Technology

I'm not in Salesforce work but its likely this part:

"but it seems like a lot of his clients want to customize the crap out of their implementation and not do things in the prescribed manner. "

When you're consulting your ethical duty is to inform the customer of the informed consequences of those choices (using your technical expertise). The client then says "do it anyway" or "we don't thinks X consequence will happen/be that bad so we want it done". Then you do it as ordered, and collect your high pay. When the consequences occur exactly as you said they would, you communicate the amount of effort (money) it will take to make it as workable as it can be now that the client chose to go down this path against your advice.

This is one of the reasons consulting is profitable. You get paid to fix the same thing multiple times. Nowhere is this unethical as long as you're honest with the client and use your skills to warn them beforehand when they are making risky (expensive) choices.

"I get the impression a lot of consultants are kind of winging it." Agreed. Every consultant I've known and worked with was winging it. Source: was consultant.

I've been involved as a SME as my work transitions over to SF from our custom built Oracle solution. We've been at this for 4 years now and I feel like it's the lack of flexibility, but also just a lot of poor quality work from the 3 companies were used so far. All 3 companies were just using cheap labor from India that genuinely do not understand even the most basic concepts of our existing system/workflow. Overall SF has felt like a "do everything our way or suffer". And boy oh boy has there been suffering.

I am currently part of team that is moving away from SF to custom web applications, SF is customizable, yes, but it is riddled with limitations and incompatiblty with other 3rd party services. Turns designing and developing what should be a quick 2 week projects into 4 months projects with all the work arounds you have to build to accomplish a task. If your intention to use SF for anything but a base CRM, just don't you will thank yourself later.

Part of the issue is that their sales pitch to get management to onboard is full of outright lies. They have one chart that basically shows that they are the leading cloud provider, beating out AWS and Azure.

As a software engineer I called them out on their bullshit right away. Sure, you can build pages on Salesforce, similar to SharePoint and some other CMS products, but it is NOT a platform that is truly competing with AWS or Azure.

Management still proceeded to go full hog into Salesforce as our "development platform" and pay consultants 300$ an hour to build shit solutions that should have just been built with standard languages on real cloud platforms. I left that dumpster file shortly after.

Now it almost seems like Salesforce is a joke in the industry, since many companies made those same mistakes and got stuck with huge bills and having to eventually back out. It doesnt help them that they basically priced themselves out of the CRM space, by trying to get you to build everything on their "platform".