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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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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.
Good. They should stop frantically adding new features and tidy up some of the crap we have to use day to day.
Unless his close family member needs a job.
It’s a bold strategy Cotton.
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
Maybe some dude in his mothers basement will use A.I to develop a good replacement for salesforce.
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.
Also the amount of management that doesn’t understand the difference between coders, programmers, and engineers. All quite different in scope and all completely necessary for at-scale production.
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.
I think that should be tried first. I really think Ai could replace them! (Especially CEOs)
The cost savings will be immense, productivity and innovation will no longer be impaired by incapable self centred arseholes playing political games, … I can see that working.
Not before the 2025 headline Salesforce lays off 25% of software development staff.
Knowing companies, they won’t realise anything and will just make their existing employees pick up the slack
Awesome. Salesforce has always been shitty. I wonder how much this will accelerate their decline.
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.
They don’t want to ruin their reputation by having functional software.
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.
I always thought the abomination that is SaaS came from Adobe
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.
Thank you for stepping in.
I’d add
Saas can compound to higher costs due to the recurring subscription, flexibility comes at a cost, especially when unnecessary features are bundled. Much like you mentioned of salesforce, there’s a limited control on your data (and your customer’s) It can’t be airgapped for critical functions You’re locked in to one vendor in many cases Cost creep when features are bundled during the enshitification phase (salesforce again) It reduces consumer/enterprise options since it’s much more profitable so it conducted to the dissappearance of several perpetual license models for scientific software that has now compounded into billions of tax money being buried for use rather than any kind of useful feature addition.
There’s nothing inherently bad or good about SaaS per se as it can make sense, the problem is it became the racehorse the entire industry bet on and *EVERY *SINGLE *FUCKING *PIECE *OF *SW is now fucking SaaS, from printer SW to games on a flipping phone to access to basic scientific sofware. What could have been a great invention to provide scalability and low upfront cost to enterprises spread like cancer and corrupted the entire software industry. For that, Salesforce has been relegated to their own hell circle.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, who is there to compete with? (The somehow-way-worse) NetSuite?
Hubspot, klaviyo, Zen desk to name a few
Maybe they hired the political strategists that keep making most Americans vote against their self interests as their sales team
“Thousands of software engineers spared a living death. Film at 11.”
