I joined Salesforce as a PMM in mid-2023, left earlier this year. People ask me about it constantly because the brand is so strong, so here's the honest version.
The good first. The benefits package is genuinely excellent. Health coverage, parental leave, the Ohana culture stuff isn't pure marketing at the team level. My direct team cared about each other. Volunteer days, mental health resources, all real. The Slack culture (ironic since they own it) is low meeting-count compared to other big companies I've been at.
Now the complicated part. Work-life balance depends almost entirely on which org you land in. Sales-adjacent orgs, especially anything close to quota, have brutal Q4s. Like, actual "I'll reply at 11pm" energy from senior folks. Product and marketing roles varied widely by manager. I had a director who genuinely protected weekends. My friend in a neighboring team was being paged on Sundays for non-urgent stuff.
The big reorg waves are real. Salesforce went through significant restructuring in 2023-2024 and the uncertainty was exhausting. Your org could get absorbed, your roadmap could get dropped, your skip-level could change three times in a year. That's not unique to Salesforce but the scale makes it jarring.
The "Ohana" language can feel hollow during layoffs. When they cut 10% in early 2023 and then turned around and used the ohana word in an all-hands two weeks later, that landed badly with a lot of people I know.
Compensation for marketing roles is solid but not the top of the market. SWE comp is better relative to peers. If you're comparing Salesforce PMM against a late-stage startup or a FAANG adjacent offer, the delta matters.
If I were joining now I'd ask interviewers: what does the team's on-call or escalation culture look like? Who sets the norms around after-hours Slack? Has this team seen layoffs in the last 18 months? The answers will tell you a lot that the career page won't.
Happily answer questions below. This is not shade, I learned a lot there.