Salesforce

Talented people, downtown SF location, CEO Marc is great in continuing to maintain momentum as well as buzz in the market.

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.

Take a pause for 1-2 years; throw away as much of the existing codebase as possible and redo it, taking modern design and architecture into account. Without this, this company is going to go down the Siebel way before you can realize what's going wrong.