I've done quite a bit of Salesforce development in my career. First as a full-time employee at the start of my career, and later on as part-time side gigs. There are a lot of negative comments here about Salesforce, and they are mostly all valid. Salesforce is not the least bit sexy, and can often be frustrating for both developers and users. There are a couple of good things about it that I wanted to share though:
* A single developer can be incredibly productive at automating a company's business processes. Fresh out of college at my first job I was the only developer supporting hundreds of daily users across our sales, customer support, operations, and finance departments - most of whom were basically working out of Salesforce full-time. Salesforce also proved really adaptable for supporting all of the crazy sales campaigns or operations initiatives that management could dream up - often with quick turnaround times. For me there is no question that the Saleforce licensing costs (or some other low-code alternative) are worthwhile for most businesses vs. trying to build internal systems from scratch.
* Developers are in high demand, and I have received lots of requests from former colleagues looking for a Salesforce developer - even a decade after I moved away from full-time Salesforce development. When I have accepted these offers I've literally been told I can charge however much I want (although I do tend to keep it reasonable).
* You tend to have much more direct contact with your users than in other B2B or B2C development roles. And users are often super-appreciative of even simple changes. It really is a great feeling to see the difference that your work makes firsthand, and I have had some great working relationships with sales and support managers over the years.
* The core Salesforce platform (forms and data modeling, workflow, API integration, etc.) is actually an incredible piece of product design and engineering in my opinion. I know it's getting long in the tooth these days, but the team that built all of that deserves credit for getting so much of it right. All the stuff that Salesforce has built or acquired since then, unfortunately, has been much less impressive.
* Salesforce is expensive for sure, but not as bad as the pricing on their website would suggest. Apparently nobody pays the list price for Salesforce licenses, and a 50% discount from the list prices is not uncommon in my experience.
Ultimately I am glad I decided to get out of Salesforce development if only because the developer experience with almost any other programming language is just so much nicer. But I learned a lot from the experience - and I think those early interactions with users and firsthand experience of how business are run have made me a more well-rounded developer. I was also able to use the skills that I learned while doing Salesforce development to transition into a role building web applications, and pursue a more traditional development career.
And now as I am eyeing retirement, I am contemplating getting back into Salesforce consulting on a part-time basis.