Salesforce professionals are increasingly hating their jobs. Why?

Salesforce professionals are sick and tired of being in the ecosystem.

Bold statements require bold evidence. So, where's the proof?

It comes from a spike in negative sentiment on online Salesforce forums and conversations with seasoned Salesforce professionals.

If that's not compelling enough for you, then stop reading.

Negative sentiment on online forums has spiked

Over the past several months, I've seen an uptick in desperation, frustration, and defeatist sentiment from Salesforce professionals on r/salesforce.

Ordinarily, I'd chalk this up to the general psychographic of r/salesforce posters and commenters, which tend to be cynical. But, this level of sentiment among the signs was abnormal.

Let's take a look at some examples:

Carla, the Salesforce admin who's bored at their job

Carla is a Salesforce Administrator who's been in the ecosystem for under a year. She's underwhelmed with the mundane tasks of updating picklist values and creating report types.

When she's not doing monotonous tasks, she's attending meetings where she doesn't fully understand their business jargon. She doesn't bother to clarify questions, and as a result, she tunes out.

This is eating at her. She sees there is no room for her to grow.

She's losing knowledge and worries that, when she goes up for interviews, prospective future employers will "find out" that she didn't pick up any worthwhile experience at her current job.

Carla had big ambitions. She wanted to land a Salesforce role at one of LinkedIn's "best companies to work."

She turned off job alerts for these types of companies. She fears she'll never get it.

And she feels drastically underpaid.

Victor, the Salesforce developer that inherited "a mess" and has no say

Unlike Carla, Victor is a Salesforce developer is working at one of the more admired companies in the ecosystem. He's been in the industry for several years but hates what his job has become.

Salesforce careers aren't all the same. Carla, the Admin, had too little work, and it was eating at her. Victor has too much. All he does is inherit projects filled with bugs or technical debt.

Yes, Salesforce developers are there to ship new features and fix bugs. That's not a surprise. According to his manager, Jacob, Victor is the go-to person to fix major Salesforce issues.

However, Victor has no say in shaping the future of the Salesforce org. He doesn't like that. He worked at previous enterprise companies, where he significantly impacted their bottom line. His idea to implement a new DevOps process for a 25-person Salesforce team saves his last employer almost half a million USD in spending each year.

He wonders if he's having bad luck or if silencing developers is the norm at other companies.

Aleksei, the Salesforce developer, is hoping for his team to adopt software engineering best practices

Aleksei has five years of Salesforce development experience and regrets ever entering the industry. With rose-colored glasses, he reminisces about his time as a software engineer, developing meaningful software that impacts customers' lives.

He disagrees with Salesforce's marketing that they're the most incredible platform globally.

He feels that Salesforce confines him to mundane Apex tasks with little room for creative programming. Despite making great money, he's never felt a genuine connection or passion for his job.

He's contemplating a career shift but is so entrenched in the ecosystem that he doesn't know how to pivot.

He's even considering moving to a company where he could be a solution engineer for one of the company's products. He feels he'd get a more intellectual challenge there.

Praveen, the Salesforce developer working 90 hours/week

After four years in the Salesforce ecosystem, Praveen is drained and unmotivated. His challenge is not the technical work, like writing Batch Apex and using Mulesoft. His challenge is dealing with the large workloads from Sales and Customer Success functions.

In addition, since the company laid off his Salesforce admin, he is handling administrative and developer tasks. He is facing high expectations from his stakeholders.

Praveen is overworking himself because he is an Indian in the United States on an H1B visa. He worries that he will be let go if he does not produce. If that happens, he'll be even more stressed because he will need to find a job quickly. If he doesn't, he'd have to self-deport. And that's not a viable option for his wife and two young daughters.

So even though business is constantly slamming him with work, it's better than being forcibly deported.

Praveen is finding ways to take a break and maintain his sanity. He is mustering up the courage to speak to his manager about the unrealistic workload but has yet to come up with the words to say to him in his next one-on-one.

Interview with an old coworker shows a hatred for careers in Salesforce

I thought this sentiment was unique to r/salesforce, but I asked a few of my former coworkers how they felt about their Salesforce careers. Here's what one of them said:

Swetha is a San Francisco-based Salesforce admin who always had a can-do attitude. She's the kind of employee that routinely won "Best Salesforce administrator" at various companies for many years in a row.

After 2020 (what happened then?), she no longer wanted to go "above and beyond" the call of duty at her job. She told me that she's  "doing the bare minimum" at her job now. Every new request that comes in is something I've seen before, and it's so boring.

One of my favorite quotes from her: "One of the company's core values is to go above and beyond for your fellow employee, and I don't care about that at all. I have no loyalty to these people."

Marketing and Customer Success often have the most mundane tasks, and that's what she's responsible for.

When I asked her why she doesn't just take up other employment opportunities, she told me about the challenges of being on an H1B visa:

"It's risky to make a move. Companies aren't making a reasonable accommodation for H1B holders. If they do decide to hire for Salesforce jobs, it won't be us. It'll be for those of national origin (aka the United States). So, I'm just going to work my 40 hours, and not do anything more or anything less."

It doesn't make sense for them to go through the recruiting process.

Why do these people continue with their Salesforce jobs?

These Salesforce professionals aren't being challenged. They're inheriting tons of technical debt. They wish their team had adopted a more engineering-focused approach instead of having the "no-code"

revolution leaves messes in their wake. These people are overworked. They're even disillusioned with the idea of company loyalty.

So when Salesforce increases the number of certifications that customer relationship management professionals can get, I'm sure they're all rolling their eyes.

But why do they continue in this line of work if it's so bad?

I don't have any actionable insights here, but I suspect that the devil you know is better than the one you don't.