Salesforce Development

[PurpleTurtle]

Any Salesforce techies on PH?

I'm a Mainframe techie, 20yrs experience, working freelance for a great client but the end of the road for that is probably in sight - global outsourcing of all Support/Development to third party providers, my future will be either as a Subject Matter Expert (very little appeal due to reduced technical nature of role) or being coerced into Project Management. People have told me I would be good at the latter but I'm the kind of bloke who wants to come in, do his tech work, go home and forget about it. Every PM I've ever known gets slowly embroiled in organisational politics and, to put it bluntly, I don't want to be the one taking flak when other people's st goes tits up. I'm a team player, but would hate to manage one.

So, given that the mainframe market it pretty dead but I'm not ready to give up coding yet, I'm looking for other avenues for a techie job. Given that I'm contract rather than permie it is difficult for me to pick up any new development skills where I am as anything remotely resembling modern development is outsourced.

A friend has suggested Salesforce would be 'relatively' quick to pick up - is it? I am accepting that I would need to take a more junior role/pay cut for a couple of years to gain experience, but looking at the Salesforce job market it seems fairly bouyant, is it?

I fell into Mainframe work as a graduate at the end of the last recession, but found I had a flair for it. It has treated me very well, but even then people were signing it off as dead. It's not quite dead, but there is very little in the way of job movement. There is a school of thought that the baby boomer generation that has a lot of MF expertise are all now 55-60 and looking at retirement, so me as a relative youngster at 43 should soon be able to name my price, but I just don't see that happening in the forseeable. Many companies have Offshored to prevent such exposure, sadly.

So, is Salesforce a good tree to be barking up for somebody that wants to remain technical as long as he can?

Anyone else made the leap from Mainframe to something more modern? How did you find it?

[dibblecorse]

The salesforce market is hugely buoyant but you won't get a job at salesforce.com, I know this as I managed a large portion of their EMEA hiring for c4 years, they don't hire developers per se in the UK, 90% of the R&D is all US based (San Fran), the places that you would need to look at are the SFDC partner network of ISV's and Systems Integrators so the likes of Accenture, EY, Astadia, Bluewolf, Thunderhead and any other of their partner network. Or the end customer.

A good place to start for a chat would be K2 Partners who are one of europes largest providers of SFDC resource to the end customers and SI / ISV market so they would be able to guide you, ping me a PM if you want a couple of recruiter contacts in that space.

[AnneTeak]

You sound very like-minded in terms of avoiding project management and wanting to keep your hands on the code so to speak.

As a developer I initially found working with SF very frustrating... The platform is designed with the idea of 'clicks before code', therefore much of it's configuration can be done without a single line of code! Great it some respects, but frustrating for programmers.

It's definitely got traction around the world and you only had to go to SF Live in London this year to see how quickly it's increasing. The UK's largest software conference (13k participants). It's become the defacto in CRM software and is now in the top five software vendors around the world.

In terms of contract rates we've seen these vary, but a usual figure outside of London seems to be around £500 daily.