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.
This was always a myth and never a real thing, except for at the highest, bleeding edge talent levels.
Especially for Enterprise Saas companies like Salesforce/Microsoft/Oracle/etc who know full well that their real competency isn’t actually the software…it’s distribution. Employees aren’t choosing to use those products, they get forced into them by management/IT or literal monopoly.
Sales is everything in B2B software and always has been. Product-led growth in B2B has always been fantasy erotic-fiction outside of chat/notes apps.
While sales is true for large enterprises, in SME and lower ones, it's users' wants and value-for-money that dominate. This domination can lead to nowhere, but quite occasionally, it leaks out as users move jobs and into positions of "power" in the larger enterprise, and choose their familiar software instead of the existing/encumbent ones.
Then these new startups get a foot hold, and become the dominant software, grow in size and learn how to B2B sale as well.
This is also the stated rationale for Cloudflare’s generous free tier. They build loyalty with hobby and side projects, and engineers take that familiarity to work with them.
DigitalOcean also had a strategy of going after the little guys/early phases of companies with their 5$ offering and lots of good free material/tutorials.
yes, Slack and github strategy. After Slack got big, it shrunk what it provides for open-source communities though. So, expect Cloudflare eventually switch.
atlassian is the big one - jira actually beat out basecamp (and fogbugz), despite them being quite similar at the beginning, and ousted the incumbent that is ibm rational suite and their ilk.
They did it by one simple trick - becoming the first ones who offered free license for open-sourcers. They invented this idea. After that, they needed to do nothing more, almost automatically becoming a monopoly.
I was there working for one of the early competitors who was thrown in the dust by that decision of Atlassian and was too late to realise they had to do the same - and folded two years later.
> Sales is everything in B2B software and always has been. Product-led growth in B2B has always been fantasy erotic-fiction outside of chat/notes apps.
PLG creates the distribution to actually implement Sales effectively and at scale for B2B. Even those companies that originally were purely Sales-led now have a strong PLG component. PLG is far from be a fantasy, but now it's almost a must have motion to build distribution and long term healthy business viability considering also that Enterprise software is living a consumerization moment. Not to mention that the next generations of users and buyers buy and expect software to be different from the past, this is already happening.
I 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?
Given 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.
The target audience seems to be whoever makes the decision to pay for it. Much like the allegations that the QWERTY layout was designed to make it easier for salesmen to type out "TYPEWRITER" quickly, I expect that salesforce's primary design goal is "stuff that will let us sell it to management" with actual performance/utility a distant second (or less).
That jives with my observations as well. What always had me deeply mystified was the near-religious conviction among small and medium sized nonprofits that they absolutely couldn't function without a feature complete clone of the kind of Salesforce integration that drove the ACLU, UNICEF, and International Rescue Committee websites. I'm like, y'all could cut your spend on web development by 70% if I could train someone to click a button once a week and import the resulting .csv into a spreadsheet. Crazy shit.
The problem with "lowish" scale SaaS products is often not creating them, but selling them. I work for a SaaS that has added a lot of features during the years, but the product 2 years ago could probably easily be created by a single dev in a couple of months and could be sellable as a product to a subset of the market today.
The reason why I don't create a simplified version of the SaaS and sell to customers is that the sales process itself is actually the hard part. You may get some sales from ads or phone calls, but you often need to sell it in person if you want to have enough customers to cover all the expenses. And if you want enterprise customers, the sales process is complex and time consuming
This is a fair point. After 5 failed startups (you'd think id learn and give up) building products and velocity had never been an issue. "Selling" is the one absolute North Star. Even if you built a feature-to-feature clone - as another commenter above pointed out - sales (or lack of it) has been the biggest differentiator.
I mean, what products are even unique to Google or Meta? The cloning is already done and the cloners are established businesses. Or, Google just cloned someone else. Did they independently discover cloud computing and make GCP? I think not.
What they really meant by this is: “Competing products [at peer companies]”.
This is still in effect, however the primary competing products at peer rivals is now “foundational ai”, and they need far less people and mostly people of a very specific skill sets of ML research, Inference Scaling, Hardware R&D, AI prompt engineering research. Also the cost to play is 10 billion minimum.
So Salesforce will perform rent seeking as long as their moat allows rather than gamble on foundational ai.
Everyone has to start somewhere, but if you don't know what ZIRP stands for you just don't have the fundamentals/haven't taken enough interest in economics to participate in a conversation related to macroeconomics and posting grumpy comments out of ignorance won't help you. You're going to have to read up on it.
Although FWIW you probably aren't a bot, an AI would likely know all about ZIRP.
I recommend against books; they're expensive and typically the page count is too high for the number of ideas unless you are really interested in the academics of it. I get a lot more out of Wikipedia [0], blogs and YouTube (although the quality of information on YouTube is typically low).
That being said, if you want some recommendations I'd suggest Tyler Cowen [1] as a good clearinghouse for topical ideas and John Cochrane [2] as an interesting read. I picked an article from the last 7 days where you can see the ZIRP in the graphs, it is all the points where US Fed Funds rate was at 0.
It really wasn't, but it did assume the audience was familiar with a specific bit of discourse about, well, ZIRPs. In particular that when debt is super cheap, companies can afford to do a lot of things that would be stupid when capital comes at a higher price. Which generally seems to have been true about a lot of SV companies.
Yeah, 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.
Like 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.
I kind of expected that reply and it just sounds like cold fusion to me. "We'll tell you how it works some other time, what matters is that it's going to change the world!" It didn't.
it is happening and lots of it. the reason you may not be seeing it is that people that have figured out how to properly monetise is sure as shit are not going to advertise it… once that are advertising are ones that haven’t yet figured out a way to do it…
Looks 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
I 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.
Their 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).
Compensated 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")
Why 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.
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)
TRX is a rigid band that doesn't stretch. You set the "resistance" by the angle of gravity relative to the band.
A TRX push-up puts less load on the primary path than a conventional push up but is very challenging to all the other muscles that it takes to not flop over when you do it
These days I'd trust AMZN less than Temu. At least Temu and sellers on Temu still want to win your trust. AMZN thinks they have it and will still think they have it long after it's lost.
This is less about Marxist/capitalist and more about a change in regulation in the US that makes R&D expenses (dev headcount) amortized over five years (for taxes) versus sales being a straight-up expense. This one is going to be good for the stock price, and the AI Agent angle is a marketing masterpiece.
It's a good point about changes in tax laws for software devs. Makes me glad I work for a non-profit (a rare non-pathological non-profit no less!)
For all the discussion about a soft job market for devs, the fact that the last Trump administration made a tax change that puts a target on our backs comes up rarely but it is part of the explanation.
Salespeople 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.
This 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.
An HN article covered this topic last month. Currently, many job postings are either attempts to attract top-tier talent at minimal compensation or, in the worst cases, entirely fictitious positions.
I 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.
If a company exec is stupid enough to not hire when there has been no demonstrated replacement for the engineers, they are likely going to drive the company into the ground in short order.
I don’t believe that companies would be stupid enough to kneecap their own growth because a SaaS company that has stopped innovating 5 years ago decided they are happy with their current headcount and used AI as an excuse.
> If a company exec is stupid enough to not hire when there has been no demonstrated replacement for the engineers, they are likely going to drive the company into the ground in short order.
Who cares when they'll just float away on a golden parachute to the next company that will overpay them to make terrible decisions. Executives will happily jump at any excuse to lower wages, cut jobs, and pocket the money they saved while raising their prices. Making it harder for people to find work because of layoffs and hiring freezes just means that if AI under-delivers (and it always does), they can just hire on a bunch of new people later at lower wages thanks to the larger pool of people looking for work.
Most likely the software engineer would be aggressively prosecuted and harshly sentenced (assuming they survive long enough to see a courtroom) while nothing substantial would improve for any of the other software engineers.
> 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.
It is the general insecurity about new tech although I haven't seen a single job being replaced by AI yet. And I also think the market for SWE is still very good though. And the only ones that use AI on a large scale for that matter.
Salesforce came into discussion as a CRM solution for us, but the salesman was so arrogant that he was quickly booted out. If first thought it would be nice to develop against a more modern system, but today I am glad we never jumped on that train. And I hear it devolved into the same mess that CRM systems somehow always seem to be.
I think there's a case to be made that the AI boom will require more engineers in the short term, not less. Think of the myriad of features AI capabilities open for any product, not to mention a CRM platform like salesforce.
As for the time it saves-Sure, AI saves plenty of time, but in a big company most of the time isn't spent on coding. It's spent on collaboration, code reviews, meetings, debugging, looking at production logs, using internal tools, etc.
NYT's political coverage has been extremely poor this year, with very obvious editorial control preventing negative coverage of Trump.
It's not obvious to me they have a bias here, but given the clear systemic issues in other reporting it's reasonable to bring a skeptical view to their own reporting.
I had an MRI in February and specifically asked about my wedding ring, the tech said it wasn't an issue. We didn't discuss composition or any other details.
I've had multiple MRIs and I always ask about my two rings. They have always said they're fine. It feels like they know something I don't, and also feels sketchy.
So the author of the article was lucky it wasn’t someone who moved to Portland. I wonder what the ratio of people who have the area code of their actual location as a phone number is.
I was thinking the same thing; the city I'm in isn't even that large (approx 450k pop.) but I could probably go through my list of contacts that live in-town and rattle off at least two-dozen area codes that aren't native to the area (on top of the dozen or so that are), with at least half of those being out-of-province. The slow death of long-distance billing, which also finds itself competing with the likes of FaceTime et. al., coupled with the highly-mobile nature of cell phones, have just made it a hassle to go through the process of changing your phone number for anything other than moving to another country (or a wicked discount).
Isn't that regulated? In many places the operators are required to let you take the number with you when you change provider to obtain a better/ cheaper service. Everybody's numbers in practice go via some LUT that's mapping a human "telephone number" which people dial to an actual service endpoint which might move (after all, cell phones already move, so this indirection was necessary to make that work) and so the rule only needs to say that there's some means by which company A gets to change the LUT for your phone instead of company B.
> Read the linked PDF from the CIA FFS. Its a fun theory and that has multiple articles linked from the 80s.
Readers should note that while the declassification source is the CIA, this was simply a note from a retired Army Lt. General pitching space related projects from a private think tank. He had no insider knowledge or intelligence at the time, which is why this whole memo can be declassified - it's pure speculation.
Fortunately for us, we don't need to delve into speculation, because Challenger had an extremely robust and well documented investigation process which established a clear cause, which was very much not Soviet malfeasance.
> My understanding is that tasers are AC, thus involuntary movements will be back and forth rather than just in one direction.
Tasers AC output is at low frequency but still significantly faster than human muscles can move, if you watch any video of a tase you'll see it causes the victim's muscles to seize up and not oscillate.
Fred Noonan was hired as the navigator specifically for this leg of the flight because of his navigation skills, which he proved by establishing Pan Am's transpacific routes, so it's not obvious to me why a navigational error would rest on Earhart's lack of skills in that area.
The only safe system is for aircraft to avoid wires.