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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

#51

Post by dasil003 »

mullingitover wrote: post #25

If I were on the Salesforce BoD I wouldn't be impressed. Let's see Benioff put his money where his mouth is, replace some C-suite seats with AI agents. Those are the really expensive salaries, and if AI is as smart as he claims it's downright reckless and negligent not to do this.

The point of this announcement is to boost sales, not to save costs. He's selling AI hype. The only thing that matters if customers are buying the hype, not the reality of AI's limitations which I'm sure the board is well aware of.

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

#52

Post by cruffle_duffle »

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

Isn’t the fix supposed to be some senior leader writes the prompt “make the code faster and less over engineered” and the Rune Goldberg contraption comes to life and echos back “eye eye captain!”. Thirty seconds later, problem solved!

That is my understanding of these AS/GI agentic wizards anyway. They’ll fire the rest of their staff right after the thing fixes all the slowness.

You don’t even need to define “slowness” in your prompt! It just knows what “slowness” means and fixes it for you! It’s truly remarkable technology. Those primadonna devs will be out on their ass any day now.

All hail our agentic future!

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

#53

Post by bayarearefugee »

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.

They never seem to talk about what happens when the the dream is ubiquitously realized and nobody is left to buy whatever it they are selling because their production expenses fund someone else's sales.

At least it will be interesting to see which pushes civilization off the cliff first, end-game capitalism ouroborosing itself or the direct impact of climate change (which is obviously also related in any case).

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

#54

Post by majormajor »

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 !

Somehow their "agent" AI can't do sales? Can't run email/call scripts? Can't track things in their own CRM?

Huh. So they are telling customers that they'll make their work more AI driven while staffing up their own human sales?

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

#55

Post by koolba »

mullingitover wrote: post #25

If I were on the Salesforce BoD I wouldn't be impressed. Let's see Benioff put his money where his mouth is, replace some C-suite seats with AI agents. Those are the really expensive salaries, and if AI is as smart as he claims it's downright reckless and negligent not to do this.

> Let's see Benioff put his money where his mouth is, replace some C-suite seats with AI agents.

How can you replace a job that involves stone cold deterministic thinking and copying the behavior of your peers after a 3-6 month review with a lifeless machine?

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

#56

Post by riku_iki »

darth_avocado wrote: post #50
riku_iki wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 co…

It depends on vertical.

Large corps likely have some huge codebases of overengineered spagetti code, which are hardly comprehendable by LLMs.

But if you want to build for example some new/smaller web/mobile apps talking to various API, LLM can boost your productivity significantly, because it will easily generate ready to use code snippets.

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

#57

Post by InkCanon »

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 !

Classic solution in search of a problem thinking. "It's not that our solution isn't wanted, our customers just need to get it!"

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

#58

Post by paxys »

didgeoridoo wrote: post #48

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…

Let's not forget pre-2020 when the company released "Salesforce Blockchain", "NFT Cloud" and "Salesforce Web3 Platform".

This is how they operate. Just one marketing hype moment after another. The actual product doesn't really matter (and in a lot of cases doesn't even launch). They just need to keep making pretty slide decks filled with meaningless buzzwords so their customers get distracted from the fact that they are paying $500+ per user per month for a shitty web UI on top of 4 database tables.

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

#59

Post by rvz »

> “And then, we will have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer."

As I was predicting... [0]

The first affected are the "support engineers" then they will try to get away with going after everyone else at the company. Test subjects are needed for a trial run.

So what eventually happens to the existing employees when the AgentForce gets even better?

Can they just admit that they are replacing workers with AI agents instead of this newspeak bullsh*t?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42630993

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

#60

Post by risyachka »

bb611 wrote: post #33

Current SFDC software engineer - this is just cover for a widespread engineering hiring freeze since the layoffs in January 2023. There's a ton of pressure to control costs after the near shareholder revolt that caused the layoffs. The public nature of the announcement is certainly marketing for our AI offerings as well, but at this point I think most engineers are just worried there will be additional layoffs, in th…

Looks like it. The only other explanation is they just stopped investing in other products and focused on Agents, thus no need for loads more of engineering.

No way in the world they got 30% gains. 5 maybe realistically

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