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

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171–180 of 409 posts

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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter as an example, showed us that the staff really do matter

I thought Twitter fired 70% of manpower and still works?

Unless I'm missing something, there's also been no innovation in their product at all. A company can only coast for so long.

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

#173
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

I'm guessing your intended subtext is something like: "eliminating jobs isn't bad or permanent since new kinds of jobs may be created elsewhere", but I don't think this satire/analogy works well.

Historically speaking farmers didn't buy much food to start with, since they already had it or traded locally with their neighbors. It was everybody else (e.g. city artisans) who bought food, and they have kept buying it because all humans need to eat regardless of where--or whether--they are employed.

Since bayarearefugee is talking about a scenario where the "dream is ubiquitously realized", that implies any new future job-categories are also eliminated. No jobs for repairing the foreman-bots that direct the repair-bots.

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

#174
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mak…

Sure, but it's either true or it's not. If they fall for the hype, the company will pay the price for it eventually. (And it's not true - if you could "replace engineers with AI" we engineers would have already done it and be relaxing while AI does our work)

The company will pay the price for it eventually but workers will pay the price right away.

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

#175
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their ultimate agent product strategy feels like reducing cost of sales... by automating salespeople. I have doubts that will ever happen, but who knows? Sales folks are highly-compensated, so even making a few of them redundant (or making existing salespeople more efficient) would be a big win for companies (Salesforce's customers).

Compensated proportional to the revenue they bring in close to the time they bring it in. (Operations cost) Very different from the software dev who gets paid today for revenue that might come in in two years. (Capital cost) The average person has no idea of how capital sees the world. A worker feels resentful if they get paid less per hour of input, a capitalist feels resentful when they get paid less per dollar of…

The investors are the capitalists. The C suite negotiator is petit bourgeoisie.

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

#176
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their ultimate agent product strategy feels like reducing cost of sales... by automating salespeople. I have doubts that will ever happen, but who knows? Sales folks are highly-compensated, so even making a few of them redundant (or making existing salespeople more efficient) would be a big win for companies (Salesforce's customers).

Compensated proportional to the revenue they bring in close to the time they bring it in. (Operations cost) Very different from the software dev who gets paid today for revenue that might come in in two years. (Capital cost) The average person has no idea of how capital sees the world. A worker feels resentful if they get paid less per hour of input, a capitalist feels resentful when they get paid less per dollar of…

This is less about Marxist/capitalist and more about a change in regulation in the US that makes R&D expenses (dev headcount) amortized over five years (for taxes) versus sales being a straight-up expense. This one is going to be good for the stock price, and the AI Agent angle is a marketing masterpiece.

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

#177
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mak…

Sure, but it's either true or it's not. If they fall for the hype, the company will pay the price for it eventually. (And it's not true - if you could "replace engineers with AI" we engineers would have already done it and be relaxing while AI does our work)

> Sure, but it's either true or it's not. If they fall for the hype, the company will pay the price for it eventually.

Sure, but I don't care about these companies - I care about my career and the opportunities available to me in the next 1-5 years. If these opportunities are tainted by false claims about AI capabilities - that is a huge problem to me. It is irrelevant to me whether the company eventually suffers for it, because that doesn't reimburse my "damages" (if they exist).

I agree with you though, and to be clear I absolutely do not believe this is anything but marketing hype - If anyone was actually doing what they claimed we'd be seeing evidence of it. I have yet, to this day, to see any evidence of such claims. If you say "30% productivity" without saying how you measured that and the methods you used, I can instantly call BS and rest easy at night. Lots of similar claims seem the same way.

"outstanding claims require outstanding evidence" or something like that.

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

#178
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…

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

#179
The real truth is that there's a lot of 1) excess (development) capacity, 2) and not enough market opportunities where software brings incremental revenue.

AI is being blamed for layoffs and hiring freezes but the reality is that selling software is not as profitable for companies.

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

#180
post #78

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?

The actual Salesforce core products are very good. Their documentation is well written. The Salesforce flow low code tool works well.

Their overly complex object/row/field permissions is a hot mess. Mulesoft is limited; there is a reason why they tried to buy Informatica.

Their marketing and hype machine hurts their credibility imo.

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