Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff

Re:Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, ... by paxys on Wednesday January 08, 2025 @06:40PM (#42639813)

Benioff is very far removed from what goes on day-to-day at Salesforce. He is the marketer in chief, nothing else. This interview itself is an ad for "Agentforce". They will keep hiring engineers as normal (heck there are 104 software engineering openings on their careers site as I write this).

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.

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Re:Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, ... by sfdcccthrow on Wednesday January 08, 2025 @07:37PM (#42640268)

Internally they are allowed. There are internal productivity tools (IDE Plugins, APIs, Frameworks, Chat) with homegrown models (in the press) and the ability to switch to other models. The various models are integrated throughout the engineering tools and Slack.

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Re:Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, ... by timcobb on Wednesday January 08, 2025 @08:55PM (#42640775)

So, uh, do you think they've driven productivity up 30%? ;) ;) ;)

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Re:Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, ... by javawizard on Wednesday January 08, 2025 @09:09PM (#42640866)

I'll say as an ex-FAANG that recently released a similar stat that it was absolutely real, but only because doing anything required an atrocious amount of boilerplate that AI was really good at figuring out.

Compared to how productive I am at my current startup? Not a chance.

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Re:Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, ... by namaria on Thursday January 09, 2025 @03:24AM (#42643059)

Well put. LLMs seem great in environments full of the cruft LLMs are trained on. Seems obvious but I hadn't put it together. Thanks for the insight.

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Re:Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, ... by mring33621 on Thursday January 09, 2025 @06:12PM (#42650811)

Anecdotally, I'd say AI assistants have probably improved my coding productivity by 30%

So maybe it's true at salesforce too?

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Re:Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, ... by TZubiri on Wednesday January 08, 2025 @11:03PM (#42641500)

"This interview itself is an ad for "Agentforce"

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

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