the end of the Tech Bro (brought to you by Salesforce)

Okay, so Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025. Salesforce will not be hiring any more software engineers in 2025 amid significant productivity boost from AI. Okay, so we are not adding any more software engineers next year, because we have increased this product the productivity this year with agent force and with other AI technologies that we're using for engineering teams by more than 30%.

So 30% productivity increased to 3 AI to the point where our engineering velocity is incredible. So what what do you think about this? Do you do you really think they improve the productivity by 30%? Whatever this means? I mean it's tough to it's tough to understand. I don't think he's being very specific right because how do they measure productivity? If that's lines of code, I mean for sure AI can write a lot of code. So it's it's extremely high to measure.

engineering teams productivity. What's more important for the companies is to to build the right thing, right? You would not need so many engineers if you were building the right thing. The easiest way to need less engineers, right is to to make sure whatever you're building makes sense. Uh, but he's not talking about that. You know, do you think that's even visible? Did AI increase your own productivity? You write code every day.

Did that increase 30% your productivity? As you mentioned, right? Productivity? I don't know. You can definitely ship a lot more code. You can ship as much code as you want because, again, AI as a language model can just churn out as much code as you want. But productivity as in, you know, value for in the software, value for for the customers. would have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer. Wow, that's that's something very making up a lot of new new terms. Um, we'll have more sales people next year. Okay, so maybe time I might become a salesperson. I don't think I'm cut for that. Uh, but maybe you are, Josh. Uh, because we really need to explain people the value that we can achieve with AI. So we'll probably add another 1,000 to 2,000 sales people to sell agent force, which is doing all the engineering work. Do you think they they're going to like Salesforce is going to win higher engineers next year being a software company and only go for sales people? I mean, you cannot really know, you know, you cannot really know what's behind it. What's how the balance sheet looks like? What actually, what are they actually engineers doing? I think a good idea would be to look at people that are using Salesforce. And understand, you know, are they winning a market share, are they not, which are the products that are actually, um, being fine, which are the products that are not? And I last time I checked, a lot of people were complaining about Salesforce, right? Salesforce, it's very expensive, it has a lot of technical depth. I don't think that AI will will solve that. You know, if you look at um, I think was it trust pilot? where people review companies and uh they have about uh 1. something. I don't think they get to two out of five. over as a company. Wow. And a lot of people were complaining about the complexity. of Salesforce about the price point as well, and about the fact that there are better solutions out there, like that it's been built for enterprises. I guess there's a lot of stuff they have there, there's a lot of legacy code. Probably their their problems would be solved by actually hiring more engineers and simplifying the product. That's what it feels from what I read about the company reviews. Now, Mhm. you have to understand CEOs. Right? Everybody's talking about AI, investors are buying AI. So why not just jump on the wagon and and talk about AI like everyone does? If you're a smart investor, if you'd be investing in Salesforce, you'd actually look at is this actually true? Do they really have an engineering problem or not? And if the product is not good enough, you have an engineering problem. You can hire 1,000 sales people to push the same technical depth. crappy product to them, it won't matter. But I didn't know exactly how things are.

inside sales force. You know, the Sleazy car says, man, I think it's going to be the the Sleazy sales force, uh, sales person. So, this came just after Zuckerberg said they are working on an AI to replace all the mid-level engineers at Meta. Um, and so there's there's kind of a trend here of CEOs coming out and saying, how much of the engineers they will replace or how much productivity they have in engineering because they replace developers.

So, if I were in the market right now as as a mid-level engineer, do you have any tip for me to like to like, you know, basically not change think about changing careers or I think I will be completely obsolete a year, two years from now. Again, I think you need to try to have vaguely thinking in this situation because there's a lot of noise and these people they have a lot of money behind them. It seems like they know they know something you don't, you're just an engineer, they are the CEO, they're very close to the tech.

Actually, I think you'd be amazed probably they're not very close to the tech. They spend most of the time in meetings with investors. But I would definitely check the company. You know, it's like like with people, don't look at what people say, look at what they do. So I would definitely try to use your engineering mind to check the company, check the reviews, let me double check with you, on Trust Pilot and I see a, you know, 500 reviews 1.4 out of 5.

That's pretty bad. That's bad. So if the product is bad and they are hiring engineers and they are using AI to to fix it, the product will probably only get worse. And then they will have more sales people. Now, a good product usually sales by itself, you don't need a lot of sales people, you don't need to push the product to the market because the market needs it, right? And that's what we know about good products.

They they, you know, nobody. So, going back to to what they say, if I were an engineer, I would take this with a with a pinch of salt. And I would look at what's behind this statement. It's very important that you're not let these things get into your head. number two, they are losing market share. Go check the competitors, who are they losing to? Go and wait for those people. So going a bit deeper, uh we see here that they're trying to sell agent force, right? That's the one thing at Salesforce right now. And this is the only thing that matters today, right? AI AI AI. By the way, when I was an engineering manager, we had a team that was a mixed team of developers and Salesforce developers that were doing kind of low code automation in the Salesforce platform. We were servicing around under 50 sales people using the platform. And I think the bill was huge by the way. I mean, people think AWS bills are big, Salesforce are a whole different level. I think for the licenses we're using, it was around 3 to 5 million, and we're talking about midsize company, right? 3 to 5 million a year only for the for the license. Okay, so our reviewer reported mixed results, finding that experience, blah, blah, experience Salesforce professionals who provided clear and detailed instruction could find using it in this agent force, while more entry-level people might make poor choice and accumulate technical depth from following the agent instruction. So what does this tell us? I mean, you know, um, I like this very complex and AI can seem to figure it out either, and it's just confusing confusing people. Because in the end like the people that are experienced, they don't need the agent. So ideally it should help the mid-level engineers that are getting on board in on this. I I it seems like companies not doing very well. And uh they are contracting, they'll have to get rid of people and the easiest thing to say it's because AI increase our productivity. And to sell it as a as a positive, when actually it's a negative, they are losing market share. Probably they are losing market share because this market of CRM, what what Salesforce is selling it, there are many new players, smaller players that are offering maybe more flexibility, more tailored solutions, who knows. Right, I'm not an expert in the CRM market, but the reality is they are losing out ground and it's better to paint it as an increase of efficiency. like you saying, my company told me they need me less because I can do the same thing I was doing in four days rather than five and I wanted more time off. When actually they are cutting your time.

time because you're not delivering. And so as as you see here, in 2023, the same CEO said they were letting off 7,000 people, that's 10%, and it was because they over hired, right? revenue accelerated to the pandemic. We had too many people leading to this economic downturn. We're facing and I take responsibility for that. I think this is actually the root cause of the layoffs in software development today.

It's not it has very little to do with AI and it has more to do with the financials of the of the companies and the over hiring phase. What what are your thoughts on this? This is probably true. They over hired, I believe a lot of these corporates they had people doing jobs that made no sense. And when the times are tough, then companies are being judged in the end by what they bring to the market.

It feels like it's more of a miscalculation of the management over hiring and now kind of adjusting to the realities of the market. Again, whenever a company is losing market share, other company will be winning it. So, probably thinking to work for those companies as I mentioned. That's what I would be looking at. CRM market is only going up. Right, it's only growing, and it will keep going. There are companies out there, like all companies, they still don't have a CRM.

But they are probably not choosing Salesforce, so the question is who are they choosing? And work, work for them, see if they are hiring. Like to wrap this up, as a software engineer today, even if you are employed, we probably feel very anxious and scared about your future because it feels like we are at the border of being obsolete. That's the the the main idea here with the layoffs. Can you summarize it really quickly, if if you were an engineer in the market right now?

How would you manage this anxiety? Again, I think you have to go back to to first principles and you have to think about it this way. Can my company ship the value that they are shipping without me? Can it can they do it if Cloud or GPT or Devin would replace me? And the answer it's no. The answer it's by far no, I haven't seen yet a big company built on top of AI agents. I don't think we are even close to that.

Even even so, if you keep thinking, you realize the big problem we have these days is is just too much noise everywhere. There's all these news, there's all these things in your feed. When you think about this is not AI, it's an LLM, it cannot it doesn't have a mental model of what a business is. So how can it build something for a user? It can predict the next token, cool, and you have these autonomous agents that can go into sick us very fast. But a human can do much more than that. That's number one. and number two, really, companies can say whatever, but you have to look at what they are paying for. So the question is, are there people in the market getting hired right now, software engineers? Are there software engineers getting offers right now? that are even better than last year? And I can tell you the answer, it's yes. The people um, it's true that there are not so many jobs like we used to have back in the pandemic. But the offers right now are higher. The jobs, the salaries have been adjusting for inflation. So, as soon as people are willing to pay, you know, don't look at what they say, look at what they pay for. And and companies that are serious, that want to not not Salesforce. In this case, maybe not meta, but there are a ton of companies out there that are hiring I think 200k openings for software engineers only in the US. Yeah, so you mentioned Devin, people always compare this, you know, 500 uh $500 uh subscription to Devin with the 250,000 yearly software engineer. So, do you think is that something that would worry you? It's understandable that people get scared when you do this end-to-end comparisons. Now, you have to like that's those are nice comparisons, but you need to really look at the reality of things. Has Devin built a successful software product yet? End-to-end without human guidance? Okay? Not really. And if the answer is not, can they actually, if you pair them up with a with a human, can they actually get rid of some developers or something? And I think it's true, you know. The way developers out there, just, you know, back in the days I was working at at software company, and we had a one developer just uh configuring virtual machines. I think those kind of jobs, they they didn't make sense in the in the first place. So there will

be a set of jobs that will get automated, maybe. Very repetitive repetitive tasks, but those are things that you could actually automate with scripts. You didn't necessarily need AI. Yeah, did. If I'm a developer, you know, working for sales force or meta and I see my CEO kind of saying this, it would be very hard for me to to be motivated. I really feel like this the the people I'm trying to add value to and work together with, I I'm working hard to replace me.

I would feel very disconnected. I feel like they're just looking to get rid of me because I'm this expensive software engineer. How How would you manage that? Just just leave, just find a different job where people actually believe in you. You know, so you don't have to work for these people. Well, what if living is not an option? Living is always an option. Living is always then then plan your leave in 6 months.

You know, start interviewing right now, start looking at your gaps, take ownership. Don't, you know, forget this paternalistic thing where your company has to approve you or your company has to take care of you. I can't imagine the, you know, the the the atmosphere, the vibe inside of companies. Right? But maybe it's time for you to to look at someone else. Don't hate them, you know, they're just don't blame them, it's just business, they they do what they have to do, they say what they think they have to say.

Just let the market decide, and for you maybe it's time to to check other opportunities. Should I apply as a sales person at sales force? I mean they have openings, right? I mean, you know, the the most important thing for a sales person is that you believe in the product you're selling. So, if you look at the reviews and they are not hiring any more engineers to fix it, it's going to be a tough one.

To all the developers watching us, check out the links in the comment. We have a technical assessment that you can do to figure out exactly where your skills are, and a free training where you learn exactly how to be in this market. with with the lay offs and AI and how to actually make it. Just like many of our MNTs are making it every day. And with that being said, me and will see you in the next one.