Interesting read. I know someone who’s been a Salesforce consultant for several years. He was offered a job at Salesforce itself, but has chosen to hop around among different 3rd party firms instead. He makes an obscene hourly rate. Yet, every project he’s worked on has had serious problems, and quite a few have flopped. I get the impression a lot of consultants are kind of winging it.
I don’t know a lot about the Salesforce platform, but it seems like a lot of his clients want to customize the crap out of their implementation and not do things in the prescribed manner. I don’t know if this is just stubbornness and stupidity on the clients’ part, or lack of flexibility within the Salesforce software, or some of both.
I’m not in Salesforce work but its likely this part:
"but it seems like a lot of his clients want to customize the crap out of their implementation and not do things in the prescribed manner. "
When you’re consulting your ethical duty is to inform the customer of the informed consequences of those choices (using your technical expertise). The client then says “do it anyway” or “we don’t thinks X consequence will happen/be that bad so we want it done”. Then you do it as ordered, and collect your high pay. When the consequences occur exactly as you said they would, you communicate the amount of effort (money) it will take to make it as workable as it can be now that the client chose to go down this path against your advice.
This is one of the reasons consulting is profitable. You get paid to fix the same thing multiple times. Nowhere is this unethical as long as you’re honest with the client and use your skills to warn them beforehand when they are making risky (expensive) choices.
in some ways SFDC is just SQL with a GUI and a permission set, but I know that some instances, like CarMax build everything from POS to inventory management on the back of Salesforce. When it’s acting as the entire backbone and structure of every operation in your business it’s less about “forcing it to do what it shouldn’t” but “it can technically do everything, so let’s make it do everything”
“I get the impression a lot of consultants are kind of winging it.” Agreed. Every consultant I’ve known and worked with was winging it. Source: was consultant.
I’ve been involved as a SME as my work transitions over to SF from our custom built Oracle solution. We’ve been at this for 4 years now and I feel like it’s the lack of flexibility, but also just a lot of poor quality work from the 3 companies were used so far. All 3 companies were just using cheap labor from India that genuinely do not understand even the most basic concepts of our existing system/workflow. Overall SF has felt like a “do everything our way or suffer”. And boy oh boy has there been suffering.
My friend the Sf consultant complains about that as well. Some of his best colleagues are from India, but they are far less numerous than the cheaper “code camp” guys from there.
I’m not very knowledgeable about Sf, but it is a little perplexing that companies want to buy it, then modify it to the point that it’s not really Sf anymore. If it doesn’t fit, use something else?
I am currently part of team that is moving away from SF to custom web applications, SF is customizable, yes, but it is riddled with limitations and incompatiblty with other 3rd party services. Turns designing and developing what should be a quick 2 week projects into 4 months projects with all the work arounds you have to build to accomplish a task. If your intention to use SF for anything but a base CRM, just don’t you will thank yourself later.
Part of the issue is that their sales pitch to get management to onboard is full of outright lies. They have one chart that basically shows that they are the leading cloud provider, beating out AWS and Azure.
As a software engineer I called them out on their bullshit right away. Sure, you can build pages on Salesforce, similar to SharePoint and some other CMS products, but it is NOT a platform that is truly competing with AWS or Azure.
Management still proceeded to go full hog into Salesforce as our “development platform” and pay consultants 300$ an hour to build shit solutions that should have just been built with standard languages on real cloud platforms. I left that dumpster file shortly after.
Now it almost seems like Salesforce is a joke in the industry, since many companies made those same mistakes and got stuck with huge bills and having to eventually back out. It doesnt help them that they basically priced themselves out of the CRM space, by trying to get you to build everything on their “platform”.
I sincerely appreciate your insight and anecdotes, as I have not had to live with Sf myself. I am too ignorant of the Sf platform to make an intelligent criticism of it, but I would be extremely surprised if it can do even half of what AWS can. I would be surprised if they are even trying to. So it does sound like sales pitch BS to me as well.
I’m not an AWS fanboy and don’t mean to sound like one. However, the number of products and services, and the sophistication of them, is fairly mind-blowing. And they add new stuff almost every week. It’s also expensive and monopolistic, so I don’t mean to praise them too much here.
They are probably different animals in some respects. On AWS, you can let them host basically every layer if you want, or you can let them only host the lower layers (VM and OS, for example) while you manage everything else (runtime, app, DB, etc). And there’s many blended models of both approaches. And it offers a lot of redundancy of choice on various things like databases, operating systems, containers, etc. It is extremely flexible and has a high level of granularity on how you set things up. It requires a lot training, admin overhead, budgeting, and monitoring. It’s expensive AF. And somehow they act like they are losing money, too, and laid a bunch of people off. Whatever, Amazon.
Azure is fairly similar to AWS in most respects, however it offers far less features and products (and is generally cheaper per hour). I have only messed around in Azure a little, I am not an expert in it by any means.
All 3 have certification programs, of course.
Taking a guess here that Salesforce tries to appeal to larger businesses that don’t want to get their hands very dirty managing many of the layers themselves. AWS and Azure market to businesses that need more flexibility and have a more complex mix of existing infrastructure.
As for Google cloud, I know zero about it other than the few things I personally use like Drive, etc.
Interesting read. I know someone who’s been a Salesforce consultant for several years. He was offered a job at Salesforce itself, but has chosen to hop around among different 3rd party firms instead. He makes an obscene hourly rate. Yet, every project he’s worked on has had serious problems, and quite a few have flopped. I get the impression a lot of consultants are kind of winging it.
I don’t know a lot about the Salesforce platform, but it seems like a lot of his clients want to customize the crap out of their implementation and not do things in the prescribed manner. I don’t know if this is just stubbornness and stupidity on the clients’ part, or lack of flexibility within the Salesforce software, or some of both.
I’m not in Salesforce work but its likely this part:
"but it seems like a lot of his clients want to customize the crap out of their implementation and not do things in the prescribed manner. "
When you’re consulting your ethical duty is to inform the customer of the informed consequences of those choices (using your technical expertise). The client then says “do it anyway” or “we don’t thinks X consequence will happen/be that bad so we want it done”. Then you do it as ordered, and collect your high pay. When the consequences occur exactly as you said they would, you communicate the amount of effort (money) it will take to make it as workable as it can be now that the client chose to go down this path against your advice.
This is one of the reasons consulting is profitable. You get paid to fix the same thing multiple times. Nowhere is this unethical as long as you’re honest with the client and use your skills to warn them beforehand when they are making risky (expensive) choices.
in some ways SFDC is just SQL with a GUI and a permission set, but I know that some instances, like CarMax build everything from POS to inventory management on the back of Salesforce. When it’s acting as the entire backbone and structure of every operation in your business it’s less about “forcing it to do what it shouldn’t” but “it can technically do everything, so let’s make it do everything”
“I get the impression a lot of consultants are kind of winging it.” Agreed. Every consultant I’ve known and worked with was winging it. Source: was consultant.
I’ve been involved as a SME as my work transitions over to SF from our custom built Oracle solution. We’ve been at this for 4 years now and I feel like it’s the lack of flexibility, but also just a lot of poor quality work from the 3 companies were used so far. All 3 companies were just using cheap labor from India that genuinely do not understand even the most basic concepts of our existing system/workflow. Overall SF has felt like a “do everything our way or suffer”. And boy oh boy has there been suffering.
My friend the Sf consultant complains about that as well. Some of his best colleagues are from India, but they are far less numerous than the cheaper “code camp” guys from there.
I’m not very knowledgeable about Sf, but it is a little perplexing that companies want to buy it, then modify it to the point that it’s not really Sf anymore. If it doesn’t fit, use something else?
I am currently part of team that is moving away from SF to custom web applications, SF is customizable, yes, but it is riddled with limitations and incompatiblty with other 3rd party services. Turns designing and developing what should be a quick 2 week projects into 4 months projects with all the work arounds you have to build to accomplish a task. If your intention to use SF for anything but a base CRM, just don’t you will thank yourself later.
Part of the issue is that their sales pitch to get management to onboard is full of outright lies. They have one chart that basically shows that they are the leading cloud provider, beating out AWS and Azure.
As a software engineer I called them out on their bullshit right away. Sure, you can build pages on Salesforce, similar to SharePoint and some other CMS products, but it is NOT a platform that is truly competing with AWS or Azure.
Management still proceeded to go full hog into Salesforce as our “development platform” and pay consultants 300$ an hour to build shit solutions that should have just been built with standard languages on real cloud platforms. I left that dumpster file shortly after.
Now it almost seems like Salesforce is a joke in the industry, since many companies made those same mistakes and got stuck with huge bills and having to eventually back out. It doesnt help them that they basically priced themselves out of the CRM space, by trying to get you to build everything on their “platform”.
I sincerely appreciate your insight and anecdotes, as I have not had to live with Sf myself. I am too ignorant of the Sf platform to make an intelligent criticism of it, but I would be extremely surprised if it can do even half of what AWS can. I would be surprised if they are even trying to. So it does sound like sales pitch BS to me as well.
I’m not an AWS fanboy and don’t mean to sound like one. However, the number of products and services, and the sophistication of them, is fairly mind-blowing. And they add new stuff almost every week. It’s also expensive and monopolistic, so I don’t mean to praise them too much here.
They are probably different animals in some respects. On AWS, you can let them host basically every layer if you want, or you can let them only host the lower layers (VM and OS, for example) while you manage everything else (runtime, app, DB, etc). And there’s many blended models of both approaches. And it offers a lot of redundancy of choice on various things like databases, operating systems, containers, etc. It is extremely flexible and has a high level of granularity on how you set things up. It requires a lot training, admin overhead, budgeting, and monitoring. It’s expensive AF. And somehow they act like they are losing money, too, and laid a bunch of people off. Whatever, Amazon.
Azure is fairly similar to AWS in most respects, however it offers far less features and products (and is generally cheaper per hour). I have only messed around in Azure a little, I am not an expert in it by any means.
All 3 have certification programs, of course.
Taking a guess here that Salesforce tries to appeal to larger businesses that don’t want to get their hands very dirty managing many of the layers themselves. AWS and Azure market to businesses that need more flexibility and have a more complex mix of existing infrastructure.
As for Google cloud, I know zero about it other than the few things I personally use like Drive, etc.