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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

#221

Post by chasd00 »

rawgabbit wrote: post #204
gregw2 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have been there and done that. In a complex SF org with a lot of triggers, any record update will get blocked. 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.

Salesforce definitely makes it easy to screw yourself with customization. It’s a very complex beast.

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

#222

Post by dasil003 »

mullingitover wrote: post #80
dasil003 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of this announcement is to boost sales, not to save costs. He's selling AI hype. The only thing that matters if customers are buying the hype, not the reality of AI's limitations which I'm sure the board is well aware of.

> He's selling AI hype AI hype is exactly what I'm talking about. I imagine if you demonstrate that you can have AI agents as viciously competitive COOs, CFOs, and CTOs, who never need time off, never sleep, it would be something that would set Wall Street on fire.

You're talking past my point. I understand there's cynicism at multiple levels.

The cynicism about AI's capabilities is well understood, we're at the peak of the hype cycle. People are selling AI across the board, but the reality will fall short of the sales pitch in innumerable ways across the board whether that be programmer productivity or anything else.

Then there's the meta cynicism about the sales pitches of AIs, reinforced my CEOs speaking to wall street about how AI will enable staff reductions. The rank and file is understandbly very angry about this, coupled with the understanding by technical folks that AI is far from being able to replace the function of actual deep-thinking humans. This is when the temptation to minimize the value of executives and "call their bluff" comes in. But here is where you need a dose of reality. Executives aren't stupid as you think, they don't get paid what they do for no reason, and despite the bad and anti-humanitarian decisions they make in the name of shareholder, they actually can't be replaced by AI. Both executives and boards understand this and so it's not really a topic of discussion. You are free to disagree with this of course, but at some point its just toothless wishful thinking.

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

#223

Post by bhouston »

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…

This is the most accurate comment. This is how Salesforce works. That said there revenue continues to grow and they continue to pivot to the new trend in their marketing. The underlying business and most of the software they are actually selling remains the same just wrapped up in different and new marketing each year. It works well as a strategy.

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

#224

Post by autoexec »

deadbabe wrote: post #203
autoexec wrote: post #197

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. 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…

What if a disgruntled software engineer shoots them in the back one day without warning??

Most likely the software engineer would be aggressively prosecuted and harshly sentenced (assuming they survive long enough to see a courtroom) while nothing substantial would improve for any of the other software engineers.

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

#225

Post by yalogin »

What is the rationale for this? The quarterly numbers for all these companies are really good, their stock price is at an all time high. So what is prompting these extreme steps? Salesforce is not the only company, most every company is this way. What do these companies know that we don’t? Is there a major correction coming?

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

#226

Post by Eric_WVGG »

csto13 wrote: post #187

As someone that sometimes has to deal with Salesforce, if AI can make the product better, god speed. Salesforce has so many warts, it's not even funny.

My first thought was, based on the current state of Salesforce it looks like they haven’t hired a new engineer since 2004.

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

#227

Post by datavirtue »

jongjong wrote: post #135
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.

Interesting. This little stunt very much reminded me of Oracle.

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

#228

Post by pylua »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #90
pylua wrote: post #35

What exactly have they achieved with ai? What incredible progress has been made ? Does anyone know, I am genuinely curious. AI has increased my productivity greatly, but it is a long way away from replacing my Job. Though maybe I am biased.

Mind if I ask what AI tooling you are using and how it's increased your productivity?

I just use chat gpt. I use it in all manners — questions about the business domain I am in, front end and backend coding questions, as well as istio configurations.

I am well versed in all three areas, but obviously I can’t remember all the syntax, and don’t have time to trial and error the changes, and ai reduces that loop. I don’t use it to generate massive blocks of code, I use it mostly to demonstrate the principle of what I am trying to achieve.

I have many specific examples of massive time save.

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

#229

Post by javawizard »

timcobb wrote: post #219
sfdcccthrow wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, uh, do you think they've driven productivity up 30%? ;) ;) ;)

I'll say as an ex-FAANG that recently released a similar stat that it was absolutely real, but only because doing anything required an atrocious amount of boilerplate that AI was really good at figuring out.

Compared to how productive I am at my current startup? Not a chance.

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

#230

Post by downrightmike »

PaulHoule wrote: post #168
wbl wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people think costs can get passed on? They can't be. Pricing is about supply elasticity and demand elasticity. Sometimes you just need to eat costs because of the competition.

Often though the competition is facing the same pressure. Or there is no competition. My trainer at the gym introduced me to https://patents.google.com/patent/US10245460B2/en?oq=1024546... which sells for about $250 (worth it if you really use it.) My first instinct is that this product ought to be available for $25 on Temu if there wasn't a patent but I know from experience that if I talked to folks at TRX they'd ha…

I got one of those from walmart in like 2018 for like $20, still going strong
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