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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 c
by bb611 2y 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 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")
- wbl 2y agoWhy do people think costs can get passed on? They can't be. Pricing is about supply elasticity and demand elasticity. Sometimes you just need to eat costs because of the competition.
- PaulHoule 2y agoOften though the competition is facing the same pressure. Or there is no competition. My trainer at the gym introduced me to https://patents.google.com/patent/US10245460B2/en?oq=10245460 https://patents.google.com/patent/US10245460B2/en?oq=1024546... which sells for about $250 (worth it if you really use it.) My first instinct is that this product ought to be available for $25 on Temu if there wasn't a patent but I know from experience that if I talked to folks at TRX they'd have a good explanation of why my number is low. (e.g. TRX is in a position to pass costs on)
- downrightmike 2y agoI got one of those from walmart in like 2018 for like $20, still going strong
- PaulHoule 2y agoTRX won a lawsuit and you can't get one from Wal-Mart today https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/trx-obtains-federal-court-order-validating-patents-and-trademarks-for-its-market-leading-suspension-trainer-300976729.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/trx-obtains-federal...
- hedora 2y agoThese are between $20 and $250, but having many different band resistance levels is useful: https://gofit.net/collections/resistance-tubes-bands https://gofit.net/collections/resistance-tubes-bands There are plenty of cheaper no-name options on Amazon, but they have the property that the handles snap off during use, risking injury.
- dartos 2y agoI think a lot of CEO were sales people. Being in that field, they can see where LLMs would fail at it. They can understand that you can’t just replace a sales team with LLMs. They don’t have that for engineering…
- bni 2y agoIm an engineer. I see no reason why LLMs shouldn't already today replace most people in sales /s
- mensetmanusman 2y agoCustomers will install agent interaction prevention agents to prevent the infinite onslaught. Sales will still happen with dinner and handshakes.
- astine 2y agoSalespeople are typically compensated based on commissions. At least the well compensated ones are. Automation can make things easier and streamline the sales process, but because the sales rep is paid a percentage of the GP of a sale, automation doesn't really their take.
- ethbr1 2y agoThe company still pays that commission. If the company instead kept that money, it would be more profitable (or could lower the price of its product). We can get into the nuances of advantageous tax treatment or not, but sales commissions come from somewhere and are essentially transaction costs.
- mrayycombi 2y agoIndeed, it's marketing slop as a pretense for a hiring freeze.
- area51org 2y agoThis kind of smokescreen only works for so long. Once it all starts failing and profits dip, things will change.
- xarope 2y agoI 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 2y agoThanks 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).
- jrockway 2y agoYeah, 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.
- ArnoVW 2y agoLike you I am highly skeptical of bullish AI narratives, even if AI clearly represents value. However, your analysis has one flaw. Our biggest corporate customer is unwilling to give testimonials about our (niche) application, because it represents a competitive advantage for them and they don’t want to educate their competitors. In theory one could imagine similar mechanisms going on in AI.
- sfdcccthrow 2y agoThere 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 2y agowhat happened in the last 2-4 months?
- vectorhacker 2y agoI'd also be interested to know what happened in the last 2-4 months.
- JohnMakin 2y agoI 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 2y agoWell 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 2y agoSure, 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)
- tdeck 2y agoThe company will pay the price for it eventually but workers will pay the price right away.
- JohnMakin 2y 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. Sure, but I don't care about these companies - I care about my career and the opportunities available to me in the next 1-5 years. If these opportunities are tainted by false claims about AI capabilities - that is a huge problem to me. It is irrelevant to me whether the company eventually suffers for it, because that doesn't reimburse my "damages" (if they exist). I agree with you though, and to be clear I absolutely do not believe this is anything but marketing hype - If anyone was actually doing what they claimed we'd be seeing evidence of it. I have yet, to this day, to see any evidence of such claims. If you say "30% productivity" without saying how you measured that and the methods you used, I can instantly call BS and rest easy at night. Lots of similar claims seem the same way. "outstanding claims require outstanding evidence" or something like that.
- markus_zhang 2y agoAh, the toxic env, I'm too familiar with it. Quarterly layoffs, perks gone, more RTO, but execs can still travel around lavishly.
- echelon 2y agoFAANG 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.
- flashgordon 2y agoI seriously wonder why this is not happening more given all the copilots available. I guess the h1bs don't have the time/appetite to do this. Wouldn't locals have enough of a vendetta to do this?
- lazide 2y agoSalesforce is a sales driven org. It’s hard for engineers (and essentially impossible for H1B’s) to replace that.
- forgetfreeman 2y agoGiven my exposure to the product and portions of it's userbase I -want- to call it a cult more than anything else, mostly based on years spent fucking around in the back end of one salesforce instance after another trying to get it to replicate functionality that I could have gotten online in an afternoon with a 2 page training document and a couple shared Google spreadsheets. I am clearly not in the target audience as I do -not- see the value proposition and never have.
- griomnib 2y agoDreamforce is basically a cult gathering.
- qwe----3 2y ago2$ per interactions (negotiable to 1$) btw
- willcipriano 2y agoChatGPriceyT
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoThanks for sharing the inside info. Companies think they are being clever.
- foogazi 2y agoWhat hiding freeze ? I’ve seen SFDC hiring managers advertising positions on LinkedIn hiring SWEs as recently as last month
- mercurialsolo 2y agoIs agentforce working at all? Any practical use-cases beyond the customer support one?
- belter 2y agoI guess in any case, after this statement by the CEO...There will be no more good quality candidates applying anyway.
- jerlam 2y agoThis 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.