Tech Careers Without Coding: Inside the Salesforce Practitioner Role

You know, you'll be on as a temporary employee, W4, blah blah blah blah, at a rate of 55 an hour equivalent of 114,500 a year.
I thought there's no way that this is real.
Hi, I'm Ravozeri and welcome to How Much Can I Make?
I am a curious journalist, fascinated by what people do for a living, what their jobs are really like, and how much they can earn.
Join me as we dive into stories behind careers, uncovering insights and details, which I hope you'll find as intriguing as I do.
So let's get started.
Today's guest is Andy De Sanctis, who will tell us how you can get into the tech industry even if you don't know how to code, even if you do not have a computer degree, but still want to make up to$300,000 a year and maybe even more.
So let's dive right in.
And first of all, Andy, thank you for doing it.
Yeah, you're welcome, Mara.
This is fun.
So I looked up on your LinkedIn page and I saw you are a Salesforce practitioner.
Correct.
What is it?
The software I work for is Salesforce.
Okay.
And that software is a platform.
So when you it it kind of does, it's it's walking and chewing gum at the same time.
It is a product, it's actually a suite of products to help you manage relationships with your customers, to help you manage relationships with your patients, if you're a hospital, manage relationships with your donors, if you are a nonprofit, maybe you're managing programs through that nonprofit or services that are being offered.
All those things are natively built into the Salesforce platform, but also this is the chew and gum part, you can build your own products on the platform without having to deal with any of the I mean, I do deal with it.
You design your own needs on the other.
Exactly.
So you design your own architecture based on the processes that are uh are needed, and it's very flexible.
That's the sort of that's why Salesforce has blown up in so many sectors, is because it's not um what's known as a closed uh source product, it's open source.
So for somebody to do what you do, they need to master Salesforce.
I think they need to master the concepts of relational databases and what's known as object-oriented environments.
The most basic of that is an Excel spreadsheet.
And you don't need to code.
That's kind of the beauty of the work I do.
Like I don't write code.
All of the code is embedded in everything that I build.
It's almost as if I'm telling the system what I want it to do, and then it goes and writes the code for me.
Is it a job or is it a freelance kind of thing?
It can be, it's it's it's very dynamic.
And because it is a software open source product, you probably should have someone dedicated in the company that manages those internal products for you.
And that would be a Salesforce administrator.
And so they would be the ones who would create all the logins for everybody, create the training, and then when configurations needed for changes, like if we want a new field or if we want a new piece of automation, that administrator would be the one who would put all of that together.
And so it's very much like having your own dedicated software developer or um resource, but they're on the company payroll, right?
The other piece of that is that maybe you don't want a dedicated administrator, maybe you want to hire a contractor to come in and help you get set up, and then you just kind of run with it, right?
There's a whole ecosystem of partners like me that will help you implement Salesforce, that will help you figure out okay, well, this thing comes pre-built in such a way, but it's like 40% actually different than what how we do it.
And so as a consultant, I would essentially manipulate Salesforce to do the thing that you do while still maintaining the fundamentals of the platform to bring value to the customer.
So it's it's extraordinarily dynamic.
And what I like about it and what I've always kind of advocated for in my own community of professionals and people getting into it, is it's accessibility, right?
It is extremely accessible for anyone to get into.
It takes a lot of self-uh taught work.
So you don't need to be a computer graduate or anything like that.
I would say that most of the people I've worked with who are, I mean, I know my background is not in computer science.
My background's in environmental uh policy and economics.
But I really I was into data from a research standpoint many years ago, and I just fell into using Salesforce, and because it is so customizable, uh, the role that I had back in Philly required the program I was running to do something that I didn't know how to make happen.
But we had this tool, and I just kind of forced it.
I willed it to my bent it to my will.
And that tool was Salesforce.
That's right, yeah, that's right.
And I was the program manager.
I ran, I had a staff of 15, and you know, we were out there doing Obama's work out there and energy efficiency and weatherization, and it was really cool.
And we were using Salesforce to to basically manage the program.
Now, I didn't want to get into Salesforce, my background was in this other space, but I just used it as a tool.
Just another software.
It's another it's yeah, it's what am I gonna do with this?
I just used it.
Okay, you know, I'm done with it, I'm gonna go to something else.
And that's when I moved to Portland because when the program ended, and I got a call from a firm in Portland who said, Hey, we are using Salesforce in one of our energy efficiency programs.
Would you fly out here for six months and help us build out this piece of functionality?
And I remember thinking, like, I can't do that.
What are they talking about?
I can't build that shit.
But I said, you know, the funny part, uh, I was making on a salary about$38,000 a year as a program manager.
And when the recruiter in Portland said, we'll pay you$55,000.
You didn't think twice.
I said, Oh, okay,$55,000, that sounds great.
Of course.
You know, and I didn't, we just kept saying$55,000, okay.
And my assumption was it was$55,000 a year, prorated at six months because they wanted me there for six months.
What he was saying was$55 an hour.
And so when I got the offer letter, it said, uh, you know, you'll be on as a temporary employee, W4, blah, blah, blah, blah, to rate$55, an hour, equivalent of$114,500 a year.
I thought, there's no way that this is real.
This isn't right.
And of course, I called the recruiter, I said, What's going on?
And he said, What do you mean what's going on?
Do you want to do this?
I said, Yeah, well, well, now I want to, you know.
Uh it was shocking because it was, it was, I was exposed to a sliver of the market that was had very, very high demand.
And I it it was a learning lesson for me because I I really saw that dynamic between labor demand and labor availability.
And there just wasn't as many, you know, uh consultancies that were starting to pop up.
There just wasn't that many people who were good at building it out.
Is the demand still exist?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I wouldn't be in business if it didn't.
And they still pay 55 an hour?
They pay more than that.
Oh well, you go and you go into the um into the space and as as a you know, an independent consultant like like myself, and you're easily billing between you know probably one and two hundred an hour.
Whoa.
Yeah, it's it's very good.
What size companies usually hire after the company?
Every size, every every size.
So you know, right now I'm working with um a small nonprofit uh that's basically a startup, and I'm doing an implementation for them.
Uh one of the really nice parts about nonprofits and Salesforce is that Salesforce will donate 10 free licenses to nonprofits at no cost for the whole the whole shebang.
Uh and that's that's about a$16,000 uh annual value because the licenses are not cheap.
The licenses are about$150 per user per month.
Okay.
So that could if you've got 10 users and it's$150 a piece per month, uh, what's the math on that?
You're at like$17,000 a year.
And that's just a habit.
That's not even the cost and time it would take to make it the way you want it.
And so the nonprofits get this break.
So folks like me can come in and say, okay, here's what are you doing?
Let's build out a product on the platform for you to use to meet your mission as an organization.
And it's so ubiquitous now in the nonprofit space that Salesforce has built products specifically for nonprofits because they can see everything that guys like me are building.
Do you need any kind of certification before a company would hire you?
How does it work?
There is there is a uh a basic certification, uh, the Salesforce Administrator certification that is sort of the gateway.
For many years, that's no one would even, and that's still true, you would not be able to get hired unless you had the certification.
And that's a certification, it it's difficult to get.
You get it from Salesforce itself?
It does.
They they have uh their own test, they have a third party that uh manages the testing, credentialing, the whole thing.
So now, I mean, when they when I started out, I think they had like five or six certifications, and now they've got like 50.
I mean, it's pretty it's pretty significant.
But that's it.
But if somebody wants to break in, they can work as an assistant or volunteer to work with somebody, get familiar with it, and then apply for the certificate?
What ends up happening a lot more often is that people see the starting salaries of people who have uh a Salesforce admin certification and they just go through all the documentation and study really, really hard, and then they start applying for jobs after they've they've got that first certification.
And what is the starting salary?
It ranges, I mean, it really is it's come down a little bit because there are so many more people going into the space than there used to be.
But you know, with zero to two years experience, you could be starting anywhere between 70 and probably$85,000 a year.
Whoa!
Yeah, that is very nice.
It's not bad.
And you can grow up to what?
Uh I know folks, you know, making close to$300,000.
Whoa.
Yeah.
$300,000 a year.
Yeah.
Once you get to that technical architect level, which is sort of the top, the top level where you're, you know, sort of the the puppet master, you know, you're pulling all the strings for all, you know, the pieces on a giant enterprise-sized organization, you become very, very valuable.
So the skills that were required from a beginner would be knowing Excel.
What else?
I think uh having a really solid understanding of criteria-based logic, like basic logic, like putting together sort of logical conditions, so that if this thing happens in a certain condition, then this other thing will happen, which is sort of the basis for automation.
I think understanding the idea of relationships between things, because again, it is a relational database.
Excel is not really a relational database.
You can create relationships like between cells across tables, but that's it's very that's very simplistic.
Right.
Um, this is much more dynamic.
I'd say Excel would be, you know, two-dimensional, and something like Salesforce would be like three-dimensional.
Can you share an example of a project you worked on?
I've worked a few projects that are are for construction and building uh companies.
I build stuff.
I like to, you know, I I told you about my house in Portland.
I did a lot of work on that place with a buddy of mine.
And just I like I hate it, but I also enjoy it.
And I built three different applications to manage the construction process uh for different organizations.
So one of them was in Portland, it was a nonprofit that built uh low-income housing for uh for folks in town.
You know, it's they're they're a construction company, right?
They have all the all the trappings and all the things that need to happen, you know.
They have their plans, they have all the materials, they have their permits, they have the subs, they've got their different, you know, they've got their plumbers, their electricians, they got to put stuff out to bid, you know, project planning, project statuses, moving things through the through the through the pipeline.
Yeah, it was a lot of fun.
That was a really that was a cool one.
That was uh I enjoyed that project, yeah.
And you think they're still using the Salesforce that's a good idea.
I hope they are, yeah, I would imagine.
I think they're probably it was a lot better than what they had before.
So So once you design for, let's say, a company like a construction company, the Salesforce to work for them, do they hire you back?
So yeah, so that's a good question.
You will often build something, and what the customer begins to realize is that, oh, okay, this is now working the way I want it to work, but you know, six months later, maybe they are doing a new thing or they're doing it a different way.
That's when they would probably re-re-engage with me to say, hey, we're gonna, we'd really like it if if we're doing this new thing, we'd really like if Salesforce could support it.
Yeah, that's when I would come in and and either do a redesign of of a particular area or build something completely new.
So you basically have uh repeated clients that come to you again and again, and you just build enough of a client base and then you'll you'll be set.
Uh yeah, I mean that's that's the that's the dream, you know, uh, and getting good relationships with the with these clients.
And many of them do have dedicated internal staff that only work on Salesforce.
But, you know, you're coming into, you know, you've been in it longer, you're you've got more expertise, you know, you're sort of brought in to uh architect a new solution, help them implement it, uh, you know, teach them best practices and that kind of thing.
So basically you can work on two or three customers at the same time, correct?
Oh, easily, yeah.
Easily.
Yes.
Nice, you can make a very nice living.
Yeah.
Is there any misconception about people that work with Salesforce?
Oh, sure.
Like what?
Set it straight.
Uh I mean, I think there are honestly a lot of the misconceptions come from users because you'll have a user who's been at a company who bought Salesforce but then that didn't invest in actually manipulating it to make it work for the company, right?
So you'll have experiences from users that are like, I hate that thing, I'll never want to use it again.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
What's unfortunate is that you can be very bad and you can hide a lot of bad work.
And because you maybe are on a project for only a month or two, that bad work may not actually ever be known until years later.
And that's something that I do experience a lot.
You know, I come into orgs that have been worked on by other consultants or other um, you know, contractors, or maybe uh they did have a dedicated admin who was brand new, was there for a year, and then left after a year.
Are there any kind of online courses that there's more online courses than you can shake a stick at?
And do you recommend taking them?
Yeah, but ultimately it's experience that gets you through it.
So when you mentioned before that people study before they take the certification uh test from Salesforce, how do they learn?
Salesforce has a learning uh website or something?
There is, there's a they have this sort of gamified, um, it's called Trailhead, and it's pretty good.
I mean, it's it's a uh it will walk you through how to do things, how to build automation.
The problem is that it's it's not really giving you experience in part because while you will go through the process of building out a complex piece of automation, it will literally give you each and every step to do it.
So you will have this list of things to do, and then you'll go over here in your org, your trial or demo org, and go build it.
And you did it, right?
But you weren't thinking.
You weren't what got you to the point where you thought it was a good idea to do X, Y, and Z.
Because the thing is, like anything else, I mean, you can cook turkey five different ways.
Right.
Right?
How you get good at it is by is by doing it.
And eating it.
That's exactly right.
One very important question.
Okay.
Is AI.
Oh, yeah.
AI can kill your job.
No, not yet.
There's not yet.
Down the road, there's gonna be some incidents where developers, software developers will use AI to actually deploy code, write and deploy code.
There's gonna be a something's gonna break, there's gonna be a mess.
And whoever's organization they put that code into, someone's gonna go, who did this?
And there will be no one answering because it was the AI that did it.
There will be no one accountable.
But somebody had to give the order to the AI to put it in, right?
Not necessarily.
You can set it up to run itself, right?
And so ultimately, maybe you could come down to the company that was using this as a tool, right?
But at the end of the day, AI is not going to be in a position anytime soon, at least from a data governance standpoint, of going into organizations and making changes to data architecture or changing data.
Like that has to be done by a human.
Why?
Because we have to be held accountable to someone, okay, not something.
Okay.
I can't take an AI agent to court.
The other thing is that the AI is not that good.
Not yet.
It's really not, and it's already starting to hit limits on what it can get good at.
And so what I use it for is very, very different.
I I do use it for like a gut check, you know.
So I'll have a design idea, I'll have a way of how I would do something, and I will put that into the AI and see what it comes back with.
Okay.
And it will, it will, sometimes it comes back with 80% of what I wanted, and this other 20% is garbage, right?
And that's pretty much the the ratio, I think.
I've used it a couple times just to test it and say, how would I do this thing in this technical environment?
And it will give you 20 steps.
And by step 13, it's just making it up.
So AI is threatening, not threatening you, it actually could help you be your consultant in a way.
It could.
And then you get some ideas that you didn't think about, maybe, or whatever, but then you go, you change it, and you implement it.
That's right.
And the one I did build, uh, so I don't, again, I told you, I don't write code.
I can't look at you at a set of code and go, oh, that's Python, or that's Ruby, or that's React, right?
I can't do that.
But I did have an idea for a product.
I went into an AI.
So when you say product, you mean for an automation, right?
No, and I had an idea for a product.
Actual product.
An actual product.
Okay.
And I said, I there's a tool called Claude, which is another, there's ChatGPT, there's Claude, there's a whole bunch of different services.
Right.
And so I started to interact with Claude about my idea.
And Claude said, Oh, yeah, we can do this.
Here's how we can put this together.
And so I began building this product on Python, which is a language I have no idea how to use.
I told it I had no idea how to use it.
And I said, okay, here's what we're gonna do.
Wow.
And it helped me figure out how to get on a remote server to run the script, which I didn't even understand that architecture until it started to explain it to me.
And then I realized, oh, okay, I need a remote server.
I can get a test server from Google.
We're gonna use Python.
Okay, I have to load all these libraries into this code base, and then this Python script is going to do the thing that I want it to do with this other service, with the Gmail service.
And so it's probably 400 lines of Python, and I wrote it, and the product works.
And it works very well.
Now here's the thing, Mara.
I did all the work.
Uh-huh.
It didn't write it, there were several iterations.
It would give me snippets of code, I would test it, maybe it worked, maybe it didn't.
If it didn't work, I'd check the error, it would tell me, oh, okay, this is why that error is happening.
Try this code, right?
It's an iterative process.
By the end of it, I learned so much about Python and remote servers and different tokens for different services and different APIs I had never worked with.
Such that if I had to do it two to three to I don't know, probably five more times, I would be using the AI less and less.
Okay.
So it's not this which is It's a learning tool for you.
It's a and I do think it could be a learning tool for most people.
I think that people walk into it thinking it's gonna do this thing for me.
It's not.
Well, all Chat GPT and Claude and a lot of these services are now, in my opinion, they're very much what we wanted the internet to be for the past 25 years.
Right.
And so, as a tool to learn, that's definitely where I see it going.
Yeah.
What will happen if another software like Salesforce will come on the market?
Are you in danger of losing your work and because people will switch?
The reason that I'm always going to have work in the Salesforce space is because it's open source.
All these other products are not open source.
Right.
If you want something changed, you gotta make a phone call to the account executive and say, hey, I need and there's some things you can do.
I don't mean that to be, you know, it's like a blank.
So most likely to stay.
Yeah, I mean, if there's and if there's another platform out there that pops up that's open source, you know, yeah, there's probably a high likelihood that, you know, people will move to that one.
So, last question.
What would you advise somebody that wants to get into it?
I'd have them ask themselves why do they want to get into it?
Because if you want to get into it for the money alone, it's gonna be very hard if you don't already have the aptitude for it.
I would say get into it because there are fundamental elements of it that you find very interesting.
Then say, okay, I'm ready to commit to this because I know if I get to the end, I can have I can make a very good living.
Excellent.
Thanks a million.
I've learned about something I had no clue about.
Well, if you ever want to talk more about it, Marat, please, you're more than welcome.
This was really interesting.
Great, this is fun.
I love talking about it.
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