![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/GettyImages-2194677103-2-e1779980561906.jpg?w=2048\")
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Legions of students pursued engineering in college in hopes of hitting the hiring market as a hot commodity. But now, their prospects are falling flat among some major employers. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently revealed that the $145 billion cloud-based platform is keeping its engineering headcount unchanged as AI generates bounds of productivity. And the recruitment freeze extends to many layers across the tech giant\u2014except for sales.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not hiring more engineers, we\u2019re not hiring more GA [general and administrative roles], we\u2019re mostly expanding only in one area,\u201d Benioff recently said during a quarterly earnings call this Wednesday, adding that the company is \u201cmostly growing in Miguel\u2019s area: in sales.\u201d<\/p>\n
Benioff noted that the number of engineers at Salesforce has stagnated for around two years, holding steady at around 15,000 staffers; last year, the CEO even announced the company would not hire any more engineers in 2025 due to AI gains. And yet Salesforce\u2019s headcount has still ticked up thanks to one key area of growth: sales.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Talent that has the savvy to sell the company\u2019s products\u2014ranging from customer clouds and AI agents to Slack\u2014is at the forefront of the business\u2019 hiring agenda. The CEO noted that the team of Miguel Milano, chief revenue officer of Salesforce, has been expanding despite reduced hiring in other departments.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we all realize the one thing that we are doing here with you\u2014selling and communicating\u2014that agents are not exactly doing that,\u201d Benioff said. \u201cThey can qualify, they can provide service, but in sales we still scale because there are so many different parts of the market that we have to get to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Salesforce\u2019s choice to hold back on engineer hiring reflects growing anxiety in the profession: that AI and reduced hiring are stifling job opportunities.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the last couple years we have not been loading up a lot more engineers,\u201d Benioff said. \u201cThe reason it\u2019s been mostly flat is because we\u2019ve been using AI to create more efficiencies for our engineers. And especially this year\u2014now with these new coding agents\u2014we\u2019ve seen even more dramatic capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n
The cloud giant isn\u2019t the only business that\u2019s tightening this department\u2019s headcount. Last year Amazon\u2019s 14,000-plus layoffs touched nearly every part of the business, yet engineers were hit the hardest with job cuts, as nearly 40% of the 4,700 layoffs across New York, California, and New Jersey were engineering roles. And Microsoft\u2019s software engineers were the largest single job category to receive layoff notices in May last year. As of early 2025, the number of job postings for software engineers\u2014the most common tech job title\u2014decreased by 49% since early 2020 levels, according to a LinkedIn analysis.\u00a0<\/p>\n
However, things may be turning around, as listings for software engineer jobs on Indeed were up 11% year over year, according to 2026 analysis from Citadel Securities. While some niches of roles like AI and cybersecurity engineers are still hot on the market, companies like Salesforce are looking for talent with the human touch to close deals.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Engineering has been rattled by hiring freezes and AI, all while offering sky-high earning potential if talent are able to get a gig and hold it down.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The latest tech revolution is proving to be a gold mine for some workers like AI engineers, as others are confronted with automation woes; one software engineer told Fortune<\/em> he was unable to snag another opportunity after being laid off in the AI era, and was forced to live in a trailer to make ends meet.\u00a0<\/p>\n And many companies are already starting to get in on the AI boom, sending a shockwave of anxiety among the sector. Last year Goldman Sachs revealed that it had hired Devin: an AI-powered autonomous software engineer. The Wall Street firm hoped the tool would increase employee productivity\u2014and Goldman\u2019s chief information officer Marco Argenti said the company could hire hundreds or even thousands more to work alongside its 12,000 human software engineers.<\/p>\n Even as companies pull back elsewhere, many are continuing to invest in the people pushing products in the AI boom\u2014making sales a resilient career choice. Sales representatives selling products and services to clients through face-to-face interactions was one of the top 10 fastest-growing jobs in the U.S. during 2025, according to LinkedIn.\u00a0<\/p>\n It was ranked above nearly all engineering roles that also made the cut\u2014except for AI engineers, which made it to number one.\u00a0<\/p>\n And Benioff picked up on their value years ago; in 2024, the Salesforce CEO announced that the company planned to hire 2,000 new sales employees to take on the increased demand of its AI tools. Additionally, about 66% of SaaS (software as a service) firms said they would ramp up their sales hiring in 2025.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #slashes #whitecollar #jobs #Salesforce #CEO #Marc #Benioff #department #hiring #sales<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Legions of students pursued engineering in college in hopes of hitting the hiring market as a hot commodity. But now, their prospects are falling flat among some major employers. Salesforce… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4536,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[361,328,6924,283,426,369,1908,1285,2396,702,1910,1911,6921,800,818,430,567,6923,6520,566,580,4991,542,565,602,433,5244,6922,335],"class_list":["post-4535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-ai-agents","tag-automation","tag-benioff","tag-business","tag-careers","tag-ceo","tag-chatbots","tag-chief-executive-officer-ceo","tag-coding","tag-department","tag-employment","tag-engineering","tag-engineers","tag-executives","tag-hiring","tag-jobs","tag-management","tag-marc","tag-marc-benioff","tag-retention","tag-sales","tag-salesforce","tag-slashes","tag-talent-acquisition","tag-tech","tag-tech-workers","tag-unemployment","tag-whitecollar","tag-workers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4535\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}