Haven't you heard? Sales force doesn't hire programmers anymore. AI is all their CEO needs. ;p. Seriously though, this behavior reminds me of Oracle, and is a great reminder that proprietary software can very quickly become a big liability.
Oracle is exactly who sprang to mind. Throughout my history as a software developer, even Microsoft has had a ton of interest in being involved in the community. Yes, they've wanted to extinguish much of it, when it didn't align with their financial goals... but they were always interested in being part of the "software development conversation". Oracle on the other hand has never extended an olive branch. They're quite happy existing on their own proprietary island. A great reminder that, "they don't want ot play in the pool with you, they want to own the whole pool and charge you to swim in it".
I worked in parallel with Sun Microsystems (prior acquisition) IBM and Oracle. All 3 were horrible in that regard. They all offered cheap services, and waited until roots were deep enough; then they would change the billing scheme multiplying fees by up to 25
Sun was always fair to me, so much so that I feel like it's unfair to lump them together.
I used Solaris on Sun Fire machines and the support was unmatched, we got massive tome manuals that described in excruciating detail exactly how the system worked in almost all scenarios and a deep programming reference.
They never upselled us on anything, or changed the price.. until Oracle bought them and jacked the support costs up (though, to be perfectly fair, they ought to jack the support costs of old systems up).
Microsoft was _awesome_ to deal with as a small company and/or an educational institution. They had special programs for startups where you could get basically anything for free, and their business side was a pleasure to deal with.
They very much understood the "Developers! Developers! Developers!" mantra.
It is impossible to know these days. I just get flooded with automated messages in random channels by them wanting to chat with me about whatever place I'm a manager at.
That doesn't really matter: Salesforce is not a technology company, it's a sales company. They need to win the loyalty of procurement decision makers, then engineers will have to use whatever the business people were sold. Exceptions are small tech-first companies where the engineers directly decide on tools.
Isn't this even more devastating in that respect? A 50x $ increase with only two days notice? This isn't some tech issue, this is directly related to procurement.
Right, but they weren't making money on that either, only $5k/yr. This wouldn't happen to a "top arr client" or whatever is the tiering their account managers follow.
Here it likely was the exact opposite: the long tail of low-paying clients is annoying to manage compared to how much they bring cumulatively. So the client had been given a choice of either becoming a high-paying client or stop being a client altogether.
Slack has been acquired. It's the same with all of these big tech companies. There is a period after acquisition where things appear to stay the same. The reality is that the real work is now happening. Operations are being studied to understand how to fold the acquisition into the parent company.
The shadow IT model isn't the dominant one in the space where Salesforce play. They used that to a degree too when they were small, but they now lean towards enterprise sales. Shadow IT is sold as a risk by them. Want something secure, safe, and compliant? Work with us because we'll sign up to these things contractually (even if delivery is questionable.)
This means that a slack salesperson has to choose between targeting a department and pissing off IT versus working on a company-level deal. This changes behavior significantly. It also changes lots of the economic expectations. Previously, these little deals here and there could add up. On top, you might get credit from driving engagement. Now you carry a much larger quota where engagement is important in practice, but not in how sales is executed.
This drives the behavior you see here. Someone is reevaluating each of the current deals with this new lens. In practice, they can maximize revenue with these bullying tactics. Many times, in the enterprise space, it's better for a customer to be cut off, or give up, even if this is temporary. The intention is for the customer to return and agree to different terms even if the financials are adjusted to something more favorable.
I know a few people who've made good money immersing their hands in this pile of rich manure as consultants, so I guess it all comes down to what you individually are willing to do for some cash.
I did it for a few years after I graduated. It paid about a 10% premium over what other dev jobs in the area paid, and you never had to do anything super technically challenging, but you were pretty much at the whims of the sales org without any kind of product management in place. Plus the owner of the stack you worked with was openly antagonistic to the fact that developers had to be involved at all, even though all of their "no-code" tools introduced complexity that required developers to be involved as soon as you did anything more interesting than whatever was in the demo.
So yeah I made some money but I'd die before I was a salesforce dev again.
People in sales think it's pretty ok, and it's easy to find contractors who will set up or expand it for you. A couple of full-time devs could set up a CMS better tailored to your company with free components, but lots of places that use Salesforce don't have in-house developers.
Salesforce knows that its codebase is a hot plate of spaghetti, but it doesn't really matter because software developers "in general" aren't their target audience in any sense.
Yes, we did by 10,000 cores a year ago, no there is no capacity, yes we will run the ERP off an old win2k server, no we are not using 10k cores for seti@home.
IMO we should count people who hate stuff like a user portal backed by one of these tools as haters of those tools. Although, the one that immediately pops into my head is some universally loathed HR portal that was backed by Peoplesoft.
As a general rule, if ever someone is presented to you as a 2-dimensional character or cartoonish hero or villain, there is usually quite a bit more to discover. This probably goes in my list of 100 things to tell any young person about life.
Some of the people who have caused the most pain, suffering and death in the world were still kind to their dogs. They are often pleasant socially. Stalin, by was apparently delightful over a glass of whiskey and some cigars.
The older I get, the more I judge people by what they work for in the world, and what changes they try to bring about. I am less interested in the face that they present socially.
> The older I get, the more I judge people by what they work for in the world, and what changes they try to bring about. I am less interested in the face that they present socially.
This is a thought I'm having lot as I get older. I've taken to judging people on how much what they say they work for in the world aligns with the profile of who they choose to work for. Not so much for unskilled in minimum wage work, but massively so for anyone who works in tech.
It pains me to see so many engineers younger than me convinced that they're bringing around positive changes with their career whilst working for companies and people who are demonstrably against everything they claim they're working for.
It speaks to motivation generally, I think. Most people just want to be able to take care of themselves and the people closest to them; they (and this includes me most of the time) don't have the bandwidth to think beyond paying next month's rent.
Can't remember the source of this quote regarding software developers: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."
Having known a couple founders turned millionaires (no one in the many millions or billions tho), they will use small as a percentage of their wealth but large in nominal terms donations to bolster their reputation in exactly the same way one might spend too much in a video game for a fancy cosmetic.
Salespeople usually worked with Salesforce in other companies, and some of them are even familiar with the dozens of low-code, no-code tools that you can use with Salesforce. All of them making the data model absurdly worse than what it already is.
Sales and marketing executives are usually the most hostile stakeholders an engineering department may have (tip: Sometimes Legal and Compliance are your best allies when in a fight against Marketing and Sales), they absolutely hate engineering because they are absurdly focused on the short run.
Give them Salesforce, Office 365, some connectors and some no-code tool and they poke holes the size of the Titanic in your security, but they don't care, because they want their brilliant ideas implemented now, and salesforce and excel let them do whatever they please now.
The thing is, Salesforce understands sales people, and the product is designed to make their lives easier and more effective. And you know what, they are good at it, that's why they are so big.
But they are horrible at integrating with anything else, making engineers happy, make data and AI people happy. They wall everything in. Guess what, you are not their customer. The sales people are.
So yeah, I hate them, but even more reluctantly, I admit that despite the multi million dollar invoice they send each year, we haven't really found a worthwile replacement. And most of our staff is actually quite positive about them because the old system was MS Dynamics, which is even worse.
My sales people hated it. They all looked around clueless as to why they were handed another place to keep contacts. It do didn't anything they were told it would. Broken promises, shattered dreams, and an executive shocked that CRM means "place to store phone numbers."
It's sold as the magic sales tool that does everything. And it does do everything, as long as a developer builds whatever everything is you need first. Otherwise it doesn't do anything. That's pretty heartbreaking to watch people realize on repeat.
This thread captures the hatred for salesforce well: it is aggressively sales first. It's the antithesis of modern engineering culture that looks to provide value to customers and tech first by putting them first.
Salesforce puts sales people first, and salespeople's job is often reduced to extracting value from customers and tech.
Same where I use to work, and upper mang. is scared to remove it due to sales people revolting. They tried years ago and a revolt happened and the cancelled they project.
Salesforce... working hard to become the SaaS-era equivalent of mid-90s "Computer Associates" (CA) ...
(Regarding acquisitions of Heroic, Sendgrid, Slack, Tableau, Mulesoft, and most recently Informatica...)
For those less-familiar with the reference, the Wikipedia entry[1] tells it well:
In 2001, The New York Times wrote that "Computer Associates has infuriated clients with high prices and poor technical support." Fortune wrote, "For all its ubiquity inside the tech departments of corporate America, CA had a horrendous reputation. Where Microsoft has long been the most feared software company, the old CA claimed the title of most despised – not by competitors but by its own customers."
Detractors of CA accused it of putting newly acquired software products into maintenance mode and milking them for cash flow. The products themselves were expensive and central to what corporate IT departments were doing, and so customers found it difficult to move away from CA. As Fortune wrote, "These products made it the barnacle of corporate America: Once you had CA software onboard, it was so onerous and expensive to pull it out that few customers ever did. That led to a lot of steady cash flow – and to arrogance on the part of CA's management." Or as The Register wrote, "CA used acquisitions to grow its portfolio.... Along the way it acquired a reputation as the place decent software goes to die."
Broadcom cleaned house though - the overwhelming majority of old school CA Technologies from line level ICs to VPs and Execs were all cut.
There was a notorious incident where some ex-VPs at CA made a whole stink about being downgraded to Managers at Broadcom due to title inflation at CA and Hock Tan personally flamed them, along with CA's shenanigans around their private jet (Broadcom demanded CA to fly commercial).
Sometimes, companies with lazy and inefficient leadership and staff need to get the stick.
As a millennial, I never understood CA’s business model. While I was too young to have exposure to the B2B software sales market, they also had a tiny presence in retail software, so I was always confused about what kind of software they actually wrote. I could grasp product-oriented companies like SAP and Microsoft, but I had no clue how a company with no obvious central product could take in the epic cash flows publicized during their accounting scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35_day_month
I believe thousands more adults are now hating it too, also reconsidering any current and potential dealings with them seeing their way of conduct. If not for the sake of righteousness, but for the sake of self interest (not to be extorted in the future by an organization prone to exploitation and extortion).
Not everywhere. Even when it's allowed it can result in shadow bans. Seems a whole lot easier to self-censor everywhere than to track who gives value to the word f**.
Fuck that noise. The places that shadow ban and encourage self-censorship do not deserve your traffic nor your content.
Start voting with your voice and your (digital) feet. Don't be sheeple. Keep the Internet weird. It is not on us to censor ourselves to protect the feelings of snowflakes who get all bent out of shape because of something someone said.
Monopolies aren't generally undone by their anti-consumer practices. Believing Salesforce will suffer from their own egregious behavior is wishful thinking.
I'm referring to a vast community of young developers who have learned a valuable lesson about the useless roles of monopolies in our lives as a dirty bonus to long payrolls of devs who work for them.
That's the best thing that could happen, more people should think poorly of salesforce. It's important to remind up and coming programmers that the big companies are not their friends.
You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes. But does it really matter?
I urge every user of Hacker News to read Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. It's the definitive statement on software capitalism.
The goal, which Thiel embraces unabashedly, is to use technology to create new and unique monopolies, and once you've created them, extract as much rent as possible from the users. Obviously the users hate that part once it kicks in.
Thiel really seems to believe this is a good thing and there's a sense in which he's right: the tech industry has created more gadgets and created (or consumed?) a level of economic activity on par with industrialization itself. We have been introduced to all manner of innovations and conveniences, and the winners at this game have won bigger than anybody else.
But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it once you can't get out, and it's all part of the plan. Again, and again, and again, for more than 40 years now.
That's why once you're done with Thiel, you should read the GNU Manifesto. Richard Stallman identified the basic dynamics here as far back as the 1980s, and started his movement from the perspective of a user of computer systems who didn't want everything to be trapped and enshittified once again. By encouraging programmers to adopt the GNU license he aimed to prevent the rent seeking stage of this process.
Both camps succeeded partially. Thiel's camp succeeded more, especially economically. Which camp you join is up to you when you write a line of code or you use a piece of software. I personally think the world is complicated and there are elements of value in both. Regardless these are the two written works which together will give you the full context about the software industry, how it works, how it got this way, and even why modern life is the way it is.
And then you will see how it is by design for Salesforce to fuck nonprofits because it works. It was in the plan from day one. They knew. They will do it again.
The book Zero to One has pretty questionable economics.
I'm paraphrasing here, it's been a long time, but his thesis is that in a competitive situation life of a company is nasty, brutish and short. And that might be true, but that doesn't mean that life for customers or shareholders or workers is anything like that.
Part of why companies have it so hard in harsh competition is that they have to pay workers well in order to attract them, and they have to offer customers real value for money (if they want to keep getting their money), and companies also have to give decent returns to shareholders.
The 19th century phrase used in public to justify building monopolistic “trusts” was avoiding “ruinous competition”, the nation would be better off with a few big monopolies
The economics are questionable in a moral sense - monopolies are widely considered to be good for the monopoly's shareholders and bad for everyone else.
The core reason people hate/distrust/discredit economics is because it lays out a lot of solid yet uncomfortable or unfortunate points. People just really really don't want to know that the economic world is just as trying and punishing as the real world.
> You would think that making your users hate you is shortsighted, yes.
The harsh truth: Alienating some free or highly discounted users can be a net win for companies if it allows them to raise their prices for remaining customers.
This is an extreme example, but it happens all the time. The free or discounted years are always angry, justifiably, but dropping the free plan is a common growth phase for companies looking to reduce their support load, server count, and increase their revenue per user.
> But it is undoubtedly anti-consumer and anti-user. They give you something good, you get hooked, and then they enshittify it
The key word here is “give”. The free plans were always supposed to be a hook for getting people familiar with the platform so they would buy it later or spread the word. Free plans disappear once the market matures because the free plan no longer serves that purpose. They don’t need to spread the word because everyone knows about Slack. It’s a pop culture word, now, not something that needs to be spread around so people talk about it to their bosses.
Makes sense, but that’s not the problem here. They could have given them, say, a month to migrate, or they could raise the price 2×, or they could have handled it in any other way that’s not “you have a week to pay us $50k or your data is gone”.
I think it's slightly worse. They didn't even have to know from day one. The incentives are such that it's easy to just over time roll into that (local?) optimum.
I find it interesting that this comment got a lot of replies but is still at 1 point. It went negative temporarily.
That means people are downvoting what is essentially a book recommendation. You ignore knowledge and the things that the architects of the modern world say about their work at your own peril, folks.
Who cares? Salesforce, as any other corporate are outsourcing to Indian kids, they don't give a...
Only people who can really change something are cybersecurity people, /"pentesters".
They should, as any other responsible pentesters holding 0days for big corps, stop reporting them to the companies, instead sell to on grey market to 3rd party. Completely legal, for you it's more money and who cares what they do with it.
