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/

by lordswork • 2 years ago

350 379 2 years ago

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.

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

Pharaoh must signal, to shareholders, to a board, and to their peers. There will be no consequences for failure to adhere to this proclamation.

colesantiago• 2 years ago

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.

throwarayes3• 2 years ago

You wonder if smart hiring managers knew to post their roles ASAP before a freeze on new roles :)

strambino2424• 2 years ago

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

toephu2• 2 years ago

Those could be legit backfills.

greatpostman• 2 years ago

There won’t be massive ai layoffs. Companies will just stop hiring

giantg2• 2 years ago

It feels they already have.

segasaturn• 2 years ago

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.

dimgl• 2 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.

nick__m• 2 years ago

《 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 !

Finnucane• 2 years ago

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

jimbru• 2 years ago

Ideally there would be no sales expenses either

cruffle_duffle2• 2 years ago

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.

bayarearefugee2• 2 years ago

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).

rocqua• 2 years ago

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.

readyplayernull• 2 years ago

The classic tell, don't show.

frereubu• 2 years ago

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.

griomnib6• 2 years ago

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”.

Rebelgecko• 2 years ago

An LLM can't explain the value of Salesforce?

griomnib6• 2 years ago

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

majormajor2• 2 years ago

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?

bee_rider4• 2 years ago

Do their customers value sales more than engineering? It seems like a self-consistent pitch if so.

InkCanon• 2 years ago

Classic solution in search of a problem thinking. "It's not that our solution isn't wanted, our customers just need to get it!"

paxys4• 2 years ago

"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

javierluraschi• 2 years ago

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.

thelittleone2• 2 years ago

Sadly status quo of the vast majority of enterprise software companies, at least after growth starts to flatten out.

throwarayes3• 2 years ago

I really hope someone here makes it their goal to get hired by Salesforce in 2025

aaurelions• 2 years ago

BarneyStinsonChallengeAccepted.gif

hx82• 2 years ago

I can't wait to read that LinkedIn job announcement post.

razster• 2 years ago

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.

notatoad2• 2 years ago

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.

linotype2• 2 years ago

Oh so Oracle.

Centigonal• 2 years ago

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.

rawgabbit7• 2 years ago

By tribes, you mean tribes that run casinos?

throwarayes3• 2 years ago

Isn't this just cover for cost cutting draw attention away from potentially bad earnings?

darth_avocado3• 2 years ago

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

jmward01• 2 years ago

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.

93po• 2 years ago

as another poster pointed out, they have 104 job listings for software developers right now, so yeah. this article is just an ad.

riku_iki2• 2 years ago

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.

darth_avocado3• 2 years ago

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.

bee_rider4• 2 years ago

“I’m not just the president.” Pause. “I’m a client too.”

Pretty old trick.

wankerrific• 2 years ago

Yep. He’s a member

actuallyalys4• 2 years ago

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.

scherlock• 2 years ago

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.

throwaway743950• 2 years ago

There may also be engineers working harder because of being worried about getting laid off. How could they separate those productivity increases from AI?

EugeneOZ• 2 years ago

Just a sales speech for Agentforce.

breckenedge2• 2 years ago

Wonder if this will include Heroku? And do they mean no more hiring at all, or just no new positions?

linotype2• 2 years ago

Heroku is still a thing? I would have figured their lunch would have been eaten years ago with how expensive they were.

breckenedge2• 2 years ago

Heh still cheaper than two operation engineer salaries.

bigfatkitten4• 2 years ago

It's still around, but like most Salesforce acquisitions it has mostly been left to languish.

Andys• 2 years ago

They're rewriting Heroku to be a hosted K8s offering. Presumably using aforementioned LLMs.

manishsharan• 2 years ago

I call BS. They will need to continue to innovate and execute new ideas. Unless they wasn't to go the GE route

aenis2• 2 years ago

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.

ozim2• 2 years ago

Plan is that others will need to hire expensive Salesforce consultants anyway. I don’t think they are getting rid of those people.

TZubiri4• 2 years ago

I feel the sudden urge to become certified as an Agentforce consultant

aenis2• 2 years ago

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.

neom• 2 years ago

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++

charlieyu1• 2 years ago

Dunning-Kruger Effect is definitely strong with AI. If I own any of their stock I’d probably sell it now.

bionhoward• 2 years ago

Salesforce seemed way slow and over engineered to me, like it was the result of double exponential feature creep over many years

bombcar• 2 years ago

Salesforce has tons of features, but at its root it's Microsoft Access Online for 80% of the companies that use it.

cruffle_duffle2• 2 years ago

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!

dvsfish• 2 years ago

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.

mullingitover6• 2 years ago

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.

dasil0033• 2 years ago

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.

mullingitover6• 2 years ago

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.

koolba• 2 years ago

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?

brandon272• 2 years ago

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.

hatefulmoron3• 2 years ago

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.

gregw23• 2 years ago

I might take it one step further... AI might /better/ at mimicking the lying and hallucinations of management than at mimicking engineering.

Jcampuzano2• 2 years ago

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.

geodel• 2 years ago

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.

psanford• 2 years ago

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.

m3kw9• 2 years ago

He will be hiring by Jan 15, 2025

angoragoats5• 2 years ago

They are hiring today. Complete BS from the CEO.

https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/?page=1&team=Software...

strambino2424• 2 years ago

These are jobs sponsoring for PERM greencards. They are using AI as an excuse to replace US citizens with foreigners

bb611• 2 years ago

Current SFDC software engineer - this is just cover for a widespread engineering hiring freeze since the layoffs in January 2023. There's a ton of pressure to control costs after the near shareholder revolt that caused the layoffs.

The public nature of the announcement is certainly marketing for our AI offerings as well, but at this point I think most engineers are just worried there will be additional layoffs, in the event management cannibalizes product for short term stock gains again.

risyachka• 2 years ago

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

ethbr12• 2 years ago

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).

mrayycombi2• 2 years ago

Indeed, it's marketing slop as a pretense for a hiring freeze.

area51org• 2 years ago

This kind of smokescreen only works for so long. Once it all starts failing and profits dip, things will change.

xarope2• 2 years ago

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.

sharkweek• 2 years ago

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).

jrockway3• 2 years ago

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.

sfdcccthrow2• 2 years ago

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.

dalyons• 2 years ago

what happened in the last 2-4 months?

JohnMakin2• 2 years ago

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.

SequoiaHope• 2 years ago

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.

gedy• 2 years ago

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)

kortilla• 2 years ago

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.

csomar• 2 years ago

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.

notadruid• 2 years ago

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.

raxxor• 2 years ago

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.

markus_zhang• 2 years ago

Ah, the toxic env, I'm too familiar with it. Quarterly layoffs, perks gone, more RTO, but execs can still travel around lavishly.

echelon• 2 years ago

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.

nielsbot• 2 years ago

time for a union

qwe----3• 2 years ago

2$ per interactions (negotiable to 1$) btw

willcipriano• 2 years ago

ChatGPriceyT

ilrwbwrkhv• 2 years ago

Thanks for sharing the inside info. Companies think they are being clever.

foogazi• 2 years ago

What hiding freeze ?

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

mianos• 2 years ago

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

mercurialsolo2• 2 years ago

Is agentforce working at all? Any practical use-cases beyond the customer support one?

belter• 2 years ago

I guess in any case, after this statement by the CEO...There will be no more good quality candidates applying anyway.

jerlam• 2 years ago

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.

pylua2• 2 years ago

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.

unclebucknasty2• 2 years ago

Mind if I ask what AI tooling you are using and how it's increased your productivity?

pylua2• 2 years ago

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.

Fokamul• 2 years ago

How many of software devs working for Salesforce are outsourced in India or literal slaves working on H1B Visa?

HL33tibCe72• 2 years ago

As a user I get strong outsourced vibes

strambino2424• 2 years ago

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%

briga2• 2 years ago

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

crabmusket• 2 years ago

What are you referring to as "this field"?

briga2• 2 years ago

Software engineering, or at least the Silicon Valley style tech sector

actuallyalys4• 2 years ago

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.

WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW2• 2 years ago

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.

BigJono• 2 years ago

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.

Barrin92• 2 years ago

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

DidYaWipe• 2 years ago

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.

pxc• 2 years ago

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?

WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW2• 2 years ago

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?

gregw23• 2 years ago

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.

rawgabbit7• 2 years ago

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.

maxfurman• 2 years ago

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

paxys4• 2 years ago

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.

sfdcccthrow2• 2 years ago

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.

timcobb• 2 years ago

So, uh, do you think they've driven productivity up 30%? ;) ;) ;)

TZubiri4• 2 years ago

"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

rawgabbit7• 2 years ago

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”.

didgeoridoo• 2 years ago

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.

paxys4• 2 years ago

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.

donw• 2 years ago

That's why the Irish pronounce it "Salesfarce"

hx82• 2 years ago

Salesmen selling to other salesmen.

kibibu2• 2 years ago

I presume it works to have the new shiny thing that execs have vaguely heard about. It only has to exist while the hype cycle is at its peak.

I'm surprised there hasn't been a Salesforce AR/VR.

Eumenes• 2 years ago

You're just mad you didn't invent it first!

mlinksva• 2 years ago

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

RainyDayTmrw• 2 years ago

Poe's Law being what it is, I had to double check, and Salesforce indeed has official marketing/landing pages for these.

arwhatever• 2 years ago

… on top of circa 1997 Java syntax …

paradox242• 2 years ago

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.

salmonet• 2 years ago

I'm old enough to remember when Dreamforce was "The Largest Internet of Things Conference".

chasd004• 2 years ago

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.

6510• 2 years ago

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.

rawgabbit7• 2 years ago

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_...

fraserharris• 2 years ago

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.

sureglymop• 2 years ago

"Einstein" references are always incredibly ironic considering how much of a socialist the guy was.

nitwit005• 2 years ago

They apparently paid $20 million for the use of Einstein's image: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-27/salesforc...

alfalfasprout• 2 years ago

yep salesforce has quite the track record of making bold marketing claims until the next hot thing shows up.

epolanski2• 2 years ago

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.

somanyphotons• 2 years ago

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

skeeter2020• 2 years ago

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.

cbm-vic-20• 2 years ago

The hard part is figuring out which half. And figuring out who the right people to make those decisions.

qwertycrackers• 2 years ago

The problem is that there's no outside way to tell which 50% is the useless half. It's just like marketing budget.

herval2• 2 years ago

The little github-styled Einstein was unforgettably cringe

jongjong• 2 years ago

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.

datavirtue• 2 years ago

Interesting. This little stunt very much reminded me of Oracle.

informal007• 2 years ago

There isn't a better topic for tech CEOs to focus on, it's pathetic for the world.

pyromaker• 2 years ago

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. :)

bhouston2• 2 years ago

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.

zamalek• 2 years ago

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).

bhouston2• 2 years ago

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.

aranchelk• 2 years ago

How is this not the top comment?

capkutay• 2 years ago

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.

onlyrealcuzzo• 2 years ago

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.

zeroonetwothree• 2 years ago

FWIW various studies find that software engineers spend about 25% of their time coding on average.

dasil0033• 2 years ago

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.

rvz• 2 years ago

“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

JCM92• 2 years ago

+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.

croes• 2 years ago

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?

WD-42• 2 years ago

Honestly who would want to work for them anyway?

mrayycombi2• 2 years ago

"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.

nashashmi• 2 years ago

AI has seem to chip away at Business administration jobs. Lots of people can’t find jobs in this area anymore

vlaksh365• 2 years ago

Doesn't seem to extend to acquisitions like Slack - https://slack.com/careers

throwaway182312• 2 years ago

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".

exabrial• 2 years ago

I lol’d at 30% boost in productivity w/AI.

Which one? All of them I’ve used produce incorrect code 90% of time.

rootedbox• 2 years ago

You know your competition also has that 30% efficiency gain??? Sounds like a good time for them to catch up.

dboreham• 2 years ago

Observationally, there's a fairly tight correlation between "making lots of money" and total bullshit.

mixmix• 2 years ago

"[...] 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.

zmmmmm• 2 years ago

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.

HL33tibCe72• 2 years ago

Who is going to add 600 more checkboxes to every settings page (up from 10000) now?

thelittleone2• 2 years ago

Perhaps he should also talk about the timeline for AI replacing the executive team.

rglover• 2 years ago

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.

broknbottle• 2 years ago

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.

JCM92• 2 years ago

So their AI sales agent is absolutely amazing but they gotta hire more humans to sell it. Got it.

dmezzetti• 2 years ago

How to make downsizing sound cool....

vcryan• 2 years ago

Any company can achieve this productivity gain simply by building only simple ~useless PoCs and stop building complex products.

tonymet• 2 years ago

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.

snarfy• 2 years ago

If shareholders want to replace the people with AI, it would be easier and more profitable to go top-down instead of bottom-up.

nextworddev• 2 years ago

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.

csto13• 2 years ago

As someone that sometimes has to deal with Salesforce, if AI can make the product better, god speed. Salesforce has so many warts, it's not even funny.

Eric_WVGG• 2 years ago

My first thought was, based on the current state of Salesforce it looks like they haven’t hired a new engineer since 2004.

strambino2424• 2 years ago

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

bigfatkitten4• 2 years ago

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.

blueguy522• 2 years ago

Enshittification - SF will become a legacy tool

geye1234• 2 years ago

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)

not2b• 2 years ago

“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.

ncr100• 2 years ago

50% of their net worth..?

dhbradshaw• 2 years ago

Hmm, could be a good time to set up as a contractor serving Salesforce

bigfatkitten4• 2 years ago

There is always excellent money to be made as a contractor doing Salesforce work.

croemer• 2 years ago

They'll probably just hire the same person anyways, just call them prompt engineer, not software engineer.

xiaodai• 2 years ago

They should hire English teachers to fix their grammar. “Will hire no more engineers.” Wtf

creamyhorror2• 2 years ago

It's fine to say "X will hire no additional staff" or "X will remain asleep no longer". These are established phrasings in English.

yalogin• 2 years ago

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?

duxup2• 2 years ago

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.

pkkkzip• 2 years ago

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.

duxup2• 2 years ago

I don't doubt that's the intent, sometimes, but hiring freezes happen lots of places and they don't mean that thing.

creamyhorror2• 2 years ago

It's not antagonistic to shareholders/investors who thought Salesforce was bloated before.

paulproteus• 2 years ago

Makes sense. Their software product isn't very good. They should take the profits they have and diversify into other businesses.

ramesh31• 2 years ago

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.

bickfordb• 2 years ago

If they're no longer a technology company, won't that crush their multiple?

crowcroft• 2 years ago

They have over 100 listed Software Engineering jobs on their site?

https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/

zombiwoof• 2 years ago

If this company future is resting on “agent force” i would imagine more engineers are leaving than wanting to work there anyway

quest88• 2 years ago

Of course they'll hire prompt engineers and agent engineers.

layman513• 2 years ago

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.

TZubiri4• 2 years ago

What do you mean failed implementations?

Like, they ask for a refund?

layman513• 2 years ago

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.

rednafi• 2 years ago

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?

ghiculescu• 2 years ago

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.

iancmceachern• 2 years ago

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.

mulmen• 2 years ago

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?

pico303• 2 years ago

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.”

mercurialsolo2• 2 years ago

Is agentforce working and are there any practical users who have got beyond the customer support use-case?

est• 2 years ago

Similarly, Satya Nadella recently said "Agents Will Replace ALL Software" in bg2 podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NtsnzRFJ_o

ertsam• 2 years ago

Salesforce and slack software engineering jobs: https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/?search=&team=Softwar...

nbzso• 2 years ago

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.

shahwaiz2• 2 years ago

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.

shahwaiz2• 2 years ago

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.

johann8384• 2 years ago

It would be fabulous if all of the current engineers quit and said "Fine let your AI do it"

squarefoot• 2 years ago

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?

nataliegunther• 2 years ago

They should fire sales, make it cheaper and use some of those savings to invest in better product people and software engineers.

blueguy522• 2 years ago

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.

mbrumlow• 2 years ago

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.

troyvit• 2 years ago

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.

r-zip• 2 years ago

How stupid do these CEOs think people are?

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

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