Awesome. Salesforce has always been shitty. I wonder how much this will accelerate their decline.
Headline in six months: Salesforce Hires Software Engineers After Realizing Middle Managers Don’t Know How To Turn AI-Generated Code Into Actual Applications
Being a software engineer is a hell of a lot more than just the actual act of writing code.
Maybe if we’d put LLM powered puppets in the meetings with management so developers can just continue with their actual work we’d get a lot more done.
I think that should be tried first. I really think Ai could replace them! (Especially CEOs)
The cost savings will be immense, productivity and innovation will no longer be impaired by incapable self centred arseholes playing political games, … I can see that working.
Knowing companies, they won’t realise anything and will just make their existing employees pick up the slack
Not before the 2025 headline Salesforce lays off 25% of software development staff.
Also the amount of management that doesn’t understand the difference between coders, programmers, and engineers. All quite different in scope and all completely necessary for at-scale production.
Wut?
123 active Software Engineering jobs listed.
Oh they’ll still fill positions it just means they’re going to contract.
Pretty sure that’s not what he meant in the podcast.
I’m a Salesforce admin. On a personal level I like it because it’s kind of a mess and I can spend time on random crap. That’s not to say that I think it’s GOOD.
Last week I had some issue and decided to give Agentforce a chance before opening a case. It rephrased a standard help page I had already read. I rephrased my question with more detail. It rephrased the same help page again. I opened a case.
Turns out what I was seeing was a known issue. Support gave me a link to the page and a fix was already pending. So the bot that they are using for case deflection doesn’t appear to search known issues at all. If you’re trying to get everyone to buy into a product, your implementation of it should be strikingly good at what it’s supposed to do.
But he went on to say: “We’re not adding any more software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with Agentforce and with other AI technology that we’re using for engineering teams by more than 30% – to the point where our engineering velocity is incredible. I can’t believe what we’re achieving in engineering.”
This announcement is just advertising for agentforce (their AI) they’re likely not being serious about it.
I’ll save you a click: AI bullshit.
As of Salesforce didn’t suck enough as is
Someone on HN said this is basically a cover for the fact that they’ve been in a hiring freeze since 2023.
They don’t want to ruin their reputation by having functional software.
bold strategy, let’s see if your shit platform can continue to compete when its barely working now.
Compete? They don’t need to compete. Their vendor lock in strategy is unbeatable. I have no idea how they continue to scam companies onto their platform, but I don’t know anyone that’s happy with it after a few years (except that one ass hat at every company that somehow keeps moving more business processes to it), and yet I’ve never seen any company successfully get off it.
Maybe they hired the political strategists that keep making most Americans vote against their self interests as their sales team
Yeah, who is there to compete with? (The somehow-way-worse) NetSuite?
Hubspot, klaviyo, Zen desk to name a few
Not to mention that Tableau is an awful product that will only continue to get worse.
And the costs for their shit products are astronomical.
Salesforce
I wish you the worst of luck, you are an awful company that makes finnicky garbage software. In my many years as an IT professional, I have never, at any point, heard anyone say anything positive about Salesforce, ever.
^expensive ^finicky ^garbage
Enterprise software is weeeeeeird. Salesforce, JIRA, Workday… these are terrible products by user standards. But they get purchased on other strengths, obviously. Compatibility with other shit software being high in the list. Configurability. Access control. Permissions roles. Some shit. I dunno. All I know is that every time we have to do something in Workday our HR department literally sends out a PowerPoint of step-by-step instructions on how to do it.
It’s all varying degrees of shitty, but Salesforce is a shit company. Not as bad as Oracle, but not good.
What are the best alternatives for large enterprise?
Pretty much just MS Dynamics. Or you build your own, that’s common too.
There are others, Zendesk has a CRM, some use ServiceNow or Hubspot but those don’t fit the same use case.
ServiceNow is absolute trash, search doesn’t even work
100% agree, it’s hot garbage. I have no idea how it’s lasted
I told my boss if they seriously consider SN for CRM or ticketing, I’m looking for work elsewhere. I won’t subject myself to that again
For which aspect? Sales force does so much that there isn’t a one product alternative. It is, however, cheaper for an enterprise to hire a team of web developers and build a custom in-house solution.
Our organization notified all they’re shifting to SAP HANA from salesforce. I have no clue what any of that means.
Oh you’re fucked.
It’s actually impressive. SAP has such an extensive suite of software they are capable of making any enterprise problem worse, more expensive, and less easy to integrate with any software not built by SAP.
CRM and Marketing
Marketing is a very broad term, what does that mean to you?
Constant contact and twilio might meet your needs depending on what they really are.
Fresh or in house, depending on what you need. Edit: Maybe Zendesk too
What’s Fresh? Freshworks? Never heard of them.
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.
Well, good luck!
I can’t wait for the AI bubble to burst. It’s going to be hilarious to see these kinds of CEOs falling flat on their faces. Unfortunately, it will not be the CEOs who will suffer the most from the consequences.
The funny thing is it’s easier to replace salespeople with AI than developers. They should be losing salespeople first!
No man, sales people are far more important to the bottom line. Profits first, then working product in the future. It’s genius, no way that model could go wrong
It’s not about business optimization, it’s about not having to defer to someone’s knowledge from the position of power.
AI bubble makes so much sense when you start looking at it this way.
I think it’s just that MBA types see engineering and support as costing money and sales as making money.
Precisely this. This is, in my view, the biggest lie American MBA schools forced down to the society: the notion that, if you can’t quantify the value of support and engineering then it does not matter. That is just a side effect of how limited accounting is as a tool to measure value and of how unimaginative accountants are, as a class of professionals.
Then MBA schools don’t directly say it but do condone the notion that one can always squeeze more profit from less cost, which works in the beginning but at the end throws the company into a potentially unrecoverable corner (Boeing), damaging people’s lives, suppliers’ businesses, and the community at large.
Agree, and “defer” can mean organizationally as in needing someone else’s input, knowledge, support, buy-in…vs. running an autocratic hierarchy, which the weak and stupid prefer. Defer also means acknowledging the value and contributions of others and compensating them accordingly.
If I had to boil a lot of the churn in the water about AI, it’s by stupid people trying to sell even stupider, desperate people the idea the immense knowledge of the earth (or even that of their accounting or customer service practices) will be within their grasp and they won’t need others anymore. Of course, some say great cut headcount, because they didn’t understand the work others do in the first place.
While most won’t fully take an approach as extreme, and any AI use will likely be more organic, there will be outliers who receive the bulk of the press.
Saying you don’t need X position in early 2025 based on the state of AI is like declaring in 1996 libraries are dead.
What does that mean? “Defer” “knowledge” “position” & “power” aren’t connecting in my head…
My read of it was “the C-suite hates when the engineers actually know how shit works, and the leadership must kowtow to the people doing the actual work.” YMMV or the commentor may have meant something completely different.
I hope it bursts soon. It’s not creating any hiring activity, which is what we little people in the industry need. But it is disruptively shifting things around and stealing funding from everything else as companies panic to put forth some kind of trash so they aren’t seen as being “behind.”
I have never interacted with an enterprise software salesperson as a customer. But I’ve had a ton of them as coworkers since I work in software development. Knowing them from the inside, so to speak, it is impossible for me to imagine how anyone takes them seriously. The only things they actually know or care about are their quota and bonus. How anyone bases a large cash spend on the things they say boggles my mind.
Lol that ain’t happening. They are doing this for short term gain. Line mus go up and ceo terms are medium term perfect for overstimulating their stock value and cashing out as they leave. The next ceo will come in to a crash in stock value and hard cuts are the only option.
So in this case, it’s good for devs as it’s only happening now while its early. gtfo while you can!
Its also worth mentioning this could be most likely more simple. Its a distraction from a sign of real financial trouble
Unless his close family member needs a job.
Maybe some dude in his mothers basement will use A.I to develop a good replacement for salesforce.
Is it because they would be bankrupt by the end of the year?
“Thousands of software engineers spared a living death. Film at 11.”
lol, one of our suppliers just changed to them 1.5 years ago.
Someone managed to fuck the portal software up so much that all the ö you type in a support case get replaced by o, both in the webview and the emails. The ä and ü work fine. It’s extra fucked.
And our support team sits in Germany, we write in German sometimes. When we use English it is only for the benefit of their Tier 3 guys.
Plus the implementation of two factor sign in is now delayed by half a year already. It seems to me more developers could be helpful
