So I have spent two full days at Dreamforce now (days 4 & 5 of being a salesforce employee😅) and I have FEELINGS. IMMA TELL YOU THEM.
Dreamforce, in case you haven't heard, is the conference salesforce puts on for its customers.
120,000+ attendees converge on the Moscone center. This pretty much sums up SF's attitude towards it:
I thought "120k salesforce customers" and pictured 120k dudes who are actually comfortable in suits - salesbros.
But they aren't all salesbros. I mean there _are_ lots of salesbros, & they behave exactly like you think. But lots of other folks as well.
Salesforce is basically Wordpress for customer data management. It started out as "just" a CRM, like Wordpress started out as "just" a blog.
But thanks to extensions from 3rd parties, & expansion of the product itself, people now use it for all sorts of other things.
Really surprised by all the non-CRM stuff people use it for: inventory, shopping carts, HR, integration with any API flavor you want, etc.
But what's fascinating to me most is not the product itself. It's the ecosystem they've spawned - made up of the people who show up to DF.
Salesbros for sure. But also a _huge_ diversity of folks that might fit under a "developer" umbrella, if we're making it verrrry broad.
Because just like Wordpress, salesforce has spawned an entire (huge!) industry of external consultants & developers who help orgs customize.
There are many ways to customize it, everything from drag & drop wysiwyg interfaces to full on coding of custom components & logic.
And many methods in between. So "developers" can be folks always in code, or who change some stuff in code, or who rarely/never do.
Salesforce _explicitly_ wants to support these two latter groups - the people that traditional dev communities look down on.
There's also a huge population of "admins," who as you might guess, administer an organization's salesforce account & data. These folks often start out as office managers or other clerical types, who are handed this responsibility because nobody else wants to do it.
Here's where it gets interesting. Admin➡️wysisyg customizer➡️occasional coder➡️full time dev is a real pipeline into software development that folks often with just high school degrees are actually taking.
This isn't just a narrative pushed by salesforce marketing; I'm meeting these people. They say things like "I love salesforce, it changed my life" with disarming sincerity.
This is a very diverse set of folks, relative to the dev population at large - more similar (as you might imagine) to the population of clerical workers.
I tend to be cynical when it comes to rallies and other big-group activities designed to engender loyalty. That, combined with my expectation of a 120k-strong SEA OF SALESBROS, meant I was bracing for 4 days of alienation and snarkiness.
Instead, I...sort of love this? These folks are fascinating. Even the salesbros are ok if you can separate them from the pack.
I'm still wrapping my head around all this, especially its implications for diversity & inclusion. It's set some wheels turning. And that feels good.
Sorry for all the traffic tho.😅
Sorry for all the traffic tho.😅
