This Too Shall Pass

One day, King Akbar, staring at the pond in his palatial house, asked his wise Vazir, 'Tell me one sentence that will hold, even if I am happy or sad.' Birbal, the wise royal advisor, instead of questioning the king's wisdom standing near a pond in the middle of the workday, replied, 'This too shall pass.'

People who celebrate the fourth of July will attest that Abraham Lincoln famously used these words in his lifetime, bringing the wisdom of the east to the modernity of the west. We are standing at the precipices of the IT industry. Daily you see your connections, their connections or someone else having a sombre post or a quiet call.

People are worried.

Three major modern economies are showing signs of crumbling, and as customer spending goes down, so does customer service. And yet, you hear the rumbling of the messages from recruiters and potential customers working daily to harvest more resumes, scrutinise more candidates and provide more jobs.

Things may look bleak at the moment, but the winds of change keep blowing. What is happening today will change. Technology has a way of adapting to how the world is shaping. This only inspires a little confidence today, but all we can do is wait for this to pass. We in Salesforce world know how to adapt to change. If you are in any role that makes you open Salesforce, then you know we scour through release notes every three months to digest the changes that come our way.

We saw this with S-Control. We now dearly miss the workflows. Process builders still need to convince us; soon, they will be gone. Salesforce Ohana, the community is a bunch of people who know that change is the only constant in our life.

We learn.

We adapt.

We move on.

And that's another thing. If you feel the world is bleak, you can learn. There are tremendous things to study. There are many trailheads to go through, and you can pick up one or two additional certifications along the way.

But in the famous words of Martin Luther King, if you can't run, walk. If you can't walk, crawl and if you cannot crawl, find someone to carry you. But whatever you do, keep walking forward.

As I was writing this article, another incident popped into my head. The year was 2010, and as I was writing an Apex trigger, an email arrived in my inbox about Cognizant holding a worldwide 'Future of work' event.

The topic remained on everyone's mind throughout the day. In a meeting, I casually asked my manager, what do you think the future of work will be? He smiled and told me that all these apex classes and code writing will be history in ten to fifteen years. People will move towards configuration changes, and workflow will be popular.

Back then, we had no idea, but maybe he had just predicted the arrival of flows, and more clients were asking for codeless implementation. There are futurists whose job is to predict the future. But any true economist will tell you that even their best theories fail many times, let alone predict the future.

It remains to be seen what the future brings to the industry. But one thing is for sure, if we go back to the wise vazir in the sixteenth century, he will also have the same answer: ' This too shall pass.'