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

Post by bhouston » Thu, Jan 09, 2025, 2:15 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #246

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…

The AI trough of trough of disillusionment is coming, and these hype-driven execs are going to feel it. There are relatively few techs that have a genuine use-case for it (copilot being an obvious example).

Post by blasphemers » Thu, Jan 09, 2025, 3:05 PM UTC

knifie_spoonie wrote: post #171

misiek08 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Twitter fired 70% of manpower and still works?

Unless I'm missing something, there's also been no innovation in their product at all. A company can only coast for so long.

Post by 93po » Thu, Jan 09, 2025, 3:09 PM UTC

jmward01 wrote: post #20

darth_avocado wrote: post #12

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

This looked a lot more like marketing than reality. If there was an article on 31 Dec 2025 that said 'Salesforce didn't hire any software engineers in 2025' I would probably have more interest in it.

Post by DangitBobby » Thu, Jan 09, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

anal_reactor wrote: post #339

griomnib wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thoug…

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, Jan 09, 2025, 3:44 PM UTC

indymike wrote: post #176

PaulHoule wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compensated proportional to the revenue they bring in close to the time they bring it in. (Operations cost) Very different from the software dev who gets paid today for revenue that might come in in two years. (Capital cost) The average person has no idea of how capital sees the world. A worker feels resentful if they get paid less per hour of input, a capitalist feels resentful when they get paid less per dollar of…

This is less about Marxist/capitalist and more about a change in regulation in the US that makes R&D expenses (dev headcount) amortized over five years (for taxes) versus sales being a straight-up expense. This one is going to be good for the stock price, and the AI Agent angle is a marketing masterpiece.