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Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff
- bigfatkitten 2y agoAs 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 2y agoPharaoh must signal, to shareholders, to a board, and to their peers. There will be no consequences for failure to adhere to this proclamation.
- JSDevOps 2y ago[dead]
- colesantiago 2y ago> Hire No More Software Engineers in 2025 https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/?page=1&team=Software%20Engineering&pagesize=20#results 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.
- throwarayes 2y agoYou wonder if smart hiring managers knew to post their roles ASAP before a freeze on new roles :)
- strambino242 2y agoThese 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 2y agoThose could be legit backfills.
- greatpostman 2y agoThere won’t be massive ai layoffs. Companies will just stop hiring
- giantg2 2y agoIt feels they already have.
- segasaturn 2y agoI 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 2y agoHow bad is the job market right now? Is it as bad as everyone says it is? Makes me pretty scared for the future, tbh.
- hatefulmoron 2y agoIt'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!
- nick__m 2y 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 2y agoThat is that capitalist dream—all sales, no production expenses.
- jimbru 2y agoIdeally there would be no sales expenses either
- cruffle_duffle 2y agoWouldn’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.
- ArtemZ 2y agoThere 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
- bayarearefugee 2y agoThey 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).
- throwarayes 2y agoI really hope someone here makes it their goal to get hired by Salesforce in 2025
- aaurelions 2y agoBarneyStinsonChallengeAccepted.gif
- hx8 2y agoI can't wait to read that LinkedIn job announcement post.
- razster 2y agoWe'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.
- notatoad 2y agosalesforce 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.
- Centigonal 2y agoI 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.
- rawgabbit 2y agoBy tribes, you mean tribes that run casinos?
- throwarayes 2y agoIsn't this just cover for cost cutting draw attention away from potentially bad earnings?
- darth_avocado 2y ago1. 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 2y agoThis 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 2y agoas another poster pointed out, they have 104 job listings for software developers right now, so yeah. this article is just an ad.
- riku_iki 2y 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_avocado 2y agoI 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.
- riku_iki 2y agoIt 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.
- EugeneOZ 2y agoJust a sales speech for Agentforce.
- breckenedge 2y agoWonder if this will include Heroku? And do they mean no more hiring at all, or just no new positions?
- linotype 2y agoHeroku is still a thing? I would have figured their lunch would have been eaten years ago with how expensive they were.
- breckenedge 2y agoHeh still cheaper than two operation engineer salaries.
- bigfatkitten 2y agoIt's still around, but like most Salesforce acquisitions it has mostly been left to languish.
- Andys 2y agoThey're rewriting Heroku to be a hosted K8s offering. Presumably using aforementioned LLMs.
- manishsharan 2y agoI call BS. They will need to continue to innovate and execute new ideas. Unless they wasn't to go the GE route
- aenis 2y agoPart 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.
- ozim 2y agoPlan is that others will need to hire expensive Salesforce consultants anyway. I don’t think they are getting rid of those people.
- TZubiri 2y agoI feel the sudden urge to become certified as an Agentforce consultant
- aenis 2y agoThe 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.
- ozim 2y agoWell 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.
- neom 2y agonice, 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 2y agoDunning-Kruger Effect is definitely strong with AI. If I own any of their stock I’d probably sell it now.
- bionhoward 2y agoSalesforce seemed way slow and over engineered to me, like it was the result of double exponential feature creep over many years
- bombcar 2y agoSalesforce has tons of features, but at its root it's Microsoft Access Online for 80% of the companies that use it.
- cruffle_duffle 2y agoIsn’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 2y agobloat, 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.
- mullingitover 2y agoIf 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.
- dasil003 2y agoThe 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.
- mullingitover 2y 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.
- bee_rider 2y agoThat 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.
- mullingitover 2y agoFrom 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?
- bee_rider 2y agoI 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.
- psanford 2y agoMarc 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 2y agoHe will be hiring by Jan 15, 2025
- angoragoats 2y agoThey are hiring today. Complete BS from the CEO. https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/?page=1&team=Software%20Engineering&pagesize=20#results https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/?page=1&team=Software...
- strambino242 2y agoThese are jobs sponsoring for PERM greencards. They are using AI as an excuse to replace US citizens with foreigners
- angoragoats 2y agoNot sure where you’re getting that from. Most of them look like regular job listings to me.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bb611 2y agoCurrent 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 2y agoLooks 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
- ethbr1 2y agoTheir 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).
- cyanydeez 2y agoThere's probably space for AI secretaries to screen contacts and to drop AI sales.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- PaulHoule 2y agoCompensated 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")
- pylua 2y agoWhat 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.
- unclebucknasty 2y agoMind if I ask what AI tooling you are using and how it's increased your productivity?
- pylua 2y agoI 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.
- unclebucknasty 2y agoGotcha. 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.
- Fokamul 2y agoHow many of software devs working for Salesforce are outsourced in India or literal slaves working on H1B Visa?
- HL33tibCe7 2y agoAs a user I get strong outsourced vibes
- strambino242 2y agoAccording 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%
- briga 2y agoIf 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 2y agoWhat are you referring to as "this field"?
- briga 2y agoSoftware engineering, or at least the Silicon Valley style tech sector
- actuallyalys 2y agoI 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.
- WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y 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.
- actuallyalys 2y agoIn 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.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoI 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 2y agoEverywhere 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?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y 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?
- gregw2 2y agoI'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.
- paxys 2y agoBenioff 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.
- sfdcccthrow 2y agoInternally 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 2y agoSo, uh, do you think they've driven productivity up 30%? ;) ;) ;)
- javawizard 2y agoI'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.
- namaria 2y agoWell 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mring33621 2y ago
- rawgabbit 2y agoAFAIK 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 2y agoI 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.
- paxys 2y agoLet'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 2y agoThat's why the Irish pronounce it "Salesfarce"
- hx8 2y agoSalesmen selling to other salesmen.
- kibibu 2y agoI 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.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoLet'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 2y agoFWIW various studies find that software engineers spend about 25% of their time coding on average.
- dasil003 2y agoThis 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.
- JCM9 2y 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.
- rvz 2y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42630993
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- croes 2y 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 2y agoHonestly who would want to work for them anyway?
- mrayycombi 2y 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 2y agoAI has seem to chip away at Business administration jobs. Lots of people can’t find jobs in this area anymore
- vlaksh365 2y agoDoesn't seem to extend to acquisitions like Slack - https://slack.com/careers https://slack.com/careers
- throwaway182312 2y agoGiven 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 2y agoI lol’d at 30% boost in productivity w/AI. Which one? All of them I’ve used produce incorrect code 90% of time.
- rootedbox 2y agoYou know your competition also has that 30% efficiency gain??? Sounds like a good time for them to catch up.
- dboreham 2y agoObservationally, there's a fairly tight correlation between "making lots of money" and total bullshit.
- mixmix 2y 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 2y 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.
- HL33tibCe7 2y agoWho is going to add 600 more checkboxes to every settings page (up from 10000) now?
- thelittleone 2y agoPerhaps he should also talk about the timeline for AI replacing the executive team.
- rglover 2y agoI'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 2y agoWhy 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.
- JCM9 2y agoSo their AI sales agent is absolutely amazing but they gotta hire more humans to sell it. Got it.
- dmezzetti 2y agoHow to make downsizing sound cool....
- vcryan 2y agoAny company can achieve this productivity gain simply by building only simple ~useless PoCs and stop building complex products.
- tonymet 2y agoSalesforce 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 2y agoIf shareholders want to replace the people with AI, it would be easier and more profitable to go top-down instead of bottom-up.
- nextworddev 2y agoThe 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 2y agoAs 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 2y agoMy first thought was, based on the current state of Salesforce it looks like they haven’t hired a new engineer since 2004.
- strambino242 2y agoMy 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
- bigfatkitten 2y agoThat'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.
- blueguy52 2y agoEnshittification - SF will become a legacy tool
- geye1234 2y agoYou 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 https://substack.com/home/post/p-153688691 (not my Substack but has a good overall view of what's going on)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- not2b 2y 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 2y ago50% of their net worth..?
- dhbradshaw 2y agoHmm, could be a good time to set up as a contractor serving Salesforce
- bigfatkitten 2y agoThere is always excellent money to be made as a contractor doing Salesforce work.
- croemer 2y agoThey'll probably just hire the same person anyways, just call them prompt engineer, not software engineer.
- xiaodai 2y agoThey should hire English teachers to fix their grammar. “Will hire no more engineers.” Wtf
- creamyhorror 2y agoIt's fine to say "X will hire no additional staff" or "X will remain asleep no longer". These are established phrasings in English.
- yalogin 2y agoWhat 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?
- duxup 2y agoI 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 2y agoI 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.
- duxup 2y agoI don't doubt that's the intent, sometimes, but hiring freezes happen lots of places and they don't mean that thing.
- creamyhorror 2y agoIt's not antagonistic to shareholders/investors who thought Salesforce was bloated before.
- paulproteus 2y agoMakes sense. Their software product isn't very good. They should take the profits they have and diversify into other businesses.
- ramesh31 2y agoRead 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 2y agoIf they're no longer a technology company, won't that crush their multiple?
- crowcroft 2y agoThey have over 100 listed Software Engineering jobs on their site? https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/ https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/
- zombiwoof 2y agoIf this company future is resting on “agent force” i would imagine more engineers are leaving than wanting to work there anyway
- quest88 2y agoOf course they'll hire prompt engineers and agent engineers.
- layman51 2y agoI 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.
- TZubiri 2y agoWhat do you mean failed implementations? Like, they ask for a refund?
- layman51 2y agoI 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.
- TZubiri 2y ago"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
- rednafi 2y agoI’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 2y agoSay 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 2y agoThis 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mulmen 2y agoSo 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 2y agoA 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.”
- mercurialsolo 2y agoIs agentforce working and are there any practical users who have got beyond the customer support use-case?
- est 2y agoSimilarly, Satya Nadella recently said "Agents Will Replace ALL Software" in bg2 podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NtsnzRFJ_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NtsnzRFJ_o
- ertsam 2y agoSalesforce and slack software engineering jobs: https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/?search=&team=Software+Engineering&pagesize=20#results https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/?search=&team=Softwar...
- nbzso 2y agoThe 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.
- shahwaiz 2y agoI 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-engineer-backend-slack/ https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/jr265886/software-eng... this was the post https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-software-engineers-in-2025-says-marc-benioff/ https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s... So i doubt the sales force CEO said that actually.
- shahwaiz 2y agoI came across same post here: https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-software-engineers-in-2025-says-marc-benioff/ 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-engineer-backend-slack/ 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 2y agoIt would be fabulous if all of the current engineers quit and said "Fine let your AI do it"
- squarefoot 2y agoHow 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 2y agoThey should fire sales, make it cheaper and use some of those savings to invest in better product people and software engineers.
- blueguy52 2y agoSpouse 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 2y agoIf 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 2y agoJudging by what I have to deal with in Salesforce this shouldn't pose much of a problem. In fact it might even help things.
- anastasiyaigo 2y ago[dead]
- r-zip 2y agoHow stupid do these CEOs think people are?