Having been in the Salesforce ecosystem for almost 2 years now, I figured I’d share lessons I have learned & some knowledge I’ve picked up so far, whether this was through error or experience, to hopefully make your life a little easier.
Declarative Isn’t Always The Best Way
As much as Salesforce encourages the use of going declarative over custom code, it may not always be the best tool to use in every situation, sometimes declarative tools cannot even do what we want in the first place.
Flow & Process Builder are powerful enough nowadays to build out a solution to manage most requests, but these just cannot be used for certain things, such as creating Web & Email Services & performing complex validation over multiple objects.
But it’s your job to be well versed enough to know when and what to use in every scenario but if not then you can reference the Salesforce docs here.
Stay Strict With Quality Conventions
It’s easy to get lazy when creating new fields, or adding new elements and variables into flow; we’ve all done it. You might tell yourself you’ll come back to it, but let’s be real, chances are you’ll forget. But this will only come to bite you in the ass later on.
And who has time to add a description to explain what something does or where it’s referenced? Nobody, right?
Well, you should start to change both of these bad habits and start naming and describing things properly, future admins will thank you!
Learn To Say No
It’s always good being the superstar, being the one to always deliver what a stakeholder is requesting no matter how ridiculous the ask and it definitely feels good when you finally deliver the proposed solution. But I’ve learned in my time inside the ecosystem that always saying yes isn’t so good for your well-being.
Burnout is real and when it hits, it hits hard. It can also affect your mental health in more ways than one, and at the end of the day, our number 1 priority should be us and not our work.
Learning how to say no is a respectable skill to have in whatever profession you’re in and will stop people from thinking you’re a push around. A ‘back door in’.
If you learn this skill, you’ll notice all kinds of different areas improve around you. You’ll enjoy working leading on to producing better work, and most importantly you’ll be happier.
Maintaining a Clean Pipeline
When it comes to making a change in a sandbox, if deployments have failed back promotions for whatever reason, it all becomes a big mess, quickly. And this mess begins to compound.
You can then unknowingly start developing a new feature in a sandbox that is behind Live and then deploy pages with missing components, objects with missing fields, picklists with missing values undoing weeks, sometimes months of work.
If you see a back promotion has failed, albeit a pain to rectify, fix it. It will save you a MASSIVE headache in the future and avoid unforeseeable issues.
Network
Probably the most important thing I’ve learned so far, and what has gotten me into the position I’m in now is networking. I used to think it was a very cliche thing, and people just said it to sound like they knew what they were talking about, but networking really is the way to fast-track your career progression.
You never know, that 1 connection you make on LinkedIn might become a hiring manager one day, or have someone in their network powerful enough to influence a new hire. That one post on your account might land its way into a CEO’s feed.
The point is you never know who may be able to change your life, so networking with as many people as possible massively increases your chances of something good happening.
As the saying goes,
It’s better to be known than to be the best.
Bonus Lesson
Just have fun… I know it sounds like the obvious one so far but sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in work, we’ve all been there. When things begin to get stressful or hard just take a step back and remember where you’ve come from, and why you are here.