I joined a smaller company Salesforce owned that was eventually swallowed whole by the larger Salesforce company, and we were fully integrated into one of the major clouds. Things were very pleasant and work was interesting before the roll over into Salesforce. However, once my team joined the larger company, is when things took a turn unfortunately.
I believe things took a turn because Salesforce is built on top down management. The bigger the title the bigger the voice you’ll have. People use their title as weight when making decisions. The overall design culture is perceived as a second thought to a lot of teams. Due in part that your engineers can and will make decisions for you based on seniority. Not all, but most teams have a hard time getting their engineers to innovate and work with them. This behavior also comes from the previously mentioned work life balance. Anything that looks like it may take an extra hour, will fall off your design quickly.
Be carful of Kool-aid drinking. They use the term “Ohana”, family in Hawaiian culture (which is also cultural appropriation) to describe their own internal company culture. The management team uses this type of thinking to determine if your a team player or not. The type of “family” culture they perpetuate creates a lot of passive aggressive behavior. Add the behavioral issues onto the top down management, and you have a recipe for ladder climbing, favoritism, yes men, and brown nosing. The executive running the design on my cloud showed incredible bias and fueled this behavior. As well as some very questionable hiring and promotional practices. I felt their behavior was highly unethical, and they felt no remorse for their actions.
The product you build at Salesforce will only ship 3 times a year. That’s if it ships at all. The pace is incredibly slow moving. I can not stress that enough. Changing an icon can literally take 9 months. This can make it hard to retain the talent that comes from a start up environment. Which Salesforce is in desperate need of.
The salary is adequate at best for most designers. I found out later that I actually made much more coming from a different company and rolling into Salesforce. RSU’s are some of the lowest you’ll be awarded in the tech industry for a company this size. Most director level people get any meaningful stock refresher. Like I mentioned, top down management. I negotiated cash over RSU’s (which made my offer compelling).
While a lot of what I wrote can seems very negative, not everyone I had the chance to work with made me feel this way. I did have the opportunity to meet “some” talented designers and engineers. I had the opportunity to volunteer and help others. The work I was doing at the time had impact up to certain point and I did learn a thing or two while at Salesforce.
TL;DR:
Top down management creates passive aggressive behavior.
Slow moving development time, Salesforce only ships 3 times a year.
Design is a second thought for most teams (but not all).
Base salary is average, not competitive.
RSU’s for a company this size are some of the worst in the industry.
