If you can remember a time when the tech market was an employee’s market, at this point, you might qualify for a veteran’s discount.
Long gone is the hiring push of the COVID-19 pandemic and the era where anyone could be choosy with jobs and salaries. The paradigm has shifted; we are in an employer’s market, and in an employer’s market we shall remain.
In the world of Salesforce, debates over whether the Mothership is the pinnacle of tech employment continue to divide the community, but half of the battle comes with realizing that this uncertainty is not unique to Salesforce. Big tech isn’t your friend, and this message has never been clearer than it is now.
The Fading Salesforce Dream
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the question “Is working for Salesforce still the dream job?” garners a lot of opinions, and mixed opinions at that. For years, Salesforce has been an exemplary company that many professionals in the ecosystem have strived to work for, routinely making it into Fortune 100’s Best Company to Work For list and boasting a strong, connected community of individuals from all countries, backgrounds, and walks of life.
It has consistently offered opportunities for everyone, from graduates, career switchers, families, and diverse communities, and for a long time, the common understanding was that you could end up working for Salesforce after being in the ecosystem, no matter who you were or where you started from.
However, over the last few years, the Salesforce “dream” has been quietly fading. Numerous layoff rounds have left both current and prospective employees questioning job security, scrapped diversity initiatives have made professionals question their worth, and the company’s sometimes questionable politics have made unfortunate headlines.
What Do Employees Think?
I got the chance to sit down with two former employees from Salesforce and Snowflake to gather their insights on their experiences with the Mothership and how they thought Salesforce has developed as both an employer and company.
“It Was a Lot More Political Than I Expected”
When asked about whether or not there was a sense of disconnect amongst employees or the ecosystem, one former employee said she believed that the situation was just beginning to shift when she was employed.
“I feel like when I joined, it was coming to a point where people were a bit disillusioned, but it wasn’t that disillusioned a scenario yet,” she explained.
She spoke positively about Salesforce’s high hiring standards, which in turn fostered a strong environment of collaboration and learning, but for her, it was internal company politics that put a damper on her experiences.
“Salesforce is so big – it was a lot more political than I expected,” she said. “There was a lot of internal politics to navigate if you wanted to be successful beyond just doing your job. I would even argue you’d have to do more internal politics than your actual job sometimes because I would feel like there would be times the politics would stand in the way, and it could be quite suffocating.”
Another aspect of her experience that stood out to her was the uncertainty around layoffs and restructuring, particularly with middle management.
“It wasn’t really publicized,” she told me. “They just happened, and we kind of just had to figure it out.”
Last year, Salesforce laid off approximately 5,000 employees compared to around 1,000 the year before, and announced layoffs of nearly 1,000 employees again at the beginning of February.
“This Type of Culture Isn’t Intimidating”
Note: While researching this piece, I wanted to make sure I was able to speak to more than one former Salesforce employee about their experiences, but it was not possible this time around. With that in mind, I wanted to ensure I could represent two contrasting opinions of working in Big Tech.
The other ex-employee I spoke to formerly worked at Snowflake, a data warehouse platform that has a long-standing partnership with Salesforce to enable customers to benefit from zero-copy, bidirectional data sharing.
Although not owned by Salesforce, Snowflake is a company that mimics Salesforce in ways – they are both SaaS companies, have AI focuses, and boast a high-performance culture.
This former employee spoke very positively about the company, saying that he wished he had joined it sooner and commended its impressive growth.
“I think Snowflake is a great company to work for and would encourage anyone to do so,” he told me.
In terms of challenges, he told me about two in particular: the company’s high-performance culture and difficulty being promoted.
“I found that the culture at Snowflake is high performance, but I don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing,” he said. “For me, this type of culture isn’t intimidating; it raises the bar of what ‘good’ looks like in enterprise software sales. Having said that, I do think some consider the high-performance culture a bit intense.”
He felt that the high-performance culture contributed to an increased level of competition surrounding promotions, but stressed that this felt normal considering the company’s operating style.
This is similar to the thoughts of the former Salesforce employee, and high-performance culture spans the majority of Big Tech. Whether or not this culture is a benefit or a drawback is a debate that has been going on for nearly as long as the ideology has been around, and it honestly depends on who you speak to.
At a time when the tech sector is facing economic instability influenced by AI companies, many SaaS businesses are replacing employees or restructuring because of AI advancements. Salesforce has notably been one of them. However, this former employee insisted that a company like Snowflake is needed more than ever, perhaps putting employment at Snowflake or a similar company at an advantage.
“Layoffs and restructuring may cause instability for software engineers or tech support teams, but I don’t see a world where enterprise tech sales are done without account executives and solution engineers,” he said. “You cannot build rapport with an AI solution, no matter how good the underlying model is or how friendly the agent sounds.”
Is Working at Salesforce Still a Good Idea?
It is safe to say that opinions on whether working at Salesforce now is a good idea are mixed. But in order to be able to gain a full understanding of the situation, it’s important to assess what Salesforce actually offers as a company in 2026.
Salesforce conducts a bi-annual employee survey in which it asks employees to provide candid feedback on their experiences. A Salesforce spokesperson told SF Ben that in the company’s latest survey (November 2025), 85% of employees said they felt a deep sense of pride working at Salesforce, and 75% said they believed their career goals could be met at Salesforce.
Not only that, but Salesforce’s spokesperson also highlighted that the company’s promotion rate has remained consistent year over year and that the promotion rate through open roles has increased year over year, demonstrating Salesforce’s investment in internal mobility. Last year, nearly half of the new hires were filled by an internal candidate.
A big point of contention for many professionals in the ecosystem, whether they work at the Mothership or not, has been Salesforce’s shifting Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) stance. Last March, Salesforce dropped diversity hiring targets from its recent annual financial disclosures as a result of executive orders surrounding the dismantling of DEI programs as issued by the current Trump administration. Unsurprisingly, this caused a considerable stir in the ecosystem, especially as Salesforce has been renowned for its dedication to DEI in the past.
However, Salesforce maintains that it remains committed to equality – equal opportunities, equal pay for equal work, and the dignity of every person. It currently has 16 Equality Groups, their name for affinity groups, and more than half of the current employees are members of one or more of these groups.
Alongside this, Salesforce has relocated 400 employees and their families due to Equality and Safety Concerns.
Why This Uncertainty Isn’t Unique
No matter which side you stand on in this debate, the unfortunate (or fortunate, depending on how you look at it) reality of the situation is that this uncertainty isn’t unique. Salesforce is not unique in this scenario, and, as the title of this post suggests, tech companies are not your friend here – and they don’t need to be.
Justin Piehowski, a Veteran Salesforce Advisor, said this best in a post on LinkedIn, stating that discussing whether or not Salesforce is the dream employer or not is the wrong conversation to be having.
Having spent five years at Salesforce himself, he was self-reportedly “one layer of leadership away from Parker Harris”. He was also part of the Well-Architected team, which had a very public death and revival effort.
“It’s the wrong question,” he wrote. “You will never find a company perfectly aligned with your values. You’re also not going to find one that makes every decision the way you would.”
“You should not expect Salesforce to be perfect. Instead, see it as a career accelerator.”
He went as far as to say that if you get the opportunity to work at Salesforce, especially if you’re in the first half of your career, you should “not think twice.”
Justin’s sentiments hit the nail on the head; no company is perfect. In tech, especially, company missions have arguably pivoted to sustainable growth rather than “growth at all costs”, and this means that all thinking around operations and profit has become laser-focused. If there’s an area of a business that is holding it back, you can best believe it will be cut, and fast.
Tech is firmly an employer’s market, and businesses will only accept the best of the best. Naturally, this is reflected in hiring, operations, and even attitudes, so although it is normal to be upset about the state of affairs (and you should fight back against wrongful treatment), it is also important to understand the reality of the market.
Final Thoughts: Your Career Is a Means to an End
My two main takeaways for you with this post are do not be put off working for Big Tech, and instead, work smarter, not harder.
The tech industry is somewhat of a mean beast. Many professionals in the sector lack the bargaining power they once used to have; businesses put profit before everything, and even navigating the market can seem like a big, confusing mess.
However, this does not mean the market isn’t for you. These companies use you as an employee – if you can, you should operate with the plan of doing just the same back. Whether that looks like a career accelerator, a glowing line on a resume, or something else, you can still make Big Tech work for you – it will just look a little different.
Working in Salesforce may not be the dream anymore, but the advice for working there is the same. If an opportunity arises, take it and run with it. But don’t limit your sights; there are plenty of companies out there that play an important role in the new AI world, and you could be part of that too.
