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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

#91

Post by taurath »

riku_iki wrote: post #56
darth_avocado wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the second those smaller prototype apps become big enough to need to scale or be maintained, you’re back at the same problem.

The whole thing it gets you then is “faster experimentation”, which was something that was /already fast/ if you use modern tools of the day. 1 week vs 2 weeks for a prototype app may build you more prototypes but it doesn’t help when you can’t scale them.

It does smooth some of the processes though - AI is maybe helpful for cognitive augmentation for coders, but it’s not going to be building you apps worth a damn.

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

#92

Post by majormajor »

bee_rider wrote: post #81
majormajor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do their customers value sales more than engineering? It seems like a self-consistent pitch if so.

Let's assume they do. They value sales, they believe Salesforce's pitch that the SF AI will reduce their sales cost.

Yet Salesforce themselves is hiring more people vs simply dogfooding their own AI agents.

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

#93

Post by bee_rider »

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

“I’m not just the president.” Pause. “I’m a client too.”

Pretty old trick.

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

#94

Post by kibibu »

paxys wrote: post #58
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…

I presume it works to have the new shiny thing that execs have vaguely heard about. It only has to exist while the hype cycle is at its peak.

I'm surprised there hasn't been a Salesforce AR/VR.

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

#97

Post by epolanski »

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…

Big orgs have plenty of people that need to justify their salaries, I mean it, I'm 100% convinced you could fire half the staff of a big organization, going heavy with the management roles and lighter on operational ones and the company would become more productive and efficient.

And the higher the people in the pyramid are the better they are at selling their ideas in their neverending quest for recognition, fat bonuses and promotions.

And once they get them, more often than not by doing pointless and even harmful work, they can then leverage it by jumping to another company.

Gervais' principle at its finest.

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

#98

Post by actuallyalys »

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

I am doubtful as well.

I could imagine 30 percent among certain engineers for certain tasks, especially if you use a popular language with popular libraries and frameworks that are well-represented in the training dataset. I don’t know how typical of a codebase Salesforce has. They could also finetune a model on their own codebase or devote a small team of engineers to figuring out which prompts, models, etc. work best for their codebase and process. In theory, those advantages could boost it beyond what testing would typically show.

But a consistent increase of “more than” 30 percent across the whole engineering workforce seems less plausible, especially lacking details on how they measured that and uptake numbers. Edited to add: Are they even confident that their engineers are using it consistently? At this scale, that’s not a given.

I’d be interested to know whether Salesforce customers have noticed a change in the number or scope of features being announced. A change of this size seems like it should be noticeable from the outside. I’d like to hear from the engineers in particular.

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

#100

Post by kibibu »

readyplayernull wrote: post #34
rocqua wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put in AI to justify saving on support staff. Then hire more people to convince customers the AI is actually just as good as speaking to a real human... It feels like mixed messaging about whether AI is actually good.

The classic tell, don't show.

If they really wanted to back it, they'd use AI salespeople.
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