I work in the Salesforce world, and this post from one of Slack's early builders is the most honest look at Salesforce culture I've read in a while: Salesforce – Part Two on Building Slack

Quick TLDR of what happened after Salesforce bought Slack for $28B:

Tickets instead of people. At Slack you asked in a channel and a human helped. At Salesforce you filed a ticket and got an automated email with a link to an internal page. The author literally couldn't get a keyboard for his desk because the help desk was only open on Thursdays.

Email and endless quizzes. Slack people suddenly had inboxes again, plus a steady stream of mandatory Trailhead quizzes that were easy to game but kept the audit trail happy.

"Welcome to the Ohana." Everyone kept saying it. The Slack folks' reaction was basically "what the f*** is Ohana?" Family is a nice word until the layoffs show up.

Money for celebrities, cuts for employees. Stewart Butterfield (Slack's founder) watched execs approve pricey celebrity appearances while cutting employee travel. McConaughey reportedly gets $10M a year. Stewart's last pre-deal meeting with Benioff got cut short because McConaughey showed up. Then he got sent to Davos, thinking he'd meet customers, and ended up on an innovation panel with will.i.am.

Hire thousands, fire thousands. VPs overhired by thousands, then laid off thousands a few quarters later. Meanwhile there's a multimillion-dollar Hawaii trip for execs called Laulima.

Reps didn't sell Slack. Salesforce AEs didn't really use Slack, didn't get it, and it wasn't a "dashboard metric," so there was no incentive to sell it. The Salesforce playbook is to build an exec relationship, land and expand into add-ons, sell paid services, and lock the customer in.

Leadership chaos. Bret Taylor, the co-CEO who pushed for the deal, quit the day before Stewart's planned exit announcement, and nobody told Stewart. Stewart's own words on the integration: "It's not integration in any sense. It's just elimination."

My take: Salesforce is a sales and marketing machine first. It's great at selling a vision, stacking SKUs, and locking customers in.

That's not evil, but don't confuse it with family. "Ohana" is branding. Your company will not love you back.

So whether you work there, want to work there, or are building your whole career on the ecosystem, stop drinking the Ohana Kool-Aid.

Learn the platform, get paid, build skills you can take anywhere, and keep your options open.

Anyone else been through a Salesforce acquisition? Curious if this matches what you saw.

For a clown car of Salesforce types like this banging at your door saying absurd things like this (see below from LinkedIn)

Marketing Cloud Next (also known as Agentforce Marketing) joins two of those worlds. It sends from Data 360 and moves when the customer's state changes: a case opens, an opportunity changes stage. That's still two-thirds of the picture. State knows who the customer is. The send reaches her. Neither one feels her act.

Braze supplies the missing third. Its sense, decide and respond loop works like a reflex arc. A signal travels to the spinal cord, a decision happens there, and the muscle fires before the brain finishes processing. ..🙄

My advice is run away and remember these long painfully complex analysis are just trying to explain why Salesforce's decades of tech debt is a good thing and you should drag your company into it. It's like someone explaining the nutritional value of Skittles like it's broccoli.

Is anyone having success using Marketing Cloud Next, like actually using it. Getting value and seeing the ROI? I’m curious about people’s experiences with it. Observations and recommendations.

I have noticed more and more companies, who are just simply letting Claude into their production environments, giving it read and write access and then setting it free inside their org. I do wonder if this is opening up for security breaches and data breach issues. I still don’t think companies realise how powerful, but also how risky it can be.

Speaking from a consultant level here who uses Claude a lot for implementations inside Salesforce.

We have shared integration users used to maintain our integrations. Because most of the integrations (d&b, sales navigator, databook) require an interactive web login, MFA gets triggered.

Multiple admins need access to this account in case something breaks. Does Salesforce support registering multiple authenticator devices on a single user, or what’s the cleanest way to share MFA access across a team?

Thanks in advance!

Hi All,

I had a base 1GP managed package and 1 unmanaged packages. Recently i converted the based package to 2GP and wanted to convert the 1GP unmanaged packages to 2GP. 

I have looked for a way to do this and Unlocked packages(no namespace) seems to be the best way to do it. I have tried converting the same metadata of unmanaged package to Unlocked Package and installed in a test org, the unmanaged package fields do list under the Unlocked Package, But also under the Unmanaged package. I tried deleting the unmanaged package but it also removes the components under it. 

Need a way so i don't have to keep the Unmanaged package in the org after i have the Unlocked package. How you all are handling this scenario? 

I have been working in service cloud,experience cloud and health cloud but have no experience in AI as it’s not being used as of now.
I want to learn AI and integrate with my existing skills of salesforce. Please guide me

Hello Guys

For those who recently landed a Salesforce job in Germany:

What strategies worked best for you?
Which platforms did you use to find job opportunities?
How is the Salesforce job market in Germany these days?

Would really appreciate your insights and advice!

Has anyone experienced an OmniScript Step intermittently skipping for rare users in production, even though the step has no conditional view and works fine upon refresh - means not a hard config issue? What causes this? Any idea on how to replicate/fix it? I tried login as those users, and i dont face it. Even those users reported that a refresh fixes the issue.

The feedback and interest to https://rowhouse.app, our Salesforce-native Grid app, has been amazing. Thank you.

Special thanks to those who have submitted issues to our Github repo (https://github.com/kugamon/rowhouse).

We are treating Rowhouse as a proper app by adding functionality you'd expect to see in a Salesforce Grids app. Here is what's new since launch = https://rowhouse.app/whats-new/

The challenge now, is getting all of you who have installed the app to be on the latest version.

Please install version 1.4 if you are on an earlier version.

Every tool pitch these days claims it can make your data AI-ready, but nobody explains what that means in terms I can actually verify. Is there a real standard for CRM data to qualify, or is this just regular data quality repackaged with a new label and a higher price tag?

Apex query failing because of one field the user can't see? Strip it instead of failing. 🛡️

From API 67.0, Apex runs in user mode by default, so a query that touches an unreadable field throws a QueryException. Security.stripInaccessible() removes inaccessible fields and lets the rest through:

SObjectAccessDecision d = Security.stripInaccessible(
    AccessType.READABLE,
    [SELECT Name, BudgetedCost, ActualCost FROM Campaign WITH SYSTEM_MODE]);
System.debug(d.getRemovedFields());  // {Campaign={ActualCost}}
List<SObject> rows = d.getRecords();

✅ AccessType: READABLE · CREATABLE · UPDATABLE · UPSERTABLE
⚠️ Want a hard stop instead? Use WITH USER_MODE.

Hi all,

I recently started working on a POC using Service Agents in the new Agentforce Studio. I’m facing an issue with rendering custom LWC components inside the Agentforce chat.
Every time I make a change, I have to activate the agent, publish it through Embedded Service Deployment, and then test it in the portal. This makes the development and testing process quite tedious.
Does anyone know how to preview custom LWC components directly in the simulator? Is there any other way to test the changes without activating the agent and publishing the deployment every time?
Or any chrome extension to debug / preview.
Any help would be appreciated. Please share your suggestions! 🙂

I keep hearing about CRMs full of workflows nobody understands anymore: built by someone who left, no notes, everyone scared to touch them.

For those who’ve dealt with it:

• Did you fix it yourselves, or pay a consultant or agency for an audit?
• Roughly what did it cost, and how long did it take?
• Did the documentation stay up to date afterwards, or go stale again?

Not selling anything. Trying to understand how teams actually handle this.

Did anyone attend the Onsite interview for FDE? If so, what was your experience and any hints on the interview questions and the difficulty?

I recently ran a small study testing how well AI agents handle real work in Salesforce, and some of the results surprised me, so I wanted to share.

I set up a dev org with a fake company and had five models (Claude Opus, Sonnet, Haiku, GPT-6.1 Sol and DeepSeek) work through 50 tasks. Each attempt was graded on what actually changed in the org, not what the model said it did.

A few things that stood out:

• All five handled everyday requests well, like merging duplicates and updating deals
• Most missed Salesforce's automatic changes, like the close date moving when a deal is marked Closed Won
• Every model reported saves as done when the save had actually failed
• Opus scored highest (87%), GPT-6.1 Sol lowest (72%)

Write-up (free): https://outsideengineer.substack.com/p/evaluating-ai-agents-on-salesforce

Code and transcripts: https://github.com/brianna-rose05/crm-agent-bench

Curious if anyone using agents in their org has seen similar things.

Hi everyone,

Has anyone implemented Sandler into their org?

Our CEO has had the entire revenue team go through Sandler training, and he has asked me to come up with a proposal for how to implement it into Salesforce. We can't be the only company who has ever wanted to do this, and I'd like to find out how other companies have handled it. I'm having no luck finding anything so far.

We’re implementing Marketing Cloud Next (Advanced Edition) for an Enterprise Edition org. Several of the org’s users are on Lightning Platform Starter licenses. Salesforce’s release notes say Platform Plus users can run marketing workflows once they’re assigned the Marketing Cloud Manager and Data 360 permission sets (https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=release-notes.rn_mktg_platform_user_license.htm&release=264&type=5), but I can’t find anything about Platform Starter.

Starter doesn’t include campaigns or leads by default and caps at 10 custom objects, so I’m not sure whether those permission sets can be assigned.

Has anyone tried this or hit an error assigning them to Starter users? Also, is anyone running non-admin marketing users on Identity licenses?

Hey everyone,

I recently got a contract-based job as a Salesforce Agentforce QA Tester. I have a Salesforce QA background, but this is my first time handling testing independently, and honestly, I’m feeling a bit lost.

I have never worked on Agentforce testing before, and I’m struggling to understand how to approach it properly.

The biggest challenge is that my team doesn’t want me to use Agentforce Testing Center because of Flex Credit consumption and some other reasons.

I’m trying to figure out how to test Agentforce manually or through alternative approaches, but I’m not sure where to start.

My main questions are:

1. How do you write test cases for Agentforce? How do you convert business requirements and user scenarios into proper test cases?
2. How do you test Agentforce without using Agentforce Testing Center? Are there alternative ways to validate the agent’s responses and behavior?
3. How do you validate whether the agent’s response is correct? Since AI responses can vary, how do you define expected results and pass/fail criteria?

I got this opportunity after a year of working in Salesforce QA, and I genuinely want to do well in this role. Since this is a contract position and I’m expected to work independently, I’m feeling a lot of pressure to figure things out quickly.

If anyone has hands-on experience testing Agentforce in a real project, please share your approach, practical examples, or any resources that could help me get started.

I would really appreciate your guidance. Thank you!

Now that Agentforce Help has replaced the Help Menu for all users without asking anybody.......Does anybody have an idea how you can access the Keyboard Shortcuts menu to turn it off? Or how you can turn of the Agentforce Help and just get the old Help Menu?

Salesforce Support has been absolutely no help.

Is this related to this month's outages? I can search topics but actual notes are empty with this agentforce outage banner.

Does Conga CPQ Worth it for enterprise category?