But he went on to say: “We’re not adding any more software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with Agentforce and with other AI technology that we’re using for engineering teams by more than 30% – to the point where our engineering velocity is incredible. I can’t believe what we’re achieving in engineering.”
This announcement is just advertising for agentforce (their AI) they’re likely not being serious about it.
Is it because they would be bankrupt by the end of the year?
They don’t want to ruin their reputation by having functional software.
Maybe some dude in his mothers basement will use A.I to develop a good replacement for salesforce.
bold strategy, let’s see if your shit platform can continue to compete when its barely working now.
Compete? They don’t need to compete. Their vendor lock in strategy is unbeatable. I have no idea how they continue to scam companies onto their platform, but I don’t know anyone that’s happy with it after a few years (except that one ass hat at every company that somehow keeps moving more business processes to it), and yet I’ve never seen any company successfully get off it.
Maybe they hired the political strategists that keep making most Americans vote against their self interests as their sales team
Not to mention that Tableau is an awful product that will only continue to get worse.
And the costs for their shit products are astronomical.
Yeah, who is there to compete with? (The somehow-way-worse) NetSuite?
Headline in six months: Salesforce Hires Software Engineers After Realizing Middle Managers Don’t Know How To Turn AI-Generated Code Into Actual Applications
Being a software engineer is a hell of a lot more than just the actual act of writing code.
Knowing companies, they won’t realise anything and will just make their existing employees pick up the slack
Not before the 2025 headline Salesforce lays off 25% of software development staff.
Maybe if we’d put LLM powered puppets in the meetings with management so developers can just continue with their actual work we’d get a lot more done.
I think that should be tried first. I really think Ai could replace them! (Especially CEOs)
The cost savings will be immense, productivity and innovation will no longer be impaired by incapable self centred arseholes playing political games, … I can see that working.
Also the amount of management that doesn’t understand the difference between coders, programmers, and engineers. All quite different in scope and all completely necessary for at-scale production.
Thank you! Subscribed and will start passing posts over there.
Salesforce
I wish you the worst of luck, you are an awful company that makes finnicky garbage software. In my many years as an IT professional, I have never, at any point, heard anyone say anything positive about Salesforce, ever.
^expensive ^finicky ^garbage
What are the best alternatives for large enterprise?
Pretty much just MS Dynamics. Or you build your own, that’s common too.
There are others, Zendesk has a CRM, some use ServiceNow or Hubspot but those don’t fit the same use case.
ServiceNow is absolute trash, search doesn’t even work
100% agree, it’s hot garbage. I have no idea how it’s lasted
I swear dynamics is the shame shit
For which aspect? Sales force does so much that there isn’t a one product alternative. It is, however, cheaper for an enterprise to hire a team of web developers and build a custom in-house solution.
Our organization notified all they’re shifting to SAP HANA from salesforce. I have no clue what any of that means.
Oh you’re fucked.
CRM and Marketing
Marketing is a very broad term, what does that mean to you?
Constant contact and twilio might meet your needs depending on what they really are.
I’ll save you a click: AI bullshit.
As of Salesforce didn’t suck enough as is
We will have more salespeople next year because we really need to explain to people exactly the value that we can achieve with AI. So, we will probably add another 1,000 to 2,000 salespeople in the short term.
Well, good luck!
I can’t wait for the AI bubble to burst. It’s going to be hilarious to see these kinds of CEOs falling flat on their faces. Unfortunately, it will not be the CEOs who will suffer the most from the consequences.
I have never interacted with an enterprise software salesperson as a customer. But I’ve had a ton of them as coworkers since I work in software development. Knowing them from the inside, so to speak, it is impossible for me to imagine how anyone takes them seriously. The only things they actually know or care about are their quota and bonus. How anyone bases a large cash spend on the things they say boggles my mind.
The funny thing is it’s easier to replace salespeople with AI than developers. They should be losing salespeople first!
No man, sales people are far more important to the bottom line. Profits first, then working product in the future. It’s genius, no way that model could go wrong
It’s not about business optimization, it’s about not having to defer to someone’s knowledge from the position of power.
AI bubble makes so much sense when you start looking at it this way.
I think it’s just that MBA types see engineering and support as costing money and sales as making money.
Precisely this. This is, in my view, the biggest lie American MBA schools forced down to the society: the notion that, if you can’t quantify the value of support and engineering then it does not matter. That is just a side effect of how limited accounting is as a tool to measure value and of how unimaginative accountants are, as a class of professionals.
Then MBA schools don’t directly say it but do condone the notion that one can always squeeze more profit from less cost, which works in the beginning but at the end throws the company into a potentially unrecoverable corner (Boeing), damaging people’s lives, suppliers’ businesses, and the community at large.
Agree, and “defer” can mean organizationally as in needing someone else’s input, knowledge, support, buy-in…vs. running an autocratic hierarchy, which the weak and stupid prefer. Defer also means acknowledging the value and contributions of others and compensating them accordingly.
If I had to boil a lot of the churn in the water about AI, it’s by stupid people trying to sell even stupider, desperate people the idea the immense knowledge of the earth (or even that of their accounting or customer service practices) will be within their grasp and they won’t need others anymore. Of course, some say great cut headcount, because they didn’t understand the work others do in the first place.
While most won’t fully take an approach as extreme, and any AI use will likely be more organic, there will be outliers who receive the bulk of the press.
Saying you don’t need X position in early 2025 based on the state of AI is like declaring in 1996 libraries are dead.
What does that mean? “Defer” “knowledge” “position” & “power” aren’t connecting in my head…
My read of it was “the C-suite hates when the engineers actually know how shit works, and the leadership must kowtow to the people doing the actual work.” YMMV or the commentor may have meant something completely different.
Sad thing is that the CEOs who always claim big responsibility wont be responsible and just jump to the next big job.
Then the company goes bancrupt people lose their income and there are 0 consequences flr these fuckers
Reality is, they will just rebrand employees.
You’re not a developer anymore, but a customer satisfaction consultant. Same job as before, but technically not a developer!!
Also, this is a great way to reduce headcount while seeming innovative to the market ghouls.
For those who are not in the know, the cancer of software as a service was pioneered by salesforce. The devil has created a new circle in hell where salesforce employees are sent not to compete with actual demons because even in hell there are unions.
Interesting perspective. Counterpoint - my line of business is seeing more customers move away from on-prem licenses and instead prefer SaaS cloud hosted solutions.
The reasons being: 1) Quicker turnaround time for customer service requests 2) product knowledge expertise 3) lower internal IT resource demands 4) SaaS usually being cheaper than license in the short term 5) the intrinsic value of owned licenses being lower than what was sold due to product lifecycles, user adoption, security constraints, etc. 6) lower perceived switching costs with SaaS.
I’m genuinely curious, why do you feel SaaS is an inferior product? What makes it the devil’s work?
And FWIW, I realize I’m typing this on a FOSS application. I absolutely see the value in FOSS, it’s why I switched from Reddit 2 years ago, but I’m not kidding myself, the devs here gotta eat too and, just like KBin, they could jump ship any day if they chose to.
SaaS cloud hosted solutions vs on prem solutions? Not necessarily a bad move. You can save money and a lot of overhead and headaches if the software we’re talking about has a lot of different potential hosting providers / licensors so that prices are competitive.
Things like choosing who to host your PostgresDb, sure you could do it on prem, but it will likely be cheaper to pick a cloud host. BUT, that’s only because Postgres is open source, leaving tons of hosting providers to compete, and it is also still very similar to the rest of SQL dbs, leaving for extremely little lock-in, both amongst DBs and amongst hosts.
Salesforce though, and similar cloud platforms, are the opposite of that. Everything you build on them is completely locked into them. The DBs are salesforces’ custom db technology (which sucks), their interfaces are coded in a combination of one of three different Salesforce specific programming languages / frameworks, and it does extremely little out of the box, meaning that as a company when you adopt it, you have to spend a ton of time and money on a salesforce admin / specialist to set everything up for you, likely a bunch of coders to write custom code for you, and at the end of the day, because of its restrictions you’ll still produce a piece of crap interface / application that requires weeks of training for any employee to use.
And after all of that, Salesforce willl still charge you somewhere on the order of 10-1000x as much for simple stuff like /GB of db storage, compared to open source competitive DBs.
When platforms have that much lock-in, then they’re ripe for exploitation, which is why Salesforce is so insanely profitable. I can pretty much guarantee you that every mid size and larger company that uses Salesforce would have spend far less money overall by hiring a dedicated software development team to build out their own applications and infrastructure using open source (cloud hosted) services.
Thank you for stepping in.
I’d add
Saas can compound to higher costs due to the recurring subscription, flexibility comes at a cost, especially when unnecessary features are bundled. Much like you mentioned of salesforce, there’s a limited control on your data (and your customer’s) It can’t be airgapped for critical functions You’re locked in to one vendor in many cases Cost creep when features are bundled during the enshitification phase (salesforce again) It reduces consumer/enterprise options since it’s much more profitable so it conducted to the dissappearance of several perpetual license models for scientific software that has now compounded into billions of tax money being buried for use rather than any kind of useful feature addition.
There’s nothing inherently bad or good about SaaS per se as it can make sense, the problem is it became the racehorse the entire industry bet on and *EVERY *SINGLE *FUCKING *PIECE *OF *SW is now fucking SaaS, from printer SW to games on a flipping phone to access to basic scientific sofware. What could have been a great invention to provide scalability and low upfront cost to enterprises spread like cancer and corrupted the entire software industry. For that, Salesforce has been relegated to their own hell circle.
I always thought the abomination that is SaaS came from Adobe
lol, one of our suppliers just changed to them 1.5 years ago.
Someone managed to fuck the portal software up so much that all the ö you type in a support case get replaced by o, both in the webview and the emails. The ä and ü work fine. It’s extra fucked.
And our support team sits in Germany, we write in German sometimes. When we use English it is only for the benefit of their Tier 3 guys.
Plus the implementation of two factor sign in is now delayed by half a year already. It seems to me more developers could be helpful
It’s a bold strategy Cotton.
Good. They should stop frantically adding new features and tidy up some of the crap we have to use day to day.
Makes sense, it’s only reasonable to expect economy wide reduction in tech workers and positions as the global workforce recovers from the overtraining and overhiring that was the hallmark of the 2000s and 2010s. This is a good thing, society’s responsibility is to make retraining easy and accessible for the millions of trained tech workers who represent the overage.
