orgs. Just over a week to go until the release notes come out in preview, and a few weeks for me to get my release webinar content together.
Relations between Salesforce and at least one activist investor appear to be warming, as a statement has been released saying that Elliott will not be nominating directors to the board. Both sides are saying how much they are enjoying working with and learning from each other, but how long the detente lasts remains to be seen. As long as Salesforce continues to produce results it will be difficult for the activists to demand much more in the way of concessions. Refinitiv called this in early March - “Unless pushy Elliott Management presents some superstar board nominees, it would be overkill to ask for more”.
This might not be the end of the tough times at Salesforce though, with COO Brian Millham indicating that if more job cuts are needed to improve efficiency, those will be made. More than a few people waiting nervously for the recommendations of the Bain and Company review I’ll wager! However, if more layoffs are required Marc Benioff is confident he can juggle the empathetic “we’re all family” with the hard nosed “it’s just business” attitudes.
Other
More layoffs might be on the cards as some tech workers claim they were hired to do nothing. I’ve seen a few of these stories doing the rounds and weirdly it seems like a lot of them are recruiters. I can see why hiring engineers ahead of the curve, but recruiters? Maybe by having the best recruiters you stop others from tapping into the talent?
A New York Times opinion piece questions if working from home is really working. Personally I’ve always found that people who don’t want to work will find a way to do that regardless of where they are located - being in the office just leads to pretending to work rather than outright slacking off. This still has the whiff of trying to get the genie back into the bottle - senior execs complaining that their staff have experienced a better work life balance and would quite like to stick with it. Reduced productivity or less personal time being lavished on company goals?
And a final entry on this topic, the big tech companies are promising to get tough on employee evaluations. After reading the details, it sounds an awful lot like the stack ranking beloved of Jack Welch when he was CEO of GM. The problem I remember with this approach was that every department stack ranked their teams and the bottom X% would be slated for removal, regardless of how well they performed. Thus if you had a department of high-achievers, you still had to lose the least high-flying, even if they were way better than the top performers of other teams. Managers would then try to trade their lowest-ranked-but-still-high-performers for a genuine low performer that they could safely lose. Thus if you were a mediocre manager with a full team of low-performers, you could trade them all away and suddenly find yourself with a much higher calibre team than you started with. Then you could further the demotivation they were already experiencing, having been forced to move teams so they didn’t get caught in a numbers-based cull, and ensure they all left anyway.
It appears that Samsung workers failed to read all the Ts and Cs before asking ChatGPT to help them. While they might have got some tips after submitting their source code, this also had the side effect of making their source code part of the training data and thus available to anyone else asking similar questions. Maybe the rise of the machines isn’t them banding together to destroy us, just sharing our deepest, darkest secrets with others!
Me
Lightning Web Component References were introduced in Spring 23, and they are a great start that will hopefully fill in the gaps quickly!
I also spent a bit of time with our BrightSIGN package, and produced a sample that received a notification once a signature had been captured and updated a checkbox on a record, no back-end code required.