Salesforce has over 15k employees, about 90% of them are sales guys, which I can not speak for. For R&D:
1. Hiring standards has been deteriorating day by day. We used to be really great at it, but now we are hiring people blindly. If we are to maintain the quality, we need to standardize the process, and learn from top tech companies(as we claim to be one). We pay pretty well compared to top tech firms in bay area, and I am sure with right interview process and effort from recruiters(hire more recruiters and tell them to reach out to everyone), we should we able to hire great engineers.
2. We have too many titles in R&D, this is great to keep employees motivated and promote them and I get that. BUT, you got to respect the title. I have seen people with very less experience and contributions, becoming Principle Engineers. I bet, these so called Principle Engineers, wont be able to pass entry level engineer's interview at a good tech company. PLEASE FIX THIS.
3. Another thing which is hurting the quality of engineering organization is letting QAs move to development without any interviews. I agree with the idea of allowing people to move between roles and do different things, but we must maintain the same interview standards while doing so. We all know that hiring standards for dev and QA are far apart, then letting QAs move to dev so easily has become a shortcut and no one is getting benefitted by this other than the individual. This hurts both dev team (as now they have to explain every line of code to QA) and it also hurts QA team as they will always have to hire new QAs (since the existing ones become dev)
4. I am not sure if this is salesforce or recruiters, but they dont give you good equity if you dont negotiate hard. The equity I have seen so far is around 50% of what a tech company in bay area (at our level) offers.
5. We have a great work culture at company, which is getting polluted by more and more higher management coming from Microsoft and Oracle. I always wonder, why we never get higher management from companies we admire (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn....). Now, these new managers are polluting the culture by thier micromanagement philosophy of earliest companies. For instance, now managers are asking receipt for $7 lunch arranged for a team meeting. This is not salesforce.
