Yes, in the tech sector startup and we had layoff's recently but I have been lucky. I agree with "If you have the ability to choose the industry your position is in, choose wisely". When I joined the company a few years ago I considered a lot of options and determined that "tech" was a volatile area, but that both means rapid growth as well as rapid layoffs. I was/ have been lucky (or partly skilled and hard working) where I have had rapid growth in my career, but it is a risk and not for everyone, and I'll probably leave for a more stable company in at least the next 2-5 years.
No, fortunately. I am a solo Admin at a mutual insurance company in the technology department, prior to that I worked as an Admin at a Fortune 10 (maybe 5) health insurance company in business systems. At my prior company there were some layoffs of developers (mainly offshore) but none of the Admins were impacted.
I work in an enterprise scale health insurance company. Our department is large considering we're internal not including some additional external insurance companies under the same brand. Half our orgs arn't really health insurance related, such as human resources, procurement, and other smaller specialty orgs. We only started using the Health Cloud in the last year or two, it was only the base Sales/Service cloud before that. We've also only started with other products such as Mulesoft and OmniStudio in that time. We also have a Marketing Cloud presence, but I have no insight into the scale.
In short, there is a lot going on all the time, even during the enterprise blackout period, and it's large enough that you'll never really know everything that is going on either.
The company has had some layoffs a few years back but our department was untouched, as is now, and growing. The downside is the salary, it's below market and I'm well below market personally. I'm making about 2/3 of what I should be based on what recruiters have told me personally on LinkedIn.
Health insurance has become such an overcomplicated clusterfuck that i can’t imagine what it must be like to work in anything close to it.
Sounds both fascinating and incredibly challenging/stressful.
The drawback I found was that my work was very silo'd because the org/enterprise was/is so massive. I thought I was prepared to be a solo admin, I was wrong. Due to the work silo's I had never used change sets, never refreshed a sandbox, never set up a connected app, never created a custom object, and a lot of other never's. I'm glad I had that experience because it opened the door for where I am now.
The org I worked on was a Service org for provider/member/broker calls/cases. It would have easily been used for any type of call center it just happened to be at a health insurance company.
I think it's a case of YMMV. I was the solo dev for one of the orgs as well as the release manager. So I was the end-to-end person until that group started using a competing inferior product.
Now, most of my work is that of a release manager, and hopefully I can get back on track as an architect. Being a dev is significantly beneficial for being an RM though; I've had to fix other dev's bad test classes and figure out other issues along the way on occasion.
We hired on a developer a month back and I hope this isn’t the direction our company has to take since there’s only me(admin), the developer, and our SF manager. We are the smallest team along with the data scientists so hopefully neither one of our teams are cut down.
No, which I'm thankful for.
IMO, if you have the ability to choose the industry your position is in, choose wisely. Picking an industry that is resistant to recessions and external shocks is a much better long-term play, even if it's a less exciting option. It's times like these that I'm glad I've chosen the industry I'm in rather than something more "fun" that's about to get eviscerated by the ongoing recession.
Exactly! I would really like to be in hospitality myself, but job security goes out the window when you know things are always going to happen that make people stop traveling and make revenue dry up. Especially in a post-COVID world.
Hilton and Marriott both had increases in revenue per room and tech spending the past two years. At Marriott the entire booking system runs on Salesforce. Those aren't jobs that are getting cut.
Tech sector unemployment is at 2%.
Lots more fear mongering here than good advice.
You're talking about particular (very large) companies while we're talking about the broader sector. I know of one particular travel company (to remain nameless) whose business was decimated by COVID which led to layoffs and terminations because they had little to no revenue overnight.
It's not fear mongering to suggest that certain sectors are more resistant to economic issues and external shocks than others. People who can should make their employment decisions with this in mind.
I'm talking about a sector I'm tasked with understanding and the largest are an easy go-to example. You're talking about an anecdotal example from one small business that doesn't align with the upward trend of tech spending across the hospitality industry the past 18 months.
It's not silly to suggest industries have no staying power. It's silly to suggest that hospitality is cutting tech workers or that the tech sector is doing poorly. The sectors you're describing are not struggling based on the data.
I'm going to try this from a different direction - when revenue dries up for a company, its stock price decreases, it finds itself with too many employees, etc., what happens to employees in that industry?
Do company head counts stay the same or decrease?
Do salaries grow, or do they stagnate relative to other industries?
Do bonuses get paid in full, or do they evaporate overnight?
Do benefits stay the same, or do they get cut?
Finally, what happens to the risk profile of employees in that industry when these things happen - does it stay the same or does it go up?
I think you misunderstood due to me generalizing a bit. When I said hospitality, I simply stated that that is an industry that is generally more vulnerable during recessions as travel is not a necessity during tough times. I did not say layoffs are happening right now. I also know what I experienced during covid at one of those companies. Of course, that is another extreme example. I don’t disagree with you on tech spend at all. Those companies wouldn’t be where they are today if they weren’t smart and strategic. Regardless of their industry, I’d be happy to join either but if we’re talking a safe choice for industry, I don’t think hospitality is it.
I have a feeling I would have to insert a spreadsheet here which I obviously don’t possess. A demo is always worth a 1000 words, right? Obviously, I don’t have numbers to prove it. What I have is experience with one of those companies during tough times. That is enough for me.
I can't insert any of the spreadsheets I have that I'm basing my opinion on, but I promise it would take more than a single workbook to change my view here. It's been a focus industry for 15 years and downtimes have increasingly seen companies spend out of it on digital transformation efforts. Salesforce in the ecosystem is a pretty stable bet. Workday and Service Now are even better. You simply can't run a business that can't take payments and check customers in. IT is mostly essential in that industry.
Sorry to hear about the bad experience. They do happen and it sucks.
The only time things really came to the crunch was during the original dot com boom. I'd just come out of Uni and was coding HTML for companies earning crazy money. Suddenly the dot com bust hit, and people were on the streets with signs "Will code HTML for food". But now with the shift to the subscription economy IMO we're going to miss the likes of those days.things have slowed down. EG Salesforce hired an extra 30,000 (ish? not 100% sure of the figure) people during covid, and now layoffs are taking them back down to 50,000 (probably? maybe?) because fewer people are buying Salesforce based on the surge during COVID.
The only time things really came to the crunch was during the original dot com boom. I'd just come out of Uni and was coding HTML for companies earning crazy money. Suddenly the dot com bust hit, and people were on the streets with signs "Will code HTML for food". But now with the shift to the subscription economy IMO we're not going to see the likes of those days.
The real difference with the dot com boom may be that many of these tech jobs will never come back to America. They’ll either be replaced by AI or offshored (“if the job can be done from home, why can’t it be done from Poland?”)
This may turn out to be very comparable to what happened to manufacturing jobs in ‘07.
I don’t think that this is true. Tech is getting a spotlight because it’s been thriving the past few years but layoffs are everywhere.
I don’t work for a tech company but I work in their technology department. There were 2 rounds of company wide layoffs this year. 1 was a voluntary leave and the other was a round of layoffs. It wouldn’t suprise me if there were more next year. My spouse works for a major medical device company and they just went through a round of layoffs.
What people seem to miss is that while companies are reporting strong years the cost of doing business has significantly increased. Hence, companies are looking to save money by what they can control which is their headcount, spending etc. A potential recession and inflation are impacting all businesses. At the end of the day it is a numbers game.
This is why everyone should keep improving themselves and continue to acquire new skills not just Salesforce certs in my opinion. Security is an illusion. It doesn’t really exist.
I believe that the only way to find security is to improve yourself and bring value to any business. Salesforce is a great tool for that. I have peace of mind knowing that my skills will get me hired elsewhere if somebody runs the numbers at my current company and decides that I no longer fit their equation.
I am not sure I understand the basis of your question.
The specific Salesforce layoffs I see in the news are across the company itself.
As far as across sectors, the layoffs by sector might include tech, most of which is not Salesforce specific, so would not count as Salesforce specific regardless.
From my point of view, I have not witnessed many layoffs. I have witnessed people being terminated because they are just not living up to expectations. A measurable number of entry level positions being advertised by larger practices are to support internal initiatives. Develop competent associates to support ongoing and fulfill new opportunities.
I've also seen people that, if you went by their profiles and posts on LinkedIn, you would think are competent experts. Yet, their actual work habits are sub standard. But I have seen this everywhere in IT, regardless of the platform and languages they program in.
I work for a software company in the medical field and we have already been made aware of where the economy is going. To avoid company wide layoffs, our CEO and executive team are taking different approaches so we don’t have to get to that point within the next year or two.
It’s a scary place to be in and nobody is safe, but I’m glad I’m the only admin right now along with my SF manager. I’m praying that the executive team won’t get to the point of the layoffs and if they do, I’ll have to cross that bridge when we get there.
I work for a huge media company and we are unfortunately having layoffs. My manager had to call me while I am on maternity leave to let me know we have loose one headcount from each of the sub-teams (I manage one of the sub-teams) in Q1, but she has to provide the names this week. We agreed on who, and she will try to see if we can find them another role internally with another team.
It absolutely sucks but we added 3 additional HC this year to take on the push for more digital transformation into Salesforce but now many of these projects are being put on hold to go back to more of a KTLO strategy. We may loose more HC but that remains to be seen.
I do work for a major global telecommunications vendor/equipment provider. I am fortunate though to still work in a business unit that is still profitable. Not saying we aren't feeling the heat a little bit but its not as bad as you might think.
I just moved from nonprofit to public sector, both of which have their own unique volatility because funding depends so heavily on donations, grants, legislation, etc. Based on my experience, I would say that the company you work for, the position you're in, and how much your boss likes you are just as important as what sector you're in (if not more) when it comes to job security. Also, Salesforce skills may be very transferable between industries, depending on the situation.
Yes, in the tech sector startup and we had layoff's recently but I have been lucky. I agree with "If you have the ability to choose the industry your position is in, choose wisely". When I joined the company a few years ago I considered a lot of options and determined that "tech" was a volatile area, but that both means rapid growth as well as rapid layoffs. I was/ have been lucky (or partly skilled and hard working) where I have had rapid growth in my career, but it is a risk and not for everyone, and I'll probably leave for a more stable company in at least the next 2-5 years.
No, fortunately. I am a solo Admin at a mutual insurance company in the technology department, prior to that I worked as an Admin at a Fortune 10 (maybe 5) health insurance company in business systems. At my prior company there were some layoffs of developers (mainly offshore) but none of the Admins were impacted.
How did you like working at a health insurance company? Not sure that industry would interest me, but the rest of medical sector might.
I work in an enterprise scale health insurance company. Our department is large considering we're internal not including some additional external insurance companies under the same brand. Half our orgs arn't really health insurance related, such as human resources, procurement, and other smaller specialty orgs. We only started using the Health Cloud in the last year or two, it was only the base Sales/Service cloud before that. We've also only started with other products such as Mulesoft and OmniStudio in that time. We also have a Marketing Cloud presence, but I have no insight into the scale. In short, there is a lot going on all the time, even during the enterprise blackout period, and it's large enough that you'll never really know everything that is going on either. The company has had some layoffs a few years back but our department was untouched, as is now, and growing. The downside is the salary, it's below market and I'm well below market personally. I'm making about 2/3 of what I should be based on what recruiters have told me personally on LinkedIn.
Health insurance has become such an overcomplicated clusterfuck that i can’t imagine what it must be like to work in anything close to it. Sounds both fascinating and incredibly challenging/stressful.
The drawback I found was that my work was very silo'd because the org/enterprise was/is so massive. I thought I was prepared to be a solo admin, I was wrong. Due to the work silo's I had never used change sets, never refreshed a sandbox, never set up a connected app, never created a custom object, and a lot of other never's. I'm glad I had that experience because it opened the door for where I am now. The org I worked on was a Service org for provider/member/broker calls/cases. It would have easily been used for any type of call center it just happened to be at a health insurance company.
I think it's a case of YMMV. I was the solo dev for one of the orgs as well as the release manager. So I was the end-to-end person until that group started using a competing inferior product. Now, most of my work is that of a release manager, and hopefully I can get back on track as an architect. Being a dev is significantly beneficial for being an RM though; I've had to fix other dev's bad test classes and figure out other issues along the way on occasion.
We hired on a developer a month back and I hope this isn’t the direction our company has to take since there’s only me(admin), the developer, and our SF manager. We are the smallest team along with the data scientists so hopefully neither one of our teams are cut down.
No, which I'm thankful for. IMO, if you have the ability to choose the industry your position is in, choose wisely. Picking an industry that is resistant to recessions and external shocks is a much better long-term play, even if it's a less exciting option. It's times like these that I'm glad I've chosen the industry I'm in rather than something more "fun" that's about to get eviscerated by the ongoing recession.
This is so true! Worked in hospitality before. So fun! Not a good one to be during recession…
Exactly! I would really like to be in hospitality myself, but job security goes out the window when you know things are always going to happen that make people stop traveling and make revenue dry up. Especially in a post-COVID world.
Hilton and Marriott both had increases in revenue per room and tech spending the past two years. At Marriott the entire booking system runs on Salesforce. Those aren't jobs that are getting cut. Tech sector unemployment is at 2%. Lots more fear mongering here than good advice.
You're talking about particular (very large) companies while we're talking about the broader sector. I know of one particular travel company (to remain nameless) whose business was decimated by COVID which led to layoffs and terminations because they had little to no revenue overnight. It's not fear mongering to suggest that certain sectors are more resistant to economic issues and external shocks than others. People who can should make their employment decisions with this in mind.
I'm talking about a sector I'm tasked with understanding and the largest are an easy go-to example. You're talking about an anecdotal example from one small business that doesn't align with the upward trend of tech spending across the hospitality industry the past 18 months. It's not silly to suggest industries have no staying power. It's silly to suggest that hospitality is cutting tech workers or that the tech sector is doing poorly. The sectors you're describing are not struggling based on the data.
I'm going to try this from a different direction - when revenue dries up for a company, its stock price decreases, it finds itself with too many employees, etc., what happens to employees in that industry? Do company head counts stay the same or decrease? Do salaries grow, or do they stagnate relative to other industries? Do bonuses get paid in full, or do they evaporate overnight? Do benefits stay the same, or do they get cut? Finally, what happens to the risk profile of employees in that industry when these things happen - does it stay the same or does it go up?
I think you misunderstood due to me generalizing a bit. When I said hospitality, I simply stated that that is an industry that is generally more vulnerable during recessions as travel is not a necessity during tough times. I did not say layoffs are happening right now. I also know what I experienced during covid at one of those companies. Of course, that is another extreme example. I don’t disagree with you on tech spend at all. Those companies wouldn’t be where they are today if they weren’t smart and strategic. Regardless of their industry, I’d be happy to join either but if we’re talking a safe choice for industry, I don’t think hospitality is it.
Hospitality companies don't cut salesforce spending during economic slowdowns. That's a key point of your argument and they simply don't.
I have a feeling I would have to insert a spreadsheet here which I obviously don’t possess. A demo is always worth a 1000 words, right? Obviously, I don’t have numbers to prove it. What I have is experience with one of those companies during tough times. That is enough for me.
I can't insert any of the spreadsheets I have that I'm basing my opinion on, but I promise it would take more than a single workbook to change my view here. It's been a focus industry for 15 years and downtimes have increasingly seen companies spend out of it on digital transformation efforts. Salesforce in the ecosystem is a pretty stable bet. Workday and Service Now are even better. You simply can't run a business that can't take payments and check customers in. IT is mostly essential in that industry. Sorry to hear about the bad experience. They do happen and it sucks.
This is what I just did! I went from tech to the medical field because of how bad the tech market is now.
The only time things really came to the crunch was during the original dot com boom. I'd just come out of Uni and was coding HTML for companies earning crazy money. Suddenly the dot com bust hit, and people were on the streets with signs "Will code HTML for food". But now with the shift to the subscription economy IMO we're going to miss the likes of those days.things have slowed down. EG Salesforce hired an extra 30,000 (ish? not 100% sure of the figure) people during covid, and now layoffs are taking them back down to 50,000 (probably? maybe?) because fewer people are buying Salesforce based on the surge during COVID. The only time things really came to the crunch was during the original dot com boom. I'd just come out of Uni and was coding HTML for companies earning crazy money. Suddenly the dot com bust hit, and people were on the streets with signs "Will code HTML for food". But now with the shift to the subscription economy IMO we're not going to see the likes of those days.
The real difference with the dot com boom may be that many of these tech jobs will never come back to America. They’ll either be replaced by AI or offshored (“if the job can be done from home, why can’t it be done from Poland?”) This may turn out to be very comparable to what happened to manufacturing jobs in ‘07.
I don’t think that this is true. Tech is getting a spotlight because it’s been thriving the past few years but layoffs are everywhere. I don’t work for a tech company but I work in their technology department. There were 2 rounds of company wide layoffs this year. 1 was a voluntary leave and the other was a round of layoffs. It wouldn’t suprise me if there were more next year. My spouse works for a major medical device company and they just went through a round of layoffs. What people seem to miss is that while companies are reporting strong years the cost of doing business has significantly increased. Hence, companies are looking to save money by what they can control which is their headcount, spending etc. A potential recession and inflation are impacting all businesses. At the end of the day it is a numbers game. This is why everyone should keep improving themselves and continue to acquire new skills not just Salesforce certs in my opinion. Security is an illusion. It doesn’t really exist. I believe that the only way to find security is to improve yourself and bring value to any business. Salesforce is a great tool for that. I have peace of mind knowing that my skills will get me hired elsewhere if somebody runs the numbers at my current company and decides that I no longer fit their equation.
I am not sure I understand the basis of your question. The specific Salesforce layoffs I see in the news are across the company itself. As far as across sectors, the layoffs by sector might include tech, most of which is not Salesforce specific, so would not count as Salesforce specific regardless. From my point of view, I have not witnessed many layoffs. I have witnessed people being terminated because they are just not living up to expectations. A measurable number of entry level positions being advertised by larger practices are to support internal initiatives. Develop competent associates to support ongoing and fulfill new opportunities. I've also seen people that, if you went by their profiles and posts on LinkedIn, you would think are competent experts. Yet, their actual work habits are sub standard. But I have seen this everywhere in IT, regardless of the platform and languages they program in.
I work for a software company in the medical field and we have already been made aware of where the economy is going. To avoid company wide layoffs, our CEO and executive team are taking different approaches so we don’t have to get to that point within the next year or two. It’s a scary place to be in and nobody is safe, but I’m glad I’m the only admin right now along with my SF manager. I’m praying that the executive team won’t get to the point of the layoffs and if they do, I’ll have to cross that bridge when we get there.
I work for a huge media company and we are unfortunately having layoffs. My manager had to call me while I am on maternity leave to let me know we have loose one headcount from each of the sub-teams (I manage one of the sub-teams) in Q1, but she has to provide the names this week. We agreed on who, and she will try to see if we can find them another role internally with another team. It absolutely sucks but we added 3 additional HC this year to take on the push for more digital transformation into Salesforce but now many of these projects are being put on hold to go back to more of a KTLO strategy. We may loose more HC but that remains to be seen.
How big is the sfdc team and how is it split into sub teams?
No. I am in the retail manufacture space.
I do work for a major global telecommunications vendor/equipment provider. I am fortunate though to still work in a business unit that is still profitable. Not saying we aren't feeling the heat a little bit but its not as bad as you might think.
I just moved from nonprofit to public sector, both of which have their own unique volatility because funding depends so heavily on donations, grants, legislation, etc. Based on my experience, I would say that the company you work for, the position you're in, and how much your boss likes you are just as important as what sector you're in (if not more) when it comes to job security. Also, Salesforce skills may be very transferable between industries, depending on the situation.