Ask HN: Can Salesforce be a long term career?

#1

Post by akudha » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:26 PM UTC

I am sick of doing web dev and I feel like my career is stuck. Not learning anything new and not making much money either. But more importantly, not doing anything interesting/fun.

Someone suggested I try salesforce. I looked around a bit - it has tons of certifications (red flag?), doesn't seem hard to learn. Looks like there are enough jobs, as of now.

So my question is - can this be a long term career? at least 8-10 years? Are there interesting projects to work on, or is it similar to doing CRUD web development again?

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

#2

Post by beckingz » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:37 PM UTC

Yes: you can make solid money as a salesforce admin/developer, especially if you are good at working with non-technical stakeholders.

Personally, I think that working with salesforce is the worst of CRUD development combined with the worst of SaaS platforms. If you want fun work, I would not recommend Salesforce.

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

#3

Post by canadianfella » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:47 PM UTC

beckingz wrote: post #2

Yes: you can make solid money as a salesforce admin/developer, especially if you are good at working with non-technical stakeholders. Personally, I think that working with salesforce is the worst of CRUD development combined with the worst of SaaS platforms. If you want fun work, I would not recommend Salesforce.

Worse than SAP?

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

#4

Post by TheAdamAndChe » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:48 PM UTC

beckingz wrote: post #2

Yes: you can make solid money as a salesforce admin/developer, especially if you are good at working with non-technical stakeholders. Personally, I think that working with salesforce is the worst of CRUD development combined with the worst of SaaS platforms. If you want fun work, I would not recommend Salesforce.

It's also somewhat risky to focus your whole career on learning a product that a single company makes. In 10 or 20 years, it may be depreciated.

There are plenty of Crystal Reports professionals who found that their skills didn't transfer as the software declined.

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

#5

Post by Pandabob » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:51 PM UTC

Wondering the same thing with Shopify. Seems like having some marketing skills might also be valuable as a Shopify Dev/Consultant.

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

#6

Post by eloff » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:52 PM UTC

Yes, we hired a Salesforce dev in the previous company I worked for. It's been around a long time, and I'm sure there will be a need for it for a while to come.

However, myself and every developer I know hates it. Having to work with it full time seems like it would be one of the more soul-crushing jobs in tech. Plus you'll constantly be doing requirement discovery with non-technical stakeholders. So you're combining the worst parts of consulting with the worst parts of development. You specifically seem to want to avoid unfun jobs, so I recommend very strongly to run in the other direction.

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

#7

Post by finiteloop » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

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 great place to start, and we purposely made our learning and credentialing free so we could make it as easy as possible for folks pivoting mid-career into Salesforce.

I would be happy to point you in the right direction. My email is bret.taylor@salesforce.com.

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

#8

Post by xeonoex » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

What do you not like about web dev? What type of work do you like doing?

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

#9

Post by maxclark » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #4

beckingz wrote: post #2

Yes: you can make solid money as a salesforce admin/developer, especially if you are good at working with non-technical stakeholders. Personally, I think that working with salesforce is the worst of CRUD development combined with the worst of SaaS platforms. If you want fun work, I would not recommend Salesforce.

It's also somewhat risky to focus your whole career on learning a product that a single company makes. In 10 or 20 years, it may be depreciated. There are plenty of Crystal Reports professionals who found that their skills didn't transfer as the software declined.

And there's plenty of COBOL developers that have been trying to retire for years but keep getting coaxed back.

Maybe the nuance you're looking for is it would be unwise to not progress your skills along the way. Like Salesforce Classic is a dead end, but if you transitioned to Lightning you're probably ok.

Or Tableau, maybe you should be learning Google Data Studio, Microsoft Power BI, etc... at the same time.

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

#10

Post by TbobbyZ » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

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.