Not surprisingly, the Ranger status requirement has been met with some disdain from employees at Slack. Two sources told Fortune that many Slack engineers have found workarounds via scripts, code that can be quickly built to automate a task, to click through the modules for them.
“There’s no mandate [on] what modules people take so people are posting lists of the easiest ones and are speed running them,” a source said.
I worked at a place that 'required' this, but when I asked what would happen if I didn't there were no concrete actions. So I never did them and I lived happily ever after. Well, I left the place because people that 'require' nonsense usually don't limit themselves to elearnings.
> According to a screenshot viewed by Fortune, there are six ranks prior to achieving Ranger status, which requires 100 badges and 50,000 points. Each module varies in points earned towards this goal, for instance, there’s a “Fearless Teaming” module which teaches staff “how psychological safety and courage help create high-performing teams,” that earns a user 300 points and takes 45 minutes to complete, the screenshot revealed.
"Hey everyone! The execs and I came up with this great idea. Let's shut the whole company down for a week, and during that time you all can take these totally relevant learning modules!"
How conflicting it must be to produce a technology designed to help companies collaborate and work remotely, but not allow your own company to collaborate and work remotely. If the VPs and executives had any self awareness they might be embarrassed.
Learning modules are useful when they fulfil some need. There’s no specific regulatory or business need being fulfilled here, near as I can tell, it sounds like they’re stopping everything for a week to pad a vanity metric.
What the article describes is more or less org-wide contempt for this initiative, which is as close to the bottom of the scale for “alignment” as you can get before people start quitting. This sounds like a morale nightmare, and cancelling 1:1s (where managers could do some damage control) just compounds the problem.
Oh, they went ahead and made that mandatory? I heard all sorts of rumors about that for a while before I left.
When I was there, you just had mandatory security trainings (fine) and the Orwellian "Corporate Message Certification", where every team in the company — including engineers — were supposed to memorize the Corporate Message (a 15-slide-long sales-pitch deck) and be able to recite it to each other, that came paired with lots of preamble about how this was so that you could be adequately prepared to evangelize Salesforce to your friends, loved ones, fellow transit passengers, and other random bystanders.
Definitely not a cult or anything though. Totally.
(and none of the teams I was on ever bothered to memorize that crap; we just booked a meeting, expensed lunch, skimmed through the slides so we could say we did it, and kept running counts of how often each stupid buzzword was used).
The goal is for Slack’s employees to reach Trailhead’s Ranger level, a feat that requires roughly 40 hours on the learning platform, whose modules include topics like “Learn about the Fourth Industrial Revolution” and “Healthy Eating.”
At which Trailhead level do they tell you about Xenu?
I wonder what sort of uptake this sort of Patronization-As-A-Service tool gets w/ Salesforce customers. Maybe it comes free with their other products, and you have to pay to turn it off.
Doing some math on the example courses (300 points for a 45 min course) and the requirement of gaining 50 000 points, that's a whopping 333 hours of just courses.
There's so much hate in the dev world for their app. I have yet to experience this horrifying performance or whatever in 10 years. Can someone please explain to me why it's so darn bad and why I should care about 100mb?
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I worked at a place that 'required' this, but when I asked what would happen if I didn't there were no concrete actions. So I never did them and I lived happily ever after. Well, I left the place because people that 'require' nonsense usually don't limit themselves to elearnings.
Worse - salespeople.
mfw
How conflicting it must be to produce a technology designed to help companies collaborate and work remotely, but not allow your own company to collaborate and work remotely. If the VPs and executives had any self awareness they might be embarrassed.
I can't image a worse time to cancel 1:1s than when pushing through some unpopular top-down decision.
Do people really need to check in with their manager about doing some task work?
If your 1:1s are status updates, then you’re doing it wrong.
Yeah not feeling like I’m going to fall out of alignment doing learning modules, but umm, ok thanks
Learning modules are useful when they fulfil some need. There’s no specific regulatory or business need being fulfilled here, near as I can tell, it sounds like they’re stopping everything for a week to pad a vanity metric.
What the article describes is more or less org-wide contempt for this initiative, which is as close to the bottom of the scale for “alignment” as you can get before people start quitting. This sounds like a morale nightmare, and cancelling 1:1s (where managers could do some damage control) just compounds the problem.
from who's point of view? :D
Oh, they went ahead and made that mandatory? I heard all sorts of rumors about that for a while before I left.
When I was there, you just had mandatory security trainings (fine) and the Orwellian "Corporate Message Certification", where every team in the company — including engineers — were supposed to memorize the Corporate Message (a 15-slide-long sales-pitch deck) and be able to recite it to each other, that came paired with lots of preamble about how this was so that you could be adequately prepared to evangelize Salesforce to your friends, loved ones, fellow transit passengers, and other random bystanders.
Definitely not a cult or anything though. Totally.
(and none of the teams I was on ever bothered to memorize that crap; we just booked a meeting, expensed lunch, skimmed through the slides so we could say we did it, and kept running counts of how often each stupid buzzword was used).
Man, I'm _so_ glad to be gone from that place.
At which Trailhead level do they tell you about Xenu?
That's level 13, after your Thetans have been excavated, drug out to the parking lot and beaten with sticks. That's Xenu's kink, and I don't judge.
Also, it costs $14 million in "donations".
This is approximately the point in a company's growth where I start looking for greener pastures.
I wonder what sort of uptake this sort of Patronization-As-A-Service tool gets w/ Salesforce customers. Maybe it comes free with their other products, and you have to pay to turn it off.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231005231634/https://fortune.c...
Doing some math on the example courses (300 points for a 45 min course) and the requirement of gaining 50 000 points, that's a whopping 333 hours of just courses.
Jesus Christ.
Can they instead spend the week rolling back their insanely bad UI revamp
Yup, software development is the new factory work.
So fucking stupid.
Do any of the courses teach employees how to write memory efficient native apps instead of bundling an entire web browser to run an IRC client?
I’ve used Slack daily for 10 years and never once used their Electron app. It’s a web app after all.
Not all features of calling/screensharing work through the website.
Not sure about all features, but certainly calling and screen-sharing works for me.
There's so much hate in the dev world for their app. I have yet to experience this horrifying performance or whatever in 10 years. Can someone please explain to me why it's so darn bad and why I should care about 100mb?
Slack is an IRC client as much as a shovel is an excavator.
In the tradition of SlashDot, could you rework this into a car analogy?