Salesforce

Environment and benefits from working there.

1. Huge break rooms and other health/relaxation-related rooms.
2. Free pop, food, a private coffee shop with baristas, and a pool table.
3. The technology infrastructure is awesome: two monitors plus laptops, raising desks, and my preferred office layout (open).
4. Everything is connected via network, including conference rooms. Top of the line.
5. You can hide and effectively do nothing for long periods of time, which is also a con.

1. Stagnation: If you are not MVP level, stagnation of skills is the game. Developers serious about their skills (learning/improving) can forget it. You could be on the same project doing the same daily routine forever.

2. Overall skills dropped across the Indy division when teams were moved from infrastructure into development, and all of the developers and QA folks became hybrid engineers. For example, QA folks who never coded were expected to be professional coders. It was a tough experience to watch these people. The experienced developers were then expected to start testing. The general practice became 'I looked at the code,' meaning nothing was actually tested from a client perspective. Quality dropped.

3. Developers or leads were moved into management. Most developers I have worked with at numerous locations love to code, not manage others or projects. That pattern carried through at Salesforce; new managers kept coding heavily, had difficulty delegating, and kept most challenging tasks to themselves.

4. Typical dev meetings had people coding on their laptops on their own tasks and not paying attention unless they were specifically called upon. Then you had to repeat the points related to them to get them up to speed, meaning lots of wasted time due to poor teamwork.

5. You can hide and effectively do nothing for long periods of time, also a pro.

6. I learned to question a lot of the technical recommendations there. Many people were not up to date on the latest technology and had moved into leadership roles, I assume due to their tenure.

1. Stop listening to your rank and file. An example is the need to have top-of-the-line laptops. Yet they are used for nothing except to remote into a virtual server that is assigned to you. These laptops are basically "dummy terminals"; the expense should be on the server side.

2. Monitor your employees. A high percentage of people will have one of the monitors playing movies or internet videos all day with headphones on. You aren't paying them for partial attention.

3. Monitor your employees. Many take advantage of the work-from-home policy. The office becomes a ghost town at predictable times, and technical staff are unable to be found for long lengths of time.

4. Monitor your employees. There are a few individuals at the office who are actually running private consultancies during typical office hours. They do work hard on issues and get them done quickly, and log time spent as a multiple of actual.

5. Monitor your employees. I saw a distinct separation between those with skills and those without. Those with skills include MVPs on staff and numerous other awesome technicians. A large percent of the dev organization was content to let their skills fade and just collect paychecks.