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Comment by brd529 | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce is an interesting one - many eng leaders don’t consider it “engineering” because they aren’t that familiar with the platform (often the salesforce devs are grouped in the the salesforce admins in their minds, and organizationally the salesforce devs often sit under IT), so it’s a problem they don’t think about much.

Then they are surprised when they find themselves desperately needing the skill set once the business has decided to do a big salesforce thing and not having anyone on hand who a) can do apex / knows salesforce or b) is willing to do it.

So they often turn to salesforce speciality agencies and pay through the nose.

To answer your question - I’ve seen salesforce agencies bill their developers and designers at a blended rate of $170-$200 for $1M+ projects for onshore (US) talent. I suspect if you are a decent software engineer who knows salesforce well you can probably find clients willing to pay higher rates.

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What is Salesforce dev? Is it webapps, but using Salesforce framework instead of RoR or Django?

CTO here, but I built the first bits of our SF setup. It’s essentially a fully cloud hosted rapid development environment that gives you a database and ways to visualise and do crud on this. For line of business stuff this can be really powerful. As a dev, it’s mostly around gluing the bits between and around the key crud actions and doing meta presentation and interface stuff.

Salesforce dev has evolved heavily in the last 10 years. Nowadays, depending on the project, you can be working on integrations most of the time, complex automations, and/or front end development through the Lightning Web Components framework. Last project I did a fair amount of work integrating Salesforce with AWS, using Lambda to talk to other services. It was pretty fun!

It's usually a soupy mix of salesforce API integration work and wading through tons and tons of programmery-looking user interfaces.

It's not hard, but it requires an incredible amount of overhead to first understand various different salesforce specific concepts and then understand the various different broken workflows your company has adopted using those concepts.

These are sweet rates. How do you get your foot in the door for such work? Is there a way to apprentice for it, I don't think I would need much time to get up to speed, I did some minor SF work but nothing that would qualify me for such projects.

These are the rates that the agencies certified by salesforce as “platinum” “gold” etc charge their customers. One idea is to start by working for one of those agencies, figure out how the system works, how salesforce refers them to their customers, etc and then when you feel like you have enough connections start your own agency to charge those rates.

> nothing that would qualify me for such projects

In my experience on the client side of a contracting relationship, that doesn't seem to give the agencies pause at all...

(As a sometimes consultant, though, I'd never bid on a project I couldn't confidently do.)

And from my experience on the "agency" side, it's at most a minor speedbump.

Client wants us to do what? Oh, I found some tutorials online and there's a lot of StackOverflow posts on the topic. Also, Jim says he did something kinda like that about 5 years ago and thinks he still remembers some of it. Let's SWAG it at $200k estimate for T&M and see if they bite.

In the 5 years I worked at an engineering services (embedded systems) company, I remember exactly ONE project we didn't bid on and that's because I kept saying over and over that we'd lose our shirt on it if we even tried.

Do you want to do it as an independent or with a consulting firm?

If independent, go to Trailhead.com setup an account and start getting some badges (there's a lot for Apex)/ developer certifications (Platform Dev I is a good one). They're kind of a pain, but relatively straightforward and are a good, in ecosystem, way to show prospects you know what Salesforce is.

If you want to work for a firm and have development experience, find a Salesforce consulting firm you like, and see if they'll hire developers who don't know Salesforce. Many will since Salesforce devs can be hard to find.

Working on Salesforce can get a bit wonky at times (like any platform), but the primary back language (Apex) is a Java derivative and will be vary familiar to anyone with Java or C# experience. Front end dev work uses web components which are similar to react. Overall I like it since the platform takes care of a lot of boilerplate and lets me focus on solving the actual business problems. My email is in my profile if anyone wants to reach out and talk about it more.

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