Salesforce APIs are unintuitive and terribly documented by design, so that their ISV ecosystem (basically people who have spent years working and getting certified for it) becomes more valuable. If they made it easy a $250/hr "Salesforce consultant" role wouldn't exist.

I don’t believe this to be the case. The root cause is that company exposed the product’s internal workings to developers via APIs 20 years ago. Tons of companies built their whole business on it, and those APIs will never be deprecated. Most of those companies don’t employ any software engineers, so migrating isn’t viable. I’ve been in the room when complicated new APIs are developed, and we definitely weren’t making things hard on purpose. Every new feature needs to work with whatever our customers built out of what came before. We did our best given the constraints.

Of course these opinions are my own, I don’t currently work at Salesforce, and I can only tell a tiny part of the story from my own perspective, and it’s probably unfair to people who did a lot of good work.

I just read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115 "what is salesforce" (linked from elsewhere here) -- quite an impressive story, lots of talented people involved it seems to me

(Incl Steve Jobs just a little bit others might find it interesting to know)

this explain a lot, thank you.

I can not think of any other logical explanation for why it is so bad.

I don't know a single enterprise application that isn't a "nightmare to work with". This is not an issue with the code/architecture but the level of complexity to operate at the scale that SFDC does.

> It reeks of different services consolidated via acquisition (or one-off services kitbashed together), and adding slack to the mix will just add yet another variation to the existing APIs.

That's not how this usually works. Heroku is still running just fine and isn't a messy bunch of APIs since they were acquired. SFDC will likely just sell Slack into their enterprise clients and let it be.

> enterprise applications are a "nightmare to work with"

It's my theory once a well-crafted enterprise application becomes very successful it bloats up until design-by-committee is necessary.

From that point on it becomes an unusable disaster.

I don’t think it’s design by committee so much as it is sales needing more ammunition to close deals. That has for my whole career been the primary motivation of almost all features outside of the “base product.”

“Hey we got $so_many million dollar client who wants to use our product but they want to auth with their AD and can’t use our three other SSO options.”

And thus was born the company’s pluggable directory over VPN connector and auth strategy.

Compare any other CRM with salesforce and 80% of the time you'll find better API / UX.

Still, salesforce can sell and that's how it got where it is.

> Compare any other CRM with salesforce and 80% of the time you'll find better API / UX.

You're right, if I'm using something as simple as Zoho, Streak, Insightly, Close, Pipedrive, etc.

But thats precisely my point - the greater the complexity of the application the more of the "nightmare of an API/UX". Have you ever worked with DynamnicsCRM? NetSuite CRM?

I have used Remedy and Microsoft Dynamics. So far Salesforce is the best one.

As a person that works a lot with Salesforce and not much with AWS, I have the same opinion but about AWS. Salesforce is not known for wonderful documentation, but experience and familiarity changes the perspective quite a bit.

You’re pretty far off base, my dude.

API quality varies from product to product. Base APIs object retrieval are excellent because tons of people use them so they received incremental improvements even after launch. More niche APIs like Communities or Chatter unfortunately don’t get as much love or attention.

Documentation, on average, is great. Light on practical examples, perhaps, but Salesforce has made huge investments into education materials for the tech side of their products. If you think THEIR docs are bad, I urge you to share what big company (Netflix? FB?) with regular users as the dominant customer has docs that do are think are better.

> I commend those devs that work with Salesforce on a daily basis!

I've heard decent ones are handsomely paid, so at least they have that going on for them.

Sounds like modern-day SAP. Pays well if you're willing to wade in and learn the beast.

You can easily make a small fortune being a Salesforce dev/consulting shop.

Medium to large business will easily pay $200k-$400k for Salesforce implementation projects.

I have one of these companies in my town. It’s amazing to me how large the market is just to make somebody else’s product not suck so bad for you.

Still feel like the business sales industry is waiting for its iPhone disruptor.

You mind telling us how to get started?

Unfortunately, it’s like any other business, you need to get your first customer. It’s a huge market and plenty of customers to go around though.

Salesforce has listings of recommended Salesforce development and implementation companies. You’ll need to get training first and prove expertise.

You could look for companies that have job listings for Salesforce administrators and then see if they are open to contract work.

Attend Dreamforce to get a feel for everything is also a good idea.

This is an accurate description!