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

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231–240 of 409 posts

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

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 AI…

> Executives aren't stupid as you think, they don't get paid what they do for no reason

I agree, but I think the reason they get paid what they do isn't because they're highly skilled (not to say they don't have skills, but those skills are mostly good ol' boys networking and the ability to do basic analysis), but rather because they're part of an insular class that protects its own. However, they're expensive and inefficient, and if we're going to practice honest capitalism then the first group to rip that bandaid off and automate away their (mostly) dead weight actually will be competitively superior to the backwards holdouts, and they will proceed to dominate the market.

This is of course if we're practicing actual capitalism and not a dressed-up form of neo-feudalism.

> but the reality will fall short of the sales pitch in innumerable ways across the board whether that be programmer productivity or anything else

Remains to be seen. We are with AI where the web was in 1996, when plenty of trusted thought leaders were sagely telling us that the web was just a place for glorified brochures.

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

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the toxic env, I'm too familiar with it. Quarterly layoffs, perks gone, more RTO, but execs can still travel around lavishly.

FAANG used to over-employ not just due to ZIRP, but also in the fear that their engineers would build competing products. These companies enjoy healthy margins. Unemployed engineers can duplicate the core functionality and offer it for less.

I seriously wonder why this is not happening more given all the copilots available. I guess the h1bs don't have the time/appetite to do this. Wouldn't locals have enough of a vendetta to do this?

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

#233
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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).

Customers will install agent interaction prevention agents to prevent the infinite onslaught.

Sales will still happen with dinner and handshakes.

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 AI…

The gap between the claimed capability of "AI Agents" and what you're actually able to build with tools like AutoGen and Crew (and presumably AgentForce, it's been a few months since I saw a demo) is the largest gap I have ever seen in the field and I've been working with NLP/Conversational AI professionally since 2016.

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

#235
I get the costs of engineering, but there's these sort semi antagonistic "yo we're not hiring software engineers" announcements that are weird.

I don't ever see someone say "we're not hiring anymore customer support" or HR, or janitorial staff, or middle management.

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

TRX won a lawsuit and you can't get one from Wal-Mart today

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/trx-obtains-federal...

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

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience, while there are some things in the backlogs that a developer can basically pick up and run with, others require input from other roles to actually address or implement properly. And then once developed, you need to test, document, and localize a feature. (Realistically, you probably want to market it as well.) Depending on your design and support model, your customer service teams may need to help organizations implement the feature effectively or may need to be trained on how to answer customer questions about that feature.

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

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Salesforce core is Java. A smattering of other languages in the mix. I left Salesforce a year ago, their main developer productivity drains had nothing to do with the code base. It's their build process where it takes a minimum of a day to get code committed, even with their git on top of perforce hack which is seriously impressive, but still a process smell, that coupled with massive overhead from when dealing with…

Thanks for the insight! That makes me even more doubtful of the 30 percent claim.

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

#240
post #235

I get the costs of engineering, but there's these sort semi antagonistic "yo we're not hiring software engineers" announcements that are weird. I don't ever see someone say "we're not hiring anymore customer support" or HR, or janitorial staff, or middle management.

I don't think a lot of HN users understand corporate speak.

When they announce they aren't hiring any more software engineers they are basically telling its own engineers to leave now or face cost cutting measures.

If you work at Salesforce, I would start putting out resumes now. The play seems to be to use the narrative "agents replaced our engineers, we cut %X of our team" as both a sales pitch and excuse for poor deliverables.

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