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

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301–310 of 409 posts

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

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

While sales is true for large enterprises, in SME and lower ones, it's users' wants and value-for-money that dominate. This domination can lead to nowhere, but quite occasionally, it leaks out as users move jobs and into positions of "power" in the larger enterprise, and choose their familiar software instead of the existing/encumbent ones.

Then these new startups get a foot hold, and become the dominant software, grow in size and learn how to B2B sale as well.

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

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big orgs have plenty of people that need to justify their salaries, I mean it, I'm 100% convinced you could fire half the staff of a big organization, going heavy with the management roles and lighter on operational ones and the company would become more productive and efficient. And the higher the people in the pyramid are the better they are at selling their ideas in their neverending quest for recognition, fat bon…

Twitter as an example, showed us that the staff really do matter

Shows that having H1Bs you can hold hostage lets you get away with anything. If it weren’t for their captive workforce they would have had far bigger problems than an unreliable service, rapidly declining user base, and imploding revenue.

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

#303
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 !

> 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 placed into a queue of one of five remaining humans who themselves are just reading a script.

The other day I had to beat the first barricade of AI chat to get in the human queue, and then it took them literally five hours to reply. I got a text at 1am.

There is nobody who when connected to some AI agent thinks “great this will solve my problems quickly!” It’s just “wow they figured out a new way to screw us”.

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

#304
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 !

An LLM can't explain the value of Salesforce?

Not until it can take you out for steaks, booze, and strippers.

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

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

> executives > honest capitalism

Pick two.

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

#306
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…

What hiding freeze ? I’ve seen SFDC hiring managers advertising positions on LinkedIn hiring SWEs as recently as last month

An HN article covered this topic last month. Currently, many job postings are either attempts to attract top-tier talent at minimal compensation or, in the worst cases, entirely fictitious positions.

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

#307
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And 80% of its value. Musk bought it at $44B. Fidelity recently used an internal valuation of $9.4B for their own shares in the company.

he bought presidency with it so it is not that bad of an investment. it is short-sighted to look at “twitter” value since he bought it, one should look his net worth since he bought it. even if closes it down tomorrow it will be money well spent

[deleted]

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

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is that capitalist dream—all sales, no production expenses.

Wouldn’t my business AI agent automatically talk with the salesforce AI agent and buy it automatically? Why would you need buyers or even sellers? Why even have humans in the loop at all for any business process or transaction. My understanding from all the magazines at my dentist office is that AI will replace the whole thing. What’s even the point of humans? It’s just AI bots jerking each other off all the way down…

There is no point in having humans, ideally we should end up with just Elon Musk and fully automated resource extraction and entertaining infrastructure to please him /s

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

#309
post #301

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…

While sales is true for large enterprises, in SME and lower ones, it's users' wants and value-for-money that dominate. This domination can lead to nowhere, but quite occasionally, it leaks out as users move jobs and into positions of "power" in the larger enterprise, and choose their familiar software instead of the existing/encumbent ones. Then these new startups get a foot hold, and become the dominant software, gr…

Very interesting, what are some good examples of this happening?

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

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean failed implementations? Like, they ask for a refund?

I think Salesforce’s customers typically sign an annual contract so not sure how the refunding thing works. Maybe they can ask Salesforce to do an “org swap” where they essentially start from scratch. (Some configuration options in the Salesforce platform are irreversible or difficult to undo. Example: Enabling “person accounts” in the data model.) What I meant by failed implementation is when the team that’s in char…

"I think Salesforce’s customers typically sign an annual contract so not sure how the refunding thing works."

"It is kind of similar to a story I have seen here on HN about Hertz (car rental company) having sued Accenture for a botched project that was supposed to help them improve the business’s website and to create mobile apps."

The main idea is that you sign a contract for some services in exchange for cash. And if the services are not provided, you don't need to pay the cash.

Depending on who has the advantage, (whether the contract was paid upfront or not), one party or the other can bring it to court, and similarly the other party can counterclaim.

In both cases the claim will be for "Breach of Contract". In my experience there is no expectation both parts of the contract have equal weigh and requirement for proof. It's not like you automatically win a case if you signed a contract, you need to show that you did the work, that client received what they asked, that you made no fraudulent representation to get them to sign. It's not as straightforward as, "they signed for 50K, therefore they owe 50K"

Of course this can be solved extrajudicially, through internal processes, but in general these processes follow the same logic as the courts of law (common law in this case), so the underlying legal case law is what shapes these refund policies.

IANAL

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