Pros
Salesforce is a great place to work, for a lot of people a lot of the time. My perspective is mostly from consulting services/CSG, but there are some things that apply across the board. -Excellent focus on work/life balance. Better than anywhere else I've found in terms of consulting or engineering jobs. -Excellent salary. My title maps to "senior manager" level as an individual contributor, and all things considered I am extremely satisfied with it. -Health insurance is excellent, in terms of coverage/cost/options. One of the better plans I've seen. -401(k) is excellent if you're an investing wonk. The match tops out at $5k which is middle-of-the-pack, and the plan is through Fidelity (meh) with which you get a good selection of funds, but more importantly, BrokerageLink to invest in the wider markets, and the ability to contribute after-tax beyond the 402(g) limit and auto-convert to Roth with 1 phone call to set this up. This is relatively new in the marketplace, and still rare. Tl;dr is you can contribute as much as $52,000 to your plan for 2020 and characterize as Roth in the end, not $19,500, regardless of your age (research "Mega Backdoor Roth"), which is a huge benefit for financial planning for highly-compensated employees. -Working for Salesforce comes with a lot of cachet within the world of software vendors and partners, and access to awesome tools and information. If you've been a consultant or worked for an ISV and geek out to the product, you're going to love it here, and often be able to get involved with really interesting clients, projects, and internal initiatives shaping future product development.
Cons
I did say "caveats". -RSUs are low as compared to FAANG and there are no refreshers - hence, there are a lot of boomerangs, and a reputation as a "retirement home", because there is no reward for working harder if you are not also trying to get promoted. -Despite claiming to have a culture of open debate, it doesn't exist and there is seemingly no motivation to change this. For example, even though they say they will answer forum questions relating to the weekly allhands, they never do if it pertains to an internal policy. There is no upward feedback mechanism, except for your direct manager, and on many teams this is a "player/coach" who has no involvement in setting the policies of the department. There is an "airing of grievances" forum but it is heavily "tone-policed". Bottom line is that if you get stuck in a bad situation or team, your options are to change teams or leave, there is no opportunity to improve things from within. -Silos and a lack of coordination result in many internally competitive and duplicative efforts, and inefficiencies. Product-wise there is crossover between Marketing Cloud and Pardot, Tableau and Einstein; and Vlocity/CPQ/B2B Commerce for example. Whatever's new and shiny (acquisitions and Dreamforce announcements) gets love, but if your area is not, good luck getting Trailhead modules or product management to prioritize new feature development. There are approximately 90 billion different efforts to create documentation for consulting resources for how to do their job, all run by different groups and stored on different platforms. And because Slack and Microsoft are viewed as competitors, there is no company-wide collaboration tool like Slack or Teams, it's just a bunch of incomplete tools like Google Chat and Salesforce Chatter and Quip and email and.... -There tends to be a lot of politics between teams, even beyond the product-related competitive/redundancy issues. In short, if you like what you're doing, and who you're doing it for/with, you're in a great position. But if you don't, you're going to have a bad time. I don't know anyone who was unhappy with their situation in Salesforce who subsequently made it better, at least without changing teams.
