Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Ask HN: Can Salesforce be a long term career?
48 points by akudha on April 29, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 65 comments
I am sick of doing web dev and I feel like my career is stuck. Not learning anything new and not making much money either. But more importantly, not doing anything interesting/fun.

Someone suggested I try salesforce. I looked around a bit - it has tons of certifications (red flag?), doesn't seem hard to learn. Looks like there are enough jobs, as of now.

So my question is - can this be a long term career? at least 8-10 years? Are there interesting projects to work on, or is it similar to doing CRUD web development again?




I am the COO of Salesforce. Two of the top ten jobs on Indeed are Salesforce Admin and Salesforce Developer, and the jobs are distributed around the world. We have a ton of stories of folks transitioning into the ecosystem and developing an extremely successful career.

Notably, our certifications are freely available at https://www.trailhead.com/. You can get started, learn, and get credentials for free. It is a great place to start, and we purposely made our learning and credentialing free so we could make it as easy as possible for folks pivoting mid-career into Salesforce.

I would be happy to point you in the right direction. My email is bret.taylor@salesforce.com.


Seriously impressed by your responsiveness here.


Shameless plug, lots of good people (admins, devs, MVPs, SFDC internal) that can help you along your journey in the SFXD discord as well [0].

https://join.sfxd.org


Off topic, but really excited to intern with you this summer :)


Excited to work with you!


I love HN.


What does Salesforce really do? I could never warp my head around it. Could you ELI5?


(I am not affiliated with SFDC)

The SalesForce product is essentially a large-scale set of software tools that can be used to manage data and communications (marketing, analytics, contracts, timelines, schedules, records, helpdesk tickets, payments, etc.) between vendors and clients. It's a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.

The reason it's not clear what their product is to non-users is that there isn't really a "default SalesForce experience"; the point of buying their software is that they (or you) are supposed to be able to customize it to the point where you can use it in exactly the way your business requires. Whether or not that is actually true is the subject of many lengthy debates on HN.


From what I gather, they're a:

Expensive and hugely expansible webapp built on top of Oracle that allows admins to make and track customers through the sales pipeline using various methods.

The software's intent is for marketing, sales, and execs to see how various campaigns are running and how to control them.

They're usually outside of standard devops pipeline by a good distance.

The downside: Salesforce seems to be at the whim of Oracle, who has their own competing product in the CRM category.

And I'm also studying it, and working towards the certs myself. May not be looooong term, but people with this knowledge do tend to get paid well. (Anything connected with marketing/sales does)


Haven't they moved off of Oracle? I recall seeing they had job openings for Postgres admins with the intention of moving off of Oracle.


its in progress. there surely are a lot of dependencies to work through. That said - I don't think Oracle would be legally allowed to or capable of damaging Salesforce by witholding licenses or whatever. And the fact that they are on Oracle currently has no effect on the developer, admin, or user facing APIs. like any cloud provider all of that is abstracted away.


At its core, Salesforce is a SaaS database platform that lets a non-programmer admin create data models for a business, as well as custom views and queries.

But Salesforce goes beyond being a database to the point of being more like a web and mobile framework specifically dedicated to building apps for business. Salesforce has its own flavor of Java (Apex) and its own MVC paradigm (Lightning). You can develop entire custom apps on Salesforce, similar to how Shopify has its own app ecosystem.


They do spend a lot of time telling admins that you don't need to do any of that scary coding thing...until you do.


I thought Salesforce certifications had registration fees. Has that changed?


There's two kinds. The certs do need paying for and test centres. Trailheads are free and give you badges. These are great as an intro, but I think many employers want the real certs.


Screenshotted your response instantly. Thanks.


Yes: you can make solid money as a salesforce admin/developer, especially if you are good at working with non-technical stakeholders.

Personally, I think that working with salesforce is the worst of CRUD development combined with the worst of SaaS platforms. If you want fun work, I would not recommend Salesforce.


It's also somewhat risky to focus your whole career on learning a product that a single company makes. In 10 or 20 years, it may be depreciated.

There are plenty of Crystal Reports professionals who found that their skills didn't transfer as the software declined.


And there's plenty of COBOL developers that have been trying to retire for years but keep getting coaxed back.

Maybe the nuance you're looking for is it would be unwise to not progress your skills along the way. Like Salesforce Classic is a dead end, but if you transitioned to Lightning you're probably ok.

Or Tableau, maybe you should be learning Google Data Studio, Microsoft Power BI, etc... at the same time.


COBOL is a programming language. Salesforce is a product.

Learning a product is good. Basing your career from it is limiting.


That advice ignores the opportunity cost of learning other things. Jack of all trades, master of none, as they say. Focus your career on what you want to focus it on. If that is Linux kernel development, great! If it's WordPress modules in PHP, great! If it's AWS (to the exclusion of GCP and Azure), great! If you'd rather specialize in multi-cloud and learn all three, awesome! Some choices will limit the future possibilities - there are fewer companies that need eg Linux kernel devs, but two of them - Facebook and Google - are both known to pay really well and aren't going away any time soon. No one has a time machine to predict the future, so who knows if Salesforce will disappear in 20 years or if it will buy out the rest of the tech industry and we'll all be working for them? Point is, specialize how you want to specialize, plenty of people have done the same and found success, others who have done the same have found failure. Others who have chosen the opposite have also done the same.


There’s lots of transferable skills from crystal reports to other reporting platforms.

It takes the professional to do that skills mapping.

Reporting systems are reporting systems for the most part. In the case of Crystal Reports, it was acquired by SAP and still pretty heavily in use in businesses.


The skills transfer to Power BI on the Microsoft side, as another example.

Finding the best version of the role is part of being a professional too. At least where I am, there are lots of opportunities with mid-to-huge insurance/finance/healthcare companies that need this type of reporting.

They outsource a lot of the work, but they also have many slot for people with the tech skill and domain experience. If you were doing sales reporting, you could easily slot into one these roles because there is a need for someone locally who can talk to stakeholders versus someone at an outsource provider who can could be a great communicator, but has too many blockers at that type of inside company communication.


Conversely a lot of non tech folks are stuck suffering with Salesforce being poorly configured or operating for them.

Small, meaningful efforts in such cases can vastly improve the actual quality of life of so many people.

The dream of tech working for people instead of people working for tech should include the majority, not a technical minority, no?


Yeah, I didn't enjoy my stint working on Salesforce code. There are a lot weird things around how long a page can run, how man records you can return, user system, no local debugging (but this was coming), etc. I understand it is a shared system but I wish they had some kind of virtualization/isolation. I always felt like I spent most of my time fighting against the platform and not doing any meaningful work. ymmv


I have found that any deep specialization that is too detached from foundational programming or systems tends to be a non-transferrable skill. Salesforce sounds kinda like that.

Can you make solid money doing it? Well sure. That's not really the question, from what I read of your question. The question is if I spend n years doing this, when n is greater than 10 will I have learned anything that lets me step into the next thing.


Devil's argument: sometimes specialization in widely used, but "boring" platforms can be lucrative. The requests by companies using the platform tend to be pretty similar, and once you build a solid understanding of the ecosystem, you can usually crank out valuable changes with minimal effort.

This model works well on the contracting end of the spectrum. I have lots of friends who pay the bills doing Wordpress/SF contracting part time and spend the free time this model affords doing fun stuff.


Yes, there can be a lot of money in unpopular legacy tech like COBOL or PL/SQL when the pool of workers is evaporating faster than the pool of jobs.

The problem is, if the pool of jobs is evaporating then some day you're going to need a different job. And if years of legacy support has left you with no modern skills, no successful projects of any substance, and high salary requirements that could be a tough place to find yourself.


The major point your not mentioning is that with SF, Wordpress, or the like, there are tons of contracting opportunities. Not contracting in the sense of being a FTE with no benefits, but actually working independently with a bunch of companies.

You collect your 10-20hr a monthly retainer, plus get a project or so a year from each client. And you can spend your copious free time developing fun side projects. Plus, your skills rarely go stale because clients will look to you for lots of other technical expertise. So while Wordpress is your bread and butter, those same clients will start looking to you to integrate with other platforms, build mobile apps, and generally be a Tech Guru.

It's a good gig. I used to do it and know tons of people that wouldn't do anything else. Getting established is the hard part, plus you have to deal with billing and collecting from clients, etc.

I'd argue that people who are successful in this field have a much, much more broad skillset than their corporate developer peers, who get stuck working with one or two technologies a year.


Yes, we hired a Salesforce dev in the previous company I worked for. It's been around a long time, and I'm sure there will be a need for it for a while to come.

However, myself and every developer I know hates it. Having to work with it full time seems like it would be one of the more soul-crushing jobs in tech. Plus you'll constantly be doing requirement discovery with non-technical stakeholders. So you're combining the worst parts of consulting with the worst parts of development. You specifically seem to want to avoid unfun jobs, so I recommend very strongly to run in the other direction.


The field of web dev is so vast and nebulous, the idea that you can't learn anything new or that you've reached a permanent plateau in your career doesn't add up.

Also, Salesforce development is a specialized field. What you're basically saying is that in the entire, vast field of web development you can learn anything new or find anything interesting to do, so you want to move into something much more specialized/narrow in focus?

Can you provide some more details on what you're currently doing?


The transferable skill being missed here is the customization and integration between such systems.

That skillet really doesn’t seem to go out of date or demand.

Spending a few years in any ecosystem and applying oneself will almost always lead one to the next thing.


We are integrating Salesforce at my company and I am currently leading a large portion of that integration. Salesforce dominates the CRM market. Unless there is some sort catastrophic event that tarnishes their reputation, they will be around for quite awhile. Their system is incredibly complex and can be somewhat difficult to reason about. I believe if you specialized in Salesforce development or administration you can most definitely make a long term career out of it. Consequently, you run the risk that of becoming highly specialized which may make you less marketable for non-Salesforce related positions. Companies are going to spend countless engineering hours and bags of money to integrate Salesforce which will ultimately vendor lock them for an extended period of time. This is great for current and future Salesforce developers because it will add stability to their job market. I don't view certifications as a red flag but there are people out there that look down on people with certifications. That is a personal problem IMO.


Remember that at any time:

- Salesforce could announce a massive change in priorities.

- Salesforce could be bought by a competitor.

- Salesforce could be [more slowly] replaced by a competitor.

The odds of any of these things happening in the next year are probably quite low. The odds of something like this happening in the next ten years is pretty high.

I can't speak to whether the work is interesting or not -- I would assume that's it's not much different from any other general business programming jobs -- but IMHO, having general skills and being able to learn new techniques is key to having a long-term career in IT.


Salesforce is a 200 billion dollar company. I see the odds of them being bought by a competitor as pretty low.


Picking winners: The same can be said for using brittle cutting edge, immature tech stacks having a limited shelf life and not worth learning if something else comes along.

Another example is Shopify, folks want help with it in a Wordpress, but more approachable audience.


Yeah that's true. But that's true of most technologies. OP should weight how easily they could pivot if any of that came true.


Certs are worth getting. I have 12, charge $100 hr as a contractor, and have only been doing it for 5 years. No degree. I get people reaching out to me daily for work.

I see it as a long term career. Salesforce has the tallest building in SF. They own Heroku.

Salesforce is not fun to work with. What is fun for me is being in demand making a ton of money.


How did you go from getting certs to being able to charge $100/ as a contractor. I imagine you had to establish some credibility by working with sales force in a more traditional setting for a while?


My first job, year 1, $40k a year

Second job, year 2 $75k a year

Third job, year 3, $75 hr

Fourth job, year 4, $100 hr


Nothing hard is always fun to work.

Fun comes in milestones and accomplishing things that leave others wondering how you pulled it off.


Yes, with a caveat... The world will always need people who are great at optimizing sales organizations. Being someone who does that and happens to be an expert of the Salesforce tool is more valuable.

The start may be getting good at the tool, but which of the more valuable?

1 - I can help you properly set up Salesforce to track your Sales team.

2 - I can help you increase Sales by 20% by optimizing your Sales funnel and putting your best people on the largest deals. We will use Salesforce to do this.

#1 charges hourly in comp with low cost locations. #2 gets equity.


I think you have to start somewhere though when you are coming from the technical side and don't have as many business chops. Tech people tend to think it's about 1 when they first start because learning the tech is a big enough hurdle. They learn the tech quickly and either leave, or start acquiring the domain knowledge.

Across Salesforce and similar technology (think SharePoint/SAP/PeopleSoft), I know people who started on 1, but are now on 2. I'm not sure I'd have expected them to become 2 and it took time, but they weren't going to get to repeat 2 as a career without having aptitude for 1.

The other path that exists is becoming a specialized consulting firm. You become an expert in 1 and know enough about 2, as well as having built a network with lots of other number 2s. You can then support them to achieve their needs. This is a really common alternative to doubling down on the business side within an organization when this tech is involved. There are lots of sub-contracting opportunities and some will become acquihires for the generalist consulting companies who themselves are looking to get acquired by CapGemini, Accenture, etc.


I actually think it’s better to go from 1 to 2 than the other way around. You just have to make number 2 your endgame. (If you are smart enough to learn the tool, then you can learn sales math)


Yes, it can be a long-term career. You need to think about what you like doing though because Salesforce often brings you in contact with a different set of customers. You will need to develop consulting skills which you might not have over the long-term. These are the things that will give you most longevity.

Consulting is a blanket term I'm using for what is in many ways a jack-of-all-trades. These are seen by techies as a negative in many careers, but is a life-saver if you go the path of Salesforce. These include: analyzing proposals, communication with non-technical people, analyzing existing systems, change management, and influence without authority.

You need to start at the bottom and ideally get to work on some larger Salesforce deployments where you have limited responsibility. That'll give you space to learn with lower risk. You'll get to see some of these consulting skills in action over a few engagements if working with reasonable companies (do a lot of research on how companies treat IT folks.) This will help you adjust because the life of a great Saleforce dev involves engagement outside of IT.

If you don't have interest in developing these consulting skills then Salesforce will start to feel like CRUD web dev again. The skills open up opportunities to do more interesting things, or be involved in design of the systems, use newer Salesforce products, etc.

It's interesting that you complain about CRUD because 99% of web dev is CRUD when you look at all web dev. There are small group of devs who are working on startups, open source libraries, or unusual areas of web dev. Most people are just building business apps or sites that read and write data. Moving to modern frontend dev and the like is justified for various reasons among regular devs, but most often everyone really just wants the novelty after years of server-side CRUD. Nothing wrong with that, but we could be more honest and less defensive about it.


I'm extremely bullish on Salesforce: they execute well, launch products consistently, acquire companies successfully, and generally understand marketing well.

The problem with a lot of technical folks is they disregard Salesforce, but they aren't the target market. Salesforce is for all the large and mid-sized companies out there who need to move from an old process to a new one, which is why Salesforce focuses so much on "digital transformation" messaging. You can make millions in this space if you can align yourself with Salesforce + the skills needed there, and actually solve problems for executives.

On your certifications concern: I'd bet that each product can go quite deep and also a lot of large companies need people to do very specific things, which is why they look for niche certifications. I find most technically specialized folks can skip certifications and actually focus on solving problems for users.


I'm not sure if it can be a long-term career.

But if you are sick of doing web dev because of "not doing anything interesting/fun" I would say there's a great chance you'll be sick really quick - most of the SaaS platform's developer experience are just horrifying.


For god's sake don't put Salesforce on your LinkedIn profile, or you'll never get anything but recruiters spamming you about terrible jobs writing Apex.


Are you finding that that is actually stopping other opportunities? Agreed that bad recruiters are spamming Salesforce professionals but is it impossible to get out of?


> So my question is - can this be a long term career? at least 8-10 years?

Yes. I've been working in Salesforce Commerce Cloud for about 8 years (it was Demandware back then[0]), been a certified Commerce Cloud Developer the whole time, and got an Architect certification in December. I'm working for a support/integration partner agency, as opposed to a merchant. So instead of working on one thing everyday, I'm assigned to a handful of clients, whose storefronts are vaguely similar.

There's a stock storefront that new ones are built from, so most storefronts work the same, the only differences being external integrations like payment and order processing. It ends up being a narrow problem space that I've enjoyed working in, instead of a customized sky's-the-limit line of business app.

[0] https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2016/07/11/sa...


First, CRM is an essential business function. CRM software helps business organize data around customers,so even if Salesforce declines, your knowledge will map to whatever is next.

Second, if you want to love doing work with Salesforce or any other CRM, you have to really like business processes, otherwise, it will feel like boring CRUD work... So much of day-to-day for sales and customer success is spent working with really awful software (and lots of great software, badly configured), with lots of double data entry and copy-pasta going on. If you can help integrate, automate and build decent UIs, you are going to do very well.

Finally, when you become an expert on enterprise software three things will create opportunity: new features to implement/customize, new customers to migrate and price sensitivity. With Salesforce, even though they are a leader both situations are great for a consultant. Salesforce customers are also willing to spend money, and aren't as price sensitive (this is a good thing) as users of many other CRMs are.


I've been doing work in Salesforce for the last 7 years in two different positions. Both are smaller companies in the Midwest (smallish city of ~100k if you include neighboring towns). I know of at least one other company in the area that is built on Salesforce. It's not the most exciting work in the world, but it's work that I know is providing value for the companies and people I work for/with.

Pros: Salesforce abstracts a lot of the DevOps/database work that I don't have a lot of experience with and lets me focus on building the applications we need. Much of my current work is building out Lightning Web components, which is your basic JavaScript web development work built on top of some pre-existing components provided by Salesforce. There is a ton of documentation and it's easy to pick up on things you need to learn.

Cons: Salesforce has a lot of quirks to it that you'll become familiar with as you get into it. Build/test/deploy cycles are slower than normal, but they are working on tools to make that experience better. In some ways, their focus on no-code is nice and it's really easy to get simple things done. In some cases though, it feels easier just to write code to get things done, especially if you suspect the feature you're working on will get more complicated over time.

All in all I'm not sorry for getting into this space. I've had enough variety in my jobs that I've done some work outside of Salesforce and I don't feel pigeon-holed. The Salesforce ecosystem seems to be growing and their is a lot of work available. I'm in my mid-40s so if I can get steady work over the next 10-15 years with decent pay, I'll be more than happy continuing work in this space.

FYI: I haven't bothered with any paid certifications though I do complete Trailheads when I need to learn something new as a way to both learn things and provide a signal to potential future employers that I know what I'm doing.


How are you not making bank as a web developer? When I worked in the USA I was making 6 figures (think of $140k/year) working through an agency that works fully remote. The beauty of it is that autodidacts are the norm and nobody requires any certifications, and nobody requires an education except maybe to make it easier to land your first job.

Currently I'm back home in the Netherlands making €95/hour or about €13.680 per month or about €164.160 per year which is about $200k US dollars at the moment of writing.

Salesforce is a product that will be replaced by others or better ones over time. It'll come with endless required certifications and, let's be honest, is being in a vendor-locked world going to be fun or GOOD for your career?

At least as a web developer you focus on open-source standards that are free for all to use and free to learn about. You will naturally evolve with future developments.


Disclaimer: I have never used Salesforce and at best have a superficial understanding of what it does.

That depends. The question you want to ask yourself is, do you want to spend the rest of your career learning to use one limited toolbox or do you want to make your own tools?

If you're bored (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong here), you're just replacing one set of Legos you piece together with another, except this new set is much more specialized and limited.

Personally (although I have to give the COO cred for replying to this post personally) I wouldn't want to tie my horse to this one pole. You're basically a puppet to Salesforce whims. If they decide to become super evil, your career is now Madvillianry.


It is highly likely that Salesforce will be around in some form or another for at least 10 years. Even if it isn’t, your knowledge of customer requirements and how they can be met will be portable beyond just 1 company.


I've worked with people who are passionate about business process, CRM integration, the quote to cash process, invoicing, billing, product code and SKU management, etc.

Are you one of those people?

Salesforce has an app store (https://appexchange.salesforce.com/). You could try making an app, and see how you like it.


Yes. There's good money in it, the certifications keep the quality good and are reasonably doable. You can transition out once you get some experience with major clients; I did Siebel for years and whilst many of my colleagues jumped to Salesforce I transitioned into the heady but well paid world of enterprise architecture.


I’m on financial side - the market is good for sales force admins and devs - partly because you can add a fair Bit of business process type items into the package. The codes a bit ugly but results seem to make clients happy and the finance people are willing to write the reasonable bucks


You should take your friend’s advice to try it first and see if it inspires you before worrying about the cash. This work is too tough to make your initial choice based on reward potential. Take a class or read up on it, maybe see if you can experiment in your free time. Then decide.


For sure it’s long term, just look at similar products like SAP.

You are good probably for your whole career


ex-SAP, left voluntarily to try startup life

Never felt more secure and welcomed by colleagues and customers. They knew I was there to work on something they would rather not have to deal with, and I was happy to do it as a recent grad.

Might consider going back in my endgame :)


I am an Analyst at a Platinum Salesforce Partner called Neuraflash (focus on Einstein, Service Cloud and FSL deployments). Our team is rapidly growing! Please reach out via my email (adam.anzuoni@neuraflash.com) for more details :)


I don't see Salesforce going away anytime soon. I was a solution architect for a few startups and we lived in SF. The difference between a good experience with SF and a bad one was mostly due to the customization.


Wondering the same thing with Shopify. Seems like having some marketing skills might also be valuable as a Shopify Dev/Consultant.


What do you not like about web dev? What type of work do you like doing?




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: