Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff(salesforceben.com) |
Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff(salesforceben.com) |
And yet I don't see anything about him stepping down. I never do.
their purpose is to extract money. salespeople like to know that money is being spent on them because that's how they measure value, and will continue to demand salesforce for as long as it is expensive.
He's lying. They are hiring. They just refuse to hire you if you were born in America
The "AI" craze is cover. It doesn't do jack shit. He knows too
https://substack.com/home/post/p-153688691 (not my Substack but has a good overall view of what's going on)
13k employees in Hyderabad alone. That's 18% of their employees. So about 27%
Which one? All of them I’ve used produce incorrect code 90% of time.
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/?page=1&team=Software...
Welcome to the meat grinder.
To make matters worse, the big investment opportunity right now is AI/AGI/LLM/Agents and so forth. As money flows toward AI focused firms, they are spending their money on GPUs and electricity. Or, alternatively, they're paying for NVIDIA/OpenAI/.. to do that for them. Some jobs have opened up in this space, but a relatively small percentage is spent on labour.
All of that is my opinion from what I've read!
The engineering org's productivity pain points aren't ever going to be solved by AI magic, or at least certainly not on the core CRM product.
Like, they ask for a refund?
What I meant by failed implementation is when the team that’s in charge of setting it up is struggling to get their staff or salespeople to use it as part of their job responsibilities.
The reason why this is challenging is that the implementation team really needs to understand the teams that are being asked to use Salesforce as part of their job while at the same time knowing the intricacies of the platform. Plus, there’s often a lot of integration of systems and data migration that would likely need to happen in a very organized fashion.
It is kind of similar to a story I have seen here on HN about Hertz (car rental company) having sued Accenture for a botched project that was supposed to help them improve the business’s website and to create mobile apps.
AI has increased my productivity greatly, but it is a long way away from replacing my Job. Though maybe I am biased.
I am well versed in all three areas, but obviously I can’t remember all the syntax, and don’t have time to trial and error the changes, and ai reduces that loop. I don’t use it to generate massive blocks of code, I use it mostly to demonstrate the principle of what I am trying to achieve.
I have many specific examples of massive time save.
The company seems like a gigantic hot air balloon, so it might as well use "AI".
You just got at your desk after scuba diving vacation pop into a Salesforce Agent and find the joy of unlimited workforce, Product Specialist Agent, Recruitment Agent, Slack Agent, integrate your Tableau data, your CRM data, your email data, your slack data into a big Salesforce Black Data Hole and lose your job in the next iteration.
Just because greed has no limits and optimized vertical integration is inevitable. I am loving it. And waiting for my UBI and social rating AI QBR/KPI.
The ultimate corporate suicide in action. Agent Smith incoming.
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/?page=1&team=Software...
It seems they are still "hiring"
If you're seeing software engineering job results in Salesforce, then we can only assume the software engineering jobs listed there are either:
1. Posted last year by Salesforce (can go at any time)
2. Fake Ghost Jobs (more likely)
If you work as an engineer at Salesforce, start to look elsewhere before they intentionally lay you off.
AFAIK, each job is only posted for 2 days to meet the minimum legal requirement for the PERM
As I was predicting... [0]
The first affected are the "support engineers" then they will try to get away with going after everyone else at the company. Test subjects are needed for a trial run.
So what eventually happens to the existing employees when the AgentForce gets even better?
Can they just admit that they are replacing workers with AI agents instead of this newspeak bullsh*t?
I can see things like update my profile. Or give me a quote for this insurance product.
I fail to see how Agentforce or AI in general means less software engineers are needed. The only explanation I can think of is he is contracting with OpenAI or Anthropic or someone else and implementing that. My experience with SF Einstein or Genie has been like “you gotta be kidding if that is what you are selling”.
That is my understanding of these AS/GI agentic wizards anyway. They’ll fire the rest of their staff right after the thing fixes all the slowness.
You don’t even need to define “slowness” in your prompt! It just knows what “slowness” means and fixes it for you! It’s truly remarkable technology. Those primadonna devs will be out on their ass any day now.
All hail our agentic future!
Currently many efforts are driven by some level of leadership trying to justify their continued employment. This isn't just a salesforce problem.
Why? Because if AI is really all that then entire companies like sales force go away. All the customers who use sales force would need to do is hire one of these laid off engineers to ask AI concrete them a free sales force.
I don't ever see someone say "we're not hiring anymore customer support" or HR, or janitorial staff, or middle management.
When they announce they aren't hiring any more software engineers they are basically telling its own engineers to leave now or face cost cutting measures.
If you work at Salesforce, I would start putting out resumes now. The play seems to be to use the narrative "agents replaced our engineers, we cut %X of our team" as both a sales pitch and excuse for poor deliverables.
30% increase in productivity would mean another 100+ engineers should also be 30% more productive.
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/jr265886/software-eng...
this was the post https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...
So i doubt the sales force CEO said that actually.
"It is kind of similar to a story I have seen here on HN about Hertz (car rental company) having sued Accenture for a botched project that was supposed to help them improve the business’s website and to create mobile apps."
The main idea is that you sign a contract for some services in exchange for cash. And if the services are not provided, you don't need to pay the cash.
Depending on who has the advantage, (whether the contract was paid upfront or not), one party or the other can bring it to court, and similarly the other party can counterclaim.
In both cases the claim will be for "Breach of Contract". In my experience there is no expectation both parts of the contract have equal weigh and requirement for proof. It's not like you automatically win a case if you signed a contract, you need to show that you did the work, that client received what they asked, that you made no fraudulent representation to get them to sign. It's not as straightforward as, "they signed for 50K, therefore they owe 50K"
Of course this can be solved extrajudicially, through internal processes, but in general these processes follow the same logic as the courts of law (common law in this case), so the underlying legal case law is what shapes these refund policies.
IANAL
Yes, that's about how I've used it. I found that it is good at snippets, mid-complexity queries, etc., but not so much full applications.
Still, I keep hearing people claim that devs are getting ~60% productivity increases. And, I'm trying to figure out if this is supposedly through tools like Copilot. Also wondering whether AI has really had a significant impact on no code and low code tools.
Just trying to see through the hype at what devs are really getting out of AI in its current state.
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.
These companies enjoy healthy margins. Unemployed engineers can duplicate the core functionality and offer it for less.
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).
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.
There’s other things going on though this will help spin.
There’s no way that productivity metric includes the last 2-4 months.
No way in the world they got 30% gains. 5 maybe realistically
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.
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).
According to Wikipedia the companies they have purchased since 2023: Airkit.ai, Spiff, Own, PredictSpring, Tenyx.
I’ve seen SFDC hiring managers advertising positions on LinkedIn hiring SWEs as recently as last month
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.
(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)
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.
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.
2020: the first AI craze, introducing “Einstein” as their name for their analytics platform, and officially changing the corporate vision to being the “No. 1 AI CRM company”.
2021: Now it’s all about “Customer 360”, i.e. account-based marketing, i.e. what basically everyone else does without such a memeable name. You wouldn’t believe the number of slide decks I had to sit through with all our little product logos orbiting this stock art character straight out of Women Laughing While Eating Salad.
2022: Never mind, now we’re betting the company on a real-time unified database called Genie, which was neither real-time nor unified (and eventually not called Genie either). Got sued for that one.
2024: AGENTS. AGENTS EVERYWHERE. WE ARE AN AGENT COMPANY NOW.
So, let’s see how this holds up in the face of the next hot thing.
The window of opportunity for this is now: people seem to believe the 'agents' are something really quite new and different, and we haven't yet reached the peak of the hype curve. (Whereas in the boring, backwards enterprise companies salesforce is very active in we are past the peak hype for LLMs/RAGs and its hard to sell that).
A bit ironic he says he will hire 2k+ sales staff though, considering part of their pitch for agentforce is it will handle any customer interactions, sales included.
I guess they are building a saleforce at the expense of everything else !
I also don't know how he is pulling the "AI is making our engineers 30% more effective" stat when last I checked software engineers at Salesforce weren't even allowed to use AI.
confirmed. Take a look at this marketing material
https://www.salesforce.com/agentforce/ai-agents-roi-calculat...
They literally advertise their AI thing under the pretense of how many people you can fire and how much money you will save.
Apparently their technology is simultaneously an AI that solves business problems as well as an AI that builds AIs that solves business problems
SalesForce, SAP, and the other purveyors of steaming legacy enterprise excrement simply point the finger at the client when end-users can't accomplish basic tasks with their systems. And of course they're prime go-tos for government work. I don't wish unemployment on their people; but the faster their monolithic junk fades away, the better.
Let's see Benioff put his money where his mouth is, replace some C-suite seats with AI agents. Those are the really expensive salaries, and if AI is as smart as he claims it's downright reckless and negligent not to do this.
AI hype is exactly what I'm talking about.
I imagine if you demonstrate that you can have AI agents as viciously competitive COOs, CFOs, and CTOs, who never need time off, never sleep, it would be something that would set Wall Street on fire.
How can you replace a job that involves stone cold deterministic thinking and copying the behavior of your peers after a 3-6 month review with a lifeless machine?
2. The productivity gains of 30% are probably overstated, in a likely effort to try and sell their AI products
This is like the opposite of 2021 where every tech company went on a wild hiring spree (remember how well that went?). Now in 2025 tech companies are just going to stop hiring anyone. I suspect by 2026 they will have a bunch of slop AI spaghetti code that no one can maintain. I'm starting to question whether this field is worth it anymore
Yes, that does stand to reason, it's the funniest bit about it. When you make engineers more productive the value of an engineer goes up, not down. Otherwise we'd have no game developers left after people went from writing assembly to working in modern game engines.
As others have pointed out it's obviously just a really cringy attempt at trying to sell their AI software, which apparently isn't smart enough to sell itself
Product can come up with and design features an order of magnitude faster than developers can implement them.
In practice established products have deep backlogs full of bugs and features that never get actioned.
If AI makes you 30% more efficient at coding (it might if you went from having literally 0 code completion or any form of AI to state of the art, not many people are doing that):
* 1 engineer = 50% feature dev (1x), 50% other
* 1 engineer with AI = 50% feature dev (1.15x), 50% other
So engineers are theoretically getting 15% more done. If your company is growing faster than 15%, you're probably still going to need to hire eng.
The real way SalesForce is going to increase productivity is by forcing more unpaid overtime, not by AI.
Engineers productivity is not linear, both over time and team size. In fact there may be productivity improvements just be freezing hiring as adding too many people becomes net negative if the architecture and domain complexity does not support. Also, writing code is not the bottleneck on value, it's making the correct changes that adds value. While AI can accelerate simple and repetitive code production, this could easily add more technical debt and be net-negative producing over time if engineers aren't thinking about the big picture. On the other hand AI could add a lot of value not directly related to coding as it can process and "understand" more breadth of information (including code) that can magnify engineers productivity if used thoughtfully, but that may have no direct relationship to coding per se.
I wish CEOs would avoid such phrasing unless "take responsibility for that" involves some personal penalty, like a lower bonus or some other way to compensate for the fact that a bad decision cost the company money.
Most SFDC projects I’ve seen recently are over budget and behind schedule on delivery.
Sounds like a nightmare. Replacing engineers with sales people trying to sell the AI. The pressure to sell is going to be tremendous, they hype will be incredible. And at the same time they are at a huge risk of sailing into the winds of the AI valley of disillusionment. Studies have shown that so far customers already find AI sales pitches a significant turnoff. They better hope customers really want whatever their AI actually does or their competitors are going to skate right past them with real actual products and features.
If you know how to build great products, now's the time to cast your line. It won't be easy, but I think there will be a lot of very happy small teams/soloists making money hand over fist (for them) over the next few years.
So why can’t AI explain that? I would think Salesforce customers are more about sales then development. Their AI can’t sell?
AI is being blamed for layoffs and hiring freezes but the reality is that selling software is not as profitable for companies.
https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...
and when opened the salesforce career page they are still hiring for software engineers in 2025.
https://careers.salesforce.com/en/jobs/jr265886/software-eng...
I doubt the authenticity of source and also i work very closely with AI-agents and this is not the case as it is represented on social media.
This is how they operate. Just one marketing hype moment after another. The actual product doesn't really matter (and in a lot of cases doesn't even launch). They just need to keep making pretty slide decks filled with meaningless buzzwords so their customers get distracted from the fact that they are paying $500+ per user per month for a shitty web UI on top of 4 database tables.
Oof, I felt that cut in my bones and I was only a customer.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a Salesforce AR/VR.
It's telling that Benioff used to work at Oracle.
https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.c360_a_data_...
And the higher the people in the pyramid are the better they are at selling their ideas in their neverending quest for recognition, fat bonuses and promotions.
And once they get them, more often than not by doing pointless and even harmful work, they can then leverage it by jumping to another company.
Gervais' principle at its finest.
Saleforce did not really suffer when NFTs died or blockchain become uncool because by then they had a new trend to promote.
"We have to hire thousands of salespeople to sell this AI agent"
Something doesn't compute
AI is so good that everything can be automated, except for sales which needs a personal touch.
Wall Street happy, bonus for all execs, the end.
This feels like one of those things where you're having to explain things so hard that it should give you a clue you're duping yourself. People don't get it? We just need more salespeople to explain it more. Gotta keep those KPIs up.
And holy fucking shit has AI made every single interaction with a company ten times more painful and time consuming. It’s the worlds most boring video game where you had to trigger the right sequence of words with some dumb robot, only then to get placed into a queue of one of five remaining humans who themselves are just reading a script.
The other day I had to beat the first barricade of AI chat to get in the human queue, and then it took them literally five hours to reply. I got a text at 1am.
There is nobody who when connected to some AI agent thinks “great this will solve my problems quickly!” It’s just “wow they figured out a new way to screw us”.
Huh. So they are telling customers that they'll make their work more AI driven while staffing up their own human sales?
It feels like mixed messaging about whether AI is actually good.
At least it will be interesting to see which pushes civilization off the cliff first, end-game capitalism ouroborosing itself or the direct impact of climate change (which is obviously also related in any case).
Why would you need buyers or even sellers? Why even have humans in the loop at all for any business process or transaction.
My understanding from all the magazines at my dentist office is that AI will replace the whole thing.
What’s even the point of humans? It’s just AI bots jerking each other off all the way down!
…now my head hurts.
Is Salesforce garbage? Is that just how CRM systems are? Is everybody just doing it wrong? What's the deal?
These kinds of tools cover 80% of what you want to do out-of-the-box.
For the remaining 20% to build it correctly you need to either hire expensive consultants or hire in-house staff to build.
Nobody budgets properly for this, and it isn't in the sales pitch, and so that last 20% is built as horrible spaghetti code by the cheapest possible devs / consultants.
Even if you wanted to pay good salaries and hire people in-house how many great engineers want to be limited to programming in Apex on salesforce?
One, the salesforce data changes all occur through APIs (ok) which various enterprise integration tools (Informatica, Mulesoft, etc) support (ok), but those tools typically dont support easy options for retrying a change to a specific row that causes an error. If you are updating 100 Accounts in a single Salesforce Bulk API call and "5" are busy/locked, you have to build a lot of custom error handling to notice and retry just those 5 rows. Its not part of most connectors or python libraries I've seen. Also, 3 of those errors might be fatal and 2 might be retriable but you have to learn which are which or blindly retry them all. In database terms, their API transactional semantics are not statement by statement ACID but row by row within an API request.
Second, no API or SOQL operations can pull back or process or update more than 50,000 rows.
Given those two things, unless the integration person is skilled about both error handling and testing, some of the object busy/contention failures only show up in production traffic with many jobs going on so a generic integration specialist doesn't know about these Salesforce-specific pitfalls and they are discovered after the integration goes live under strange production access patterns.
EDIT: a third issue is that most Salesforce developers are UI-centric in their thinking and training and don't have database or data modeling or data integration experience to draw on so the troubleshooting for data issues on their end tends to suffer.
Their overly complex object/row/field permissions is a hot mess. Mulesoft is limited; there is a reason why they tried to buy Informatica.
Their marketing and hype machine hurts their credibility imo.
If we take at face value that AI can “replace” a software engineer, it can most certainly replace most of the managers and executives above that role.
AI could largely already fill the role and fulfill all responsibilities at expected level of any C suite or management only position better right now than it could a software or operational position.
Their position is fundamentally easier to do for an AI compared to operational and labor roles. They are given data and output a decision or course of action. But since they largely aren't the ones implementing said action plan it's perfectly suitable for an AI.
C suites and execs are going to do all they can to ever avoid mentioning this though.
I am doubtful as well.
I could imagine 30 percent among certain engineers for certain tasks, especially if you use a popular language with popular libraries and frameworks that are well-represented in the training dataset. I don’t know how typical of a codebase Salesforce has. They could also finetune a model on their own codebase or devote a small team of engineers to figuring out which prompts, models, etc. work best for their codebase and process. In theory, those advantages could boost it beyond what testing would typically show.
But a consistent increase of “more than” 30 percent across the whole engineering workforce seems less plausible, especially lacking details on how they measured that and uptake numbers. Edited to add: Are they even confident that their engineers are using it consistently? At this scale, that’s not a given.
I’d be interested to know whether Salesforce customers have noticed a change in the number or scope of features being announced. A change of this size seems like it should be noticeable from the outside. I’d like to hear from the engineers in particular.
In short, you could have agents that code at 2x but it would have only a small impact on deliverabkes since non-coding processes have a higher impact on velocity.
it maybe not, LLMs deliver clear value in coding tasks, but the thing is that competitors also will have gains, deliver more features, fixes and products.
Even if 30% productivity gains are true, they are probably not because of AI. They could have fired a bunch of low performers and overworked the rest of the engineers to achieve productivity gains, but even then, I’d be very skeptical if the 30% gains would stay there long term.
Pretty old trick.
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.
However, line and middle SFDC managers are partly evaluated based on the size of their orgs. This obviously leads to perverse incentives to bloat one's org; the loss of fiefdom then leads to loss of promotion opportunity and even employment.
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.
Yet Salesforce themselves is hiring more people vs simply dogfooding their own AI agents.
Compared to how productive I am at my current startup? Not a chance.
So maybe it's true at salesforce too?
"Albert Einstein is one of the founders of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. To him, the university represented a combination of the commitment to his Jewish identity and his belief in the universal values of the pursuit of truth and respect for every human being."
No paywall link: https://archive.is/2024.03.27-141124/https://www.bloomberg.c...
On the one hand, about 8% of their students are from Palestine. On the other, they’ve repeatedly retaliated against students and faculty members for protesting and making anti-genocide statements, and the university is on Boycott Divest Sanction lists.
The products are clunky, difficult to integrate/use/deploy, a lot of times they simply don't work or require an immense amount of effort to be barely workable. It's really hard to understand the value proposition, I guess they might have very good salespeople reaching out to the right clueless people to pitch.
I imagine getting that ratio up is important, especially with recent inflation.
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.
SF doesn’t have tables. It is not a relational database. It is slow because it is an enterprise application.
The link details the steps that are triggered every time a record is updated.
https://www.salesforceben.com/learn-salesforce-order-of-exec...
A crucial aspect of the relational database is that the tables have columns which refer to another table (e.g. AccountId) and this what they call “lookup relationships” or “master-detail relationships” in Salesforce.
Also, I recently learned that SQL has triggers too in case you want the same procedure to take place after an INSERT, UPDATE, etc.
"If we replace 95% percent of farmers with tractors, who's going to buy all the food that's being grown?"
Historically speaking farmers didn't buy much food to start with, since they already had it or traded locally with their neighbors. It was everybody else (e.g. city artisans) who bought food, and they have kept buying it because all humans need to eat regardless of where--or whether--they are employed.
Since bayarearefugee is talking about a scenario where the "dream is ubiquitously realized", that implies any new future job-categories are also eliminated. No jobs for repairing the foreman-bots that direct the repair-bots.
And on top of that situation, we are also demanding unlimited growth. Good luck with that.
JOINS do not exist in Salesforce. Instead you have to create bridge tables. Even then you can only traverse a max of three objects at a time.
Please do not try to use Salesforce as a general database, you are only putting yourself in a world of hurt.
The only solution is to refactor all the apex triggers processes and flows to something more orderly. Technically it is doable. Politically it is almost impossible. SF is an ERP in most companies and touches every department.
I would love to be wrong on this.
My day job is implementing large SF projects. Multi-million record data migrations arent unusual. Even if the data is clean and mapped the migrations take weeks of planning. We go over every inch of the setup to make sure we have the best chance of getting a clean load on try #1. However, we schedule for 3 trial loads and verification before a “go live load” into actual production. Even after all that it’s still an all nighter with contingency plans and c-suite cell numbers on deck.
Large corps likely have some huge codebases of overengineered spagetti code, which are hardly comprehendable by LLMs.
But if you want to build for example some new/smaller web/mobile apps talking to various API, LLM can boost your productivity significantly, because it will easily generate ready to use code snippets.
I think it's the other way around, though.
Those code monstrosities aren't comprehendible by humans, especially after the wanton RIFs that have happened in the past couple years that have cut loose a lot of people who know where the bodies are buried.
However, with copilot you can just figuratively walk up to any repo and ask "@workspace what's going on in this codebase" and it'll tell you. From experience I can say this can deliver results. Downright rotten code that would've taken me a good week to figure out can be figured out in an hour. It's damn near witchcraft.
The whole thing it gets you then is “faster experimentation”, which was something that was /already fast/ if you use modern tools of the day. 1 week vs 2 weeks for a prototype app may build you more prototypes but it doesn’t help when you can’t scale them.
It does smooth some of the processes though - AI is maybe helpful for cognitive augmentation for coders, but it’s not going to be building you apps worth a damn.
However, I could see the issue of AI 'hallucinations' being a non-issue in this domain because many in C-Suite positions have been 'hallucinating' for decades.
A company as a something like a collection of guilds coordinated by AI facilitators would be really fascinating.
We can have a funding agent provision an agent-based board as well. What's the point of a board that can't react to real-time market information 24x7x365?
The cynicism about AI's capabilities is well understood, we're at the peak of the hype cycle. People are selling AI across the board, but the reality will fall short of the sales pitch in innumerable ways across the board whether that be programmer productivity or anything else.
Then there's the meta cynicism about the sales pitches of AIs, reinforced my CEOs speaking to wall street about how AI will enable staff reductions. The rank and file is understandbly very angry about this, coupled with the understanding by technical folks that AI is far from being able to replace the function of actual deep-thinking humans. This is when the temptation to minimize the value of executives and "call their bluff" comes in. But here is where you need a dose of reality. Executives aren't stupid as you think, they don't get paid what they do for no reason, and despite the bad and anti-humanitarian decisions they make in the name of shareholder, they actually can't be replaced by AI. Both executives and boards understand this and so it's not really a topic of discussion. You are free to disagree with this of course, but at some point its just toothless wishful thinking.
I agree, but I think the reason they get paid what they do isn't because they're highly skilled (not to say they don't have skills, but those skills are mostly good ol' boys networking and the ability to do basic analysis), but rather because they're part of an insular class that protects its own. However, they're expensive and inefficient, and if we're going to practice honest capitalism then the first group to rip that bandaid off and automate away their (mostly) dead weight actually will be competitively superior to the backwards holdouts, and they will proceed to dominate the market.
This is of course if we're practicing actual capitalism and not a dressed-up form of neo-feudalism.
> but the reality will fall short of the sales pitch in innumerable ways across the board whether that be programmer productivity or anything else
Remains to be seen. We are with AI where the web was in 1996, when plenty of trusted thought leaders were sagely telling us that the web was just a place for glorified brochures.
Pick two.
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.
Then these new startups get a foot hold, and become the dominant software, grow in size and learn how to B2B sale as well.
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.
Is there any evidence to support this? It would imply that even their least promising employees would still pose a threat which seems unlikely.
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.
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
At my job, our main repo is over 300k lines of just Ruby code, plus a bunch of JS, ERB templates, and other stuff. Every AI tool I've thrown at it is great at making surgical edits to single files (or small groups of files) but completely chokes if you ask it a question that requires it to understand context across the repo. I'm always hoping that I'm just using the tools wrong, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case.
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…
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")
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)
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.
Sales will still happen with dinner and handshakes.
We can get into the nuances of advantageous tax treatment or not, but sales commissions come from somewhere and are essentially transaction costs.
I think you’re going to see a lot of tech companies adopt a less acute version of this strategy unfortunately
Realistically, this is a delicate balancing act. As others have noted, the Sales and PR game then (and always) drives the new and existing monies that come in.
Though Elon Musk's purchase of the company was entirely in his own self-interest, and unfortunately, it's serving him well so far. Buying a company for a fraction of his personal wealth and leveraging that into having the president as his personal servant is one of the greatest investments in American history.
What's the point of having Fuck You Money if you can't say "Fuck You?" Your value assessment isn't taking into account the value of destroying old Twitter, of removing a major bullhorn in the information environment away from people that Musk probably considers adversaries at best, and malevolent actors at worst. Simply standing up his own competing platform would not have accomplished this.
Asana, Figma, Miro, Box, Evernote, ClickUp, Basecamp, Zapier, HubSpot, Calendly, Shopify, WordPress
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/trx-obtains-federal...
https://gofit.net/collections/resistance-tubes-bands
There are plenty of cheaper no-name options on Amazon, but they have the property that the handles snap off during use, risking injury.
“Elon made an obvious mistake? Oh no, newb. Look on this other indicator that reinforces my bias.”
A TRX push-up puts less load on the primary path than a conventional push up but is very challenging to all the other muscles that it takes to not flop over when you do it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNuZWO0if5o
These days I'd trust AMZN less than Temu. At least Temu and sellers on Temu still want to win your trust. AMZN thinks they have it and will still think they have it long after it's lost.