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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?

#51

Post by snarf21 »

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.

Yeah, I didn't enjoy my stint working on Salesforce code. There are a lot weird things around how long a page can run, how man records you can return, user system, no local debugging (but this was coming), etc. I understand it is a shared system but I wish they had some kind of virtualization/isolation. I always felt like I spent most of my time fighting against the platform and not doing any meaningful work. ymmv

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

#52

Post by ilikeerp »

duckfang wrote: post #48
gtt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

At the whim of oracle? Built 'on top' of oracle?

Using an Oracle DB doesn't make you a slave to Oracle Corp.

It's also not expensive. Some of the businesses cases I've seen for SF have a massive ROI.

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

#53

Post by gher-shyu3i »

duckfang wrote: post #48
gtt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Haven't they moved off of Oracle? I recall seeing they had job openings for Postgres admins with the intention of moving off of Oracle.

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

#54

Post by csharpminor »

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?

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 custom apps on Salesforce, similar to how Shopify has its own app ecosystem.

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

#55

Post by fragmede »

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.

That advice ignores the opportunity cost of learning other things. Jack of all trades, master of none, as they say. Focus your career on what you want to focus it on. If that is Linux kernel development, great! If it's WordPress modules in PHP, great! If it's AWS (to the exclusion of GCP and Azure), great! If you'd rather specialize in multi-cloud and learn all three, awesome! Some choices will limit the future possibilities - there are fewer companies that need eg Linux kernel devs, but two of them - Facebook and Google - are both known to pay really well and aren't going away any time soon. No one has a time machine to predict the future, so who knows if Salesforce will disappear in 20 years or if it will buy out the rest of the tech industry and we'll all be working for them? Point is, specialize how you want to specialize, plenty of people have done the same and found success, others who have done the same have found failure. Others who have chosen the opposite have also done the same.

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

#56

Post by zerkten »

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 started on 1, but are now on 2. I'm not sure I'd have expected them to become 2 and it took time, but they weren't going to get to repeat 2 as a career without having aptitude for 1.

The other path that exists is becoming a specialized consulting firm. You become an expert in 1 and know enough about 2, as well as having built a network with lots of other number 2s. You can then support them to achieve their needs. This is a really common alternative to doubling down on the business side within an organization when this tech is involved. There are lots of sub-contracting opportunities and some will become acquihires for the generalist consulting companies who themselves are looking to get acquired by CapGemini, Accenture, etc.

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

#57

Post by the_only_law »

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?

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

#58

Post by michaelt »

mywittyname wrote: post #43
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 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 find yourself.

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

#59

Post by alrayyes »

Disclaimer: I have never used Salesforce and at best have a superficial understanding of what it does.

That depends. The question you want to ask yourself is, do you want to spend the rest of your career learning to use one limited toolbox or do you want to make your own tools?

If you're bored (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong here), you're just replacing one set of Legos you piece together with another, except this new set is much more specialized and limited.

Personally (although I have to give the COO cred for replying to this post personally) I wouldn't want to tie my horse to this one pole. You're basically a puppet to Salesforce whims. If they decide to become super evil, your career is now Madvillianry.

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

#60

Post by jareklupinski »

Curzel wrote: post #40

For sure it’s long term, just look at similar products like SAP. You are good probably for your whole career

ex-SAP, left voluntarily to try startup life

Never felt more secure and welcomed by colleagues and customers. They knew I was there to work on something they would rather not have to deal with, and I was happy to do it as a recent grad.

Might consider going back in my endgame :)

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