Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff(salesforceben.com)
salesforceben.com
Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff
https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-software-engineers-in-2025-says-marc-benioff/
408 comments
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.
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 software and always has been. Product-led growth in B2B has always been fantasy erotic-fiction outside of chat/notes apps.
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 software and always has been. Product-led growth in B2B has always been fantasy erotic-fiction outside of chat/notes apps.
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.
Then these new startups get a foot hold, and become the dominant software, grow in size and learn how to B2B sale as well.
Very interesting, what are some good examples of this happening?
Stack, Zoom, Trello, Dropbox, Canva, Notion, AirTable..
Asana, Figma, Miro, Box, Evernote, ClickUp, Basecamp, Zapier, HubSpot, Calendly, Shopify, WordPress
Asana, Figma, Miro, Box, Evernote, ClickUp, Basecamp, Zapier, HubSpot, Calendly, Shopify, WordPress
This is also the stated rationale for Cloudflare’s generous free tier. They build loyalty with hobby and side projects, and engineers take that familiarity to work with them.
DigitalOcean also had a strategy of going after the little guys/early phases of companies with their 5$ offering and lots of good free material/tutorials.
yes, Slack and github strategy. After Slack got big, it shrunk what it provides for open-source communities though. So, expect Cloudflare eventually switch.
atlassian is the big one - jira actually beat out basecamp (and fogbugz), despite them being quite similar at the beginning, and ousted the incumbent that is ibm rational suite and their ilk.
They did it by one simple trick - becoming the first ones who offered free license for open-sourcers. They invented this idea. After that, they needed to do nothing more, almost automatically becoming a monopoly.
I was there working for one of the early competitors who was thrown in the dust by that decision of Atlassian and was too late to realise they had to do the same - and folded two years later.
Being able to use company email on your personal devices and Mac laptops come to mind
> Sales is everything in B2B software and always has been. Product-led growth in B2B has always been fantasy erotic-fiction outside of chat/notes apps.
PLG creates the distribution to actually implement Sales effectively and at scale for B2B. Even those companies that originally were purely Sales-led now have a strong PLG component. PLG is far from be a fantasy, but now it's almost a must have motion to build distribution and long term healthy business viability considering also that Enterprise software is living a consumerization moment. Not to mention that the next generations of users and buyers buy and expect software to be different from the past, this is already happening.
PLG creates the distribution to actually implement Sales effectively and at scale for B2B. Even those companies that originally were purely Sales-led now have a strong PLG component. PLG is far from be a fantasy, but now it's almost a must have motion to build distribution and long term healthy business viability considering also that Enterprise software is living a consumerization moment. Not to mention that the next generations of users and buyers buy and expect software to be different from the past, this is already happening.
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?
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 as I do -not- see the value proposition and never have.
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).
That jives with my observations as well. What always had me deeply mystified was the near-religious conviction among small and medium sized nonprofits that they absolutely couldn't function without a feature complete clone of the kind of Salesforce integration that drove the ACLU, UNICEF, and International Rescue Committee websites. I'm like, y'all could cut your spend on web development by 70% if I could train someone to click a button once a week and import the resulting .csv into a spreadsheet. Crazy shit.
It’s a variant of ‘no one got fired for buying IBM’. Microsoft has a similar position now in their niche. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/duenablomstrom1/2018/11/30/nobo...]
Dreamforce is basically a cult gathering.
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
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
>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.
Is there any evidence to support this? It would imply that even their least promising employees would still pose a threat which seems unlikely.
What they really meant by this is: “Competing products [at peer companies]”.
This is still in effect, however the primary competing products at peer rivals is now “foundational ai”, and they need far less people and mostly people of a very specific skill sets of ML research, Inference Scaling, Hardware R&D, AI prompt engineering research. Also the cost to play is 10 billion minimum.
So Salesforce will perform rent seeking as long as their moat allows rather than gamble on foundational ai.
This is still in effect, however the primary competing products at peer rivals is now “foundational ai”, and they need far less people and mostly people of a very specific skill sets of ML research, Inference Scaling, Hardware R&D, AI prompt engineering research. Also the cost to play is 10 billion minimum.
So Salesforce will perform rent seeking as long as their moat allows rather than gamble on foundational ai.
time for a union
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I kind of expected that reply and it just sounds like cold fusion to me. "We'll tell you how it works some other time, what matters is that it's going to change the world!" It didn't.
The reason they can’t replace the pilots is due to liability. You think Salesforce will accept liability if the plane crashes?
That one's IBM but of course not. It's just snake oil.
Airlines are likely forced to have 2 pilots at all times for legal reasons, even if the pilots do absolutely nothing.
it is happening and lots of it. the reason you may not be seeing it is that people that have figured out how to properly monetise is sure as shit are not going to advertise it… once that are advertising are ones that haven’t yet figured out a way to do it…
There is no company-wide hiring freeze, but there’s teams/products/etc… who have them.
There’s other things going on though this will help spin.
There’s no way that productivity metric includes the last 2-4 months.
There’s other things going on though this will help spin.
There’s no way that productivity metric includes the last 2-4 months.
what happened in the last 2-4 months?
I'd also be interested to know what happened in the last 2-4 months.
Looks like it. The only other explanation is they just stopped investing in other products and focused on Agents, thus no need for loads more of engineering.
No way in the world they got 30% gains. 5 maybe realistically
No way in the world they got 30% gains. 5 maybe realistically
I recently had a refreshing conversation with a bank VP (head of AI), he said yes, they do see 30-40% improvement in "some" processes, so overall maybe 0.5-1% improvement.
So I'm betting they got 30% gains in e.g. "OCRing" and quote that, ignoring that the OCR part is 1% of an entire process chain.
So I'm betting they got 30% gains in e.g. "OCRing" and quote that, ignoring that the OCR part is 1% of an entire process chain.
Their ultimate agent product strategy feels like reducing cost of sales... by automating salespeople.
I have doubts that will ever happen, but who knows?
Sales folks are highly-compensated, so even making a few of them redundant (or making existing salespeople more efficient) would be a big win for companies (Salesforce's customers).
I have doubts that will ever happen, but who knows?
Sales folks are highly-compensated, so even making a few of them redundant (or making existing salespeople more efficient) would be a big win for companies (Salesforce's customers).
I think a lot of CEO were sales people.
Being in that field, they can see where LLMs would fail at it.
They can understand that you can’t just replace a sales team with LLMs.
They don’t have that for engineering…
Being in that field, they can see where LLMs would fail at it.
They can understand that you can’t just replace a sales team with LLMs.
They don’t have that for engineering…
Im an engineer. I see no reason why LLMs shouldn't already today replace most people in sales /s
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 investment. The Marxist viewpoint that they conflict directly is quite wrong: operations costs can be passed on to the consumer, but a capitalist is going to have to negotiate with their investors if they are having trouble with the bang/buck ratio of their investments.
(I'd had a job go really badly. A friend of mine said my problem was "I was only getting paid a fraction of the value that I create", I said "I tried getting paid more than the value I created and it ended in tears")
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 investment. The Marxist viewpoint that they conflict directly is quite wrong: operations costs can be passed on to the consumer, but a capitalist is going to have to negotiate with their investors if they are having trouble with the bang/buck ratio of their investments.
(I'd had a job go really badly. A friend of mine said my problem was "I was only getting paid a fraction of the value that I create", I said "I tried getting paid more than the value I created and it ended in tears")
Why do people think costs can get passed on? They can't be. Pricing is about supply elasticity and demand elasticity. Sometimes you just need to eat costs because of the competition.
Often though the competition is facing the same pressure. Or there is no competition.
My trainer at the gym introduced me to
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10245460B2/en?oq=1024546...
which sells for about $250 (worth it if you really use it.) My first instinct is that this product ought to be available for $25 on Temu if there wasn't a patent but I know from experience that if I talked to folks at TRX they'd have a good explanation of why my number is low. (e.g. TRX is in a position to pass costs on)
My trainer at the gym introduced me to
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10245460B2/en?oq=1024546...
which sells for about $250 (worth it if you really use it.) My first instinct is that this product ought to be available for $25 on Temu if there wasn't a patent but I know from experience that if I talked to folks at TRX they'd have a good explanation of why my number is low. (e.g. TRX is in a position to pass costs on)
I got one of those from walmart in like 2018 for like $20, still going strong
TRX won a lawsuit and you can't get one from Wal-Mart today
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/trx-obtains-federal...
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/trx-obtains-federal...
These are between $20 and $250, but having many different band resistance levels is useful:
https://gofit.net/collections/resistance-tubes-bands
There are plenty of cheaper no-name options on Amazon, but they have the property that the handles snap off during use, risking injury.
https://gofit.net/collections/resistance-tubes-bands
There are plenty of cheaper no-name options on Amazon, but they have the property that the handles snap off during use, risking injury.
TRX is a rigid band that doesn't stretch. You set the "resistance" by the angle of gravity relative to the band.
A TRX push-up puts less load on the primary path than a conventional push up but is very challenging to all the other muscles that it takes to not flop over when you do it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNuZWO0if5o
These days I'd trust AMZN less than Temu. At least Temu and sellers on Temu still want to win your trust. AMZN thinks they have it and will still think they have it long after it's lost.
A TRX push-up puts less load on the primary path than a conventional push up but is very challenging to all the other muscles that it takes to not flop over when you do it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNuZWO0if5o
These days I'd trust AMZN less than Temu. At least Temu and sellers on Temu still want to win your trust. AMZN thinks they have it and will still think they have it long after it's lost.
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.
It's a good point about changes in tax laws for software devs. Makes me glad I work for a non-profit (a rare non-pathological non-profit no less!)
For all the discussion about a soft job market for devs, the fact that the last Trump administration made a tax change that puts a target on our backs comes up rarely but it is part of the explanation.
For all the discussion about a soft job market for devs, the fact that the last Trump administration made a tax change that puts a target on our backs comes up rarely but it is part of the explanation.
The chance happened in 2023.
The investors are the capitalists. The C suite negotiator is petit bourgeoisie.
Customers will install agent interaction prevention agents to prevent the infinite onslaught.
Sales will still happen with dinner and handshakes.
Sales will still happen with dinner and handshakes.
Salespeople are typically compensated based on commissions. At least the well compensated ones are. Automation can make things easier and streamline the sales process, but because the sales rep is paid a percentage of the GP of a sale, automation doesn't really their take.
The company still pays that commission. If the company instead kept that money, it would be more profitable (or could lower the price of its product).
We can get into the nuances of advantageous tax treatment or not, but sales commissions come from somewhere and are essentially transaction costs.
We can get into the nuances of advantageous tax treatment or not, but sales commissions come from somewhere and are essentially transaction costs.
There's probably space for AI secretaries to screen contacts and to drop AI sales.
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Indeed, it's marketing slop as a pretense for a hiring freeze.
This kind of smokescreen only works for so long. Once it all starts failing and profits dip, things will change.
Thanks for sharing the inside info. Companies think they are being clever.
This hiring freeze has not stopped Salesforce from acquisitions. I suppose this means that instead of investing in their current products, they're just going to buy existing ones instead.
According to Wikipedia the companies they have purchased since 2023: Airkit.ai, Spiff, Own, PredictSpring, Tenyx.
According to Wikipedia the companies they have purchased since 2023: Airkit.ai, Spiff, Own, PredictSpring, Tenyx.
What hiding freeze ?
I’ve seen SFDC hiring managers advertising positions on LinkedIn hiring SWEs as recently as last month
I’ve seen SFDC hiring managers advertising positions on LinkedIn hiring SWEs as recently as last month
Is agentforce working at all? Any practical use-cases beyond the customer support one?
I guess in any case, after this statement by the CEO...There will be no more good quality candidates applying anyway.
I really don't care generally if a business feels the need to hype things like this - but these kinds of announcements have downstream effects on salaries and job availability far outside a company like this. Other management/C-suites are gonna hear "we replaced all our engineers with AI!" and similarly slow down hiring/etc. This is already being seen throughout the industry, I am aware, but such a visible player making an announcement like this, while it almost certainly is just marketing, drives me a little crazy because it indirectly affects a lot of people.
If a company exec is stupid enough to not hire when there has been no demonstrated replacement for the engineers, they are likely going to drive the company into the ground in short order.
I don’t believe that companies would be stupid enough to kneecap their own growth because a SaaS company that has stopped innovating 5 years ago decided they are happy with their current headcount and used AI as an excuse.
I don’t believe that companies would be stupid enough to kneecap their own growth because a SaaS company that has stopped innovating 5 years ago decided they are happy with their current headcount and used AI as an excuse.
> If a company exec is stupid enough to not hire when there has been no demonstrated replacement for the engineers, they are likely going to drive the company into the ground in short order.
Who cares when they'll just float away on a golden parachute to the next company that will overpay them to make terrible decisions. Executives will happily jump at any excuse to lower wages, cut jobs, and pocket the money they saved while raising their prices. Making it harder for people to find work because of layoffs and hiring freezes just means that if AI under-delivers (and it always does), they can just hire on a bunch of new people later at lower wages thanks to the larger pool of people looking for work.
Who cares when they'll just float away on a golden parachute to the next company that will overpay them to make terrible decisions. Executives will happily jump at any excuse to lower wages, cut jobs, and pocket the money they saved while raising their prices. Making it harder for people to find work because of layoffs and hiring freezes just means that if AI under-delivers (and it always does), they can just hire on a bunch of new people later at lower wages thanks to the larger pool of people looking for work.
What if a disgruntled software engineer shoots them in the back one day without warning??
Oh plenty of company are stupid enough, good thing that they eventually disintegrate.
Sure, but it's either true or it's not. If they fall for the hype, the company will pay the price for it eventually.
(And it's not true - if you could "replace engineers with AI" we engineers would have already done it and be relaxing while AI does our work)
(And it's not true - if you could "replace engineers with AI" we engineers would have already done it and be relaxing while AI does our work)
> Sure, but it's either true or it's not. If they fall for the hype, the company will pay the price for it eventually.
Sure, but I don't care about these companies - I care about my career and the opportunities available to me in the next 1-5 years. If these opportunities are tainted by false claims about AI capabilities - that is a huge problem to me. It is irrelevant to me whether the company eventually suffers for it, because that doesn't reimburse my "damages" (if they exist).
I agree with you though, and to be clear I absolutely do not believe this is anything but marketing hype - If anyone was actually doing what they claimed we'd be seeing evidence of it. I have yet, to this day, to see any evidence of such claims. If you say "30% productivity" without saying how you measured that and the methods you used, I can instantly call BS and rest easy at night. Lots of similar claims seem the same way.
"outstanding claims require outstanding evidence" or something like that.
Sure, but I don't care about these companies - I care about my career and the opportunities available to me in the next 1-5 years. If these opportunities are tainted by false claims about AI capabilities - that is a huge problem to me. It is irrelevant to me whether the company eventually suffers for it, because that doesn't reimburse my "damages" (if they exist).
I agree with you though, and to be clear I absolutely do not believe this is anything but marketing hype - If anyone was actually doing what they claimed we'd be seeing evidence of it. I have yet, to this day, to see any evidence of such claims. If you say "30% productivity" without saying how you measured that and the methods you used, I can instantly call BS and rest easy at night. Lots of similar claims seem the same way.
"outstanding claims require outstanding evidence" or something like that.
The company will pay the price for it eventually but workers will pay the price right away.
It is the general insecurity about new tech although I haven't seen a single job being replaced by AI yet. And I also think the market for SWE is still very good though. And the only ones that use AI on a large scale for that matter.
Salesforce came into discussion as a CRM solution for us, but the salesman was so arrogant that he was quickly booted out. If first thought it would be nice to develop against a more modern system, but today I am glad we never jumped on that train. And I hear it devolved into the same mess that CRM systems somehow always seem to be.
Salesforce came into discussion as a CRM solution for us, but the salesman was so arrogant that he was quickly booted out. If first thought it would be nice to develop against a more modern system, but today I am glad we never jumped on that train. And I hear it devolved into the same mess that CRM systems somehow always seem to be.
Good. This sector could use of a change of leadership. If it takes a few rough years and some failed businesses then so be it.
I think there's a case to be made that the AI boom will require more engineers in the short term, not less. Think of the myriad of features AI capabilities open for any product, not to mention a CRM platform like salesforce.
As for the time it saves-Sure, AI saves plenty of time, but in a big company most of the time isn't spent on coding. It's spent on collaboration, code reviews, meetings, debugging, looking at production logs, using internal tools, etc.
As for the time it saves-Sure, AI saves plenty of time, but in a big company most of the time isn't spent on coding. It's spent on collaboration, code reviews, meetings, debugging, looking at production logs, using internal tools, etc.
Well to the extent that this happens (I agree it probably has this effect) that would benefit them anyway and I suspect they know about it.
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’t believe the number of slide decks I had to sit through with all our little product logos orbiting this stock art character straight out of Women Laughing While Eating Salad.
2022: Never mind, now we’re betting the company on a real-time unified database called Genie, which was neither real-time nor unified (and eventually not called Genie either). Got sued for that one.
2024: AGENTS. AGENTS EVERYWHERE. WE ARE AN AGENT COMPANY NOW.
So, let’s see how this holds up in the face of the next hot thing.
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’t believe the number of slide decks I had to sit through with all our little product logos orbiting this stock art character straight out of Women Laughing While Eating Salad.
2022: Never mind, now we’re betting the company on a real-time unified database called Genie, which was neither real-time nor unified (and eventually not called Genie either). Got sued for that one.
2024: AGENTS. AGENTS EVERYWHERE. WE ARE AN AGENT COMPANY NOW.
So, let’s see how this holds up in the face of the next hot thing.
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 are paying $500+ per user per month for a shitty web UI on top of 4 database tables.
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 are paying $500+ per user per month for a shitty web UI on top of 4 database tables.
I wasn't sure whether "NFT Cloud" was real or parody so had to look it up. 2022 but it's in the official history https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/the-history-of-sales... noted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31666887
According to the numbers in that link, their nominal revenue per employee flattened out shortly after IPO up until it stops listing them in 2020.
I imagine getting that ratio up is important, especially with recent inflation.
I imagine getting that ratio up is important, especially with recent inflation.
> 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.
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...
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...
Salesforce’s product is technically is a relational database. Maybe it doesn’t perfectly fit the relational model that Edgar Codd theorized, but I don’t think any widely used database product does.
A crucial aspect of the relational database is that the tables have columns which refer to another table (e.g. AccountId) and this what they call “lookup relationships” or “master-detail relationships” in Salesforce.
Also, I recently learned that SQL has triggers too in case you want the same procedure to take place after an INSERT, UPDATE, etc.
A crucial aspect of the relational database is that the tables have columns which refer to another table (e.g. AccountId) and this what they call “lookup relationships” or “master-detail relationships” in Salesforce.
Also, I recently learned that SQL has triggers too in case you want the same procedure to take place after an INSERT, UPDATE, etc.
In Salesforce everything is an API call with hard limits eg you can only return 200 records unless you hit the bulk api.
JOINS do not exist in Salesforce. Instead you have to create bridge tables. Even then you can only traverse a max of three objects at a time.
Please do not try to use Salesforce as a general database, you are only putting yourself in a world of hurt.
JOINS do not exist in Salesforce. Instead you have to create bridge tables. Even then you can only traverse a max of three objects at a time.
Please do not try to use Salesforce as a general database, you are only putting yourself in a world of hurt.
I'm old enough to remember when Dreamforce was "The Largest Internet of Things Conference".
Don’t forget IOT Cloud back when IOT was a thing. I think I was one of the first 10 people holding that certification. I really liked the architecture but the product sort of went nowhere. After learning about data cloud I feel like a lot of that architecture (iirc it was called Thunder) wound up in data cloud.
I think silicon labs uses salesforce for their iot cloud. The iot cloud - globally - is gigantic, and a requirement for any embedded iot device with a radio.
That's why the Irish pronounce it "Salesfarce"
Salesmen selling to other salesmen.
Poe's Law being what it is, I had to double check, and Salesforce indeed has official marketing/landing pages for these.
… on top of circa 1997 Java syntax …
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.
Ergonomics have value in itself, dressing up DBs in good ergonomics around some applied use-cases has quite some value for companies to not have to deal with edge cases that email + spreadsheets will suffer from at scale, that's also why I do not understand Salesforce.
The products are clunky, difficult to integrate/use/deploy, a lot of times they simply don't work or require an immense amount of effort to be barely workable. It's really hard to understand the value proposition, I guess they might have very good salespeople reaching out to the right clueless people to pitch.
The products are clunky, difficult to integrate/use/deploy, a lot of times they simply don't work or require an immense amount of effort to be barely workable. It's really hard to understand the value proposition, I guess they might have very good salespeople reaching out to the right clueless people to pitch.
You're just mad you didn't invent it first!
This is the most accurate comment. This is how Salesforce works. That said there revenue continues to grow and they continue to pivot to the new trend in their marketing. The underlying business and most of the software they are actually selling remains the same just wrapped up in different and new marketing each year. It works well as a strategy.
But this IS the strategy. One thing after another, giving perception that SF is "leading" the way and enterprise customers continue to listen to the SF sales reps who just need to tell the story, so on and on it goes. :)
It sounds like one of those big companies that's just very well hooked up to the institutional money printers and the main challenge for them is making up narratives to justify the money that's flowing into their coffers unconditionally.
It's telling that Benioff used to work at Oracle.
It's telling that Benioff used to work at Oracle.
Interesting. This little stunt very much reminded me of Oracle.
Yeah. I got the evil eye when I told my company Genie aka Data Cloud is nothing more than a ETL and data warehouse for the different SF clouds. The SF director at my company went on a rant on how stupid I was. It was a déjà vu moment for me. I had SF and Microsoft account reps go ballistic when I informed my bosses of my opinion of their shitty products.
https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.c360_a_data_...
https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.c360_a_data_...
This is exactly correct. This is Salesforce's 3rd or 4th rebranding of Customer Data Platform, which has never taken off. This latest positioning is targeting Snowflake.
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 bonuses and promotions.
And once they get them, more often than not by doing pointless and even harmful work, they can then leverage it by jumping to another company.
Gervais' principle at its finest.
And the higher the people in the pyramid are the better they are at selling their ideas in their neverending quest for recognition, fat bonuses and promotions.
And once they get them, more often than not by doing pointless and even harmful work, they can then leverage it by jumping to another company.
Gervais' principle at its finest.
The problem is that there's no outside way to tell which 50% is the useless half. It's just like marketing budget.
As someone who was spent 5+ years in one of their many acquired companies, SFDC management has a reasonably accurate sense of their best performing staff.
However, line and middle SFDC managers are partly evaluated based on the size of their orgs. This obviously leads to perverse incentives to bloat one's org; the loss of fiefdom then leads to loss of promotion opportunity and even employment.
However, line and middle SFDC managers are partly evaluated based on the size of their orgs. This obviously leads to perverse incentives to bloat one's org; the loss of fiefdom then leads to loss of promotion opportunity and even employment.
If you can fire half of the people at a big company, you could also erase half the small startups with no impact as well.
I would think most people would take that for granted. Small startups are often "pre-impact" (or "pre-failure", situation depending..)
Those startups take care of that themselves.
Twitter as an example, showed us that the staff really do matter
I feel like Twitter is a bit of a Rorschach test. If you want to “keep the lights on” you can get away with mass layoffs, but your revenues and product development sure do suffer.
I think you’re going to see a lot of tech companies adopt a less acute version of this strategy unfortunately
I think you’re going to see a lot of tech companies adopt a less acute version of this strategy unfortunately
It's another form taken by enshittification to squeeze more money from the business. Employees are the largest cost center. If a business can get away with less innovation then they will get rid of and hire less staff to maintain their margin.
Realistically, this is a delicate balancing act. As others have noted, the Sales and PR game then (and always) drives the new and existing monies that come in.
Realistically, this is a delicate balancing act. As others have noted, the Sales and PR game then (and always) drives the new and existing monies that come in.
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.
Let's not forget the cheaper out-/"near"-sourced employees. Geographic arbitrage to save on the cost of staff.
To be fair, they became a lot more efficient if the goal was to streamline propaganda and bot adoption
I thought Twitter fired 70% of manpower and still works?
It also lost 70% of its revenue.
The deal still has me scratching my head. They tossed out the brand name and logo. Elon already had the X name and domain. For much less than $44B I feel like you could clone Twitter and come up with a strategy to acquire users. Hell, for $1 billion you could probably pay a good number of influencers to move to your platform. $44 billion is an absolute fuckton of money to kill Twitter and move those people to your pet project.
> $44 billion is an absolute fuckton of money to kill Twitter and move those people to your pet project.
What's the point of having Fuck You Money if you can't say "Fuck You?" Your value assessment isn't taking into account the value of destroying old Twitter, of removing a major bullhorn in the information environment away from people that Musk probably considers adversaries at best, and malevolent actors at worst. Simply standing up his own competing platform would not have accomplished this.
What's the point of having Fuck You Money if you can't say "Fuck You?" Your value assessment isn't taking into account the value of destroying old Twitter, of removing a major bullhorn in the information environment away from people that Musk probably considers adversaries at best, and malevolent actors at worst. Simply standing up his own competing platform would not have accomplished this.
It's weird that everyone and their mum "could" clone twitter easily. And yet the only products of note that's more than dismissive hackernews comments/slideware with something in production at similar scale was meta with threads and that's still inferior in terms of search and discoverability and scaffolded with the guts of Instagram and bluesky which has the advantage of being founded by Jack Dorsey and has been around for years now. For all the big talk musk et al have I'm not sure they could actually have built a clone. You can pay influencers but if we look at how dominant tiktok is/was making buzz and content is more of an outcome of a bunch of incentivisations and the kind of non technical community management stuff people dismiss as marketing than throwing money at all the big names you can find.
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
Next-level elon defense here.
“Elon made an obvious mistake? Oh no, newb. Look on this other indicator that reinforces my bias.”
“Elon made an obvious mistake? Oh no, newb. Look on this other indicator that reinforces my bias.”
not bias but facts :) he took over twitter, made it into right-wing propaganda machine, changed algorithm during the election campaign ... it is short-sighted to not take into account that he basically bought dissemination of public information and single-handedly swayed the election. if you think he bought twitter to make money off it I have some crypto to sell to you :)
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That's gotta be the most inefficient way to start a microblog at effectively elonmusk.com
That's less an issue of a lack of manpower and more the result of one person up top pushing everyone away. A less annoying owner could lay off 70% of the staff without gutting revenue.
Though Elon Musk's purchase of the company was entirely in his own self-interest, and unfortunately, it's serving him well so far. Buying a company for a fraction of his personal wealth and leveraging that into having the president as his personal servant is one of the greatest investments in American history.
Though Elon Musk's purchase of the company was entirely in his own self-interest, and unfortunately, it's serving him well so far. Buying a company for a fraction of his personal wealth and leveraging that into having the president as his personal servant is one of the greatest investments in American history.
That's unrelated to the staff trim.
Unless I'm missing something, there's also been no innovation in their product at all. A company can only coast for so long.
Was there innovation in the twitter product pre-elon?
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The opposite, I think. It showed us how bloated the average tech corp actual is. Musk may have went too far with his cuts, but directionally I believe he’s right.
Seems like an odd takeaway to me - they fired 90% of their staff and now pump out new features way more quickly than old Twitter.
What features? Only updates I ever hear is various security features getting disabled/going dead and various tech demos getting checked out/failing.
The hard part is figuring out which half. And figuring out who the right people to make those decisions.
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).
Salesforce will just pivot in its marketing again. They latch on to the latest trend and drop it as soon as it isn't hot any more. They have constantly done this, it is their operating procedure.
Saleforce did not really suffer when NFTs died or blockchain become uncool because by then they had a new trend to promote.
Saleforce did not really suffer when NFTs died or blockchain become uncool because by then they had a new trend to promote.
yep salesforce has quite the track record of making bold marketing claims until the next hot thing shows up.
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.
The little github-styled Einstein was unforgettably cringe
"Einstein" references are always incredibly ironic considering how much of a socialist the guy was.
They apparently paid $20 million for the use of Einstein's image: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-27/salesforc...
TIL that the likeness of Einstein was licensed. Proceeds go to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which is fitting considering his support and investment:
"Albert Einstein is one of the founders of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. To him, the university represented a combination of the commitment to his Jewish identity and his belief in the universal values of the pursuit of truth and respect for every human being."
No paywall link: https://archive.is/2024.03.27-141124/https://www.bloomberg.c...
"Albert Einstein is one of the founders of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. To him, the university represented a combination of the commitment to his Jewish identity and his belief in the universal values of the pursuit of truth and respect for every human being."
No paywall link: https://archive.is/2024.03.27-141124/https://www.bloomberg.c...
I had no idea. That his likeness is still protected IP so long after he died really drives home just how utterly broken the current IP law is.
It’s sad they are so far off mission these days.
On the one hand, about 8% of their students are from Palestine. On the other, they’ve repeatedly retaliated against students and faculty members for protesting and making anti-genocide statements, and the university is on Boycott Divest Sanction lists.
On the one hand, about 8% of their students are from Palestine. On the other, they’ve repeatedly retaliated against students and faculty members for protesting and making anti-genocide statements, and the university is on Boycott Divest Sanction lists.
How is this not the top comment?
There isn't a better topic for tech CEOs to focus on, it's pathetic for the world.
Part of their sales drive. We are absolutely assaulted by their sales reps trying to sell agentforce. They wine and dine non-technical executives and push the "ai agents will do everything" story. He is just reinforcing this narrative. Nothing to see here.
Plan is that others will need to hire expensive Salesforce consultants anyway. I don’t think they are getting rid of those people.
The plan is also to force existing customers to re-negotiate their existing long term contracts (many made on favourable terms a few years ago) to include the agentforce and data cloud stuff.
The window of opportunity for this is now: people seem to believe the 'agents' are something really quite new and different, and we haven't yet reached the peak of the hype curve. (Whereas in the boring, backwards enterprise companies salesforce is very active in we are past the peak hype for LLMs/RAGs and its hard to sell that).
A bit ironic he says he will hire 2k+ sales staff though, considering part of their pitch for agentforce is it will handle any customer interactions, sales included.
The window of opportunity for this is now: people seem to believe the 'agents' are something really quite new and different, and we haven't yet reached the peak of the hype curve. (Whereas in the boring, backwards enterprise companies salesforce is very active in we are past the peak hype for LLMs/RAGs and its hard to sell that).
A bit ironic he says he will hire 2k+ sales staff though, considering part of their pitch for agentforce is it will handle any customer interactions, sales included.
Well it would be lonely out there if all of the company is CEO and rest automated agents. Some shareholders might even ask why they need a CEO.
I feel the sudden urge to become certified as an Agentforce consultant
nice, strategic reduction in workforce growth that accomplishes a similar outcome to a layoff: controlling headcount to optimize margins and account for market conditions, disguised as sales and marketing. A++
《 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 !
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
"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.
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.
> 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.
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”.
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”.
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%
You do realize there are other reasons to need service than tech support right? Like having to fight an insurance company to get the life saving medical care you pay them thousands of dollars for?
Is there any data to back this up?
Believing you are smarter than 90% of people is the “data”.
Somehow their "agent" AI can't do sales? Can't run email/call scripts? Can't track things in their own CRM?
Huh. So they are telling customers that they'll make their work more AI driven while staffing up their own human sales?
Huh. So they are telling customers that they'll make their work more AI driven while staffing up their own human sales?
Do their customers value sales more than engineering? It seems like a self-consistent pitch if so.
Let's assume they do. They value sales, they believe Salesforce's pitch that the SF AI will reduce their sales cost.
Yet Salesforce themselves is hiring more people vs simply dogfooding their own AI agents.
Yet Salesforce themselves is hiring more people vs simply dogfooding their own AI agents.
Engineers aren't hot chicks that show up with sandwiches.
Put in AI to justify saving on support staff. Then hire more people to convince customers the AI is actually just as good as speaking to a real human...
It feels like mixed messaging about whether AI is actually good.
It feels like mixed messaging about whether AI is actually good.
The classic tell, don't show.
If they really wanted to back it, they'd use AI salespeople.
Classic solution in search of a problem thinking. "It's not that our solution isn't wanted, our customers just need to get it!"
An LLM can't explain the value of Salesforce?
Not until it can take you out for steaks, booze, and strippers.
Sadly status quo of the vast majority of enterprise software companies, at least after growth starts to flatten out.
That is that capitalist dream—all sales, no production expenses.
Ideally there would be no sales expenses either
They never seem to talk about what happens when the the dream is ubiquitously realized and nobody is left to buy whatever it they are selling because their production expenses fund someone else's sales.
At least it will be interesting to see which pushes civilization off the cliff first, end-game capitalism ouroborosing itself or the direct impact of climate change (which is obviously also related in any case).
At least it will be interesting to see which pushes civilization off the cliff first, end-game capitalism ouroborosing itself or the direct impact of climate change (which is obviously also related in any case).
>They never seem to talk about what happens when the the dream is ubiquitously realized and nobody is left to buy whatever it they are selling because their production expenses fund someone else's sales.
"If we replace 95% percent of farmers with tractors, who's going to buy all the food that's being grown?"
"If we replace 95% percent of farmers with tractors, who's going to buy all the food that's being grown?"
I'm guessing your intended subtext is something like: "eliminating jobs isn't bad or permanent since new kinds of jobs may be created elsewhere", but I don't think this satire/analogy works well.
Historically speaking farmers didn't buy much food to start with, since they already had it or traded locally with their neighbors. It was everybody else (e.g. city artisans) who bought food, and they have kept buying it because all humans need to eat regardless of where--or whether--they are employed.
Since bayarearefugee is talking about a scenario where the "dream is ubiquitously realized", that implies any new future job-categories are also eliminated. No jobs for repairing the foreman-bots that direct the repair-bots.
Historically speaking farmers didn't buy much food to start with, since they already had it or traded locally with their neighbors. It was everybody else (e.g. city artisans) who bought food, and they have kept buying it because all humans need to eat regardless of where--or whether--they are employed.
Since bayarearefugee is talking about a scenario where the "dream is ubiquitously realized", that implies any new future job-categories are also eliminated. No jobs for repairing the foreman-bots that direct the repair-bots.
There will always be jobs even if production increasing workers arent needed. If the capital owners can create massive wealth without labor they will always be willing to part with some of it to have concubines, personal chefs, chess trainers for their children, gladiators or whatever other nonsense gets their rocks off.
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More like "If 93% of people only have 7% of the wealth, and 12 guys have the 93% of wealth, how are we going to sell anything?!"
Not really a clever observation on your part, this is the trite response everyone trots out but where it fails is in scope. We aren't talking about replacing 95% of a particular job (which has happened many times in the past over a long period of time), we are talking about replacing 95% of all people (in a relatively short period of time).
And on top of that situation, we are also demanding unlimited growth. Good luck with that.
And on top of that situation, we are also demanding unlimited growth. Good luck with that.
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!
…now my head hurts.
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!
…now my head hurts.
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
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 engineers at Salesforce weren't even allowed to use AI.
I also don't know how he is pulling the "AI is making our engineers 30% more effective" stat when last I checked software engineers at Salesforce weren't even allowed to use AI.
"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
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
Internally they are allowed. There are internal productivity tools (IDE Plugins, APIs, Frameworks, Chat) with homegrown models (in the press) and the ability to switch to other models. The various models are integrated throughout the engineering tools and Slack.
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.
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.
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Anecdotally, I'd say AI assistants have probably improved my coding productivity by 30%
So maybe it's true at salesforce too?
So maybe it's true at salesforce too?
I tried to buy Pro Tools a few years ago. Avid was using a SalesForce system, which is such a monumental piece of trash that they couldn't complete the transaction. The attempt involved weeks of back-&-forth, mind-bogglingly incompetent and defective. They ended up giving me a temporary license because they thought I had a project to complete.
SalesForce, SAP, and the other purveyors of steaming legacy enterprise excrement simply point the finger at the client when end-users can't accomplish basic tasks with their systems. And of course they're prime go-tos for government work. I don't wish unemployment on their people; but the faster their monolithic junk fades away, the better.
SalesForce, SAP, and the other purveyors of steaming legacy enterprise excrement simply point the finger at the client when end-users can't accomplish basic tasks with their systems. And of course they're prime go-tos for government work. I don't wish unemployment on their people; but the faster their monolithic junk fades away, the better.
Everywhere I've worked at that had some kind of Salesforce integration, that integration seemed almost incomprehensibly complex or a source of endless problems, and often both. But I've never been (nor wanted to be) very closely involved with any such integrations.
Is Salesforce garbage? Is that just how CRM systems are? Is everybody just doing it wrong? What's the deal?
Is Salesforce garbage? Is that just how CRM systems are? Is everybody just doing it wrong? What's the deal?
> Is that just how CRM systems are? Is everybody just doing it wrong? What's the deal?
These kinds of tools cover 80% of what you want to do out-of-the-box.
For the remaining 20% to build it correctly you need to either hire expensive consultants or hire in-house staff to build.
Nobody budgets properly for this, and it isn't in the sales pitch, and so that last 20% is built as horrible spaghetti code by the cheapest possible devs / consultants.
Even if you wanted to pay good salaries and hire people in-house how many great engineers want to be limited to programming in Apex on salesforce?
These kinds of tools cover 80% of what you want to do out-of-the-box.
For the remaining 20% to build it correctly you need to either hire expensive consultants or hire in-house staff to build.
Nobody budgets properly for this, and it isn't in the sales pitch, and so that last 20% is built as horrible spaghetti code by the cheapest possible devs / consultants.
Even if you wanted to pay good salaries and hire people in-house how many great engineers want to be limited to programming in Apex on salesforce?
I've only been involved with such Salesforce integrations at one company, but based on that, I can give you my take. I'd be interested to hear others'.
One, the salesforce data changes all occur through APIs (ok) which various enterprise integration tools (Informatica, Mulesoft, etc) support (ok), but those tools typically dont support easy options for retrying a change to a specific row that causes an error. If you are updating 100 Accounts in a single Salesforce Bulk API call and "5" are busy/locked, you have to build a lot of custom error handling to notice and retry just those 5 rows. Its not part of most connectors or python libraries I've seen. Also, 3 of those errors might be fatal and 2 might be retriable but you have to learn which are which or blindly retry them all. In database terms, their API transactional semantics are not statement by statement ACID but row by row within an API request.
Second, no API or SOQL operations can pull back or process or update more than 50,000 rows.
Given those two things, unless the integration person is skilled about both error handling and testing, some of the object busy/contention failures only show up in production traffic with many jobs going on so a generic integration specialist doesn't know about these Salesforce-specific pitfalls and they are discovered after the integration goes live under strange production access patterns.
EDIT: a third issue is that most Salesforce developers are UI-centric in their thinking and training and don't have database or data modeling or data integration experience to draw on so the troubleshooting for data issues on their end tends to suffer.
One, the salesforce data changes all occur through APIs (ok) which various enterprise integration tools (Informatica, Mulesoft, etc) support (ok), but those tools typically dont support easy options for retrying a change to a specific row that causes an error. If you are updating 100 Accounts in a single Salesforce Bulk API call and "5" are busy/locked, you have to build a lot of custom error handling to notice and retry just those 5 rows. Its not part of most connectors or python libraries I've seen. Also, 3 of those errors might be fatal and 2 might be retriable but you have to learn which are which or blindly retry them all. In database terms, their API transactional semantics are not statement by statement ACID but row by row within an API request.
Second, no API or SOQL operations can pull back or process or update more than 50,000 rows.
Given those two things, unless the integration person is skilled about both error handling and testing, some of the object busy/contention failures only show up in production traffic with many jobs going on so a generic integration specialist doesn't know about these Salesforce-specific pitfalls and they are discovered after the integration goes live under strange production access patterns.
EDIT: a third issue is that most Salesforce developers are UI-centric in their thinking and training and don't have database or data modeling or data integration experience to draw on so the troubleshooting for data issues on their end tends to suffer.
I have been there and done that. In a complex SF org with a lot of triggers, any record update will get blocked.
The only solution is to refactor all the apex triggers processes and flows to something more orderly. Technically it is doable. Politically it is almost impossible. SF is an ERP in most companies and touches every department.
The only solution is to refactor all the apex triggers processes and flows to something more orderly. Technically it is doable. Politically it is almost impossible. SF is an ERP in most companies and touches every department.
Salesforce definitely makes it easy to screw yourself with customization. It’s a very complex beast.
The regular REST api has request scoped transactions. Only the bulk api has the issues you describe. The bulk api is kind of a special thing annyway and has its quirks. The regular REST api works more like what you’d expect.
Great point. That said, the remaining problem is that regular API calls dont scale/perform well for integrations between systems involving lots of data syncing. A few records? Fine. Many? Not so much.
I would love to be wrong on this.
I would love to be wrong on this.
Yeah pushing or pulling large, according to salesforce, numbers of records is definitely harder than it should be. On the “push” side you have row lock errors and no way to disable APEX based triggers unless you’ve designed that into the code itself. On the pull side, if you’re trying to extract a large number of records and your soql query times out you’re out of luck. SF is good about creating custom indexes for you through a support case but it takes time. Even then, on the order of millions of records it’s still difficult.
My day job is implementing large SF projects. Multi-million record data migrations arent unusual. Even if the data is clean and mapped the migrations take weeks of planning. We go over every inch of the setup to make sure we have the best chance of getting a clean load on try #1. However, we schedule for 3 trial loads and verification before a “go live load” into actual production. Even after all that it’s still an all nighter with contingency plans and c-suite cell numbers on deck.
My day job is implementing large SF projects. Multi-million record data migrations arent unusual. Even if the data is clean and mapped the migrations take weeks of planning. We go over every inch of the setup to make sure we have the best chance of getting a clean load on try #1. However, we schedule for 3 trial loads and verification before a “go live load” into actual production. Even after all that it’s still an all nighter with contingency plans and c-suite cell numbers on deck.
Salesforce has the ability for users to define their own bespoke data models. This modeling is nearly always done by sales people who may or may not be good at sales, but are almost never good at data modeling - not an insult, simply stating that data modeling isn't their job - and so the models are almost always a mess. The problems flow from there
The actual Salesforce core products are very good. Their documentation is well written. The Salesforce flow low code tool works well.
Their overly complex object/row/field permissions is a hot mess. Mulesoft is limited; there is a reason why they tried to buy Informatica.
Their marketing and hype machine hurts their credibility imo.
Their overly complex object/row/field permissions is a hot mess. Mulesoft is limited; there is a reason why they tried to buy Informatica.
Their marketing and hype machine hurts their credibility imo.
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If I were on the Salesforce BoD I wouldn't be impressed.
Let's see Benioff put his money where his mouth is, replace some C-suite seats with AI agents. Those are the really expensive salaries, and if AI is as smart as he claims it's downright reckless and negligent not to do this.
Let's see Benioff put his money where his mouth is, replace some C-suite seats with AI agents. Those are the really expensive salaries, and if AI is as smart as he claims it's downright reckless and negligent not to do this.
The point of this announcement is to boost sales, not to save costs. He's selling AI hype. The only thing that matters if customers are buying the hype, not the reality of AI's limitations which I'm sure the board is well aware of.
> He's selling AI hype
AI hype is exactly what I'm talking about.
I imagine if you demonstrate that you can have AI agents as viciously competitive COOs, CFOs, and CTOs, who never need time off, never sleep, it would be something that would set Wall Street on fire.
AI hype is exactly what I'm talking about.
I imagine if you demonstrate that you can have AI agents as viciously competitive COOs, CFOs, and CTOs, who never need time off, never sleep, it would be something that would set Wall Street on fire.
I'm surprised this has caught on yet... Well, not really I suppose -- for obvious power-tripping reasons.
However, I could see the issue of AI 'hallucinations' being a non-issue in this domain because many in C-Suite positions have been 'hallucinating' for decades.
However, I could see the issue of AI 'hallucinations' being a non-issue in this domain because many in C-Suite positions have been 'hallucinating' for decades.
That seems like it might actually work though.
A company as a something like a collection of guilds coordinated by AI facilitators would be really fascinating.
A company as a something like a collection of guilds coordinated by AI facilitators would be really fascinating.
From there it only follows: (camera pans to board of directors) "What would you say… ya' do here?"
We can have a funding agent provision an agent-based board as well. What's the point of a board that can't react to real-time market information 24x7x365?
We can have a funding agent provision an agent-based board as well. What's the point of a board that can't react to real-time market information 24x7x365?
I guess an LLM probably can legally own things or be legally responsible for decisions. We’ll need one person at the top as a money-holder/sin-eater.
The humans who lead companies are rarely held personally responsible (in a legal sense) for decisions they make anyway, so having LLMs at the helm wouldn’t really be that much of a change.
We can classify LLM's as 'people' like we do for corporations in the US. (sarcasm)
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 AIs, reinforced my CEOs speaking to wall street about how AI will enable staff reductions. The rank and file is understandbly very angry about this, coupled with the understanding by technical folks that AI is far from being able to replace the function of actual deep-thinking humans. This is when the temptation to minimize the value of executives and "call their bluff" comes in. But here is where you need a dose of reality. Executives aren't stupid as you think, they don't get paid what they do for no reason, and despite the bad and anti-humanitarian decisions they make in the name of shareholder, they actually can't be replaced by AI. Both executives and boards understand this and so it's not really a topic of discussion. You are free to disagree with this of course, but at some point its just toothless wishful thinking.
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 AIs, reinforced my CEOs speaking to wall street about how AI will enable staff reductions. The rank and file is understandbly very angry about this, coupled with the understanding by technical folks that AI is far from being able to replace the function of actual deep-thinking humans. This is when the temptation to minimize the value of executives and "call their bluff" comes in. But here is where you need a dose of reality. Executives aren't stupid as you think, they don't get paid what they do for no reason, and despite the bad and anti-humanitarian decisions they make in the name of shareholder, they actually can't be replaced by AI. Both executives and boards understand this and so it's not really a topic of discussion. You are free to disagree with this of course, but at some point its just toothless wishful thinking.
> 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 inefficient, and if we're going to practice honest capitalism then the first group to rip that bandaid off and automate away their (mostly) dead weight actually will be competitively superior to the backwards holdouts, and they will proceed to dominate the market.
This is of course if we're practicing actual capitalism and not a dressed-up form of neo-feudalism.
> but the reality will fall short of the sales pitch in innumerable ways across the board whether that be programmer productivity or anything else
Remains to be seen. We are with AI where the web was in 1996, when plenty of trusted thought leaders were sagely telling us that the web was just a place for glorified brochures.
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 inefficient, and if we're going to practice honest capitalism then the first group to rip that bandaid off and automate away their (mostly) dead weight actually will be competitively superior to the backwards holdouts, and they will proceed to dominate the market.
This is of course if we're practicing actual capitalism and not a dressed-up form of neo-feudalism.
> but the reality will fall short of the sales pitch in innumerable ways across the board whether that be programmer productivity or anything else
Remains to be seen. We are with AI where the web was in 1996, when plenty of trusted thought leaders were sagely telling us that the web was just a place for glorified brochures.
> executives
> honest capitalism
Pick two.
Pick two.
The gap between the claimed capability of "AI Agents" and what you're actually able to build with tools like AutoGen and Crew (and presumably AgentForce, it's been a few months since I saw a demo) is the largest gap I have ever seen in the field and I've been working with NLP/Conversational AI professionally since 2016.
> Let's see Benioff put his money where his mouth is, replace some C-suite seats with AI agents.
How can you replace a job that involves stone cold deterministic thinking and copying the behavior of your peers after a 3-6 month review with a lifeless machine?
How can you replace a job that involves stone cold deterministic thinking and copying the behavior of your peers after a 3-6 month review with a lifeless machine?
That is a point that seems to get lost in the hype (or fear) of AI replacing software engineers.
If we take at face value that AI can “replace” a software engineer, it can most certainly replace most of the managers and executives above that role.
If we take at face value that AI can “replace” a software engineer, it can most certainly replace most of the managers and executives above that role.
I'll do you better.
AI could largely already fill the role and fulfill all responsibilities at expected level of any C suite or management only position better right now than it could a software or operational position.
Their position is fundamentally easier to do for an AI compared to operational and labor roles. They are given data and output a decision or course of action. But since they largely aren't the ones implementing said action plan it's perfectly suitable for an AI.
C suites and execs are going to do all they can to ever avoid mentioning this though.
AI could largely already fill the role and fulfill all responsibilities at expected level of any C suite or management only position better right now than it could a software or operational position.
Their position is fundamentally easier to do for an AI compared to operational and labor roles. They are given data and output a decision or course of action. But since they largely aren't the ones implementing said action plan it's perfectly suitable for an AI.
C suites and execs are going to do all they can to ever avoid mentioning this though.
I might take it one step further... AI might /better/ at mimicking the lying and hallucinations of management than at mimicking engineering.
Right. When many jobs could be reduced to interacting with a keyboard and a camera/microphone connected to a computer, I would suggest that software engineers are not at the front of the queue to be automated away. In the AI vision we're definitely there, but we have lots of company.
The thing that will create the real-life Butlerian Jihad against AI agents will be when they come for the lawyers' jobs.
For better or worse it is total dollars for IT/Software salaries vs total dollars for exec salaries. And in this case software salaries is very large number that need to be cut.
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
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.
as another poster pointed out, they have 104 job listings for software developers right now, so yeah. this article is just an ad.
> The productivity gains of 30% are probably overstated
I am doubtful as well.
I could imagine 30 percent among certain engineers for certain tasks, especially if you use a popular language with popular libraries and frameworks that are well-represented in the training dataset. I don’t know how typical of a codebase Salesforce has. They could also finetune a model on their own codebase or devote a small team of engineers to figuring out which prompts, models, etc. work best for their codebase and process. In theory, those advantages could boost it beyond what testing would typically show.
But a consistent increase of “more than” 30 percent across the whole engineering workforce seems less plausible, especially lacking details on how they measured that and uptake numbers. Edited to add: Are they even confident that their engineers are using it consistently? At this scale, that’s not a given.
I’d be interested to know whether Salesforce customers have noticed a change in the number or scope of features being announced. A change of this size seems like it should be noticeable from the outside. I’d like to hear from the engineers in particular.
I am doubtful as well.
I could imagine 30 percent among certain engineers for certain tasks, especially if you use a popular language with popular libraries and frameworks that are well-represented in the training dataset. I don’t know how typical of a codebase Salesforce has. They could also finetune a model on their own codebase or devote a small team of engineers to figuring out which prompts, models, etc. work best for their codebase and process. In theory, those advantages could boost it beyond what testing would typically show.
But a consistent increase of “more than” 30 percent across the whole engineering workforce seems less plausible, especially lacking details on how they measured that and uptake numbers. Edited to add: Are they even confident that their engineers are using it consistently? At this scale, that’s not a given.
I’d be interested to know whether Salesforce customers have noticed a change in the number or scope of features being announced. A change of this size seems like it should be noticeable from the outside. I’d like to hear from the engineers in particular.
Salesforce core is Java. A smattering of other languages in the mix. I left Salesforce a year ago, their main developer productivity drains had nothing to do with the code base. It's their build process where it takes a minimum of a day to get code committed, even with their git on top of perforce hack which is seriously impressive, but still a process smell, that coupled with massive overhead from when dealing with inter team dependencies and various "edicts" getting passed down from on high that blow up any planning.
In short, you could have agents that code at 2x but it would have only a small impact on deliverabkes since non-coding processes have a higher impact on velocity.
In short, you could have agents that code at 2x but it would have only a small impact on deliverabkes since non-coding processes have a higher impact on velocity.
I left in 2020 before a bunch of the new dev processes were made and enforced, from what I've heard since the replacements aren't better and at least half sounded insane. Wouldn't surprise me if core teams have lost more than 30% productivity... not to mention all the low morale. AI can maybe claw some back, especially if it helps long-term quality; I'd try to be optimistic on it at least helping get fast "unit" test coverage that doesn't need the world running to execute.
Thanks for the insight! That makes me even more doubtful of the 30 percent claim.
There may also be engineers working harder because of being worried about getting laid off. How could they separate those productivity increases from AI?
> The productivity gains of 30% are probably overstated
it maybe not, LLMs deliver clear value in coding tasks, but the thing is that competitors also will have gains, deliver more features, fixes and products.
it maybe not, LLMs deliver clear value in coding tasks, but the thing is that competitors also will have gains, deliver more features, fixes and products.
I am yet to have Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Facebook suggest that they’ve achieved 30% productivity gains from AI. Those are companies at the forefront of AI investment and if they haven’t achieved that kind of increased engineering productivity, I am ready to bet money on the fact that any other company claiming so hasn’t either.
Even if 30% productivity gains are true, they are probably not because of AI. They could have fired a bunch of low performers and overworked the rest of the engineers to achieve productivity gains, but even then, I’d be very skeptical if the 30% gains would stay there long term.
Even if 30% productivity gains are true, they are probably not because of AI. They could have fired a bunch of low performers and overworked the rest of the engineers to achieve productivity gains, but even then, I’d be very skeptical if the 30% gains would stay there long term.
The Google CEO did say that > 25% of Google's internal new code is written using AI. But the claim seems a bit dubious...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41991291
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41991291
It depends on vertical.
Large corps likely have some huge codebases of overengineered spagetti code, which are hardly comprehendable by LLMs.
But if you want to build for example some new/smaller web/mobile apps talking to various API, LLM can boost your productivity significantly, because it will easily generate ready to use code snippets.
Large corps likely have some huge codebases of overengineered spagetti code, which are hardly comprehendable by LLMs.
But if you want to build for example some new/smaller web/mobile apps talking to various API, LLM can boost your productivity significantly, because it will easily generate ready to use code snippets.
> Large corps likely have some huge codebases of overengineered spagetti code, which are hardly comprehendable by LLMs.
I think it's the other way around, though.
Those code monstrosities aren't comprehendible by humans, especially after the wanton RIFs that have happened in the past couple years that have cut loose a lot of people who know where the bodies are buried.
However, with copilot you can just figuratively walk up to any repo and ask "@workspace what's going on in this codebase" and it'll tell you. From experience I can say this can deliver results. Downright rotten code that would've taken me a good week to figure out can be figured out in an hour. It's damn near witchcraft.
I think it's the other way around, though.
Those code monstrosities aren't comprehendible by humans, especially after the wanton RIFs that have happened in the past couple years that have cut loose a lot of people who know where the bodies are buried.
However, with copilot you can just figuratively walk up to any repo and ask "@workspace what's going on in this codebase" and it'll tell you. From experience I can say this can deliver results. Downright rotten code that would've taken me a good week to figure out can be figured out in an hour. It's damn near witchcraft.
I have never seen this work, at all, with a large codebase. Can you give a specific example of a large repo where this produced useful/coherent results?
Id be curious as well but really doubt AI could make much headway into a legacy codebase I recently spent some time on. There is tacit knowledge that AI cannot pick up on, many things are named wrong, there are patches and workarounds that barely make any sense, architecture inconsistencies and transitions in style from 20 years ago to now. Maybe if there was some documentation and explanatory notes. Without needing to fill the gaps by simply asking the prompter for more information, im inclined to suspect the same old eagerness to bullshitting that LLMs have been programed in.
I have seen multiple people claim that {Copilot|Claude|a local Llama model} has been great for them at understanding large codebases, but at least to date, I have yet to actually have anyone provide a concrete example when I ask. Maybe others have a different idea of what constitutes "large."
At my job, our main repo is over 300k lines of just Ruby code, plus a bunch of JS, ERB templates, and other stuff. Every AI tool I've thrown at it is great at making surgical edits to single files (or small groups of files) but completely chokes if you ask it a question that requires it to understand context across the repo. I'm always hoping that I'm just using the tools wrong, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case.
At my job, our main repo is over 300k lines of just Ruby code, plus a bunch of JS, ERB templates, and other stuff. Every AI tool I've thrown at it is great at making surgical edits to single files (or small groups of files) but completely chokes if you ask it a question that requires it to understand context across the repo. I'm always hoping that I'm just using the tools wrong, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case.
But the second those smaller prototype apps become big enough to need to scale or be maintained, you’re back at the same problem.
The whole thing it gets you then is “faster experimentation”, which was something that was /already fast/ if you use modern tools of the day. 1 week vs 2 weeks for a prototype app may build you more prototypes but it doesn’t help when you can’t scale them.
It does smooth some of the processes though - AI is maybe helpful for cognitive augmentation for coders, but it’s not going to be building you apps worth a damn.
The whole thing it gets you then is “faster experimentation”, which was something that was /already fast/ if you use modern tools of the day. 1 week vs 2 weeks for a prototype app may build you more prototypes but it doesn’t help when you can’t scale them.
It does smooth some of the processes though - AI is maybe helpful for cognitive augmentation for coders, but it’s not going to be building you apps worth a damn.
while I agree with the sentiment that it's hard to evaluate the real gains, it's definitely not just about code generation. Debugging is a a big part of the value, IMO.
But, we are talking about Salesforce.
“I’m not just the president.” Pause. “I’m a client too.”
Pretty old trick.
Pretty old trick.
Yep. He’s a member
If there are productivity gains of 30% per engineer, doesn't it stand to reason that hiring more engineers would make the org even more productive?
This is like the opposite of 2021 where every tech company went on a wild hiring spree (remember how well that went?). Now in 2025 tech companies are just going to stop hiring anyone. I suspect by 2026 they will have a bunch of slop AI spaghetti code that no one can maintain. I'm starting to question whether this field is worth it anymore
This is like the opposite of 2021 where every tech company went on a wild hiring spree (remember how well that went?). Now in 2025 tech companies are just going to stop hiring anyone. I suspect by 2026 they will have a bunch of slop AI spaghetti code that no one can maintain. I'm starting to question whether this field is worth it anymore
Soon there's going to be a fuckload of money in pretending to clean up AI generated code while secretly deleting it and starting again.
>doesn't it stand to reason that hiring more engineers would make the org even more productive?
Yes, that does stand to reason, it's the funniest bit about it. When you make engineers more productive the value of an engineer goes up, not down. Otherwise we'd have no game developers left after people went from writing assembly to working in modern game engines.
As others have pointed out it's obviously just a really cringy attempt at trying to sell their AI software, which apparently isn't smart enough to sell itself
Yes, that does stand to reason, it's the funniest bit about it. When you make engineers more productive the value of an engineer goes up, not down. Otherwise we'd have no game developers left after people went from writing assembly to working in modern game engines.
As others have pointed out it's obviously just a really cringy attempt at trying to sell their AI software, which apparently isn't smart enough to sell itself
I don’t find the claim of 30 percent improvement plausible, but it actually does track to me that you might pause hiring for a time if your employees were suddenly more productive in order to catch up in other parts of the business or figure out what markets to put your new productivity toward.
> in order to catch up in other parts of the business or figure out what markets to put your new productivity toward.
Product can come up with and design features an order of magnitude faster than developers can implement them.
In practice established products have deep backlogs full of bugs and features that never get actioned.
Product can come up with and design features an order of magnitude faster than developers can implement them.
In practice established products have deep backlogs full of bugs and features that never get actioned.
In my experience, while there are some things in the backlogs that a developer can basically pick up and run with, others require input from other roles to actually address or implement properly. And then once developed, you need to test, document, and localize a feature. (Realistically, you probably want to market it as well.) Depending on your design and support model, your customer service teams may need to help organizations implement the feature effectively or may need to be trained on how to answer customer questions about that feature.
What are you referring to as "this field"?
Software engineering, or at least the Silicon Valley style tech sector
Let's say coding is actually 50% of your job (for almost no engineers is it).
If AI makes you 30% more efficient at coding (it might if you went from having literally 0 code completion or any form of AI to state of the art, not many people are doing that):
* 1 engineer = 50% feature dev (1x), 50% other
* 1 engineer with AI = 50% feature dev (1.15x), 50% other
So engineers are theoretically getting 15% more done. If your company is growing faster than 15%, you're probably still going to need to hire eng.
The real way SalesForce is going to increase productivity is by forcing more unpaid overtime, not by AI.
If AI makes you 30% more efficient at coding (it might if you went from having literally 0 code completion or any form of AI to state of the art, not many people are doing that):
* 1 engineer = 50% feature dev (1x), 50% other
* 1 engineer with AI = 50% feature dev (1.15x), 50% other
So engineers are theoretically getting 15% more done. If your company is growing faster than 15%, you're probably still going to need to hire eng.
The real way SalesForce is going to increase productivity is by forcing more unpaid overtime, not by AI.
This kind of math is nonsense, even as a back-of-the-napkin exercise.
Engineers productivity is not linear, both over time and team size. In fact there may be productivity improvements just be freezing hiring as adding too many people becomes net negative if the architecture and domain complexity does not support. Also, writing code is not the bottleneck on value, it's making the correct changes that adds value. While AI can accelerate simple and repetitive code production, this could easily add more technical debt and be net-negative producing over time if engineers aren't thinking about the big picture. On the other hand AI could add a lot of value not directly related to coding as it can process and "understand" more breadth of information (including code) that can magnify engineers productivity if used thoughtfully, but that may have no direct relationship to coding per se.
Engineers productivity is not linear, both over time and team size. In fact there may be productivity improvements just be freezing hiring as adding too many people becomes net negative if the architecture and domain complexity does not support. Also, writing code is not the bottleneck on value, it's making the correct changes that adds value. While AI can accelerate simple and repetitive code production, this could easily add more technical debt and be net-negative producing over time if engineers aren't thinking about the big picture. On the other hand AI could add a lot of value not directly related to coding as it can process and "understand" more breadth of information (including code) that can magnify engineers productivity if used thoughtfully, but that may have no direct relationship to coding per se.
FWIW various studies find that software engineers spend about 25% of their time coding on average.
They have over 100 listed Software Engineering jobs on their site?
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/
“As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.”
I wish CEOs would avoid such phrasing unless "take responsibility for that" involves some personal penalty, like a lower bonus or some other way to compensate for the fact that a bad decision cost the company money.
I wish CEOs would avoid such phrasing unless "take responsibility for that" involves some personal penalty, like a lower bonus or some other way to compensate for the fact that a bad decision cost the company money.
50% of their net worth..?
+400% engineering time and effort because of the bloated mess Salesforce has become, then -30% because of “AI productivity”. Got it.
Most SFDC projects I’ve seen recently are over budget and behind schedule on delivery.
Most SFDC projects I’ve seen recently are over budget and behind schedule on delivery.
Isn't this just cover for cost cutting draw attention away from potentially bad earnings?
> 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
Sounds like a nightmare. Replacing engineers with sales people trying to sell the AI. The pressure to sell is going to be tremendous, they hype will be incredible. And at the same time they are at a huge risk of sailing into the winds of the AI valley of disillusionment. Studies have shown that so far customers already find AI sales pitches a significant turnoff. They better hope customers really want whatever their AI actually does or their competitors are going to skate right past them with real actual products and features.
Sounds like a nightmare. Replacing engineers with sales people trying to sell the AI. The pressure to sell is going to be tremendous, they hype will be incredible. And at the same time they are at a huge risk of sailing into the winds of the AI valley of disillusionment. Studies have shown that so far customers already find AI sales pitches a significant turnoff. They better hope customers really want whatever their AI actually does or their competitors are going to skate right past them with real actual products and features.
I'm mouth-agape at the opportunity incumbents are giving to small/indie teams (to build better, competing products). I had a feeling some version of this would happen as cheap cash dried up (and founding talent exited), but not to this scale.
If you know how to build great products, now's the time to cast your line. It won't be easy, but I think there will be a lot of very happy small teams/soloists making money hand over fist (for them) over the next few years.
If you know how to build great products, now's the time to cast your line. It won't be easy, but I think there will be a lot of very happy small teams/soloists making money hand over fist (for them) over the next few years.
I really hope someone here makes it their goal to get hired by Salesforce in 2025
I can't wait to read that LinkedIn job announcement post.
BarneyStinsonChallengeAccepted.gif
Marc Benioff says a lot of things. You would think they wouldn't have any software engineering job postings up if this were actually true.
> 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.”
So why can’t AI explain that? I would think Salesforce customers are more about sales then development. Their AI can’t sell?
So why can’t AI explain that? I would think Salesforce customers are more about sales then development. Their AI can’t sell?
Who is going to add 600 more checkboxes to every settings page (up from 10000) now?
This has several results. One may be the desired financial result, the other is the total gutting of the engineering culture. When you do this all raises and promotions are essentially on hold as well. Anyone who wants upward career mobility, and can, will leave. Leaving only the least motivated and least "desirable" employees.
What is the rationale for this? The quarterly numbers for all these companies are really good, their stock price is at an all time high. So what is prompting these extreme steps? Salesforce is not the only company, most every company is this way. What do these companies know that we don’t? Is there a major correction coming?
Salesforce and slack software engineering jobs: https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/?search=&team=Softwar...
The real truth is that there's a lot of 1) excess (development) capacity, 2) and not enough market opportunities where software brings incremental revenue.
AI is being blamed for layoffs and hiring freezes but the reality is that selling software is not as profitable for companies.
AI is being blamed for layoffs and hiring freezes but the reality is that selling software is not as profitable for companies.
I came across same post here:
https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...
and when opened the salesforce career page they are still hiring for software engineers in 2025.
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/jr265886/software-eng...
I doubt the authenticity of source and also i work very closely with AI-agents and this is not the case as it is represented on social media.
https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...
and when opened the salesforce career page they are still hiring for software engineers in 2025.
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/jr265886/software-eng...
I doubt the authenticity of source and also i work very closely with AI-agents and this is not the case as it is represented on social media.
As an ex Salesforce employee with lots of friends still there, I'm going to call bullshit on this one.
The engineering org's productivity pain points aren't ever going to be solved by AI magic, or at least certainly not on the core CRM product.
The engineering org's productivity pain points aren't ever going to be solved by AI magic, or at least certainly not on the core CRM product.
Pharaoh must signal, to shareholders, to a board, and to their peers. There will be no consequences for failure to adhere to this proclamation.
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 have a technical background. Apparently there are failed implementations at for-profit customers too which sounds super odd considering how expensive it all is and the consulting partner ecosystem.
What do you mean failed implementations?
Like, they ask for a refund?
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 charge of setting it up is struggling to get their staff or salespeople to use it as part of their job responsibilities.
The reason why this is challenging is that the implementation team really needs to understand the teams that are being asked to use Salesforce as part of their job while at the same time knowing the intricacies of the platform. Plus, there’s often a lot of integration of systems and data migration that would likely need to happen in a very organized fashion.
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.
What I meant by failed implementation is when the team that’s in charge of setting it up is struggling to get their staff or salespeople to use it as part of their job responsibilities.
The reason why this is challenging is that the implementation team really needs to understand the teams that are being asked to use Salesforce as part of their job while at the same time knowing the intricacies of the platform. Plus, there’s often a lot of integration of systems and data migration that would likely need to happen in a very organized fashion.
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.
"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
"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
What exactly have they achieved with ai? What incredible progress has been made ? Does anyone know, I am genuinely curious.
AI has increased my productivity greatly, but it is a long way away from replacing my Job. Though maybe I am biased.
AI has increased my productivity greatly, but it is a long way away from replacing my Job. Though maybe I am biased.
Mind if I ask what AI tooling you are using and how it's increased your productivity?
I just use chat gpt. I use it in all manners — questions about the business domain I am in, front end and backend coding questions, as well as istio configurations.
I am well versed in all three areas, but obviously I can’t remember all the syntax, and don’t have time to trial and error the changes, and ai reduces that loop. I don’t use it to generate massive blocks of code, I use it mostly to demonstrate the principle of what I am trying to achieve.
I have many specific examples of massive time save.
I am well versed in all three areas, but obviously I can’t remember all the syntax, and don’t have time to trial and error the changes, and ai reduces that loop. I don’t use it to generate massive blocks of code, I use it mostly to demonstrate the principle of what I am trying to achieve.
I have many specific examples of massive time save.
Gotcha. Thanks.
Yes, that's about how I've used it. I found that it is good at snippets, mid-complexity queries, etc., but not so much full applications.
Still, I keep hearing people claim that devs are getting ~60% productivity increases. And, I'm trying to figure out if this is supposedly through tools like Copilot. Also wondering whether AI has really had a significant impact on no code and low code tools.
Just trying to see through the hype at what devs are really getting out of AI in its current state.
Yes, that's about how I've used it. I found that it is good at snippets, mid-complexity queries, etc., but not so much full applications.
Still, I keep hearing people claim that devs are getting ~60% productivity increases. And, I'm trying to figure out if this is supposedly through tools like Copilot. Also wondering whether AI has really had a significant impact on no code and low code tools.
Just trying to see through the hype at what devs are really getting out of AI in its current state.
Given that no one really understands what Salesforce actually does, much less what value it provides, why would it need intelligent engineers?
The company seems like a gigantic hot air balloon, so it might as well use "AI".
The company seems like a gigantic hot air balloon, so it might as well use "AI".
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.
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.
> Hire No More Software Engineers in 2025
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/?page=1&team=Software...
It seems they are still "hiring"
If you're seeing software engineering job results in Salesforce, then we can only assume the software engineering jobs listed there are either:
1. Posted last year by Salesforce (can go at any time)
2. Fake Ghost Jobs (more likely)
If you work as an engineer at Salesforce, start to look elsewhere before they intentionally lay you off.
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/?page=1&team=Software...
It seems they are still "hiring"
If you're seeing software engineering job results in Salesforce, then we can only assume the software engineering jobs listed there are either:
1. Posted last year by Salesforce (can go at any time)
2. Fake Ghost Jobs (more likely)
If you work as an engineer at Salesforce, start to look elsewhere before they intentionally lay you off.
You wonder if smart hiring managers knew to post their roles ASAP before a freeze on new roles :)
These are jobs required to sponsor a PERM greencard. In order to qualify, an American cannot be able to do the job, which clearly they are (SF let go thousands in the last few years alone), so they "ghost" any US applicant and claim they didn't receive the application
AFAIK, each job is only posted for 2 days to meet the minimum legal requirement for the PERM
AFAIK, each job is only posted for 2 days to meet the minimum legal requirement for the PERM
Those could be legit backfills.
A grandiose statement like, “…to the point where our engineering velocity is incredible. I can’t believe what we’re achieving in engineering” needs to be followed by, “Ignore the man behind the curtain.”
> “And then, we will have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer."
As I was predicting... [0]
The first affected are the "support engineers" then they will try to get away with going after everyone else at the company. Test subjects are needed for a trial run.
So what eventually happens to the existing employees when the AgentForce gets even better?
Can they just admit that they are replacing workers with AI agents instead of this newspeak bullsh*t?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42630993
As I was predicting... [0]
The first affected are the "support engineers" then they will try to get away with going after everyone else at the company. Test subjects are needed for a trial run.
So what eventually happens to the existing employees when the AgentForce gets even better?
Can they just admit that they are replacing workers with AI agents instead of this newspeak bullsh*t?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42630993
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AFAIK Agentforce is programming the chatbot to allow it to execute SF flows on behalf of the customer.
I can see things like update my profile. Or give me a quote for this insurance product.
I fail to see how Agentforce or AI in general means less software engineers are needed. The only explanation I can think of is he is contracting with OpenAI or Anthropic or someone else and implementing that. My experience with SF Einstein or Genie has been like “you gotta be kidding if that is what you are selling”.
I can see things like update my profile. Or give me a quote for this insurance product.
I fail to see how Agentforce or AI in general means less software engineers are needed. The only explanation I can think of is he is contracting with OpenAI or Anthropic or someone else and implementing that. My experience with SF Einstein or Genie has been like “you gotta be kidding if that is what you are selling”.
Spouse works at salesforce as a PM - they are in several team structuring/hiring calls and it's all contractors. So SF is hiring - just not FTE.
Salesforce seemed way slow and over engineered to me, like it was the result of double exponential feature creep over many years
Isn’t the fix supposed to be some senior leader writes the prompt “make the code faster and less over engineered” and the Rune Goldberg contraption comes to life and echos back “eye eye captain!”. Thirty seconds later, problem solved!
That is my understanding of these AS/GI agentic wizards anyway. They’ll fire the rest of their staff right after the thing fixes all the slowness.
You don’t even need to define “slowness” in your prompt! It just knows what “slowness” means and fixes it for you! It’s truly remarkable technology. Those primadonna devs will be out on their ass any day now.
All hail our agentic future!
That is my understanding of these AS/GI agentic wizards anyway. They’ll fire the rest of their staff right after the thing fixes all the slowness.
You don’t even need to define “slowness” in your prompt! It just knows what “slowness” means and fixes it for you! It’s truly remarkable technology. Those primadonna devs will be out on their ass any day now.
All hail our agentic future!
Salesforce has tons of features, but at its root it's Microsoft Access Online for 80% of the companies that use it.
bloat, feature creep, insistence upon itself, are all tantamount to this economic system. Without them, there isn't enough for everyone to do.
True innovation is rare or prohibitively expensive these day since most of the low hanging fruit has already been picked.
Currently many efforts are driven by some level of leadership trying to justify their continued employment. This isn't just a salesforce problem.
Currently many efforts are driven by some level of leadership trying to justify their continued employment. This isn't just a salesforce problem.
If shareholders want to replace the people with AI, it would be easier and more profitable to go top-down instead of bottom-up.
If this was true salesforce is in more trouble than any engineer.
Why? Because if AI is really all that then entire companies like sales force go away. All the customers who use sales force would need to do is hire one of these laid off engineers to ask AI concrete them a free sales force.
Why? Because if AI is really all that then entire companies like sales force go away. All the customers who use sales force would need to do is hire one of these laid off engineers to ask AI concrete them a free sales force.
I get the costs of engineering, but there's these sort semi antagonistic "yo we're not hiring software engineers" announcements that are weird.
I don't ever see someone say "we're not hiring anymore customer support" or HR, or janitorial staff, or middle management.
I don't ever see someone say "we're not hiring anymore customer support" or HR, or janitorial staff, or middle management.
I don't think a lot of HN users understand corporate speak.
When they announce they aren't hiring any more software engineers they are basically telling its own engineers to leave now or face cost cutting measures.
If you work at Salesforce, I would start putting out resumes now. The play seems to be to use the narrative "agents replaced our engineers, we cut %X of our team" as both a sales pitch and excuse for poor deliverables.
When they announce they aren't hiring any more software engineers they are basically telling its own engineers to leave now or face cost cutting measures.
If you work at Salesforce, I would start putting out resumes now. The play seems to be to use the narrative "agents replaced our engineers, we cut %X of our team" as both a sales pitch and excuse for poor deliverables.
I don't doubt that's the intent, sometimes, but hiring freezes happen lots of places and they don't mean that thing.
It's not antagonistic to shareholders/investors who thought Salesforce was bloated before.
It would be fabulous if all of the current engineers quit and said "Fine let your AI do it"
Read into this what you will for Salesforce particularly, but we are probably going to start seeing similar announcements from other companies. Generative AI has completely revolutionzed the nature of knowledge work, and this will be the year when it really starts to hit.
How does this trend cope with the inevitable commoditization of AI? I mean, when having the best software engineers doesn't make the difference anymore because every company can afford the AI doing their job, presumably at comparable efficiency?
So their AI sales agent is absolutely amazing but they gotta hire more humans to sell it. Got it.
Similarly, Satya Nadella recently said "Agents Will Replace ALL Software" in bg2 podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NtsnzRFJ_o
They should hire English teachers to fix their grammar. “Will hire no more engineers.” Wtf
It's fine to say "X will hire no additional staff" or "X will remain asleep no longer". These are established phrasings in English.
Why wouldn’t a company that has found the secret to productivity not double down and give themselves a massive lead on others in focused area of their choosing.
30% increase in productivity would mean another 100+ engineers should also be 30% more productive.
30% increase in productivity would mean another 100+ engineers should also be 30% more productive.
Say what you like about Benioff (he seems pretty annoying) or his products (happy former customer), but if you want to read a single book that will increase your chances of success in SaaS, his book Behind the Cloud is my pick.
Salesforce is the Herbalife of software companies. Kudos to them for making great money, but their products all seem to be worse versions of their competitors, sold at a much higher price. It never adds up.
So if you are an software engineer at Salesforce can you get anything you want by threatening to leave? Or are they still trying to push people out and reduce headcount?
I came across that post recently and lookup the salesforce careers and this not the case they are still hiring in 2025.
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/jr265886/software-eng...
this was the post https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...
So i doubt the sales force CEO said that actually.
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/jr265886/software-eng...
this was the post https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...
So i doubt the sales force CEO said that actually.
Doesn't seem to extend to acquisitions like Slack - https://slack.com/careers
Judging by what I have to deal with in Salesforce this shouldn't pose much of a problem. In fact it might even help things.
They should fire sales, make it cheaper and use some of those savings to invest in better product people and software engineers.
Makes sense. Their software product isn't very good. They should take the profits they have and diversify into other businesses.
If this company future is resting on “agent force” i would imagine more engineers are leaving than wanting to work there anyway
Any company can achieve this productivity gain simply by building only simple ~useless PoCs and stop building complex products.
They'll probably just hire the same person anyways, just call them prompt engineer, not software engineer.
How many of software devs working for Salesforce are outsourced in India or literal slaves working on H1B Visa?
According to the DOL, about 5600 are H1Bs. 1100 PERMs in the last year too. with a global workforce of 72000, these two alone (both in US) are 9.3% of their employees
13k employees in Hyderabad alone. That's 18% of their employees. So about 27%
13k employees in Hyderabad alone. That's 18% of their employees. So about 27%
As a user I get strong outsourced vibes
Is agentforce working and are there any practical users who have got beyond the customer support use-case?
You know your competition also has that 30% efficiency gain??? Sounds like a good time for them to catch up.
Wonder if this will include Heroku? And do they mean no more hiring at all, or just no new positions?
Heroku is still a thing? I would have figured their lunch would have been eaten years ago with how expensive they were.
Heh still cheaper than two operation engineer salaries.
It's still around, but like most Salesforce acquisitions it has mostly been left to languish.
They're rewriting Heroku to be a hosted K8s offering. Presumably using aforementioned LLMs.
I lol’d at 30% boost in productivity w/AI.
Which one? All of them I’ve used produce incorrect code 90% of time.
Which one? All of them I’ve used produce incorrect code 90% of time.
[deleted]
If they're no longer a technology company, won't that crush their multiple?
Perhaps he should also talk about the timeline for AI replacing the executive team.
Hmm, could be a good time to set up as a contractor serving Salesforce
There is always excellent money to be made as a contractor doing Salesforce work.
Of course they'll hire prompt engineers and agent engineers.
How stupid do these CEOs think people are?
How to make downsizing sound cool....
[deleted]
He will be hiring by Jan 15, 2025
[deleted]
They are hiring today. Complete BS from the CEO.
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/?page=1&team=Software...
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/?page=1&team=Software...
These are jobs sponsoring for PERM greencards. They are using AI as an excuse to replace US citizens with foreigners
Not sure where you’re getting that from. Most of them look like regular job listings to me.
AI has seem to chip away at Business administration jobs. Lots of people can’t find jobs in this area anymore
"Incredible AI productivity" translation: we want to squeeze more work out of our existing workforce for even more super-profits!!!
Welcome to the meat grinder.
Welcome to the meat grinder.
I call BS. They will need to continue to innovate and execute new ideas. Unless they wasn't to go the GE route
There won’t be massive ai layoffs. Companies will just stop hiring
I think this is already happening, the monthly HN "Who's Hiring" threads have felt like attending a funeral since Microsoft-Google-Twitter mega-layoffs two years ago.
How bad is the job market right now? Is it as bad as everyone says it is? Makes me pretty scared for the future, tbh.
It's definitely bad, although attributing the state of the job market to AI is a mistake. As a result of wider economic conditions, money is expensive and companies can't justify borrowing money to have massive headcount, driving down the number of software engineers in demand. This caused a big glut of qualified software developers seeking employment, only to find that the music had stopped and there weren't any chairs left. This coincides with an ever growing number of new graduates in CS who are seeking to find their place in the market. In other words, the market is very competitive. This is especially true for fresh graduates.
To make matters worse, the big investment opportunity right now is AI/AGI/LLM/Agents and so forth. As money flows toward AI focused firms, they are spending their money on GPUs and electricity. Or, alternatively, they're paying for NVIDIA/OpenAI/.. to do that for them. Some jobs have opened up in this space, but a relatively small percentage is spent on labour.
All of that is my opinion from what I've read!
To make matters worse, the big investment opportunity right now is AI/AGI/LLM/Agents and so forth. As money flows toward AI focused firms, they are spending their money on GPUs and electricity. Or, alternatively, they're paying for NVIDIA/OpenAI/.. to do that for them. Some jobs have opened up in this space, but a relatively small percentage is spent on labour.
All of that is my opinion from what I've read!
It feels they already have.
"[...] we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we're now facing, and I take responsibility for that."
And yet I don't see anything about him stepping down. I never do.
And yet I don't see anything about him stepping down. I never do.
Just a sales speech for Agentforce.
I’m surprised this obvious marketing BS made it to the front page. Didn’t they do the same thing before with Blockchain and real-time databases?
Observationally, there's a fairly tight correlation between "making lots of money" and total bullshit.
Honestly who would want to work for them anyway?
Dunning-Kruger Effect is definitely strong with AI. If I own any of their stock I’d probably sell it now.
We've had two large tribes come to use from SalesForce and tell us all the issues they've had from no support to poor sales relations. My interactions with the support was just downright saddening. I cannot imagine having to do anything AI related with them. Also, most companies now can just build their own CMS with ease, SalesForce is not going to be around for long.
I don't know if salesforce is a well run company today, but it was for a long time. The inertia that it's built up and the market leader position that it has means that, even if its glory days are past, it will be around for decades.
salesforce will be around forever.
their purpose is to extract money. salespeople like to know that money is being spent on them because that's how they measure value, and will continue to demand salesforce for as long as it is expensive.
their purpose is to extract money. salespeople like to know that money is being spent on them because that's how they measure value, and will continue to demand salesforce for as long as it is expensive.
By tribes, you mean tribes that run casinos?
My inside sources at salesforce say that this is just cover for them replacing existing employees with H1Bs and PERMs from Asia. That's why there are still SWE jobs on the company site even though he says they aren't hiring
He's lying. They are hiring. They just refuse to hire you if you were born in America
The "AI" craze is cover. It doesn't do jack shit. He knows too
He's lying. They are hiring. They just refuse to hire you if you were born in America
The "AI" craze is cover. It doesn't do jack shit. He knows too
That's not new. There are teams who haven't been allowed to hire outside India for the last 3-4 years. Someone in the US leaves, their backfill gets hired in Hyderabad.
Enshittification - SF will become a legacy tool
You were downvoted, but what you say is essentially true. H1Bs are a huge part of why it's so hard to find a job right now. BigTech games the system to make it virtually impossible for US-based people to apply.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-153688691 (not my Substack but has a good overall view of what's going on)
https://substack.com/home/post/p-153688691 (not my Substack but has a good overall view of what's going on)
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 the event management cannibalizes product for short term stock gains again.