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Ask HN: Can Salesforce be a long term career?

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Re: Ask HN: Can Salesforce be a long term career?

#61

Post by zerkten »

Yes, it can be a long-term career. You need to think about what you like doing though because Salesforce often brings you in contact with a different set of customers. You will need to develop consulting skills which you might not have over the long-term. These are the things that will give you most longevity.

Consulting is a blanket term I'm using for what is in many ways a jack-of-all-trades. These are seen by techies as a negative in many careers, but is a life-saver if you go the path of Salesforce. These include: analyzing proposals, communication with non-technical people, analyzing existing systems, change management, and influence without authority.

You need to start at the bottom and ideally get to work on some larger Salesforce deployments where you have limited responsibility. That'll give you space to learn with lower risk. You'll get to see some of these consulting skills in action over a few engagements if working with reasonable companies (do a lot of research on how companies treat IT folks.) This will help you adjust because the life of a great Saleforce dev involves engagement outside of IT.

If you don't have interest in developing these consulting skills then Salesforce will start to feel like CRUD web dev again. The skills open up opportunities to do more interesting things, or be involved in design of the systems, use newer Salesforce products, etc.

It's interesting that you complain about CRUD because 99% of web dev is CRUD when you look at all web dev. There are small group of devs who are working on startups, open source libraries, or unusual areas of web dev. Most people are just building business apps or sites that read and write data. Moving to modern frontend dev and the like is justified for various reasons among regular devs, but most often everyone really just wants the novelty after years of server-side CRUD. Nothing wrong with that, but we could be more honest and less defensive about it.

Re: Ask HN: Can Salesforce be a long term career?

#62

Post by mywittyname »

michaelt wrote: post #58
mywittyname wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's argument: sometimes specialization in widely used, but "boring" platforms can be lucrative. The requests by companies using the platform tend to be pretty similar, and once you build a solid understanding of the ecosystem, you can usually crank out valuable changes with minimal effort. This model works well on the contracting end of the spectrum. I have lots of friends who pay the bills doing Wordpress/SF con…

Yes, there can be a lot of money in unpopular legacy tech like COBOL or PL/SQL when the pool of workers is evaporating faster than the pool of jobs. The problem is, if the pool of jobs is evaporating then some day you're going to need a different job. And if years of legacy support has left you with no modern skills, no successful projects of any substance, and high salary requirements that could be a tough place to…

The major point your not mentioning is that with SF, Wordpress, or the like, there are tons of contracting opportunities. Not contracting in the sense of being a FTE with no benefits, but actually working independently with a bunch of companies.

You collect your 10-20hr a monthly retainer, plus get a project or so a year from each client. And you can spend your copious free time developing fun side projects. Plus, your skills rarely go stale because clients will look to you for lots of other technical expertise. So while Wordpress is your bread and butter, those same clients will start looking to you to integrate with other platforms, build mobile apps, and generally be a Tech Guru.

It's a good gig. I used to do it and know tons of people that wouldn't do anything else. Getting established is the hard part, plus you have to deal with billing and collecting from clients, etc.

I'd argue that people who are successful in this field have a much, much more broad skillset than their corporate developer peers, who get stuck working with one or two technologies a year.

Re: Ask HN: Can Salesforce be a long term career?

#63

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

I've worked with people who are passionate about business process, CRM integration, the quote to cash process, invoicing, billing, product code and SKU management, etc.

Are you one of those people?

Salesforce has an app store (https://appexchange.salesforce.com/). You could try making an app, and see how you like it.

Re: Ask HN: Can Salesforce be a long term career?

#64

Post by mathattack »

zerkten wrote: post #56
mathattack wrote: post #37

Yes, with a caveat... The world will always need people who are great at optimizing sales organizations. Being someone who does that and happens to be an expert of the Salesforce tool is more valuable. The start may be getting good at the tool, but which of the more valuable? 1 - I can help you properly set up Salesforce to track your Sales team. 2 - I can help you increase Sales by 20% by optimizing your Sales funne…

I think you have to start somewhere though when you are coming from the technical side and don't have as many business chops. Tech people tend to think it's about 1 when they first start because learning the tech is a big enough hurdle. They learn the tech quickly and either leave, or start acquiring the domain knowledge. Across Salesforce and similar technology (think SharePoint/SAP/PeopleSoft), I know people who st…

I actually think it’s better to go from 1 to 2 than the other way around. You just have to make number 2 your endgame. (If you are smart enough to learn the tool, then you can learn sales math)

Re: Ask HN: Can Salesforce be a long term career?

#67

Post by slimbods »

csharpminor wrote: post #54
gtt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does Salesforce really do? I could never warp my head around it. Could you ELI5?

At its core, Salesforce is a SaaS database platform that lets a non-programmer admin create data models for a business, as well as custom views and queries. But Salesforce goes beyond being a database to the point of being more like a web and mobile framework specifically dedicated to building apps for business. Salesforce has its own flavor of Java (Apex) and its own MVC paradigm (Lightning). You can develop entire…

They do spend a lot of time telling admins that you don't need to do any of that scary coding thing...until you do.

Re: Ask HN: Can Salesforce be a long term career?

#68

Post by TbobbyZ »

the_only_law wrote: post #57
TbobbyZ wrote: post #10

Certs are worth getting. I have 12, charge $100 hr as a contractor, and have only been doing it for 5 years. No degree. I get people reaching out to me daily for work. I see it as a long term career. Salesforce has the tallest building in SF. They own Heroku. Salesforce is not fun to work with. What is fun for me is being in demand making a ton of money.

How did you go from getting certs to being able to charge $100/ as a contractor. I imagine you had to establish some credibility by working with sales force in a more traditional setting for a while?

My first job, year 1, $40k a year

Second job, year 2 $75k a year

Third job, year 3, $75 hr

Fourth job, year 4, $100 hr

Re: Ask HN: Can Salesforce be a long term career?

#69

Post by lovetocode »

finiteloop wrote: post #7

I am the COO of Salesforce. Two of the top ten jobs on Indeed are Salesforce Admin and Salesforce Developer, and the jobs are distributed around the world. We have a ton of stories of folks transitioning into the ecosystem and developing an extremely successful career. Notably, our certifications are freely available at https://www.trailhead.com/ . You can get started, learn, and get credentials for free. It is a gre…

I thought Salesforce certifications had registration fees. Has that changed?

Re: Ask HN: Can Salesforce be a long term career?

#70

Post by ilikeerp »

kodah wrote: post #20

I have found that any deep specialization that is too detached from foundational programming or systems tends to be a non-transferrable skill. Salesforce sounds kinda like that. Can you make solid money doing it? Well sure. That's not really the question, from what I read of your question. The question is if I spend n years doing this, when n is greater than 10 will I have learned anything that lets me step into the…

Depends what your ambitions are. I've seen SF devs move into architecture then move into tech consulting and make good money and grow strong careers. I've seen tech consultants grow to be partners at places like Deloitte or independent management consultants.

There's a whole industry in technology that doesn't' involve writing code and often pays very well. I once helped a large cosmetics company completely transform their business by designing and guiding their enterprise architecture. From crap order processing and slow delivery to best in class customer experience and very efficient supply chain. I didn't write a single line of code but I did bill them over 140k for less than 6 months of work.

After 10 years of SF, I would expect to be leading a large practice at a global consulting firm otherwise billing myself out as an SF architect for a very a healthy day rate.

If your ambition is to write javascript forever, then SF isn't really for you. I went from junior java dev to a top 1% salary off the back of a platform similar to SF and I did it in less than a decade.

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