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Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

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Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#41

Post by DidYaWipe »

I tried to buy Pro Tools a few years ago. Avid was using a SalesForce system, which is such a monumental piece of trash that they couldn't complete the transaction. The attempt involved weeks of back-&-forth, mind-bogglingly incompetent and defective. They ended up giving me a temporary license because they thought I had a project to complete.

SalesForce, SAP, and the other purveyors of steaming legacy enterprise excrement simply point the finger at the client when end-users can't accomplish basic tasks with their systems. And of course they're prime go-tos for government work. I don't wish unemployment on their people; but the faster their monolithic junk fades away, the better.

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#42

Post by ozim »

aenis wrote: post #18

Part of their sales drive. We are absolutely assaulted by their sales reps trying to sell agentforce. They wine and dine non-technical executives and push the "ai agents will do everything" story. He is just reinforcing this narrative. Nothing to see here.

Plan is that others will need to hire expensive Salesforce consultants anyway. I don’t think they are getting rid of those people.

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#43

Post by bombcar »

bionhoward wrote: post #24

Salesforce seemed way slow and over engineered to me, like it was the result of double exponential feature creep over many years

Salesforce has tons of features, but at its root it's Microsoft Access Online for 80% of the companies that use it.

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#44

Post by paxys »

Benioff is very far removed from what goes on day-to-day at Salesforce. He is the marketer in chief, nothing else. This interview itself is an ad for "Agentforce". They will keep hiring engineers as normal (heck there are 104 software engineering openings on their careers site as I write this).

I also don't know how he is pulling the "AI is making our engineers 30% more effective" stat when last I checked software engineers at Salesforce weren't even allowed to use AI.

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#46

Post by rawgabbit »

AFAIK Agentforce is programming the chatbot to allow it to execute SF flows on behalf of the customer.

I can see things like update my profile. Or give me a quote for this insurance product.

I fail to see how Agentforce or AI in general means less software engineers are needed. The only explanation I can think of is he is contracting with OpenAI or Anthropic or someone else and implementing that. My experience with SF Einstein or Genie has been like “you gotta be kidding if that is what you are selling”.

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#47

Post by cruffle_duffle »

Finnucane wrote: post #21
nick__m wrote: post #7

《 And then, we will have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer. We will have more salespeople next year because we really need to explain to people exactly the value that we can achieve with AI. So, we will probably add another 1,000 to 2,000 salespeople in the short term.” 》 I guess they are building a saleforce at the expense of everything else !

That is that capitalist dream—all sales, no production expenses.

Wouldn’t my business AI agent automatically talk with the salesforce AI agent and buy it automatically?

Why would you need buyers or even sellers? Why even have humans in the loop at all for any business process or transaction.

My understanding from all the magazines at my dentist office is that AI will replace the whole thing.

What’s even the point of humans? It’s just AI bots jerking each other off all the way down!

…now my head hurts.

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#48

Post by didgeoridoo »

I was at Salesforce for 4 years, and during those years the company made a massive deal about:

2020: the first AI craze, introducing “Einstein” as their name for their analytics platform, and officially changing the corporate vision to being the “No. 1 AI CRM company”.

2021: Now it’s all about “Customer 360”, i.e. account-based marketing, i.e. what basically everyone else does without such a memeable name. You wouldn’t believe the number of slide decks I had to sit through with all our little product logos orbiting this stock art character straight out of Women Laughing While Eating Salad.

2022: Never mind, now we’re betting the company on a real-time unified database called Genie, which was neither real-time nor unified (and eventually not called Genie either). Got sued for that one.

2024: AGENTS. AGENTS EVERYWHERE. WE ARE AN AGENT COMPANY NOW.

So, let’s see how this holds up in the face of the next hot thing.

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#49

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

Let's say coding is actually 50% of your job (for almost no engineers is it).

If AI makes you 30% more efficient at coding (it might if you went from having literally 0 code completion or any form of AI to state of the art, not many people are doing that):

* 1 engineer = 50% feature dev (1x), 50% other

* 1 engineer with AI = 50% feature dev (1.15x), 50% other

So engineers are theoretically getting 15% more done. If your company is growing faster than 15%, you're probably still going to need to hire eng.

The real way SalesForce is going to increase productivity is by forcing more unpaid overtime, not by AI.

Re: Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

#50

Post by darth_avocado »

riku_iki wrote: post #27
darth_avocado wrote: post #12

1. Salesforce will continue to hire engineers 2. The productivity gains of 30% are probably overstated, in a likely effort to try and sell their AI products

> The productivity gains of 30% are probably overstated it maybe not, LLMs deliver clear value in coding tasks, but the thing is that competitors also will have gains, deliver more features, fixes and products.

I am yet to have Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Facebook suggest that they’ve achieved 30% productivity gains from AI. Those are companies at the forefront of AI investment and if they haven’t achieved that kind of increased engineering productivity, I am ready to bet money on the fact that any other company claiming so hasn’t either.

Even if 30% productivity gains are true, they are probably not because of AI. They could have fired a bunch of low performers and overworked the rest of the engineers to achieve productivity gains, but even then, I’d be very skeptical if the 30% gains would stay there long term.

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