Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announces no new software engineer hires – see how AI is shaping the company's future.

Salesforce Will Hire No More Software Engineers in 2025, Says Marc Benioff

https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-software-engineers-in-2025-says-marc-benioff/

++ i also agree with what you’re saying, Jamie

Doesn't matter. o3 is a massive leap in reasoning skills. Very different from currently existing tools. People just like to convince themselves that reality they don't like isn't happening.

Besides that.. I don't know why you're being so defensive on the behalf of big tech companies that do what they want regardless and don't need anyone defending them. 

Whatever their justification is, less tech jobs is.. not a good thing?

LLMs are already helping do grond breaking research in fields like medicine. They can take the data they're trained on and take it much further. And that's LLMs before o3. o3 takes it to a different level.

Just came across this. I rest my case. 

https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-software-engineers-in-2025-says-marc-benioff/

The tough job market isn't *just* because of AI.. For example, companies know they can get away with annual layoffs now. It's not a huge surprise that developers are on the chopping block along with everyone else. They're usually the most expensive people 🤷🏻‍♀️

i would agree it makes just starting to create a product more accessible but this is different than it’s ability to outright replace workers for a big tech company, for example.

OK. No need to get upset. We just disagree. It's all right.

workers as in devs, in the above post^

this is from the perspective i have developed working on ai and automation tools in an engineering/tech lead role day to day, fwiw.

these are tools that can disrupt no doubt, but the impact they currently have is often overstated imo.

there’s still a lot of tech jobs i see, but the bar to entry is higher and the competition is much fiercer. compared to the state of hiring in tech industries not even a decade ago i think this amplifies people’s perspective of how poor things are.

Currently, yes. As I said, Copilot helps an engineer be much more productive but you still need to have engineering skills and experience. o3 sounds like a completely different beast. We'll know more soon.

my experience and perspective wrt tech industry is that there was genuinely a lot of excess for a while (when i entered uni the idea of graduating into a cushy tech job was almost a given) and as times have gotten tougher this excess has dried up.

Even if what you're saying is 100% true we need to move past this idea that companies and their leadership are infallible. The reality is that people don't always know what they're doing or worse - they know and simply don't care. Sad but true

We will see. I don't think either of us know enough about it since it just came out in closed beta. If it can code at the level they say it'll be able to do everything senior engineers do, including system design.

My point was that o3 is a whole new level of AI. With Copilot (which has already 10x'ed dev productivity) you still need to really know what you're doing. o3 will likely allow anyone who has a product idea create a product. No years of tech expertise necessary.

Crazy how much credit people will give to text predictor++, even though it still doesn't have an understanding of what the problem you're asking it is. It's helpful, sure, but I don't think most people are losing their jobs to this just yet

This will revolutionize tech making it accessible to the masses. That's the good news. The bad news is that people who were making a lot of money because they were the only ones who knew how to do these things are going to become irrelevant.

The free money well has dried up and people are scrambling for new ideas.. So they're all jumping on the AI ship whether or not it makes sense to do so 🤷🏻‍♀️

That's the great thing about this tech. People will be able to test it independently and confirm or question what Open AI said about it.

yeah i have known companies who legitimately do fire based exclusively on cost of employee, leaving huge gaps in knowledge/lack of specific SMEs.

imo, economic factors far outweigh AI’s abilities in these firing decisions. present day, anyhow.

I think people just don't want to face the reality of where this is going. Even if o3 doesn't lead to full replacement of devs (and all knowledge workers, for that matter) it's only a matter of time. And not very much time.

Read the thread or do a bit of research. That's the point. o3 is able to reason. Probably better than most people. 😂

i’m not denying the capability of o3. simply saying that the total replacement of devs that people dream of/catastrophize about is a ways off yet.

i also think that putting the lion’s share of blame for dev jobs drying up on ai is an incomplete picture of what’s happening.

Sure but that's a different conversation from the one I started. I was just talking about the impact o3 and similar products (surely to launch soon) will have.

Governments will have to figure out a completely different way of managing society once we enter the post work era. And it's not as far off as most people think. Andrew Yang got laughed at by a lot of normies but that's what always happens to those who are a bit ahead.

i never said the job market wasn’t tough. i have incredibly qualified friends who have had to look for months upon months to find work. my point is that there’s a lot of existential doom around the job of the developer and i’m hesitant to buy into it at this current moment.

But if you have to think about a difficult problem, and you have to reason with the given conditions and constraints, you won't get very far with just prompting, because oftentimes your problem will be more complex than whatever it's been trained on

I also don't know how you can trust research from the company that's trying to sell you the product. Of course they're going to make it look good, they want to make money. That's how marketing works. It's like putting all your trust in the "9 out of 10 doctors" thing

Especially not people whose entire job is to think and reason about problems logically. If all you do at your day job is press buttons on a keyboard like Employee 427, then yeah LLMs can probably replace you, because you're not doing much more than they are

Check developer threads on Reddit, Levels or HN, for example. Even many senior engineers with years of experience have found the market to be tough.

i feel like we’ve been ‘a few months away’ from ai replacing all devs and designers for like a year now

I did read the thread and did my own research before making my points. That said, I can see that this discussion isn't gonna go anywhere, so I'm just gonna leave it here

There's a huge impact already on the developer market now, before o3. Just ask any developer who has been looking for a new job in the past year. They used to have it really sweet. Two weeks and a new job paying much more. Very different now.

I mean.. ok? 

What we were saying before still stands.. Especially when Salesforce has been laying people off for years. Their big thing at one point was NFTs. 

I don't think you understood what we were saying

Idk, it's surprising how short-sighted some companies are. Spotify laid-off the person who made their algorithm what it is. They look at people as numbers on a spreadsheet.. (c)

It may not be a complete picture but those are semantics. I'm interested in the major shift going on not minor immediate things that might have a slight impact as well.

Didn't say it was the only factor but it's a really big factor. You wouldn't fire people you need. Even if they're expensive. The truth is that even things like Copilot have 10x developer productivity. This is according to my developer friends themselves.

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