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

Current SFDC software engineer - this is just cover for a widespread engineering hiring freeze since the layoffs in January 2023. There&#x27;s a ton of pressure to control costs after the near shareholder revolt that caused the layoffs.<p>The public nature of the announcement is certainly marketing for our AI offerings as well, but at this point I think most engineers are just worried there will be additional layoffs, in the event management cannibalizes product for short term stock gains again.

I was at Salesforce for 4 years, and during those years the company made a massive deal about:<p>2020: the first AI craze, introducing “Einstein” as their name for their analytics platform, and officially changing the corporate vision to being the “No. 1 AI CRM company”.<p>2021: Now it’s all about “Customer 360”, i.e. account-based marketing, i.e. what basically everyone else does without such a memeable name. You wouldn’t believe the number of slide decks I had to sit through with all our little product logos orbiting this stock art character straight out of Women Laughing While Eating Salad.<p>2022: Never mind, now we’re betting the company on a real-time unified database called Genie, which was neither real-time nor unified (and eventually not called Genie either). Got sued for that one.<p>2024: AGENTS. AGENTS EVERYWHERE. WE ARE AN AGENT COMPANY NOW.<p>So, let’s see how this holds up in the face of the next hot thing.

Part of their sales drive. We are absolutely assaulted by their sales reps trying to sell agentforce. They wine and dine non-technical executives and push the &quot;ai agents will do everything&quot; story. He is just reinforcing this narrative. Nothing to see here.

《 And then, we will have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer. We will have more salespeople next year because we really need to explain to people exactly the value that we can achieve with AI. So, we will probably add another 1,000 to 2,000 salespeople in the short term.” 》<p>I guess they are building a <i>saleforce</i> at the expense of everything else !

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 &quot;Agentforce&quot;. They will keep hiring engineers as normal (heck there are 104 software engineering openings on their careers site as I write this).<p>I also don&#x27;t know how he is pulling the &quot;AI is making our engineers 30% more effective&quot; stat when last I checked software engineers at Salesforce weren&#x27;t even allowed to use AI.

I tried to buy Pro Tools a few years ago. Avid was using a SalesForce system, which is such a monumental piece of trash that they couldn&#x27;t complete the transaction. The attempt involved weeks of back-&amp;-forth, mind-bogglingly incompetent and defective. They ended up giving me a temporary license because they thought I had a project to complete.<p>SalesForce, SAP, and the other purveyors of steaming legacy enterprise excrement simply point the finger at the client when end-users can&#x27;t accomplish basic tasks with their systems. And of course they&#x27;re prime go-tos for government work. I don&#x27;t wish unemployment on their people; but the faster their monolithic junk fades away, the better.

If I were on the Salesforce BoD I wouldn&#x27;t be impressed.<p>Let&#x27;s see Benioff put his money where his mouth is, replace some C-suite seats with AI agents. Those are the <i>really</i> expensive salaries, and if AI is as smart as he claims it&#x27;s downright reckless and negligent <i>not</i> to do this.

1. Salesforce will continue to hire engineers<p>2. The productivity gains of 30% are probably overstated, in a likely effort to try and sell their AI products

If there are productivity gains of 30% per engineer, doesn&#x27;t it stand to reason that hiring more engineers would make the org even more productive?<p>This is like the opposite of 2021 where every tech company went on a wild hiring spree (remember how well that went?). Now in 2025 tech companies are just going to stop hiring anyone. I suspect by 2026 they will have a bunch of slop AI spaghetti code that no one can maintain. I&#x27;m starting to question whether this field is worth it anymore

Let&#x27;s say coding is actually 50% of your job (for almost no engineers is it).<p>If AI makes you 30% more efficient at coding (it might if you went from having literally 0 code completion or any form of AI to state of the art, not many people are doing that):<p>* 1 engineer = 50% feature dev (1x), 50% other<p>* 1 engineer with AI = 50% feature dev (1.15x), 50% other<p>So engineers are theoretically getting 15% more done. If your company is growing faster than 15%, you&#x27;re probably still going to need to hire eng.<p>The real way SalesForce is going to increase productivity is by forcing more unpaid overtime, not by AI.

They have over 100 listed Software Engineering jobs on their site?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careers.salesforce.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careers.salesforce.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;</a>

“As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.”<p>I wish CEOs would avoid such phrasing unless &quot;take responsibility for that&quot; involves some personal penalty, like a lower bonus or some other way to compensate for the fact that a bad decision cost the company money.

+400% engineering time and effort because of the bloated mess Salesforce has become, then -30% because of “AI productivity”. Got it.<p>Most SFDC projects I’ve seen recently are over budget and behind schedule on delivery.

Isn&#x27;t this just cover for cost cutting draw attention away from potentially bad earnings?

&gt; We will have more salespeople next year because we really need to explain to people exactly the value that we can achieve with AI. So, we will probably add another 1,000 to 2,000 salespeople in the short term<p>Sounds like a nightmare. Replacing engineers with sales people trying to sell the AI. The pressure to sell is going to be tremendous, they hype will be incredible. And at the same time they are at a huge risk of sailing into the winds of the AI valley of disillusionment. Studies have shown that so far customers already find AI sales pitches a significant turnoff. They better hope customers really want whatever their AI actually does or their competitors are going to skate right past them with real actual products and features.

I&#x27;m mouth-agape at the opportunity incumbents are giving to small&#x2F;indie teams (to build better, competing products). I had a feeling some version of this would happen as cheap cash dried up (and founding talent exited), but not to this scale.<p>If you know how to build great products, now&#x27;s the time to cast your line. It won&#x27;t be easy, but I think there will be a lot of very happy small teams&#x2F;soloists making money hand over fist (for them) over the next few years.

I really hope someone here makes it their goal to get hired by Salesforce in 2025

Marc Benioff says a lot of things. You would think they wouldn&#x27;t have any software engineering job postings up if this were actually true.

&gt; We will have more salespeople next year because we really need to explain to people exactly the value that we can achieve with AI. So, we will probably add another 1,000 to 2,000 salespeople in the short term.”<p>So why can’t AI explain that? I would think Salesforce customers are more about sales then development. Their AI can’t sell?

Who is going to add 600 more checkboxes to every settings page (up from 10000) now?

This has several results. One may be the desired financial result, the other is the total gutting of the engineering culture. When you do this all raises and promotions are essentially on hold as well. Anyone who wants upward career mobility, and can, will leave. Leaving only the least motivated and least &quot;desirable&quot; employees.

What is the rationale for this? The quarterly numbers for all these companies are really good, their stock price is at an all time high. So what is prompting these extreme steps? Salesforce is not the only company, most every company is this way. What do these companies know that we don’t? Is there a major correction coming?

Salesforce and slack software engineering jobs: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careers.salesforce.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;?search=&amp;team=Software+Engineering&amp;pagesize=20#results" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careers.salesforce.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;?search=&amp;team=Softwar...</a>

The real truth is that there&#x27;s a lot of 1) excess (development) capacity, 2) and not enough market opportunities where software brings incremental revenue.<p>AI is being blamed for layoffs and hiring freezes but the reality is that selling software is not as profitable for companies.

I came across same post here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.salesforceben.com&#x2F;salesforce-will-hire-no-more-software-engineers-in-2025-says-marc-benioff&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.salesforceben.com&#x2F;salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...</a><p>and when opened the salesforce career page they are still hiring for software engineers in 2025.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careers.salesforce.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;jr265886&#x2F;software-engineer-backend-slack&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careers.salesforce.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;jr265886&#x2F;software-eng...</a><p>I doubt the authenticity of source and also i work very closely with AI-agents and this is not the case as it is represented on social media.

As an ex Salesforce employee with lots of friends still there, I&#x27;m going to call bullshit on this one.<p>The engineering org&#x27;s productivity pain points aren&#x27;t ever going to be solved by AI magic, or at least certainly not on the core CRM product.

I have experience working with the Salesforce platform via the “Power of Us” program where nonprofits can get a discount and some free user licenses. It is interesting how much the platform has changed from the perspective of an “Admin”. I have frequently heard from others that compared to the past, it is much more difficult to for a staffer to implement it, especially if it’s not their primary role or they don’t have a technical background. Apparently there are failed implementations at for-profit customers too which sounds super odd considering how expensive it all is and the consulting partner ecosystem.

What exactly have they achieved with ai? What incredible progress has been made ? Does anyone know, I am genuinely curious.<p>AI has increased my productivity greatly, but it is a long way away from replacing my Job. Though maybe I am biased.

Given that no one really understands what Salesforce actually does, much less what value it provides, why would it need intelligent engineers?<p>The company seems like a gigantic hot air balloon, so it might as well use &quot;AI&quot;.

The dreams of upper management are coming true.<p>You just got at your desk after scuba diving vacation pop into a Salesforce Agent and find the joy of unlimited workforce, Product Specialist Agent, Recruitment Agent, Slack Agent, integrate your Tableau data, your CRM data, your email data, your slack data into a big Salesforce Black Data Hole and lose your job in the next iteration.<p>Just because greed has no limits and optimized vertical integration is inevitable. I am loving it. And waiting for my UBI and social rating AI QBR&#x2F;KPI.<p>The ultimate corporate suicide in action. Agent Smith incoming.

&gt; Hire No More Software Engineers in 2025<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careers.salesforce.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;?page=1&amp;team=Software%20Engineering&amp;pagesize=20#results" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careers.salesforce.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;?page=1&amp;team=Software...</a><p>It seems they are still &quot;hiring&quot;<p>If you&#x27;re seeing software engineering job results in Salesforce, then we can only assume the software engineering jobs listed there are either:<p>1. Posted last year by Salesforce (can go at any time)<p>2. Fake Ghost Jobs (more likely)<p>If you work as an engineer at Salesforce, start to look elsewhere before they intentionally lay you off.

A grandiose statement like, “…to the point where our engineering velocity is incredible. I can’t believe what we’re achieving in engineering” needs to be followed by, “Ignore the man behind the curtain.”

&gt; “And then, we will have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer.&quot;<p>As I was predicting... [0]<p>The first affected are the &quot;support engineers&quot; then they will <i>try</i> to get away with going after everyone else at the company. Test subjects are needed for a trial run.<p>So what <i>eventually</i> happens to the existing employees when the AgentForce gets even better?<p>Can they just admit that they are replacing workers with AI agents instead of this newspeak bullsh*t?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42630993">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42630993</a>

AFAIK Agentforce is programming the chatbot to allow it to execute SF flows on behalf of the customer.<p>I can see things like update my profile. Or give me a quote for this insurance product.<p>I fail to see how Agentforce or AI in general means less software engineers are needed. The only explanation I can think of is he is contracting with OpenAI or Anthropic or someone else and implementing that. My experience with SF Einstein or Genie has been like “you gotta be kidding if that is what you are selling”.

Spouse works at salesforce as a PM - they are in several team structuring&#x2F;hiring calls and it&#x27;s all contractors. So SF is hiring - just not FTE.

Salesforce seemed way slow and over engineered to me, like it was the result of double exponential feature creep over many years

If shareholders want to replace the people with AI, it would be easier and more profitable to go top-down instead of bottom-up.

If this was true salesforce is in more trouble than any engineer.<p>Why? Because if AI is really all that then entire companies like sales force go away. All the customers who use sales force would need to do is hire one of these laid off engineers to ask AI concrete them a free sales force.

I get the costs of engineering, but there&#x27;s these sort semi antagonistic &quot;yo we&#x27;re not hiring software engineers&quot; announcements that are weird.<p>I don&#x27;t ever see someone say &quot;we&#x27;re not hiring anymore customer support&quot; or HR, or janitorial staff, or middle management.

It would be fabulous if all of the current engineers quit and said &quot;Fine let your AI do it&quot;

Read into this what you will for Salesforce particularly, but we are probably going to start seeing similar announcements from other companies. Generative AI has completely revolutionzed the nature of knowledge work, and this will be the year when it really starts to hit.

How does this trend cope with the inevitable commoditization of AI? I mean, when having the best software engineers doesn&#x27;t make the difference anymore because every company can afford the AI doing their job, presumably at comparable efficiency?

So their AI sales agent is absolutely amazing but they gotta hire more humans to sell it. Got it.

Similarly, Satya Nadella recently said &quot;Agents Will Replace ALL Software&quot; in bg2 podcast <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9NtsnzRFJ_o" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9NtsnzRFJ_o</a>

They should hire English teachers to fix their grammar. “Will hire no more engineers.” Wtf

Why wouldn’t a company that has found the secret to productivity not double down and give themselves a massive lead on others in focused area of their choosing.<p>30% increase in productivity would mean another 100+ engineers should also be 30% more productive.

Say what you like about Benioff (he seems pretty annoying) or his products (happy former customer), but if you want to read a single book that will increase your chances of success in SaaS, his book Behind the Cloud is my pick.

Salesforce is the Herbalife of software companies. Kudos to them for making great money, but their products all seem to be worse versions of their competitors, sold at a much higher price. It never adds up.

So if you are an software engineer at Salesforce can you get anything you want by threatening to leave? Or are they still trying to push people out and reduce headcount?

I came across that post recently and lookup the salesforce careers and this not the case they are still hiring in 2025.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careers.salesforce.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;jr265886&#x2F;software-engineer-backend-slack&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careers.salesforce.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;jobs&#x2F;jr265886&#x2F;software-eng...</a><p>this was the post <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.salesforceben.com&#x2F;salesforce-will-hire-no-more-software-engineers-in-2025-says-marc-benioff&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.salesforceben.com&#x2F;salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...</a><p>So i doubt the sales force CEO said that actually.

Doesn&#x27;t seem to extend to acquisitions like Slack - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com&#x2F;careers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slack.com&#x2F;careers</a>

As someone that sometimes has to deal with Salesforce, if AI can make the product better, god speed. Salesforce has so many warts, it&#x27;s not even funny.

Judging by what I have to deal with in Salesforce this shouldn&#x27;t pose much of a problem. In fact it might even help things.

They should fire sales, make it cheaper and use some of those savings to invest in better product people and software engineers.

Makes sense. Their software product isn&#x27;t very good. They should take the profits they have and diversify into other businesses.

If this company future is resting on “agent force” i would imagine more engineers are leaving than wanting to work there anyway

Any company can achieve this productivity gain simply by building only simple ~useless PoCs and stop building complex products.

They&#x27;ll probably just hire the same person anyways, just call them prompt engineer, not software engineer.

How many of software devs working for Salesforce are outsourced in India or literal slaves working on H1B Visa?

Is agentforce working and are there any practical users who have got beyond the customer support use-case?

You know your competition also has that 30% efficiency gain??? Sounds like a good time for them to catch up.

Wonder if this will include Heroku? And do they mean no more hiring at all, or just no new positions?

I lol’d at 30% boost in productivity w&#x2F;AI.<p>Which one? All of them I’ve used produce incorrect code 90% of time.

If they&#x27;re no longer a technology company, won&#x27;t that crush their multiple?

Perhaps he should also talk about the timeline for AI replacing the executive team.

Hmm, could be a good time to set up as a contractor serving Salesforce

Of course they&#x27;ll hire prompt engineers and agent engineers.

How stupid do these CEOs think people are?

How to make downsizing sound cool....

He will be hiring by Jan 15, 2025

AI has seem to chip away at Business administration jobs. Lots of people can’t find jobs in this area anymore

&quot;Incredible AI productivity&quot; translation: we want to squeeze more work out of our existing workforce for even more super-profits!!!<p>Welcome to the meat grinder.

I call BS. They will need to continue to innovate and execute new ideas. Unless they wasn&#x27;t to go the GE route

There won’t be massive ai layoffs. Companies will just stop hiring

&quot;[...] we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we&#x27;re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.&quot;<p>And yet I don&#x27;t see anything about him stepping down. I never do.

Just a sales speech for Agentforce.

I’m surprised this obvious marketing BS made it to the front page. Didn’t they do the same thing before with Blockchain and real-time databases?

Observationally, there&#x27;s a fairly tight correlation between &quot;making lots of money&quot; and total bullshit.

Honestly who would want to work for them anyway?

Dunning-Kruger Effect is definitely strong with AI. If I own any of their stock I’d probably sell it now.

We&#x27;ve had two large tribes come to use from SalesForce and tell us all the issues they&#x27;ve had from no support to poor sales relations. My interactions with the support was just downright saddening. I cannot imagine having to do anything AI related with them. Also, most companies now can just build their own CMS with ease, SalesForce is not going to be around for long.

My inside sources at salesforce say that this is just cover for them replacing existing employees with H1Bs and PERMs from Asia. That&#x27;s why there are still SWE jobs on the company site even though he says they aren&#x27;t hiring<p>He&#x27;s lying. They are hiring. They just refuse to hire you if you were born in America<p>The &quot;AI&quot; craze is cover. It doesn&#x27;t do jack shit. He knows too