Mostly positive experience, even after my role was eliminated
Pros
There are a lot of perks of working at Salesforce, at least for my role. I had the option of working from home and many people in my role did so as well. The office has open ("Ohana") seating to accommodate that. This suited my personality well but if you prefer face-to-face meetings with your team members, this might be a negative for you. Throughout my time at Salesforce I had coworkers and managers that lived in different states than me. Which is fine nowadays considering all the virtual meeting options. There are free snacks and drinks in the break room. If you become a parent while at Salesforce, you have the option of taking up to 6 months paternity leave at 80% pay, which is outstanding at least by US standards. I never ended up taking the full 6 months for either of the kids I had while employed at Salesforce, I guess out of a dumb sense of duty to my coworkers and Salesforce. Don't do what I did. Take the full 6 months and don't regret it. I enjoyed all the people that I worked with and I had the opportunity to work with a lot of big name accounts. Overall I thought it was a positive experience. My role was eliminated which is why I had to leave Salesforce. I was not happy about it but they were very generous. After my role was eliminated and my role responsibilities were taken away, they continued to pay me for two months while I looked for internal and external opportunities. I was able to find another opportunity outside of Salesforce prior to the end of the 2nd month. Had I not found another role, however, they would have given me a generous severance package in addition to what I had already been paid. I would imagine that is a lot more than most other companies would do.
Cons
My role (and other roles in my part of the organization) became very specialized over time, which I assume to was to help with efficiency in client work. But it also meant that I was doing a lot of the same tasks over and over again. I found there was little opportunity to branch out to take on responsibilities of other roles or to learn another role. I knew several people who left Salesforce because they became frustrated at their lack of advancement. People in my role also had a billable utilization goal of 36 hours a week. If you did not have that much time billable, it was seen as an issue. But you are not always in charge of how much work you had or what work was available. Which is true of many businesses, I know. Also, if you wanted to take time off, you needed to find a backup (or multiple backups) to take on your account work while you are out. Which can be difficult if everyone is trying to work 36 billable hours a week. And you had to train them if they had never worked on your account before. So taking time off was a chore, at least for my role. I ended up taking only maybe 2 weeks off during a year. I regularly hit my cap of 300 PTO hours and stopped accumulating PTO. And the billable utilization goal was pushed so much that they started tying it to the quarterly bonuses. In the end, it didn't end up meaning much because my role was eliminated even though at the time I was regularly billing 36+ hours a week. Ultimately, I would preach to not drink the Kool Aid. They preach that everyone that works there is part of the "Ohana" and is family but don't buy it. This is probably not new to a lot of you, but it's just marketing. They are a business first. They don't really care about you. You have to look out for yourself first and foremost. If you start buying into it even just a little bit, that's when you don't take as much time off as you should or don't take your full 6 months of paternity leave out of some sense of obligation to the "Ohana." Take advantage of everything they give you down to the last PTO hour because they will happily discard you without hesitation when they don't see value in you as an "Ohana" member any longer. If you feel stagnant in your role, use your free work time to help yourself or get out of there because they will not help you take another role.
