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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

#331

Post by juped »

kibibu wrote: post #94
paxys wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget pre-2020 when the company released "Salesforce Blockchain", "NFT Cloud" and "Salesforce Web3 Platform". This is how they operate. Just one marketing hype moment after another. The actual product doesn't really matter (and in a lot of cases doesn't even launch). They just need to keep making pretty slide decks filled with meaningless buzzwords so their customers get distracted from the fact that they…

I presume it works to have the new shiny thing that execs have vaguely heard about. It only has to exist while the hype cycle is at its peak. I'm surprised there hasn't been a Salesforce AR/VR.

Not even Salesforce was deranged enough to buy into "Metaverse"?

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

#332

Post by nbzso »

The dreams of upper management are coming true.

You just got at your desk after scuba diving vacation pop into a Salesforce Agent and find the joy of unlimited workforce, Product Specialist Agent, Recruitment Agent, Slack Agent, integrate your Tableau data, your CRM data, your email data, your slack data into a big Salesforce Black Data Hole and lose your job in the next iteration.

Just because greed has no limits and optimized vertical integration is inevitable. I am loving it. And waiting for my UBI and social rating AI QBR/KPI.

The ultimate corporate suicide in action. Agent Smith incoming.

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

#333

Post by capkutay »

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…

salesforce is a sales and marketing company first, tech company second. it's in their interest to create a ton of buzz and hype on whatever the current thing is and how they are that thing. Then they go on to sell a basic CRUD app that has to be customized by consultants.

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

#335

Post by namaria »

6510 wrote: post #324
paxys wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget pre-2020 when the company released "Salesforce Blockchain", "NFT Cloud" and "Salesforce Web3 Platform". This is how they operate. Just one marketing hype moment after another. The actual product doesn't really matter (and in a lot of cases doesn't even launch). They just need to keep making pretty slide decks filled with meaningless buzzwords so their customers get distracted from the fact that they…

I never dare say that part out loud but isn't that all we do? Move things into db tables and back. Like packing mules to go to market.

Dressed up dbs. That's what 90% of the saas economy is. I feel like I'm going mad. How can such a gigantic part of the software economy be just dressing up dbs and making them hard to interoperate? I can't make sense of it. Any business can run using email and vanilla spreadsheets. Everything else just feels like a surreal dance while I can't hear the music.

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

#336

Post by namaria »

javawizard wrote: post #229
timcobb wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well put. LLMs seem great in environments full of the cruft LLMs are trained on. Seems obvious but I hadn't put it together. Thanks for the insight.

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

#337

Post by antonvs »

wbl wrote: post #320
pembrook wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was always a myth and never a real thing, except for at the highest, bleeding edge talent levels. Especially for Enterprise Saas companies like Salesforce/Microsoft/Oracle/etc who know full well that their real competency isn’t actually the software…it’s distribution. Employees aren’t choosing to use those products, they get forced into them by management/IT or literal monopoly. Sales is everything in B2B softwa…

That wasn't true for the first spreadsheet apps or database apps. Or Autodesk back when it first appeared.

The world has changed since then. A lot.

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

#338

Post by ArnoVW »

jrockway wrote: post #283
sharkweek wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Like you I am highly skeptical of bullish AI narratives, even if AI clearly represents value.

However, your analysis has one flaw. Our biggest corporate customer is unwilling to give testimonials about our (niche) application, because it represents a competitive advantage for them and they don’t want to educate their competitors.

In theory one could imagine similar mechanisms going on in AI.

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

#339

Post by anal_reactor »

griomnib wrote: post #303
frereubu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we really need to explain to people exactly the value that we can achieve with AI This feels like one of those things where you're having to explain things so hard that it should give you a clue you're duping yourself. People don't get it? We just need more salespeople to explain it more . Gotta keep those KPIs up.

The funny thing is you can’t hide how bad this shit is because at some point everybody who doesn’t have a personal assistant has to deal with customer support of some sort. And holy fucking shit has AI made every single interaction with a company ten times more painful and time consuming. It’s the worlds most boring video game where you had to trigger the right sequence of words with some dumb robot, only then to get…

90% of users have silly questions, which is why all customer support conversations start with "have you tried restarting your router" and "is electricity working in your area". AI chatbots are completely fine for those 90% users who have such simple requests, but they're indeed a nightmare for the 10% who can do basic troubleshooting steps on their own and need support with more advanced questions. Nobody cares though, because we're 10%

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

#340

Post by throwaway83626 »

flashgordon wrote: post #257
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 .

True that. It I was thinking more about other products that are "lowish" scale and not ad driven. Especially SaaS products.

The problem with "lowish" scale SaaS products is often not creating them, but selling them. I work for a SaaS that has added a lot of features during the years, but the product 2 years ago could probably easily be created by a single dev in a couple of months and could be sellable as a product to a subset of the market today.

The reason why I don't create a simplified version of the SaaS and sell to customers is that the sales process itself is actually the hard part. You may get some sales from ads or phone calls, but you often need to sell it in person if you want to have enough customers to cover all the expenses. And if you want enterprise customers, the sales process is complex and time consuming

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