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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

#131

Post by [deleted] »

pxc wrote: post #78
DidYaWipe wrote: post #41

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 exc…

Everywhere I've worked at that had some kind of Salesforce integration, that integration seemed almost incomprehensibly complex or a source of endless problems, and often both. But I've never been (nor wanted to be) very closely involved with any such integrations. Is Salesforce garbage? Is that just how CRM systems are? Is everybody just doing it wrong? What's the deal?

[deleted]

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

#132

Post by sharkweek »

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…

Thanks for sharing some inside baseball.

This definitely reads more like a “everything is going AWESOME ignore anything else you hear about us” PR-ese.

I read this as messaging to shareholders more than anyone else (and sure some word-spreading about the product).

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

#133

Post by arwhatever »

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…

… on top of circa 1997 Java syntax …

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

#134

Post by rglover »

I'm mouth-agape at the opportunity incumbents are giving to small/indie teams (to build better, competing products). I had a feeling some version of this would happen as cheap cash dried up (and founding talent exited), but not to this scale.

If you know how to build great products, now's the time to cast your line. It won't be easy, but I think there will be a lot of very happy small teams/soloists making money hand over fist (for them) over the next few years.

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

#135

Post by jongjong »

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…

It sounds like one of those big companies that's just very well hooked up to the institutional money printers and the main challenge for them is making up narratives to justify the money that's flowing into their coffers unconditionally.

It's telling that Benioff used to work at Oracle.

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

#136

Post by WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW »

actuallyalys wrote: post #104
briga wrote: post #37

If there are productivity gains of 30% per engineer, doesn't it stand to reason that hiring more engineers would make the org even more productive? This is like the opposite of 2021 where every tech company went on a wild hiring spree (remember how well that went?). Now in 2025 tech companies are just going to stop hiring anyone. I suspect by 2026 they will have a bunch of slop AI spaghetti code that no one can maint…

I don’t find the claim of 30 percent improvement plausible, but it actually does track to me that you might pause hiring for a time if your employees were suddenly more productive in order to catch up in other parts of the business or figure out what markets to put your new productivity toward.

> in order to catch up in other parts of the business or figure out what markets to put your new productivity toward.

Product can come up with and design features an order of magnitude faster than developers can implement them.

In practice established products have deep backlogs full of bugs and features that never get actioned.

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

#137

Post by sfdcccthrow »

paxys wrote: post #44

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 en…

Internally they are allowed. There are internal productivity tools (IDE Plugins, APIs, Frameworks, Chat) with homegrown models (in the press) and the ability to switch to other models. The various models are integrated throughout the engineering tools and Slack.

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

#138

Post by angoragoats »

bee_rider wrote: post #108
mullingitover wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From there it only follows: (camera pans to board of directors) "What would you say… ya' do here?" We can have a funding agent provision an agent-based board as well. What's the point of a board that can't react to real-time market information 24x7x365?

I guess an LLM probably can legally own things or be legally responsible for decisions. We’ll need one person at the top as a money-holder/sin-eater.

The humans who lead companies are rarely held personally responsible (in a legal sense) for decisions they make anyway, so having LLMs at the helm wouldn’t really be that much of a change.

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

#139

Post by broknbottle »

Why wouldn’t a company that has found the secret to productivity not double down and give themselves a massive lead on others in focused area of their choosing.

30% increase in productivity would mean another 100+ engineers should also be 30% more productive.

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

#140

Post by gruez »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #53
Finnucane wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

>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.

"If we replace 95% percent of farmers with tractors, who's going to buy all the food that's being grown?"

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