Comment by herokaithrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by herokaithrow | Hacker News Reader

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I worked for them for a long time. They've been under a feature freeze and slowly but surely losing headcount for years. The engineers still there that I know have really lost any enthusiasm for the platform as a result. The engineers that originally built Cedar are probably the best I've ever worked with which is how it's been remarkably stable for so long to end-users.

According to LinkedIn they have 141 employees, down 30% in 2 years. We had nearly 400 at peak I think. They had a significant layoff in 2020.

I would not recommend using it unless Salesforce turns things around and starts investing back into the platform. If you are currently on it you should be making plans to move off of it. Ask your sales rep about "Project Periwinkle", which is intended to spin down Heroku and just make it all various Salesforce services. "Periwinkle" being a mix of purple and blue.

EDIT: I want to add that the common trope of "Salesforce killed Heroku" is not true—or at least it's not the full picture. Salesforce bought Heroku in 2010, only 3 years after it was founded. Salesforce largely built Heroku and later suffocated it through not giving us any headcount. There was a time when they cared, and if you ever saw our old office you know what I mean. I have no idea why Salesforce gave up, but us ex-Herokai debate about it a lot.

> According to LinkedIn they have 141 employees, down 30% in 2 years. We had nearly 400 at peak I think. They had a significant layoff in 2020.

Not very related, but this is an example of a service (maybe just for me) I've wanted to setup with LinkedIn: Given company X, find all people that work or used to work there, then get rotation statistics. You should be able to see how many people (and %) go in and in what time on average.

I know of a smallish startup (70 people) where execs (VP and C level) rotated pretty often because of the policies of the CEO (was extremely cheap). It would be a great tool to have when exploring new companies.

A caveat that I considered adding to that statistic but left out due to brevity:

30% is likely over-estimating because there is likely some # of people that still work on Heroku but labeled themselves as Salesforce employees. There are also probably a higher number of people that work on Heroku part-time so also label themselves as Salesforce.

A tool like your suggestion could probably help but it would include folks that transitioned to a different part of Salesforce entirely.

That's a bummer. I have built a ton of nights and weekends projects using Heroku. I've even used it in my professional career getting the real estate software we were developing to get up and running with a very small team. We eventually moved to AWS but Heroku made it easy for us to just focus on the product.

Salesforce just released a feature called Functions (not the best name) that relies solely on Heroku based on what i see in my logs. Maybe Salesforce doesn't have big plans for Heroku but they do seem to care at least enough to release a new product on Heroku.

https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/platform/functions/ove...

That was built by Heroku engineers. We had hoped to build a general purpose FaaS platform but instead we were forced to build that pile of Apex. Expect to see only these kind of products coming out of Heroku.

When I said "spin down Heroku" I probably should've said, "spin down the Heroku brand". Maybe that doesn't mean much to you, but I know a lot of Heroku customers probably wouldn't want to use a PaaS if it had only Salesforce branding—despite Salesforce running Heroku for the past 12 years.

It probably makes sense at this point for Salesforce to go this direction, but they're not being honest with their general purpose Heroku customers about where the platform is headed. I wish they would be.

Any insight into the Heroku Connect platform? We're a BIG user of this product and the only reason we have any direct dealings with Heroku.

Anything directly involving Salesforce like that will definitely be maintained and probably improved, so you're safe. I wouldn't be surprised if the branding changes though.

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