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Thousands of teen coders now hate Salesforce in advance. This is very shortsighted.
by actionfromafar 1y ago
Thousands of teen coders now hate Salesforce in advance. This is very shortsighted.
- ecocentrik 1y agoSome of the worst BAs and PMs I've encountered in my career all work for Saleforce now.
- dotancohen 1y agoThough maybe one of the better lessons they could have learned in such a course.
- actionfromafar 1y agoHey, I think we agree on something.
- amelius 1y agoYes, they earned their Stallman degree.
- mihaaly 1y agoI believe thousands more adults are now hating it too, also reconsidering any current and potential dealings with them seeing their way of conduct. If not for the sake of righteousness, but for the sake of self interest (not to be extorted in the future by an organization prone to exploitation and extortion).
- safety1st 1y agoYou would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes. But does it really matter? I urge every user of Hacker News to read Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. It's the definitive statement on software capitalism. The goal, which Thiel embraces unabashedly, is to use technology to create new and unique monopolies, and once you've created them, extract as much rent as possible from the users. Obviously the users hate that part once it kicks in. Thiel really seems to believe this is a good thing and there's a sense in which he's right: the tech industry has created more gadgets and created (or consumed?) a level of economic activity on par with industrialization itself. We have been introduced to all manner of innovations and conveniences, and the winners at this game have won bigger than anybody else. But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it once you can't get out, and it's all part of the plan. Again, and again, and again, for more than 40 years now. That's why once you're done with Thiel, you should read the GNU Manifesto. Richard Stallman identified the basic dynamics here as far back as the 1980s, and started his movement from the perspective of a user of computer systems who didn't want everything to be trapped and enshittified once again. By encouraging programmers to adopt the GNU license he aimed to prevent the rent seeking stage of this process. Both camps succeeded partially. Thiel's camp succeeded more, especially economically. Which camp you join is up to you when you write a line of code or you use a piece of software. I personally think the world is complicated and there are elements of value in both. Regardless these are the two written works which together will give you the full context about the software industry, how it works, how it got this way, and even why modern life is the way it is. And then you will see how it is by design for Salesforce to fuck nonprofits because it works. It was in the plan from day one. They knew. They will do it again.
- actionfromafar 1y agoI think it's slightly worse. They didn't even have to know from day one. The incentives are such that it's easy to just over time roll into that (local?) optimum.
- eru 1y agoThe book Zero to One has pretty questionable economics. I'm paraphrasing here, it's been a long time, but his thesis is that in a competitive situation life of a company is nasty, brutish and short. And that might be true, but that doesn't mean that life for customers or shareholders or workers is anything like that. Part of why companies have it so hard in harsh competition is that they have to pay workers well in order to attract them, and they have to offer customers real value for money (if they want to keep getting their money), and companies also have to give decent returns to shareholders.
- pessimizer 1y agoI have no idea what you mean by "questionable economics" here. You seem to be saying that it seems true, but doesn't conform to your values.
- Workaccount2 1y agoThe core reason people hate/distrust/discredit economics is because it lays out a lot of solid yet uncomfortable or unfortunate points. People just really really don't want to know that the economic world is just as trying and punishing as the real world.
- eru 1y agoHuh? Economics as a discipline is great. Orthodox economics is exactly what I'm drawing on with my comment.
- radlad 1y agoThe economics are questionable in a moral sense - monopolies are widely considered to be good for the monopoly's shareholders and bad for everyone else.
- gregw2 1y agoSalesforce... working hard to become the SaaS-era equivalent of mid-90s "Computer Associates" (CA) ... (Regarding acquisitions of Heroic, Sendgrid, Slack, Tableau, Mulesoft, and most recently Informatica...) For those less-familiar with the reference, the Wikipedia entry[1] tells it well: In 2001, The New York Times wrote that "Computer Associates has infuriated clients with high prices and poor technical support." Fortune wrote, "For all its ubiquity inside the tech departments of corporate America, CA had a horrendous reputation. Where Microsoft has long been the most feared software company, the old CA claimed the title of most despised – not by competitors but by its own customers." Detractors of CA accused it of putting newly acquired software products into maintenance mode and milking them for cash flow. The products themselves were expensive and central to what corporate IT departments were doing, and so customers found it difficult to move away from CA. As Fortune wrote, "These products made it the barnacle of corporate America: Once you had CA software onboard, it was so onerous and expensive to pull it out that few customers ever did. That led to a lot of steady cash flow – and to arrogance on the part of CA's management." Or as The Register wrote, "CA used acquisitions to grow its portfolio.... Along the way it acquired a reputation as the place decent software goes to die." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA_Technologies
- bauruine 1y ago>On July 11, 2018, Broadcom Inc. announced it would acquire CA Technologies for $18.9 billion in cash. I'm not surprised. That sounds exactly like Broadcom.
- Aeolun 1y agoYou’d think they failed based on the description given earlier. But that doesn’t sound like failure to me…
- alephnerd 1y agoBroadcom cleaned house though - the overwhelming majority of old school CA Technologies from line level ICs to VPs and Execs were all cut. There was a notorious incident where some ex-VPs at CA made a whole stink about being downgraded to Managers at Broadcom due to title inflation at CA and Hock Tan personally flamed them, along with CA's shenanigans around their private jet (Broadcom demanded CA to fly commercial). Sometimes, companies with lazy and inefficient leadership and staff need to get the stick.
- luckman212 1y agoWait, there are people who actually don't hate Salesforce?
- eru 1y agoPeople who haven't heard of them generally don't have an opinion on them.
- bee_rider 1y agoIMO we should count people who hate stuff like a user portal backed by one of these tools as haters of those tools. Although, the one that immediately pops into my head is some universally loathed HR portal that was backed by Peoplesoft.
- matwood 1y agoMy sales people love it.
- jmclnx 1y agoSame where I use to work, and upper mang. is scared to remove it due to sales people revolting. They tried years ago and a revolt happened and the cancelled they project. This is at a fortune 500 company.
- duxup 1y agoIs there a good rundown on what they see / like? I’ve only seen salesforce from a non sales perspective and it was a horror show, but I’m curious what it looks like to sales folks who like it?
- dahcryn 1y agoThe thing is, Salesforce understands sales people, and the product is designed to make their lives easier and more effective. And you know what, they are good at it, that's why they are so big. But they are horrible at integrating with anything else, making engineers happy, make data and AI people happy. They wall everything in. Guess what, you are not their customer. The sales people are. So yeah, I hate them, but even more reluctantly, I admit that despite the multi million dollar invoice they send each year, we haven't really found a worthwile replacement. And most of our staff is actually quite positive about them because the old system was MS Dynamics, which is even worse.
- AbstractH24 1y agoSalesforce either knows exactly want it’s doing or it’s in an epic doom loop. On the one hand, Turing their back on pretty much everything everyone liked about it because could be seen short sighted, and it will crumble. Or an intentional pivot. Knowing a subset is locked in and can be exploited to grow in new directions. Either way, the shift is kind of epic. And only seems to be gaining steam.
- vintermann 1y ago> Or an intentional pivot. Knowing a subset is locked in and can be exploited to grow in new directions. Larry Ellison is now apparently the world's second richest man. Apropos nothing.
- AbstractH24 1y agoThe thought that Benioff could be the Ellison of the 2040s is kinda nuts
- ipython 1y agoJust wait till they learn about Broadcom!
- artk42 1y agoThis is awesome, honestly. The more monopolists f_ck up, the cleaner the future to be built.
- thrance 1y agoMonopolies aren't generally undone by their anti-consumer practices. Believing Salesforce will suffer from their own egregious behavior is wishful thinking.
- artk42 1y agoI'm referring to a vast community of young developers who have learned a valuable lesson about the useless roles of monopolies in our lives as a dirty bonus to long payrolls of devs who work for them.
- beAbU 1y agoYou are allowed to say fuck on the internet.
- iinnPP 1y agoNot everywhere. Even when it's allowed it can result in shadow bans. Seems a whole lot easier to self-censor everywhere than to track who gives value to the word f**.
- rixthefox 1y agoFuck that noise. The places that shadow ban and encourage self-censorship do not deserve your traffic nor your content. Start voting with your voice and your (digital) feet. Don't be sheeple. Keep the Internet weird. It is not on us to censor ourselves to protect the feelings of snowflakes who get all bent out of shape because of something someone said.
- throw457r32r 1y agoYou’re also allowed to say f_ck. It’s the internet and you can decide what you want to type.
- Aeolun 1y agoAre there any coders that like salesforce in the first place? This is firmly one of those ‘foisted on you by management’ kind of products right?
- bombcar 1y agoIf you look at Salesforce as "Access as a SaaS" it's not so bad. But if you're coming at it from a LAMP stack or otherwise having direct access to a real SQL database designed by intelligent people, it's pretty meh.
- bayindirh 1y agoIt's pretty depressing to see how much performance and capacity we waste.
- bombcar 1y agoHush you. I need 48 cores at 5 GHz and 200 gigs of RAM to serve a simple status page.
- bayindirh 1y agoI'm an HPC admin, I can (and will) make you serve this page from NIC's unused core. I need these cores for streaming cat videos.
- bombcar 1y agoYes, we did by 10,000 cores a year ago, no there is no capacity, yes we will run the ERP off an old win2k server, no we are not using 10k cores for seti@home. Runs Prime95 like a baws
- notpushkin 1y agoI’d love a self-hostable, in-browser Access. Preferably Access 97.
- ZiiS 1y agoJust seems more efficient to me.
- xedrac 1y agoHaven't you heard? Sales force doesn't hire programmers anymore. AI is all their CEO needs. ;p. Seriously though, this behavior reminds me of Oracle, and is a great reminder that proprietary software can very quickly become a big liability.
- pessimizer 1y ago[flagged]
- boringg 1y agoI mean the sales team is probably all AI at this point.
- whstl 1y agoIt is impossible to know these days. I just get flooded with automated messages in random channels by them wanting to chat with me about whatever place I'm a manager at.
- nobleach 1y agoOracle is exactly who sprang to mind. Throughout my history as a software developer, even Microsoft has had a ton of interest in being involved in the community. Yes, they've wanted to extinguish much of it, when it didn't align with their financial goals... but they were always interested in being part of the "software development conversation". Oracle on the other hand has never extended an olive branch. They're quite happy existing on their own proprietary island. A great reminder that, "they don't want ot play in the pool with you, they want to own the whole pool and charge you to swim in it".
- burnte 1y agoMarc Benioff is an acolyte of Ellison, he learned and uses the same tactics.
- f1shy 1y agoI worked in parallel with Sun Microsystems (prior acquisition) IBM and Oracle. All 3 were horrible in that regard. They all offered cheap services, and waited until roots were deep enough; then they would change the billing scheme multiplying fees by up to 25
- AndyMcConachie 1y agoWhat better lesson could there be? Learn to hate corporate America early so you're not disabused later in life.
- alexey-salmin 1y agoThat doesn't really matter: Salesforce is not a technology company, it's a sales company. They need to win the loyalty of procurement decision makers, then engineers will have to use whatever the business people were sold. Exceptions are small tech-first companies where the engineers directly decide on tools.
- isleyaardvark 1y agoIsn't this even more devastating in that respect? A 50x $ increase with only two days notice? This isn't some tech issue, this is directly related to procurement.
- alexey-salmin 1y agoRight, but they weren't making money on that either, only $5k/yr. This wouldn't happen to a "top arr client" or whatever is the tiering their account managers follow. Here it likely was the exact opposite: the long tail of low-paying clients is annoying to manage compared to how much they bring cumulatively. So the client had been given a choice of either becoming a high-paying client or stop being a client altogether.
- zoechi 1y agoThat could be done so that it doesn't look like extortion though
- alexey-salmin 1y agoAbsolutely, it's just there's no commercial pressure on Salesforce company structure to evolve towards valuing the feelings of small clients.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoThey are just going to push the industry towards Teams at this point.
- micromacrofoot 1y agocoders aren't the ones choosing salesforce, everyone I know that has worked on writing code for it hates it
- ferguess_k 1y agoWho cares? Managers just bagged fat bonus and jump ship when it goes down. The whole world is like this now /s.
- burnte 1y agoAnd yet entirely predictable.
- Fokamul 1y agoWho cares? Salesforce, as any other corporate are outsourcing to Indian kids, they don't give a... Only people who can really change something are cybersecurity people, /"pentesters". They should, as any other responsible pentesters holding 0days for big corps, stop reporting them to the companies, instead sell to on grey market to 3rd party. Completely legal, for you it's more money and who cares what they do with it. True whitehats are cucks, change my mind.
- mystraline 1y agoIndeed, for for-profit companies. They too can buy the exploits off the market as well. Just, the price for the company is 25x higher than individual costs. If corporations can price discriminate on non-EEOC metrics, so can I.
- mips_avatar 1y agoThat's the best thing that could happen, more people should think poorly of salesforce. It's important to remind up and coming programmers that the big companies are not their friends.