All Slack Employees Forced To Spend a Week Getting Salesforce Certifications - S...
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All Slack Employees Forced To Spend a Week Getting Salesforce Certifications
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In a message to employees in mid-September, Slack CEO Lidiane Jones wrote that the one week shutdown, dubbed "Ranger Week," is intended to give everyone "dedicated time to make a lot of progress towards the goal." Jones wrote in her message that the product development engineering (PDE), customer experience (CE), Biz Ops, and communication departments are expected to participate in Ranger Week. "It's important that we all reach Ranger status this year, and I want to ensure that everyone has focus time to upskill on Trailhead," Jones wrote in the message to staff. "I know this will disrupt and slow V2MOM progress for many of us -- we are making this a priority now so we can quickly get back to work on our roadmaps," she said, referring to the company's annual forward-looking strategy planning document which stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measures. [...]
"We really are canceling all meetings next week to facilitate this heads-down time, even 1:1s," Slack's chief of staff to the CTO wrote to employees on Wednesday. "We don't know yet what will happen to people who haven't hit Ranger by Jan. 31. At a minimum, it will make Slack look bad compared to the other clouds. Please do use the time next week to make as much progress as you can!" [...] Still, the work stoppage is somewhat porous. Slack's CTO noted that "deploys, on-call rotations, and interviews" will still happen as normal, and while no executive has used the word "mandatory," it's considered strongly encouraged. According to Insider, some workers at Slack are "gaming" the platform to speed through the sessions.
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Our company's parent company required all of us to go through one of those painful Powerpoint-looking "classes" that explain completely obvious things as if you were mentally challenged, then take a mini multiple-choice test to regurgitate what you just saw in the Powerpoint 10 minutes ago.
This thing we had to do was a bunch of modules about phishing and social engineering. It was basically 2 hours of boring web-based sildes that can best be summed up as "don't talk to strangers" and "if it looks suspicious, it probably is and you should tell your supervisor".
You had to go through all the slides, and then score a minimum of 50% at the final test for the module to complete and for the damn thing to finally leave you alone and let you resume real work.
Of course, us engineer quickly found out how to script-get all the slides to trigger the test, then automatically try all the test's possible answers until it would say passed. One of us had to spend 30 minutes to defeat the stupid thing with Python and Selenium, but it saved everybody else 2 hours of pointless "online education". Well worth it, and the guy got invited for a drink:)
Of course, we didn't give the script to the suits. Let them enjoy their own dog food.
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So you cheated a test designed for the lowest common denominator? If my employer wants to waste my time on boring two hour presentations then that's exactly what they're getting.
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In this thread: the optimistic jr newb who thinks doing everything asap and looking for work during lulls, and the old chrotchity old Unix beard who knows the value of a dollar. Both are bad for business but at least they average out to a normal developer.
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Why waste the hour though? The company is just paying for the results anyway. Try to stand out by showing the bosses you can achieve the same results in a fraction of the time! Be a go getter, or better yet a team player and share the quiz answers with your co-workers.
Everyone knows the tests are bullshit and half of them are their for insurance reasons or something equally as asinine. Many years ago I worked at a job where someone had the answers to the yearly safety training quiz pinned to the board be-
Smart ppl use the CC or hearing impaired options. capture the text. search text for the exact phrases in the question. 100% done in no time.
And yes, *always* save your work for next year. If they don't change the test...not your problem.
The only incorrect thing in your post is the 50%. It's 100% CYA and absolutely nothing more. If companies have even a handful of people who actually *need* to learn the stuff....walking lawsuit factory.
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Of course, us engineer quickly found out how to script-get all the slides to trigger the test, then automatically try all the test's possible answers until it would say passed. One of us had to spend 30 minutes to defeat the stupid thing with Python and Selenium, but it saved everybody else 2 hours of pointless "online education". Well worth it, and the guy got invited for a drink:)
Of course, we didn't give the script to the suits. Let them enjoy their own dog food.
So you cheated a test designed for the lo
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yeah, it's amazing that if they actually invested in actual interesting and effective training, it would be useful and get decent engagement.
Just had some for my consulting client. Actually geared toward developers and making resilient software. Buzzwords galore but, the actual things they were saying in the training are top notch best practice stuff.
Now, will said client pay for the tools and time to set all that 'good stuff' up? that's kinda the problem in the real world.
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Why do you think they spent that two hours doing more work? It's called "Slack" for a reason.
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I imagine you're being paid, so technically it's their time. Just sayin'...
Some youngsters don't seem to realize that's how an employer/employee relationship works.-
This youngster doesn't want to waste his time by being someone else's time, so he prefers to always refer to "his time".
And not being paid by the hour changes this relationship a lot.If you're paid by the hour to watch an empty parking lot, wasted time.
If you're paid to paint lines in said parking lot, who cares if you did it in less time than expected, plus you get to leave early.
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There's a difference between normal corporate training, where you do what you describe with training provided by the cheapest commodity supplier out there, versus 40 hours of that designed solely to make Salesforce training look better. Corporate training is often stuff required by law in some places (harrassment), or stuff the execs demand (ethics), or work place oriented (safety). But "Healthy Eating" and "Fourth Industrial Revolution" is not corporate training.
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If you want to pay me to spend all day doing a bunch of pointless stupid shit instead of getting any work done, it's no skin off my back. Normally someone just schedules meetings for that, but "Ranger Week" sounds like a blast. I'm pretty sure I'd learn best about the 4th industrial revolution or Web 3.0.1.2 in an environment more conducive to my education such as my local pub. The employees there can join in and help upskill my pint into a tall.
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Maybe so at slack; I imagine it's different if you're in the Army.:-)
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Although the deadlines for the normal work are invariably not going to be pushed back because of Ranger Week. So they spend a week gaming this training so that their employer can game the popularity ratings of their training platform, and the end result is that everyone is now one week behind on their tasks.
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by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Friday October 06, 2023 @07:57PM (#63907351)
"We don't know yet what will happen to people who haven't hit Ranger by Jan. 31. At a minimum, it will make Slack look bad compared to the other clouds."
Make you look bad? How, exactly? Do you really think when people are evaluating cloud offerings they are saying "I wonder which ones know about the fourth industrial revolution"? or "I want to be sure my cloud provider's staff is comprised of healthy eaters!"
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No, it's worse than that: they're probably just wondering "Is this company's staff mostly Rangers?"
I'll be honest, I don't know who Trailhead is or what the Ranger status is, but it sounds like it's important to pretend you're it from what TFA is implying.
I guess it's like ISO9001: a lot of companies don't give a shit about ISO9001, don't know what it's for or what they could gain from it from a quality standpoint. But they want the label: they want to say they're an ISO9001 company. And so they go through
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by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Friday October 06, 2023 @08:27PM (#63907383)
I don't know what any of that shit is either, but I can't help wonder if the CEO is on the board at Trailhead or has a friend there that they're helping through this. I'm assuming it's some kind of corporate fuckery since they paid for this Slashvertisement. Or maybe they're just trying to find a reason to fire people and having to achieve Ranger status is so soul crushing that some people will quit. If that's the case we'll know because if they didn't hit their targets they'll be an article about their move to an open office plan in a month.-
If this is Slashvertisement, it must be the worst kind:) I still don't really know who Trailhead is but I know I want nothing to do with them. Also, I know if I hire their services for my company, it'll make it look silly like Slack.
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True story. I worked for middlin sized gov't software contractor, few thousand employees. One day the CEO of Aeron chairs joins our board of directors. Amazing coincidence that within a month everybody had an Aeron chair. Hated those things.
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Yeah, CMM/CMMI was the buzz stuff years ago. One of the certified levels was "Do you have a plan written down". Could be on a god damned dirty bar napkin but that counted as 'having a plan written down'.
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It's a strong sign of a CEO who doesn't know what they are doing, and is leading by following a (in this case, very small) crowd. (Note also the weird use of the word "cloud," showing she doesn't know much about technology either.)
She is a Microsoftie, going with the flow of other Microsoft execs: https://www.linkedin.com/in/li... [linkedin.com]-
Can you narrow down that category a bit?
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This is kind of the "eat your own dogfood" mentality, it's that instead of just wasting hours on a company's mediocre products they have to spend a week just to push up the numbers so that potential users of the training platform think it's more popular than it really is.
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I would love for a paid week to get new training and certifications.
All these people can also update their resumes after that week.
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I watched decades ago with a British republican politician. Somehow this fellow had at one point been appointed to the Privy Council, at which point he was sworn to secrecy. The thing that got to him, which he repeated on TV, was that he didn't have to swear or attest to anything; by virtue of being *told* that he was being sworn in, he was now legally bound.
Similarly, by watching the powerpoint, you too now have enough flare on your vest.
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I work when I want on what I want to. I certainly don't put myself through any of this shit. It was bad enough when I was in the corporate world with the likes of The Forum (EST-lite), new ways to misapply ISO 9000, and time management training (look, a free DayTimer!) up the wazoo, but just reading this makes me want to hurl. Good luck kids, you'll need it in the bright new fully enshitified futurama ride you're stuck on.
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by ZipK ( 1051658 ) on Friday October 06, 2023 @08:20PM (#63907373)
Retirement is getting better each and every day. It's hard to imagine how I put up with this sort of nonsense for 35 years. -
Not Salesforce, but for another vendor where we had mandatory office "learning" - workmates and I would screenshot-the-heck out of these type of forced educations and then email the screenshots and answers around the office. Personally, I found such forced learning akin to some kind of torture, leaving a negative opinion of that vendor permanently in my mind.
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It seems like a contender for gold in the olympics of stupidity
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While I do think that software programmers are not as different as some of them would like to think, there are real advantages to not treat all workers the same.
There are plenty of people that are fine getting paid to watch pretty mindless content and take easy quizzes. However, there are those employees that uniformly hate such things.
Of course, those are often the employees you want to retain, because they often want to just get stuff done.
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Will continue until morale improves.
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Before reading this summary, I certainly would have answered the following quiz question incorrectly:
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Clearly the answer is zero since they'll all be in training for the whole of next week...
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It's a great thing they're not taking that week to unfuck their shit new UI. I'd hate to not feel like my computer is shitting in my eyeballs every time i get lost in that steaming turd of a UI.
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Getting paid to learn civics/history and healthcare sounds good to me. It is certainly better than being judged on 35 tasks that the boss never trained me to do and never will because that's spending his money making me qualified to work for the competition.
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This looks like one of the ridiculous things hr does. The more useless, the better. I wonder what they learn in their "degrees"... -how to bore people -ways of wasting everyone's time -how not to help employees -licking the bosses' arses I've never been in a company that would have worked a lot better had they got rid of their hr wastrels
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