No vision or leadership, no value for time or results. A sclerotic company with an unshakeable commitment to mediocrity
Pros
Free food, located on Yonge line. Salesforce is doing well, and as a Salesforce "consultant" in an ecosystem where demand far exceeds supply, your prospects will be more closely tied to their ability to attract investment than to your own knowledge and performance. If some of the following sound like you: - You are incurious and uncritical. - You hate learning and being pushed to do better. - You are all about the 'big picture.' You're above the dirty work of understanding a problem, designing a feasible solution and actually following through on your design. Incorrectly describing something somebody else did, claiming credit for the good and punting responsibility for the bad, sounds to you like a very fulfilling way to live. - You know that the easiest way to get smarter is to simply move to a different room where everybody else is dumber. High standards make you feel insecure, and you will fiercely defend your right to drag the standard down for yourself and people around you. - You have an extremely "busy" life, evidenced by the fact that you haven't even had time to play Assassin's Creed 8120312421 because you're only halfway through Assassin's Creed 71289124. - You heard there's lots of money in tech. You don't really get what those nerds are saying about solving problems and creating opportunities, but you see some people passing around some money to try and make a difference somewhere, and you see some opportunities to siphon away some of that money for yourself. - You understand that being the master to your tools takes mental effort. You would much prefer to be a slave. Then you will find like-minded people and a passable living here.
Cons
- An expert understanding that mere weeks of work for the entire team can save a project "manager" many minutes of thought. - An absurdly narrow-minded focus on customer service to the detriment of customer satisfaction. They will defend themselves by trying to say something reasonable like "serving our clients is what our profession is about." Unfortunately, they will accidentally instead say "stop trying to make me use my brain, I want to unquestioningly do whatever the client feels like asking us to do no matter how counterproductive or trivial or unreasonable because that will hopefully make them happy with me. I will hopefully have time later to wonder why I'm spending all my time deflecting blame and trying to get people to work 15 hour days when my projects mysteriously go over budget and fail to deliver and the clients for some reason are not very happy. We call ourselves 'consultants,' but remember we're really just charlatans and sycophants and being unable to respond in a halfway intelligent manner while getting abused by our clients is what our real profession is about." - An atmosphere of disingenuous positivity with precisely zero reflection at the end of nightmare projects or ever. Yet again deployment failed and you had to ask people to work until midnight because yet again you were too lazy to properly log into a sandbox environment so you knowingly made all your changes directly in UAT then started marking everything as complete without telling anyone because 'It's fine somebody else can just manually go through all the build errors later when everything's on fire?' Great work everybody, let's do it again! - A belief that expertise can be substituted with "I memorized the certification exam questions someone dumped on the internet and retried the exam until I got the same questions I memorized." Everybody will immediately change their title to "something consultant" or "something manager" and begin their real job of locating the most easily-pacified managers in the largest and least efficient corporations so they can sell hours instead of results. - A culture comprised of people with non-existent grasps of their own crafts, which breeds a deep sense of insecurity. Expect "senior" and "managerial" staff here to cope by resisting progress, dragging down high performers, invent new facts to cover gaps on the spot, sulk when it becomes obvious that they have no clue what they're talking about, and try to throw somebody else under the bus to save face when someone on the clients' side wakes up to the fact that there's an iceberg straight ahead and the boat's on fire. - A striking absence of specialized tools, infrastructure, products, skills and people capable of producing any of those things. "Buy, don't build!" say our big SaaS overlords, which somehow becomes "buy a license to use a black box to solve every trivial problem and then suddenly I have 28 apps that do ostensibly the same thing but never quite exactly what I need them to do, also that library I bet big on because Salesforce promised it would magically solve all my problems is unstable and unmaintained since the demo video release, also all these 90s era GUIs tithe 3 seconds of my life every time I blink or sneeze or click something". But Salesforce couldn't possibly have a financial incentive for telling us "run the company like this or we'll stop calling you Platinum and you'll stop being special," and those super-hardcore-techy-coder-nerd-losers are so silly always saying it might be a good idea to figure out a thing or two ourselves. - An historical trend here where capable people leave the company in waves. The ones left behind will first be really confused. Then, they will unironically declare that "the only places for talented people are here or the Valley" and immediately repeat the usual cycle of preying on new grads and recent immigrants while sitting around hoping to be handed an easy-to-use shortcut to share in Salesforce's success. - The company is far too stupid to scale beyond single person projects without running into very serious problems. If you managed to get your high school diploma without having to bribe someone you'll find after the first few months that you have very little to learn from the full timers here. - Every day you will come to work and immediately wonder how some of the people sitting around you managed to find enough food as children to survive and grow all the way to adulthood. On the bright side, you will on a daily basis bear witness to Divine Miracles Explainable Only By Providence. Praise Marc Benioff!