Awesome. Salesforce has always been shitty. I wonder how much this will accelerate their decline.
I’m a Salesforce admin. On a personal level I like it because it’s kind of a mess and I can spend time on random crap. That’s not to say that I think it’s GOOD.
Last week I had some issue and decided to give Agentforce a chance before opening a case. It rephrased a standard help page I had already read. I rephrased my question with more detail. It rephrased the same help page again. I opened a case.
Turns out what I was seeing was a known issue. Support gave me a link to the page and a fix was already pending. So the bot that they are using for case deflection doesn’t appear to search known issues at all. If you’re trying to get everyone to buy into a product, your implementation of it should be strikingly good at what it’s supposed to do.
Wut?
123 active Software Engineering jobs listed.
Oh they’ll still fill positions it just means they’re going to contract.
Pretty sure that’s not what he meant in the podcast.
“Thousands of software engineers spared a living death. Film at 11.”
But he went on to say: “We’re not adding any more software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with Agentforce and with other AI technology that we’re using for engineering teams by more than 30% – to the point where our engineering velocity is incredible. I can’t believe what we’re achieving in engineering.”
This announcement is just advertising for agentforce (their AI) they’re likely not being serious about it.
Is it because they would be bankrupt by the end of the year?
Thank you! Subscribed and will start passing posts over there.
Maybe some dude in his mothers basement will use A.I to develop a good replacement for salesforce.
They don’t want to ruin their reputation by having functional software.
Makes sense, it’s only reasonable to expect economy wide reduction in tech workers and positions as the global workforce recovers from the overtraining and overhiring that was the hallmark of the 2000s and 2010s. This is a good thing, society’s responsibility is to make retraining easy and accessible for the millions of trained tech workers who represent the overage.
It’s a bold strategy Cotton.
bold strategy, let’s see if your shit platform can continue to compete when its barely working now.
Compete? They don’t need to compete. Their vendor lock in strategy is unbeatable. I have no idea how they continue to scam companies onto their platform, but I don’t know anyone that’s happy with it after a few years (except that one ass hat at every company that somehow keeps moving more business processes to it), and yet I’ve never seen any company successfully get off it.
Not to mention that Tableau is an awful product that will only continue to get worse.
And the costs for their shit products are astronomical.
Maybe they hired the political strategists that keep making most Americans vote against their self interests as their sales team
Yeah, who is there to compete with? (The somehow-way-worse) NetSuite?
Hubspot, klaviyo, Zen desk to name a few
The sad truth is, we hardly have any software engineers anymore. Trying to find one that is not a prompt monkey has become a serious challenge. Especially new “talent” is a waste of money. You wish it wasn’t so, but AI is on par with engineers. Especially when those engineers just end up using LLMs. Even people who want to learn now have a poisoned well where facts are impossible to find
I disagree. I used to be a software engineer (and may be again at some point) and the problem with avoiding junior developers is that we need them if we ever want to have any senior developers.
Also, LLMs don’t replace 90% of what a software engineer does. Copilot or whatever is a nice tool that spits out code. It’s not able to architect shit or choose the right tech to use in the first place.
And to be honest, it seems like A.I. progress has hit a bit of a wall and the reality is that it may take decades, trillions of dollars, and maybe even an energy revolution to ever reach its imagined potential. Look at full self-driving cars. The tech seemed like it was 90% there about a decade ago but that last 10% of any big project is the real challenge.
I actually personally fully agree with you.
I just see a different picture in the industry. Decision makers also use AI to evaluate your work. If the AI judges that your solution is not good, you face more resistance than if you submitted a solution close to the AI expectations. You are inherently incentived to not introduce original thought beyond what your executives can have explained to them by AI anyway.
I fully understand that this is short-sighted behavior, but it’s real bottom-line-thinking of today.
I’m a software engineer and you got any sources for this? We use ChatGPT and Copilot and stuff and it helps but it doesn’t seem as dire as what you’re saying from what I can see? At least not yet.
Salesforce overhired during the pandemic like everyone else and is now selling AI as their efficienc boost or whatever.
There are few reports of this directly from the industry, because nobody wants to admit talent shortage. It’s a much better sell to claim that you pivot towards AI.
I’m an enterprise consultant for technology executives, and work mostly as a platform architect for a global enterprise. The scale of this issue is invisible to most people.
I know this is basically “trust me, bro”, and I wish I had more to show, but this evolution is in plain sight. And it’s not like AI introduced this problem either. I’m old. Still, take my Internet connection away from me, and watch me struggle to figure out if I want .includes() or .contains() on a JS array. There is a scale.
The problem is that we’ve reached a point where it’s easier to generate a convenient result that communicates well, instead of the “correct” solution that your executives don’t understand. Decision makers today will literally take your technical concept from your presentation to have it explained to them by an LLM afterwards. They will then challenge you and your concept, based on their interactions with the LLM.
LLMs are continuously moved towards a customer-pleasing behavior, they are commercial products. If you ask them for something, they are likely to produce a response that is as widely understood as possible. If you, as a supposed expert, can’t match those “communication skills”, AI-based work will defeat you. Nobody likes a solution that points out unaddressed security issues. A concept that doesn’t mention them, goes down a lot easier. This is accelerated by people also using AI to automate their review work. The AI prefers work that is similar to its own. Your exceptional work does not align with the most common denominator.
You can’t “just Google it” anymore, all results are LLM garbage (and Google was always biased to begin with as well). All source information pools are poisoned by LLM garbage at this point. If you read a stack of books and create something original, it’s not generally understood, or seen as unnecessarily complicated. If you can ask an AI for a solution, and it will actually provide that, and everyone can ask their LLM if it’s good stuff, and everyone is instantly happy, what are the incentives for developers to resist that? Even if you just let an LLM rewrite your original concept, it will still reach higher acceptance.
You also must step outside of your own perspective to fully evaluate this. Ignore what you believe about LLMs helping you personally for a moment. There are millions of people out there using this technology. I attended seminars with 100+ people where they were instructed on “prompting” to generate technical documentation and compliance correspondence. You have no chance to win a popularity contest against an LLM.
So why would I need you, if the LLM already makes me happier than your explanations I don’t understand, and you yourself are also inherently motivated to just use LLM results to meet expectations?
Yes, I know, because my entire enterprise will crumble long-term if I buy into the AI bullshit and can’t attract actual talent. But who will admit it first, while there is so much money to be made with snake oil?
lol, one of our suppliers just changed to them 1.5 years ago.
Someone managed to fuck the portal software up so much that all the ö you type in a support case get replaced by o, both in the webview and the emails. The ä and ü work fine. It’s extra fucked.
And our support team sits in Germany, we write in German sometimes. When we use English it is only for the benefit of their Tier 3 guys.
Plus the implementation of two factor sign in is now delayed by half a year already. It seems to me more developers could be helpful
Salesforce
I wish you the worst of luck, you are an awful company that makes finnicky garbage software. In my many years as an IT professional, I have never, at any point, heard anyone say anything positive about Salesforce, ever.
Enterprise software is weeeeeeird. Salesforce, JIRA, Workday… these are terrible products by user standards. But they get purchased on other strengths, obviously. Compatibility with other shit software being high in the list. Configurability. Access control. Permissions roles. Some shit. I dunno. All I know is that every time we have to do something in Workday our HR department literally sends out a PowerPoint of step-by-step instructions on how to do it.
What are the best alternatives for large enterprise?
Fresh or in house, depending on what you need. Edit: Maybe Zendesk too
For which aspect? Sales force does so much that there isn’t a one product alternative. It is, however, cheaper for an enterprise to hire a team of web developers and build a custom in-house solution.
Our organization notified all they’re shifting to SAP HANA from salesforce. I have no clue what any of that means.
Oh you’re fucked.
It’s actually impressive. SAP has such an extensive suite of software they are capable of making any enterprise problem worse, more expensive, and less easy to integrate with any software not built by SAP.
CRM and Marketing
Marketing is a very broad term, what does that mean to you?
Constant contact and twilio might meet your needs depending on what they really are.
Pretty much just MS Dynamics. Or you build your own, that’s common too.
There are others, Zendesk has a CRM, some use ServiceNow or Hubspot but those don’t fit the same use case.
ServiceNow is absolute trash, search doesn’t even work
100% agree, it’s hot garbage. I have no idea how it’s lasted
I told my boss if they seriously consider SN for CRM or ticketing, I’m looking for work elsewhere. I won’t subject myself to that again
I swear dynamics is the shame shit
^expensive ^finicky ^garbage
