Engineer • Former Employee
Pros: Talented people, downtown SF location, CEO Marc is great in continuing to maintain momentum as well as buzz in the market.
Cons: A lot has gone wrong lately at Salesforce.com. I will list a few:
* Acquisitions left and right are not very motivating for employees, as they are now just becoming integration agents rather than innovating anything they can be proud of.
* Don't believe the Gartner report or Forbes' Most Innovative Company award. Innovation is at its lowest point in the company ever. Most people in R&D are completely disassociated with the product they are building. Forget about innovation; they don't even understand customer needs well enough.
* Salesforce is now like a giant sloth. Things that used to get done in a week now take over a year. Rapid hiring to improve speed has helped in the past, but hiring more people, especially in R&D, isn't valuable anymore.
* Most old-timers in R&D have left, including both executives and engineers. New executives hired in R&D are kind of old-school Oracle/EMC guys who don't even know what Salesforce used to be. The culture has changed beyond repair. Result: No innovation, not much accountability, politics, a bunch of processes that no one needs but no one dares to change.
* Ancient technologies, a monolithic giant codebase that no one really understands now. No unit testing; everything is tested through functional black-box testing. You can change something that can result in something completely unrelated breaking. Developer productivity is at the lowest I have ever seen in my career. Think about it this way: you code for a day and fix test failures for the next five days. Not rewarding at all.
* Big initiatives always come in a top-down way. More than half of them end up nowhere.