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As a certified Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud Architect who has been out of a job for months, this alarmingly impacts me. Looks like I'm gonna need to replatform

As a certified Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud Architect who has been out of a job for months, this alarmingly impacts me. Looks like I'm gonna need to replatform my skills to be relevant. I've been working on the platform since it was called Demandware, and I've been on numerous implementations and sites while working for a partner/consulting firm. I was laid off in January. It seems that Salesforce is pushing a mircoservices architecture for e-commerce (headless SFCC) hard. Separate systems are used to support features that Commerce Cloud can do on its own, but isn't setup that way for reasons I've yet to fully comprehend. Perhaps its more scalable, but Commerce Cloud already allowed you to scale up and down the number of backend servers with load. Perhaps they sell the idea that deployments can happen separately, so that you can update your homepage without bringing along any partially complete backend features, but in my years of doing releases, that's never once been an issue. Page redesigns aren't as big of a headache anymore thanks to a page designer feature. My cynical side says Big Cloud wants to sell more so it can charge more. I got a job during the summer that used such a microservices system (first time I've ever worked on one), but that job ultimately didn't work out for reasons that weren't entirely technical. AMA, I guess.

nicholasjarnold 2y ago
When you say "SF is pushing a microservices architecture for e-commerce hard", I wonder if you mean they attempt to rope customers into buying into the Mulesoft ecosystem (most of which, btw, is old versions of Spring on old JVM under the hood). They now own Mulesoft, and there is an army of sales people whom are presumably really good at getting the execs excited for groundbreaking features like "API Governance", "API Gateway", "low-code" and my favorite "security". A company I worked with suffered some serious setbacks after a lot of promises, many months and many many millions burned on this stuff. I'll be a happy man if I never have to hear about SAPI/BAPI/CRAPPI from ProServices people that don't even understand their own products let alone sound engineering principles again. I must admit that I wasn't directly involved with SF/Mulesoft impls, but I did suffer through many regrettable touch points with it.
- theandrewbailey 2y ago
  > When you say "SF is pushing a microservices architecture for e-commerce hard", I wonder if you mean they attempt to rope customers into buying into the Mulesoft ecosystem Yup, bingo! Before I got laid off, I was working on... monolithic (for the lack of a better term) SFCC systems, never headless. The vast majority of the few SFCC job postings I've come across have been asking for Mulesoft experience, and that summer job also featured it, though I never worked directly on it, only the SFCC instances that sat behind it. I've never worked with any Salesforce sales team prior to actually getting to work, and in fact, all of my work in the past 7-ish years (and most of it before) has been post-launch development and support. EDIT: And when I started looking at what Mulesoft was, why, and how to use it, all I found was hype about APIs; nothing about why you would point web browsers at it for HTML. The documentation might as well have said it was a genie that made all your wishes come true.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
tootie 2y ago
This is the risk of a being a product expert. I've been through a few cycles. Transitioning can be done. You can also seek clients who are looking to migrate away from Demandware.
- burnte 2y ago
  I have inadvertently made a name for myself inside Salesforce for migrating people off of it in short timeframes. My last meeting with them for a company, they asked if I was the same [Name] who worked with X, Y, and Z, all companies I moved from Salesforce. I actually got them to settle a contract for 50 cents on the dollar for early termination. There's a real market for people who will pay to move from SF to see huge savings. Being a Saleforce export would only help.
  - tootie 2y ago
    Curious what you see people are moving to. We migrated to SF from a super legacy piece of shit so it's been a big improvement but it's a beast for a company our size and wicked expensive.
    - burnte 2y ago
      It's usually either another CRM, like Nutshell, Sugar, Zoho, or a dozen other CRMs, or pointing out that what they built out Salesforce is another type of app all together, and direct them to a proper app for that market. The latter type tends to be ticket systems, document management ssytems, and in the case of one company they used it as an EMR. The EMR they used was open source but did very little. They liked the "free" aspect of it, but they were paying $400k/yr on Salesforce to do all the things their EMR didn't, as well as another app platform they were building out on. I pointed out they were spending $600k/yr on an EMR, not zero dollars. The COO pitched a HUGE fit but they did move to a $200k/yr EMR that did everything and they saved tremendous amounts of time in clinic, and money in administrator salaries.
      - bigfatkitten 2y ago
ethbr1 2y ago
What incentives lead companies to adopt heavyweight, vendor-specific platforms for core business functions... and then outsource all the operation and support of it? I've seen this with a ton of Salesforce/adjacent platforms, and it's always confused me. For something that critical, doesn't it make sense to have inhouse expertise?
- theandrewbailey 2y ago
  For most companies, there are in-house people there who are trained on the vendor specific platform, and understand (at least at a high-level) how it works. When they want to make big changes, they start talking to their partners/outsourcing companies about it, so that they, themselves, won't have to hire more people just for this one project. (afterwards, what will they be doing?)
- delfinom 2y ago
  >“The reason most enterprise software is so expensive is because it takes so many steak dinners to put it in your hand,” Shopify Chief Operating Officer Kaz Nejatian said in an interview. This is why. "Lobbying" aka "business dinners" aka "kickbacks" and more.

nicholasjarnold 2y ago

When you say "SF is pushing a microservices architecture for e-commerce hard", I wonder if you mean they attempt to rope customers into buying into the Mulesoft ecosystem (most of which, btw, is old versions of Spring on old JVM under the hood). They now own Mulesoft, and there is an army of sales people whom are presumably really good at getting the execs excited for groundbreaking features like "API Governance", "API Gateway", "low-code" and my favorite "security". A company I worked with suffered some serious setbacks after a lot of promises, many months and many many millions burned on this stuff. I'll be a happy man if I never have to hear about SAPI/BAPI/CRAPPI from ProServices people that don't even understand their own products let alone sound engineering principles again. I must admit that I wasn't directly involved with SF/Mulesoft impls, but I did suffer through many regrettable touch points with it.

theandrewbailey 2y ago
> When you say "SF is pushing a microservices architecture for e-commerce hard", I wonder if you mean they attempt to rope customers into buying into the Mulesoft ecosystem Yup, bingo! Before I got laid off, I was working on... monolithic (for the lack of a better term) SFCC systems, never headless. The vast majority of the few SFCC job postings I've come across have been asking for Mulesoft experience, and that summer job also featured it, though I never worked directly on it, only the SFCC instances that sat behind it. I've never worked with any Salesforce sales team prior to actually getting to work, and in fact, all of my work in the past 7-ish years (and most of it before) has been post-launch development and support. EDIT: And when I started looking at what Mulesoft was, why, and how to use it, all I found was hype about APIs; nothing about why you would point web browsers at it for HTML. The documentation might as well have said it was a genie that made all your wishes come true.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

tootie 2y ago

This is the risk of a being a product expert. I've been through a few cycles. Transitioning can be done. You can also seek clients who are looking to migrate away from Demandware.

burnte 2y ago
I have inadvertently made a name for myself inside Salesforce for migrating people off of it in short timeframes. My last meeting with them for a company, they asked if I was the same [Name] who worked with X, Y, and Z, all companies I moved from Salesforce. I actually got them to settle a contract for 50 cents on the dollar for early termination. There's a real market for people who will pay to move from SF to see huge savings. Being a Saleforce export would only help.
- tootie 2y ago
  Curious what you see people are moving to. We migrated to SF from a super legacy piece of shit so it's been a big improvement but it's a beast for a company our size and wicked expensive.
  - burnte 2y ago
    It's usually either another CRM, like Nutshell, Sugar, Zoho, or a dozen other CRMs, or pointing out that what they built out Salesforce is another type of app all together, and direct them to a proper app for that market. The latter type tends to be ticket systems, document management ssytems, and in the case of one company they used it as an EMR. The EMR they used was open source but did very little. They liked the "free" aspect of it, but they were paying $400k/yr on Salesforce to do all the things their EMR didn't, as well as another app platform they were building out on. I pointed out they were spending $600k/yr on an EMR, not zero dollars. The COO pitched a HUGE fit but they did move to a $200k/yr EMR that did everything and they saved tremendous amounts of time in clinic, and money in administrator salaries.
    - bigfatkitten 2y ago

ethbr1 2y ago

What incentives lead companies to adopt heavyweight, vendor-specific platforms for core business functions... and then outsource all the operation and support of it? I've seen this with a ton of Salesforce/adjacent platforms, and it's always confused me. For something that critical, doesn't it make sense to have inhouse expertise?

theandrewbailey 2y ago
For most companies, there are in-house people there who are trained on the vendor specific platform, and understand (at least at a high-level) how it works. When they want to make big changes, they start talking to their partners/outsourcing companies about it, so that they, themselves, won't have to hire more people just for this one project. (afterwards, what will they be doing?)
delfinom 2y ago
>“The reason most enterprise software is so expensive is because it takes so many steak dinners to put it in your hand,” Shopify Chief Operating Officer Kaz Nejatian said in an interview. This is why. "Lobbying" aka "business dinners" aka "kickbacks" and more.