No new engineer hires this year as AI coding tools boost productivity, says Salesforce

Salesforce will not hire any more engineers this year after investment in AI coding tools provided a 30 percent productivity boost, its CEO claimed as he sought to charm investors. Speaking as the CRM giant announced underwhelming Q4 results, Marc Benioff told analysts on an earnings call that Salesforce was seeing "tremendous …

[GoneFission]

>"They were maybe a little under-invested in and there were pretty high failure rates," John-David Lovelock, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, told The Register

Clearly the answer here is to lay more people off so you can redirect more investment into GenAI. Keep gambling on the virtual golden goose that needs no unions or benefits until your org has been reduced to a husked shell, crowned by a boardroom full of suits feeding wads of cash into a slot in the wall labeled "AI workforce revolution".

[ecofeco]

Well, it seems to work these days, doesn't it?

I know we like to make fun of corporate shells, but honestly, no employees and nothing given for customer' money is the end goal of all American businesses.

No joke. Not even fucking joking at all.

[barracus]

That is what I call the REAL American Dream...

[Dan 55]

GenAI is going to be like Agile. If it doesn't work you're not doing it right... where right in GenAI's case is sink more money into it.

[MachDiamond]

I'm not

I'm a hardware sorta guy. Coding is not a core skill of mine and I'm still not seeing AI tools that allow me to bypass somebody that does know their beans when it comes to code. The other issue is that even if there is some AI lash up that will set me up with some code based on a description, how will I know if it's very well optimized if I don't know how to vet what I've been handed? It can be as much of an art as a science.

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

Re: I'm not

But hardware is specialised and matters. If you want a web page lashed together in React by a web monkey...? Or want a macro for Excel?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that's more commentary on economic uncertainty.Wouldn't a smart growing company use AI not to slow recruitment but to accelerate away from competition even further? Do even more rather than same for less?

[Like a badger]

The article is pretty downbeat and focuses on Salesforce not meeting quarterly expectations (fair enough, Wall Street is a swamp of short termism, speculation and greed).

However, on a full year basis Salesforce did pretty well. Comparing FY24 with FY23, sales grew by 11%, but cost of sales grew by only 4%, sales general & admin costs went down by 6%, headcount was down 8.5%, and pre-tax profit up by 650%. Over on the balance sheet total assets were near enough unchanged, so getting more out of the same assets. For a mature company, that's pretty good.

It's only on Wall Street where people say "shit company, they only increased profit by 650%".

[Claptrap314]

As if Tableau and Heroku support weren't already #$*!(@#&

Not sure that anything more needs to be said...