201–210 of 409 posts
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).
There's probably space for AI secretaries to screen contacts and to drop AI sales.
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 engin…
In short, you could have agents that code at 2x but it would have only a small impact on deliverabkes since non-coding processes have a higher impact on velocity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a company exec is stupid enough to not hire when there has been no demonstrated replacement for the engineers, they are likely going to drive the company into the ground in short order. I don’t believe that companies would be stupid enough to kneecap their own growth because a SaaS company that has stopped innovating 5 years ago decided they are happy with their current headcount and used AI as an excuse.
> If a company exec is stupid enough to not hire when there has been no demonstrated replacement for the engineers, they are likely going to drive the company into the ground in short order. Who cares when they'll just float away on a golden parachute to the next company that will overpay them to make terrible decisions. Executives will happily jump at any excuse to lower wages, cut jobs, and pocket the money they sa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The only solution is to refactor all the apex triggers processes and flows to something more orderly. Technically it is doable. Politically it is almost impossible. SF is an ERP in most companies and touches every department.
I wish CEOs would avoid such phrasing unless "take responsibility for that" involves some personal penalty, like a lower bonus or some other way to compensate for the fact that a bad decision cost the company money.
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…
Yes, that does stand to reason, it's the funniest bit about it. When you make engineers more productive the value of an engineer goes up, not down. Otherwise we'd have no game developers left after people went from writing assembly to working in modern game engines.
As others have pointed out it's obviously just a really cringy attempt at trying to sell their AI software, which apparently isn't smart enough to sell itself
“As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.” I wish CEOs would avoid such phrasing unless "take responsibility for that" involves some personal penalty, like a lower bonus or some other way to compensate for the fact that a bad decision cost the company money.
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 bon…
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?"
And on top of that situation, we are also demanding unlimited growth. Good luck with that.
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. "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 bec…