Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

salesforceben.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 409 posts

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

#281

Post by TZubiri »

paxys wrote: post #44

Benioff is very far removed from what goes on day-to-day at Salesforce. He is the marketer in chief, nothing else. This interview itself is an ad for "Agentforce". They will keep hiring engineers as normal (heck there are 104 software engineering openings on their careers site as I write this). I also don't know how he is pulling the "AI is making our engineers 30% more effective" stat when last I checked software en…

"This interview itself is an ad for "Agentforce"

confirmed. Take a look at this marketing material

https://www.salesforce.com/agentforce/ai-agents-roi-calculat...

They literally advertise their AI thing under the pretense of how many people you can fire and how much money you will save.

Apparently their technology is simultaneously an AI that solves business problems as well as an AI that builds AIs that solves business problems

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

#282

Post by TZubiri »

layman51 wrote: post #277

I have experience working with the Salesforce platform via the “Power of Us” program where nonprofits can get a discount and some free user licenses. It is interesting how much the platform has changed from the perspective of an “Admin”. I have frequently heard from others that compared to the past, it is much more difficult to for a staffer to implement it, especially if it’s not their primary role or they don’t hav…

What do you mean failed implementations?

Like, they ask for a refund?

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

#283

Post by jrockway »

sharkweek wrote: post #132
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…

Thanks for sharing some inside baseball. This definitely reads more like a “everything is going AWESOME ignore anything else you hear about us” PR-ese. I read this as messaging to shareholders more than anyone else (and sure some word-spreading about the product).

Yeah, it's just an ad for Agentforce. They have been aggressively advertising on TV lately.

One ad shows a restaurant seating customers in the rain because they aren't using AI. The other ad shows someone buying clothes that don't match because AI wasn't suggesting them. (They also serve the customer shrimp, which he doesn't like.) Looking at weather forecasts and rescheduling reservations has nothing to do with AI, and I doubt AI can do anything other than write the "we're sorry" message. (Additionally, most restaurants simply ask what food you want before preparing it, so they don't have to worry about feeding you something you don't want.) Meanwhile, choosing matching colors for multiple articles of clothing is at most a satisfiability problem, which again has nothing to do with AI. I also doubt the sales floor staff needs any help with that. There are a fixed number of SKUs and colors. If a customer says "I like this shirt, can you suggest pants", I feel like 98% of adults would be able to competently assist. They also don't get paid very much, so it's unclear what the Salesforce value add is there.

IBM also does a bunch of AI advertising and the gist is that it is being used for air traffic control. Somehow, I doubt that. If AI could replace one pilot on 10% of flights, the airlines would make millions of dollars. They all still have 2, though.

I'd love to see a case study from someone other than the AI vendor. The ideas in the TV commercials aren't even good. Would love to see "well actually we're making a ton of money thanks to these products". The reason we're not seeing it is because it isn't happening.

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

#284

Post by javierluraschi »

paxys wrote: post #87
nick__m wrote: post #7

《 And then, we will have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer. We will have more salespeople next year because we really need to explain to people exactly the value that we can achieve with AI. So, we will probably add another 1,000 to 2,000 salespeople in the short term.” 》 I guess they are building a saleforce at the expense of everything else !

"Here's an AI Agentforce that can do all your sales for you!" "We have to hire thousands of salespeople to sell this AI agent" Something doesn't compute

They are probably struggling to keep sales number up, they need more sales and cut costs. So makes sense to hire more sales people and freeze development… but that’s a sad story, let’s fix that sad story with AI:

AI is so good that everything can be automated, except for sales which needs a personal touch.

Wall Street happy, bonus for all execs, the end.

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

#285

Post by jrockway »

i_love_retros wrote: post #260
flashgordon wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[flagged]

I mean, what products are even unique to Google or Meta? The cloning is already done and the cloners are established businesses. Or, Google just cloned someone else. Did they independently discover cloud computing and make GCP? I think not.

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

#286

Post by tjpnz »

echelon wrote: post #215
markus_zhang wrote: post #151

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.

>in the fear that their engineers would build competing products.

Is there any evidence to support this? It would imply that even their least promising employees would still pose a threat which seems unlikely.

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

#287

Post by rawgabbit »

lazide wrote: post #258
paradox242 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so their customers get distracted from the fact that they are paying $500+ per user per month for a shitty web UI on top of 4 database tables. Oof, I felt that cut in my bones and I was only a customer.

slow database tables too.

A minor nitpick.

SF doesn’t have tables. It is not a relational database. It is slow because it is an enterprise application.

The link details the steps that are triggered every time a record is updated.

https://www.salesforceben.com/learn-salesforce-order-of-exec...

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

#288

Post by GolfPopper »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #247
lazide wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salesforce is a sales driven org. It’s hard for engineers (and essentially impossible for H1B’s) to replace that .

Given my exposure to the product and portions of it's userbase I -want- to call it a cult more than anything else, mostly based on years spent fucking around in the back end of one salesforce instance after another trying to get it to replicate functionality that I could have gotten online in an afternoon with a 2 page training document and a couple shared Google spreadsheets. I am clearly not in the target audience…

The target audience seems to be whoever makes the decision to pay for it. Much like the allegations that the QWERTY layout was designed to make it easier for salesmen to type out "TYPEWRITER" quickly, I expect that salesforce's primary design goal is "stuff that will let us sell it to management" with actual performance/utility a distant second (or less).

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

#289

Post by roenxi »

i_love_retros wrote: post #273
roenxi wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone has to start somewhere, but if you don't know what ZIRP stands for you just don't have the fundamentals/haven't taken enough interest in economics to participate in a conversation related to macroeconomics and posting grumpy comments out of ignorance won't help you. You're going to have to read up on it. Although FWIW you probably aren't a bot, an AI would likely know all about ZIRP.

Yeah my knowledge of macroeconomics is lacking, can you recommend any books?

I recommend against books; they're expensive and typically the page count is too high for the number of ideas unless you are really interested in the academics of it. I get a lot more out of Wikipedia [0], blogs and YouTube (although the quality of information on YouTube is typically low).

That being said, if you want some recommendations I'd suggest Tyler Cowen [1] as a good clearinghouse for topical ideas and John Cochrane [2] as an interesting read. I picked an article from the last 7 days where you can see the ZIRP in the graphs, it is all the points where US Fed Funds rate was at 0.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy

[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/

[2] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/inflation-and-the-macroec...

Post reply on HN