Headline in six months: Salesforce Hires Software Engineers After Realizing Middle Managers Don’t Know How To Turn AI-Generated Code Into Actual Applications
Being a software engineer is a hell of a lot more than just the actual act of writing code.
Maybe if we’d put LLM powered puppets in the meetings with management so developers can just continue with their actual work we’d get a lot more done.
It’s a bold strategy Cotton.
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.
I’ll save you a click: AI bullshit.
We will have more salespeople next year because we really need to explain to people exactly the value that we can achieve with AI. So, we will probably add another 1,000 to 2,000 salespeople in the short term.
Well, good luck!
I can’t wait for the AI bubble to burst. It’s going to be hilarious to see these kinds of CEOs falling flat on their faces. Unfortunately, it will not be the CEOs who will suffer the most from the consequences.
Lol that ain’t happening. They are doing this for short term gain. Line mus go up and ceo terms are medium term perfect for overstimulating their stock value and cashing out as they leave. The next ceo will come in to a crash in stock value and hard cuts are the only option.
So in this case, it’s good for devs as it’s only happening now while its early. gtfo while you can!
Its also worth mentioning this could be most likely more simple. Its a distraction from a sign of real financial trouble
The funny thing is it’s easier to replace salespeople with AI than developers. They should be losing salespeople first!
It’s not about business optimization, it’s about not having to defer to someone’s knowledge from the position of power.
AI bubble makes so much sense when you start looking at it this way.
I think it’s just that MBA types see engineering and support as costing money and sales as making money.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It’s all varying degrees of shitty, but Salesforce is a shit company. Not as bad as Oracle, but not good.
For those who are not in the know, the cancer of software as a service was pioneered by salesforce. The devil has created a new circle in hell where salesforce employees are sent not to compete with actual demons because even in hell there are unions.
Interesting perspective. Counterpoint - my line of business is seeing more customers move away from on-prem licenses and instead prefer SaaS cloud hosted solutions.
The reasons being: 1) Quicker turnaround time for customer service requests 2) product knowledge expertise 3) lower internal IT resource demands 4) SaaS usually being cheaper than license in the short term 5) the intrinsic value of owned licenses being lower than what was sold due to product lifecycles, user adoption, security constraints, etc. 6) lower perceived switching costs with SaaS.
I’m genuinely curious, why do you feel SaaS is an inferior product? What makes it the devil’s work?
And FWIW, I realize I’m typing this on a FOSS application. I absolutely see the value in FOSS, it’s why I switched from Reddit 2 years ago, but I’m not kidding myself, the devs here gotta eat too and, just like KBin, they could jump ship any day if they chose to.
SaaS cloud hosted solutions vs on prem solutions? Not necessarily a bad move. You can save money and a lot of overhead and headaches if the software we’re talking about has a lot of different potential hosting providers / licensors so that prices are competitive.
Things like choosing who to host your PostgresDb, sure you could do it on prem, but it will likely be cheaper to pick a cloud host. BUT, that’s only because Postgres is open source, leaving tons of hosting providers to compete, and it is also still very similar to the rest of SQL dbs, leaving for extremely little lock-in, both amongst DBs and amongst hosts.
Salesforce though, and similar cloud platforms, are the opposite of that. Everything you build on them is completely locked into them. The DBs are salesforces’ custom db technology (which sucks), their interfaces are coded in a combination of one of three different Salesforce specific programming languages / frameworks, and it does extremely little out of the box, meaning that as a company when you adopt it, you have to spend a ton of time and money on a salesforce admin / specialist to set everything up for you, likely a bunch of coders to write custom code for you, and at the end of the day, because of its restrictions you’ll still produce a piece of crap interface / application that requires weeks of training for any employee to use.
And after all of that, Salesforce willl still charge you somewhere on the order of 10-1000x as much for simple stuff like /GB of db storage, compared to open source competitive DBs.
When platforms have that much lock-in, then they’re ripe for exploitation, which is why Salesforce is so insanely profitable. I can pretty much guarantee you that every mid size and larger company that uses Salesforce would have spend far less money overall by hiring a dedicated software development team to build out their own applications and infrastructure using open source (cloud hosted) services.
