Pros
I've spent over 8 years with Salesforce in various management and individual contributor roles, all customer or partner facing. Some of the pros:
- vibrant, fast paced culture
- smart, fun, aggressive colleagues
- management is focused on latest tech trends and staying or becoming a leader for many of them
- by and large, customers and partners are very positive about the technology
- good benefits and perqs
- hip urban culture at HQ
- a chart-your-own-course mentality that rewards those who aggressively seek out the job they want and pursue it, or sometimes even create it
Cons
After my long tenure and many Dreamforce conferences, I'm nearly fried. To say the culture is fast paced and the focus is always changing is an understatement. The reason Salesforce always seems on top, and chasing the latest trend, and in the press, is because employees are expected to run harder, carry more, cheer loudly, and pivot constantly. It's the world's biggest startup in behavior. But at the same time, with the recent influx of top career sales leaders from Oracle and what appears to be a board-level mandate for doubling revenue, employees are being asked to do even more with even less, fill higher quotas with smaller territories, less help, and the big company bureaucracy is rearing it's ugly head.
Worse still is the politics. When you hire a bunch of smart, aggressive people, and put them in an environment of outsized expectations, throw in a bunch of re-orgs and changing management, and sprinkle with uncertainty and constantly changing priorities, you inevitably get people back stabbing each other and throwing others under the bus to appear smarter and more worthy of promotion.
The few at the top will get very, very rich. The rest will lose the sense of personal ownership and start to wonder why they've given up health and family
