Ask HN: Can Salesforce be a long term career?
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?
73 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadPersonally, 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.
There are plenty of Crystal Reports professionals who found that their skills didn't transfer as the software declined.
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.
Learning a product is good. Basing your career from it is limiting.
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.
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.
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?
It presents a clearly defined model on how things should work. Maybe you're better off going back to your break-fix break-fix JS development....
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.
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.
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)
Using an Oracle DB doesn't make you a slave to Oracle Corp.
It's also not expensive. Some of the businesses cases I've seen for SF have a massive ROI.
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.
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.
https://join.sfxd.org
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.
Fun comes in milestones and accomplishing things that leave others wondering how you pulled it off.
Second job, year 2 $75k a year
Third job, year 3, $75 hr
Fourth job, year 4, $100 hr
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?
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.
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.
- 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.
Another example is Shopify, folks want help with it in a Wordpress, but more approachable audience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a whole industry in technology that doesn't' involve writing code and often pays very well. I once helped a large cosmetics company completely transform their business by designing and guiding their enterprise architecture. From crap order processing and slow delivery to best in class customer experience and very efficient supply chain. I didn't write a single line of code but I did bill them over 140k for less than 6 months of work.
After 10 years of SF, I would expect to be leading a large practice at a global consulting firm otherwise billing myself out as an SF architect for a very a healthy day rate.
If your ambition is to write javascript forever, then SF isn't really for you. I went from junior java dev to a top 1% salary off the back of a platform similar to SF and I did it in less than a decade.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
You are good probably for your whole career
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 :)
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.