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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

#141

Post by angoragoats »

mullingitover wrote: post #116
riku_iki wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Large corps likely have some huge codebases of overengineered spagetti code, which are hardly comprehendable by LLMs. I think it's the other way around, though. Those code monstrosities aren't comprehendible by humans , especially after the wanton RIFs that have happened in the past couple years that have cut loose a lot of people who know where the bodies are buried. However, with copilot you can just figuratively…

I have never seen this work, at all, with a large codebase. Can you give a specific example of a large repo where this produced useful/coherent results?

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

#142

Post by area51org »

risyachka wrote: post #60
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

This kind of smokescreen only works for so long. Once it all starts failing and profits dip, things will change.

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

#143

Post by sfdcccthrow »

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…

There is no company-wide hiring freeze, but there’s teams/products/etc… who have them.

There’s other things going on though this will help spin.

There’s no way that productivity metric includes the last 2-4 months.

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

#145

Post by WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW »

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?

> Is that just how CRM systems are? Is everybody just doing it wrong? What's the deal?

These kinds of tools cover 80% of what you want to do out-of-the-box.

For the remaining 20% to build it correctly you need to either hire expensive consultants or hire in-house staff to build.

Nobody budgets properly for this, and it isn't in the sales pitch, and so that last 20% is built as horrible spaghetti code by the cheapest possible devs / consultants.

Even if you wanted to pay good salaries and hire people in-house how many great engineers want to be limited to programming in Apex on salesforce?

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

#147

Post by JohnMakin »

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…

I really don't care generally if a business feels the need to hype things like this - but these kinds of announcements have downstream effects on salaries and job availability far outside a company like this. Other management/C-suites are gonna hear "we replaced all our engineers with AI!" and similarly slow down hiring/etc. This is already being seen throughout the industry, I am aware, but such a visible player making an announcement like this, while it almost certainly is just marketing, drives me a little crazy because it indirectly affects a lot of people.

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

#150

Post by gregw2 »

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?

I've only been involved with such Salesforce integrations at one company, but based on that, I can give you my take. I'd be interested to hear others'.

One, the salesforce data changes all occur through APIs (ok) which various enterprise integration tools (Informatica, Mulesoft, etc) support (ok), but those tools typically dont support easy options for retrying a change to a specific row that causes an error. If you are updating 100 Accounts in a single Salesforce Bulk API call and "5" are busy/locked, you have to build a lot of custom error handling to notice and retry just those 5 rows. Its not part of most connectors or python libraries I've seen. Also, 3 of those errors might be fatal and 2 might be retriable but you have to learn which are which or blindly retry them all. In database terms, their API transactional semantics are not statement by statement ACID but row by row within an API request.

Second, no API or SOQL operations can pull back or process or update more than 50,000 rows.

Given those two things, unless the integration person is skilled about both error handling and testing, some of the object busy/contention failures only show up in production traffic with many jobs going on so a generic integration specialist doesn't know about these Salesforce-specific pitfalls and they are discovered after the integration goes live under strange production access patterns.

EDIT: a third issue is that most Salesforce developers are UI-centric in their thinking and training and don't have database or data modeling or data integration experience to draw on so the troubleshooting for data issues on their end tends to suffer.

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