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My own experience in e-commerce was that Salesforce came in to a couple of companies I worked at and it wasn't a fit. Which was weird. I recently looked for a

My own experience in e-commerce was that Salesforce came in to a couple of companies I worked at and it wasn't a fit. Which was weird. I recently looked for a platform for CRM, invoicing, project management and communication, and Salesforce didn't really have anything out of the box (or within a reasonable distance of a read-to-go-box) for that either. There was little off-the-shelf available... not even starter packs, which I found a bit curious. Ended up going with Accelo, which I think of as one level up from a bare Salesforce install. My conclusion.. albeit not entirely informed, is that I probably am happiest never working in a company, or with a client, that's oriented around Salesforce processes.

commandlinefan 7y ago
I was tricked into doing SFDC development for a while, about eight years ago. I had a background in more “traditional” application development: Java on the back end and Javascript on the front end. Working in Salesforce was honestly a pretty miserable experience. Everything you do in it is metered; you have a limit on the number of DB calls you can make in an hour, a limit on how many bytes you can access in an hour, a limit on how many rows you can save… it’s almost as bad as AWS, but nowhere near as manageable because you can’t tell if you’re going to hit a limit until you hit it in production. At least back then, there was no interactive debugger for Apex, and no test client for SOQL (their “almost SQL but not SQL” query language), so any debugging you wanted to do was done using print statements. And of course, you couldn’t run anything locally - everything had to be copied up to their servers in order to something as trivial as test a form validation. I slogged through it for about 3 years before I finally gave up on it - although it does a good job of making simple things like creating input forms for database object easy, it makes harder things like an actual business workflow impossible (it’s noteworthy that even the CRM functionality wasn’t implemented in “pure” Apex/VisualForce because it was too limiting even for the thing that Salesforce was designed for).
amyjess 7y ago
From the impression I got reading OP's article, Salesforce is intended mostly for companies that can hire a dedicated Salesforce admin (or two) who can really set everything up exactly to your company's specifications, which means that smaller companies that don't have the resources to do that would be better off with one of the less-flexible CRMs/ERPs out there.

commandlinefan 7y ago

I was tricked into doing SFDC development for a while, about eight years ago. I had a background in more “traditional” application development: Java on the back end and Javascript on the front end. Working in Salesforce was honestly a pretty miserable experience. Everything you do in it is metered; you have a limit on the number of DB calls you can make in an hour, a limit on how many bytes you can access in an hour, a limit on how many rows you can save… it’s almost as bad as AWS, but nowhere near as manageable because you can’t tell if you’re going to hit a limit until you hit it in production. At least back then, there was no interactive debugger for Apex, and no test client for SOQL (their “almost SQL but not SQL” query language), so any debugging you wanted to do was done using print statements. And of course, you couldn’t run anything locally - everything had to be copied up to their servers in order to something as trivial as test a form validation. I slogged through it for about 3 years before I finally gave up on it - although it does a good job of making simple things like creating input forms for database object easy, it makes harder things like an actual business workflow impossible (it’s noteworthy that even the CRM functionality wasn’t implemented in “pure” Apex/VisualForce because it was too limiting even for the thing that Salesforce was designed for).

amyjess 7y ago

From the impression I got reading OP's article, Salesforce is intended mostly for companies that can hire a dedicated Salesforce admin (or two) who can really set everything up exactly to your company's specifications, which means that smaller companies that don't have the resources to do that would be better off with one of the less-flexible CRMs/ERPs out there.