this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
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[–] wabafee@lemmy.world 4 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Is it because they would be bankrupt by the end of the year?

[–] AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml 32 points 9 hours ago

They don’t want to ruin their reputation by having functional software.

[–] Vipsu@lemmy.world 15 points 8 hours ago

Maybe some dude in his mothers basement will use A.I to develop a good replacement for salesforce.

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 67 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

oh...you're serious

bold strategy, let's see if your shit platform can continue to compete when its barely working now.

[–] invertedspear@lemm.ee 34 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Lumisal@lemmy.world 9 points 10 hours ago

Maybe they hired the political strategists that keep making most Americans vote against their self interests as their sales team

[–] oakey66@lemmy.world 5 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Not to mention that Tableau is an awful product that will only continue to get worse.

[–] oakey66@lemmy.world 4 points 10 hours ago

And the costs for their shit products are astronomical.

[–] Prox@lemmy.world 8 points 12 hours ago

Yeah, who is there to compete with? (The somehow-way-worse) NetSuite?

[–] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 8 hours ago (1 children)
[–] ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 3 points 4 hours ago

Thank you! Subscribed and will start passing posts over there.

[–] kescusay@lemmy.world 155 points 17 hours ago (4 children)

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.

[–] NotSteve_@lemmy.ca 5 points 5 hours ago

Knowing companies, they won't realise anything and will just make their existing employees pick up the slack

[–] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 8 points 11 hours ago

Not before the 2025 headline Salesforce lays off 25% of software development staff.

[–] SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 34 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Zementid@feddit.nl 13 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I think that should be tried first. I really think Ai could replace them! (Especially CEOs)

[–] nightwatch_admin@feddit.nl 1 points 3 hours ago

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.

[–] astrsk@fedia.io 2 points 12 hours ago

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.

[–] DudeImMacGyver@kbin.earth 56 points 15 hours ago (11 children)

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.

[–] trustnoone@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 14 hours ago

^expensive ^finicky ^garbage

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[–] baggachipz@sh.itjust.works 102 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I’ll save you a click: AI bullshit.

[–] huginn@feddit.it 41 points 17 hours ago

As of Salesforce didn't suck enough as is

[–] doeknius_gloek@discuss.tchncs.de 53 points 16 hours ago (4 children)

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.

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 6 points 9 hours ago

I have never interacted with an enterprise software salesperson as a customer. But I’ve had a ton of them as coworkers since I work in software development. Knowing them from the inside, so to speak, it is impossible for me to imagine how anyone takes them seriously. The only things they actually know or care about are their quota and bonus. How anyone bases a large cash spend on the things they say boggles my mind.

[–] Natanael@slrpnk.net 33 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

The funny thing is it's easier to replace salespeople with AI than developers. They should be losing salespeople first!

[–] peoplebeproblems@midwest.social 7 points 13 hours ago

No man, sales people are far more important to the bottom line. Profits first, then working product in the future. It's genius, no way that model could go wrong

[–] Slotos@feddit.nl 7 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

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.

[–] SirActionSack@aussie.zone 9 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I think it's just that MBA types see engineering and support as costing money and sales as making money.

[–] clutchtwopointzero@lemmy.world 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Precisely this. This is, in my view, the biggest lie American MBA schools forced down to the society: the notion that, if you can't quantify the value of support and engineering then it does not matter. That is just a side effect of how limited accounting is as a tool to measure value and of how unimaginative accountants are, as a class of professionals.

Then MBA schools don't directly say it but do condone the notion that one can always squeeze more profit from less cost, which works in the beginning but at the end throws the company into a potentially unrecoverable corner (Boeing), damaging people's lives, suppliers' businesses, and the community at large.

[–] pdxfed@lemmy.world 4 points 13 hours ago

Agree, and "defer" can mean organizationally as in needing someone else's input, knowledge, support, buy-in...vs. running an autocratic hierarchy, which the weak and stupid prefer. Defer also means acknowledging the value and contributions of others and compensating them accordingly.

If I had to boil a lot of the churn in the water about AI, it's by stupid people trying to sell even stupider, desperate people the idea the immense knowledge of the earth (or even that of their accounting or customer service practices) will be within their grasp and they won't need others anymore. Of course, some say great cut headcount, because they didn't understand the work others do in the first place.

While most won't fully take an approach as extreme, and any AI use will likely be more organic, there will be outliers who receive the bulk of the press.

Saying you don't need X position in early 2025 based on the state of AI is like declaring in 1996 libraries are dead.

[–] Drunemeton@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

What does that mean? “Defer” “knowledge” “position” & “power” aren’t connecting in my head…

[–] JayleneSlide@lemmy.world 9 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

My read of it was "the C-suite hates when the engineers actually know how shit works, and the leadership must kowtow to the people doing the actual work." YMMV or the commentor may have meant something completely different.

[–] Kekzkrieger@feddit.org 2 points 11 hours ago

Sad thing is that the CEOs who always claim big responsibility wont be responsible and just jump to the next big job.

Then the company goes bancrupt people lose their income and there are 0 consequences flr these fuckers

[–] leisesprecher@feddit.org 4 points 14 hours ago

Reality is, they will just rebrand employees.

You're not a developer anymore, but a customer satisfaction consultant. Same job as before, but technically not a developer!!

Also, this is a great way to reduce headcount while seeming innovative to the market ghouls.

[–] Viri4thus@feddit.org 27 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] wildncrazyguy138@fedia.io 4 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 10 points 13 hours ago

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.

[–] NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.com 2 points 13 hours ago

I always thought the abomination that is SaaS came from Adobe

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 14 hours ago

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

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