“I think we all realize the one thing that we are doing here with you—selling and communicating—that agents are not exactly doing that,” Benioff said. “They can qualify, they can provide service, but in sales we still scale because there are so many different parts of the market that we have to get to.”
Salesforce’s choice to hold back on engineer hiring reflects growing anxiety in the profession: that AI and reduced hiring are stifling job opportunities.
“For the last couple years we have not been loading up a lot more engineers,” Benioff said. “The reason it’s been mostly flat is because we’ve been using AI to create more efficiencies for our engineers. And especially this year—now with these new coding agents—we’ve seen even more dramatic capabilities.”
Engineering has been rattled by hiring freezes and AI, all while offering sky-high earning potential if talent are able to get a gig and hold it down.
It was ranked above nearly all engineering roles that also made the cut—except for AI engineers, which made it to number one.
