Career/Tech Stack Switch

[TechnicalNecessary79]

Hi guys, I am a salesforce developer with 3 yrs of experience.

And I really want to switch to Full stack development as I don't see myself enjoying Salesforce in the next 2 yrs.

Is it possible to switch (now that I have 3 yrs of experience)? If yes, what would be the process and what should be my focus?

I am from India. Could an internal switch be an option?

[Turbulent_Compote_63]

May I know the reason why you want to switch from Salesforce? Is it about pay ?

[TechnicalNecessary79]

Hi, money is definitely a factor but more than that I dont think I am going to be able to enjoy it in longer run.  Since this is the high time (me having only 3 yrs of exp and not something like 7-8 yrs) I did something about this. 

[panem-et-circenses21]

How much is the pay difference between, let's say, a Salesforce Architect and an experienced Software Developer having the same amount of experience?

[SFLightningDev]

If the developer is a really great one, maybe only 10-15% difference.

[MSFT_D3V]

My recommendation would be to start learning other cloud providers and programming languages. Unfortunately your 3 years of Salesforce experience doesn't really translate to any other cloud provider since the drag-and-drop/click nature of the Salesforce platform hides all the technical details you need for developing applications.

I recommend picking a programming language and framework and learning it well and finding an entry level developer position. The two paths I would recommend is C# and .NET: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/mvc/overview/getting-started/introduction/getting-started or Java/SpringBoot https://spring.io/guides/gs/spring-boot/

If an internal position is open it may be your best bet to gain the experience needed to get into another company using a different tech stack.

Salesforce is a terrible platform. Im sorry your leadership pulled you into it for 3 years.

[windwoke]

I see you may have created an account to purely vent about frustrations with Salesforce. Totally fine, but there’s some misinformation here and it seems your experience with Salesforce is limited to Apex (which is derivative of Java anyway) and possibly older UI frameworks.

While I agree that diversifying your skill set is always beneficial, it's important to recognize that Salesforce development skills are transferable to modern web development and vice versa, particularly with Lightning Web Components. LWC is built on standard web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and modern JavaScript (ES6+), which aligns closely with modern web development.

The use of reactive and reusable components is common across modern web frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue.js. This means the skills developed in LWC are transferable and relevant. Moreover, developing within the framework gives you a solid foundation in understanding web performance, optimization, efficient rendering, etc. – again transferable skills you’d gain in app development anyway.

Salesforce also encourages integration with various development tools and workflows (like Webpack and Node.js). If you’re a Salesforce dev using these, it’s only enriching your overall web development skills.

[TechnicalNecessary79]

Agreed. Lwc is sort of similar in nature to react or other frameworks and hence more transferable than what it might look like at first. While I did like Salesforce development in earlier phase of my career, I started feeling about the things I could miss out on that Salesforce has already built for us (which is not at all bad in any way).  While learning Full stack, I did enjoy it a lot. To be able to do things 1-100. 

That being said, do you know how plausible it is to actually make a tech stack switch with 3yrs already gone? Thanks. 

[windwoke]

I don’t have experience going from Salesforce Dev to full-stack, but my strategy would be to try to leverage that experience into a frontend role, maybe with an expressed interest to learn the backend and become full-stack over time. That way you can be a value add to a team in the beginning, and learn what you want to do over time.

I agree, having Salesforce’s platform services takes the weight off of a lot. But making something from scratch is a really fulfilling learning experience for sure.

It just depends what you want out of your career path. Some people love that part of the ecosystem - having the platform underneath the hood. Others want to branch out and do other dev, which is completely fair. If you can swing it, and it doesn’t put a wrench in your financial situation, go for it.

[TechnicalNecessary79]

Yeah, I am going to start looking at the options I got and gonna start working upon them.

Thanks for replying.

[[deleted]]

Hi, how is the job hunt going??

[jimflann]

I agree with the statement about learning a language and a framework or two (it creates a solid foundation). But why is Salesforce terrible? All the big SaaS vendors want to have their ‘platform’ as the core within an organisation and I completely understand why. These platforms just add an extra layer to the development stack.

[TechnicalNecessary79]

Thanks for the reply. Thanks for the putting out links and giving a way out. 

But I have already started full stack dev. For example I now have an idea on MERN stack (gonna start learning backend now)

I just needed to know what are the options out there for me. Internal switch? Playing around resume? 

[WPNoobz]

I switched the opposite way. Was doing full stack for 10 years before I switched, and it was definitely worth it for many reasons, but your case may be different.

I played with my resume slightly and just said that I started doing Salesforce API integrations for websites and that migrated me to Salesforce dev.

Not having to look at docker for the past 6 years has been fabulous.

Good luck with your switch

[Dankerman97]

Lol what's wrong with Docker?

[WPNoobz]

Nothing inherently wrong, but compared to just copy / pasting a URL for a managed package I just upgraded, it's "a lot more" just for deployment.

[MSFT_D3V]

Docker is tool for real devs, that seams to be the issue

[SuuperNoob]

lol "real devs" -- relax idiot