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Kind of ironic. Salesforce is basically one of the major spiritual grandfathers of Slop. It is not uncommon in production systems to find that objects like Cont
by elzbardico 19d ago
Kind of ironic. Salesforce is basically one of the major spiritual grandfathers of Slop. It is not uncommon in production systems to find that objects like Contact and Account have hundreds of custom fields. Sometimes, you find out that several of them have the same meaning and semantics, but were used at different times. Digging out you discover that some Marketing guy that used to work at the company did some task in a certain way that was lost when he was gone, and then a few months later his substitute had the same need and went ahead and created the same field with a slightly different name.
Doing data engineering work with Salesforce data is an exercise on archeology, psychology and organizational politics.
Slop is basically the ontological and teleological philosophy behind Salesforce very existence. Despite the official discourse that the "No Software" meant no infrastructure, no toil with updates and configuration, the subtext as intended for executives was very clear: "No need for you to be blocked by those pricks from engineering and their stupid, bureaucratic and gatekeeping rules".
"No software" was a call-to-arms to a certain subset of managers that were radicalized by Nicholas Carr's 2023 HBR article "IT Doesn't matter". It doesn't matter that Carr was a journalist and a writer with a masters in English that has never ever run even a small bodega, or has never managed an IT department. Anti-intellectualism and the abundance of capital brought in by the petrodollar that allowed the US government to run deficits year by year while exporting the ensuing inflationary effects to rest of world, would ensure that this message would ressonate and then even be amplified during the years of ZIRP and the Baillouts. Play fast and loose, first come, first served, a rising tide rises all boats and all that jazz. Wall Street favors bold, and the heck with the long term! This quarter will only live once!
Frankly, this is just poetic justice: Kill by slop, be killed by slop.
- schnevets 19d agoSomething tells me Troy the Salesforce Admin/BD Analyst did not cause the SAAS infrastructure to go down. And I think you're confusing crud with slop.
- isityettime 19d agoI've never worked somewhere that had a Salesforce integration which wasn't an eternal disaster. Have you? Why is every company's Salesforce team absolute bottom of the barrel developers with super high churn, no responsibility, and little competency? Something about the product and its positioning attracts catastrophe. That's what GP is talking about.
- abeyer 19d agoIt sounds like you've worked places that have made a staffing decision and paid the price. It happens, but it's far from universal.
- elzbardico 19d agoI didn't say anything even close to that.
- gregw2 19d agoTypo: Carr wrote that in 2003, not 2023 for those of you who missed the foolishness and insane wreckage that article caused. The lost business value and competitiveness caused by outsourcing IT overseas to unmotivated parties under Carr's premise is hard to put your finger on but I have seen the aftermath and it's pretty massive.
- elzbardico 19d agoThanks for catching the typo!
- abeyer 19d ago> Doing data engineering work with Salesforce data is an exercise on archeology, psychology and organizational politics. What business focused systems is this _not_ true for? Doubly so for such systems that encourage non-developer users to customize the database schema? Not saying that's always a great choice, but they're far from the only ones to have made it, enterprise customers love to buy it, and Salesforce is actually one of the better ones I've seen to deal with from a technical perspective. There is _far, far_ worse out there. Most of this comes down to a business and design problem... your entire first paragraph reads as a broken process that no system is going to fix.