bajirao

Started with BOOBS as I spent a lot of time in EnterpiseFizzBuzz and laughed a lot. I will certainly come back to the rest of the chapters but wanted to acknowledge your great writing.

What's the recommended 'size' of the machine to run this?

I tried to run it on a pretty beefy machine (8 core cpu/32 GB RAM) to use with ~40 odd PDF documents. My observation is that the queries (chat) takes forever and also getting Segmentation fault (core dumped) for every other or so query.

Not the original poster, but I noticed two things about MuleSoft. First and foremost the developer tooling - especially MuleSoft's Anypoint Studio IDE - is horrible. It could compete for the worst IDE experience out there and easily win by a landslide. It requires obscene amounts of resources (CPU/memory) and barely works with Hello World type applications. For anything midly complex than 1+1 = 2, be prepared to face constant freezes, frequent restarts and loss of developer productivity. Mule code is an XML based proprietary DSL, learning which isn't useful outside MuleSoft ecosystem. And this lock in / proprietary way is everywhere. e.g. Mule uses RAML (instead of Open API for API design) or Mule uses its own data transformation language called DataWeave which has a steep learning curve. The second and more concerning issue is the cost. MuleSoft is incredibly expensive as a product, and hiring good MuleSoft consultants is hard. It's difficult to justify it's price tag when there are better options available at lower prices (e.g. apigee/kong for api management). Other reasons include bad documentation, history of miserable support for backward compatibility (aka Mule 3 and Mule 4), treating other programming languages (python, java etc) as second class citizens in Mule etc

Yes it was absolutely promoted from the top. There was a meditation room in Salesforce tower as well as regional headquarters. We had meditation experts and monks (remember Gavin Belson's spiritual friend from Silicon Valley?) join all hands meetings. During pandemic there were biweekly wellness hours on EVERYONE's calendar where people could optionally do guided meditation for a couple of hours. Just last year I saw they announced some wellness ranch. Probably a five star holiday resort for employees I guess. (I wasn't employee then so just guessing). Employees were required to put in VTO hours every year. VTO goals were part of many team's V2MOM (just google this acronym for details). I am not sure if Salesforce bean counters considered ROI due to this PR branding when it was strictly enforced, nevertheless it wasn't contributing to improvement in quality of products, innovation, customer's experience and revenues.

Yeah IMO those colleagues didn't pull their weight to justify their titles (Sr. Director whatever). While Salesforce's titles are very inflated (Director at Salesforce maps to L6 in other companies), these were still senior talented folks drawing good salaries. I never saw if actually delivered something. Salesforce ecosystem (Salesforce partners, consultants, customers etc) is great. but I am not very convinced by Salesforce's impact outside of its business activities. Their 1-1-1 pledge or stakeholder capitalism model isn't genuine. These are PR stunts where Salesforce could post some rainbow flag pictures or Matthew Mc's videos about global warming on social media. During my tenure at Salesforce it was possible to work for single digit hours per week and still be a top performer. The rest of the 'work' time was occupied by team socials, VTO activities and other shenanigans.

Having said that the number one thing Salesforce should culturally do is put more focus on what it's customers need. It is a sales and marketing organization, which it is very very very good at. But you can't just keep up by upselling stuff to customers. If you don't keep your customers happy, all this WLB doesn't really help.

Whereas _every_ internal Salesforce townhall type meeting starts with 'Trust is our #1 value'.

As an ex trailblazer I can confirm this. That all hands was unreal. Everyone was asking about layoffs on all-hands slack channel, and Mark/Brett were demoing upcoming new features in their Work.com product.

Ex employee here. Salesforce was the most laid back, rest and vest, coasting culture in my experience. Generous employee benefits, absolutely no work pressure. They took pride in their work life balance. Many employees (in product and marketing) were just focusing on (flavor of the day) activism - BLM, AAPI, GLBT, Homelessness in SFO. I always wondered if these employees had any 'actual job' in the company or their managers even cared what their team delivers. As an employee it was great. As an ex employee whose vested RSUs are more than 50% down from it's peak, it sucked. While I feel bad for those who are laid off, this downsizing was written on the wall.

Congratulations! Father of 18 months old girl here. Nothing to add really except to repeat the advice already given in this thread. Have patience. It gets tough on many days and remember that it too shall pass. Your wife will go through a lot of changes in her body. Take care of her.

I hope it works out for you!

Very uplifting. Thanks for sharing this.

>I come from a low caste. The only folks who have asked about my caste and asked if I am from a higher caste are white Americans due to my vegetarianism (voluntary for ethical reasons).

Because other Indians will identify your caste based on your last name, food habits, dialect, your family business (etc). They don't need to ask you.

Its 100% true in my experience. You can identify caste of most Indians based on their last names. This is one of the reasons some Indians do not use last name at all. (e.g. from Tamil Nadu or from Northern states of India). At work you can't hide your last name, so other Indian co-workers can identify your caste with trivial effort. However, I try to hide my last name in any type of social (non-work) related conversations and try to avoid any groups where group members are really curious about my last name.

Oh okay thanks! I see other comments with the same observation.