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Comment by finiteloop | Hacker News Reader

I am the COO of Salesforce. Two of the top ten jobs on Indeed are Salesforce Admin and Salesforce Developer, and the jobs are distributed around the world. We have a ton of stories of folks transitioning into the ecosystem and developing an extremely successful career.

Notably, our certifications are freely available at https://www.trailhead.com/. You can get started, learn, and get credentials for free. It is a great place to start, and we purposely made our learning and credentialing free so we could make it as easy as possible for folks pivoting mid-career into Salesforce.

I would be happy to point you in the right direction. My email is bret.taylor@salesforce.com.

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Seriously impressed by your responsiveness here.

Shameless plug, lots of good people (admins, devs, MVPs, SFDC internal) that can help you along your journey in the SFXD discord as well [0].

https://join.sfxd.org

Off topic, but really excited to intern with you this summer :)

Excited to work with you!

I love HN.

What does Salesforce really do? I could never warp my head around it. Could you ELI5?

From what I gather, they're a:

Expensive and hugely expansible webapp built on top of Oracle that allows admins to make and track customers through the sales pipeline using various methods.

The software's intent is for marketing, sales, and execs to see how various campaigns are running and how to control them.

They're usually outside of standard devops pipeline by a good distance.

The downside: Salesforce seems to be at the whim of Oracle, who has their own competing product in the CRM category.

And I'm also studying it, and working towards the certs myself. May not be looooong term, but people with this knowledge do tend to get paid well. (Anything connected with marketing/sales does)

Haven't they moved off of Oracle? I recall seeing they had job openings for Postgres admins with the intention of moving off of Oracle.

its in progress. there surely are a lot of dependencies to work through. That said - I don't think Oracle would be legally allowed to or capable of damaging Salesforce by witholding licenses or whatever. And the fact that they are on Oracle currently has no effect on the developer, admin, or user facing APIs. like any cloud provider all of that is abstracted away.

(I am not affiliated with SFDC)

The SalesForce product is essentially a large-scale set of software tools that can be used to manage data and communications (marketing, analytics, contracts, timelines, schedules, records, helpdesk tickets, payments, etc.) between vendors and clients. It's a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.

The reason it's not clear what their product is to non-users is that there isn't really a "default SalesForce experience"; the point of buying their software is that they (or you) are supposed to be able to customize it to the point where you can use it in exactly the way your business requires. Whether or not that is actually true is the subject of many lengthy debates on HN.

At its core, Salesforce is a SaaS database platform that lets a non-programmer admin create data models for a business, as well as custom views and queries.

But Salesforce goes beyond being a database to the point of being more like a web and mobile framework specifically dedicated to building apps for business. Salesforce has its own flavor of Java (Apex) and its own MVC paradigm (Lightning). You can develop entire custom apps on Salesforce, similar to how Shopify has its own app ecosystem.

They do spend a lot of time telling admins that you don't need to do any of that scary coding thing...until you do.

I thought Salesforce certifications had registration fees. Has that changed?

There's two kinds. The certs do need paying for and test centres. Trailheads are free and give you badges. These are great as an intro, but I think many employers want the real certs.

Screenshotted your response instantly. Thanks.

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