[bb611]

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.

[markus_zhang]

Ah, the toxic env, I'm too familiar with it. Quarterly layoffs, perks gone, more RTO, but execs can still travel around lavishly.

[echelon]

FAANG used to over-employ not just due to ZIRP, but also in the fear that their engineers would build competing products.

These companies enjoy healthy margins. Unemployed engineers can duplicate the core functionality and offer it for less.

[pembrook]

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.

[chii]

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.

[safety1st]

Very interesting, what are some good examples of this happening?

[ipaddr]

Stack, Zoom, Trello, Dropbox, Canva, Notion, AirTable..

Asana, Figma, Miro, Box, Evernote, ClickUp, Basecamp, Zapier, HubSpot, Calendly, Shopify, WordPress

[spamizbad]

Being able to use company email on your personal devices and Mac laptops come to mind

[ReDeiPirati]

> 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.

[wbl]

That wasn't true for the first spreadsheet apps or database apps. Or Autodesk back when it first appeared.

[antonvs]

The world has changed since then. A lot.

[flashgordon]

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?

[lazide]

Salesforce is a sales driven org. It’s hard for engineers (and essentially impossible for H1B’s) to replace that.

[forgetfreeman]

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.

[GolfPopper]

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).

[griomnib]

Dreamforce is basically a cult gathering.

[flashgordon]

True that. It I was thinking more about other products that are "lowish" scale and not ad driven. Especially SaaS products.

[throwaway83626]

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

[tjpnz]

>in the fear that their engineers would build competing products.

Is there any evidence to support this? It would imply that even their least promising employees would still pose a threat which seems unlikely.

[cellis]

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.

[nielsbot]

time for a union

[sharkweek]

Thanks for sharing some inside baseball.

This definitely reads more like a “everything is going AWESOME ignore anything else you hear about us” PR-ese.

I read this as messaging to shareholders more than anyone else (and sure some word-spreading about the product).

[jrockway]

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.

[ArnoVW]

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.

[jrockway]

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.

[insane_dreamer]

The reason they can’t replace the pilots is due to liability. You think Salesforce will accept liability if the plane crashes?

[jrockway]

That one's IBM but of course not. It's just snake oil.

[JambalayaJimbo]

Airlines are likely forced to have 2 pilots at all times for legal reasons, even if the pilots do absolutely nothing.

[bdangubic]

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…

[sfdcccthrow]

There is no company-wide hiring freeze, but there’s teams/products/etc… who have them.

There’s other things going on though this will help spin.

There’s no way that productivity metric includes the last 2-4 months.

[dalyons]

what happened in the last 2-4 months?

[vectorhacker]

I'd also be interested to know what happened in the last 2-4 months.

[risyachka]

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

[xarope]

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.

[c0redump]

Does OCR refer here to “optical character recognition”?

[xarope]

Yes. Just using that as an example where "AI" (not the hyped up LLMs) has really helped.

[ethbr1]

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).

[dartos]

I think a lot of CEO were sales people.

Being in that field, they can see where LLMs would fail at it.

They can understand that you can’t just replace a sales team with LLMs.

They don’t have that for engineering…

[bni]

Im an engineer. I see no reason why LLMs shouldn't already today replace most people in sales /s

[PaulHoule]

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")

[wbl]

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.

[PaulHoule]

Often though the competition is facing the same pressure. Or there is no competition.

My trainer at the gym introduced me to

https://patents.google.com/patent/US10245460B2/en?oq=1024546...

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)

[downrightmike]

I got one of those from walmart in like 2018 for like $20, still going strong

[indymike]

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.

[PaulHoule]

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.

[indymike]

The chance happened in 2023.

[zeckalpha]

The investors are the capitalists. The C suite negotiator is petit bourgeoisie.

[mensetmanusman]

Customers will install agent interaction prevention agents to prevent the infinite onslaught.

Sales will still happen with dinner and handshakes.

[astine]

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.

[ethbr1]

The company still pays that commission. If the company instead kept that money, it would be more profitable (or could lower the price of its product).

We can get into the nuances of advantageous tax treatment or not, but sales commissions come from somewhere and are essentially transaction costs.

[cyanydeez]

There's probably space for AI secretaries to screen contacts and to drop AI sales.

[mrayycombi]

Indeed, it's marketing slop as a pretense for a hiring freeze.

[area51org]

This kind of smokescreen only works for so long. Once it all starts failing and profits dip, things will change.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

Thanks for sharing the inside info. Companies think they are being clever.

[qwe----3]

2$ per interactions (negotiable to 1$) btw

[willcipriano]

ChatGPriceyT

[jerlam]

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.

[foogazi]

What hiding freeze ?

I’ve seen SFDC hiring managers advertising positions on LinkedIn hiring SWEs as recently as last month

[mianos]

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.

[stogot]

I’ve been looking for a job and found a few that were clearly fictiocus

[mercurialsolo]

Is agentforce working at all? Any practical use-cases beyond the customer support one?

[belter]

I guess in any case, after this statement by the CEO...There will be no more good quality candidates applying anyway.

[JohnMakin]

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.

[kortilla]

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.

[autoexec]

> 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.

[deadbabe]

What if a disgruntled software engineer shoots them in the back one day without warning??

[autoexec]

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.

[c0redump]

Another one would simply take their place

[Aperocky]

Oh plenty of company are stupid enough, good thing that they eventually disintegrate.

[gedy]

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.

(And it's not true - if you could "replace engineers with AI" we engineers would have already done it and be relaxing while AI does our work)

[JohnMakin]

> 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.

[tdeck]

The company will pay the price for it eventually but workers will pay the price right away.

[raxxor]

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.

[csomar]

Good. This sector could use of a change of leadership. If it takes a few rough years and some failed businesses then so be it.

[notadruid]

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.

[SequoiaHope]

Well to the extent that this happens (I agree it probably has this effect) that would benefit them anyway and I suspect they know about it.