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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?

#41

Post by 734129837261 »

How are you not making bank as a web developer? When I worked in the USA I was making 6 figures (think of $140k/year) working through an agency that works fully remote. The beauty of it is that autodidacts are the norm and nobody requires any certifications, and nobody requires an education except maybe to make it easier to land your first job.

Currently I'm back home in the Netherlands making €95/hour or about €13.680 per month or about €164.160 per year which is about $200k US dollars at the moment of writing.

Salesforce is a product that will be replaced by others or better ones over time. It'll come with endless required certifications and, let's be honest, is being in a vendor-locked world going to be fun or GOOD for your career?

At least as a web developer you focus on open-source standards that are free for all to use and free to learn about. You will naturally evolve with future developments.

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

#42

Post by gtt »

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…

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

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

#43

Post by mywittyname »

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…

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 contracting part time and spend the free time this model affords doing fun stuff.

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

#44

Post by cl42 »

I'm extremely bullish on Salesforce: they execute well, launch products consistently, acquire companies successfully, and generally understand marketing well.

The problem with a lot of technical folks is they disregard Salesforce, but they aren't the target market. Salesforce is for all the large and mid-sized companies out there who need to move from an old process to a new one, which is why Salesforce focuses so much on "digital transformation" messaging. You can make millions in this space if you can align yourself with Salesforce + the skills needed there, and actually solve problems for executives.

On your certifications concern: I'd bet that each product can go quite deep and also a lot of large companies need people to do very specific things, which is why they look for niche certifications. I find most technically specialized folks can skip certifications and actually focus on solving problems for users.

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

#45

Post by zerkten »

j45 wrote: post #22
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There’s lots of transferable skills from crystal reports to other reporting platforms. It takes the professional to do that skills mapping. Reporting systems are reporting systems for the most part. In the case of Crystal Reports, it was acquired by SAP and still pretty heavily in use in businesses.

The skills transfer to Power BI on the Microsoft side, as another example.

Finding the best version of the role is part of being a professional too. At least where I am, there are lots of opportunities with mid-to-huge insurance/finance/healthcare companies that need this type of reporting.

They outsource a lot of the work, but they also have many slot for people with the tech skill and domain experience. If you were doing sales reporting, you could easily slot into one these roles because there is a need for someone locally who can talk to stakeholders versus someone at an outsource provider who can could be a great communicator, but has too many blockers at that type of inside company communication.

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

#46

Post by vips7L »

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…

Shameless plug, lots of good people (admins, devs, MVPs, SFDC internal) that can help you along your journey in the SFXD discord as well [0].

https://join.sfxd.org

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

#47

Post by ipaddr »

maxclark wrote: post #9
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

COBOL is a programming language. Salesforce is a product.

Learning a product is good. Basing your career from it is limiting.

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

#48

Post by duckfang »

gtt wrote: post #42
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…

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

From what I gather, they're a:

Expensive and hugely expansible webapp built on top of Oracle that allows admins to make and track customers through the sales pipeline using various methods.

The software's intent is for marketing, sales, and execs to see how various campaigns are running and how to control them.

They're usually outside of standard devops pipeline by a good distance.

The downside: Salesforce seems to be at the whim of Oracle, who has their own competing product in the CRM category.

And I'm also studying it, and working towards the certs myself. May not be looooong term, but people with this knowledge do tend to get paid well. (Anything connected with marketing/sales does)

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

#49

Post by quacked »

gtt wrote: post #42
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…

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

(I am not affiliated with SFDC)

The SalesForce product is essentially a large-scale set of software tools that can be used to manage data and communications (marketing, analytics, contracts, timelines, schedules, records, helpdesk tickets, payments, etc.) between vendors and clients. It's a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.

The reason it's not clear what their product is to non-users is that there isn't really a "default SalesForce experience"; the point of buying their software is that they (or you) are supposed to be able to customize it to the point where you can use it in exactly the way your business requires. Whether or not that is actually true is the subject of many lengthy debates on HN.

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

gtt wrote: post #42
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…

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

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