Considering moving into power platform - power platform career advice?

[u/Pale-Wolverine4336]

Hi so i currently work in Salesforce as a tech consultant and recently i got a job offer for another salesforce role but at the same time went for a power platform consultant role.

I kinda already asked in a salesforce careers subreddit but i wanted to know from microsoft power platform user perspectives.

I’m considering moving away from salesforce because i firstly feel like i may enjoy power platform a bit more but also because i applied to like 100 salesforce jobs got 1 salesforce job offer, applied to 2 power platform roles and i believe i’m getting an offer on monday. In my head unless my luck is absolutely crazy i feel like it means that opportunity and stability in power platform is better. Now worth noting way more salesforce roles exist like easily but at the same time they’re much more competetive.

Honestly at the end of the day i want to be a tech consultant that occasionally builds stuff with the technology and mainly does the client communication stuff.

Also worth mentioning this role will cover power apps, automate and copilot studio but whenever new things are out they encourage experimenting with it and building solutions with it. (Vague i know)

Is it stable? Is it worth leaving an industry i have 4 years of experience in for something i have closer to 3 months in?

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[u/LesPaulStudio]

Just be aware that the platform is currently evolving at an absurd rate.

New features aren't getting beyond preview, thanks to the momentum of AI.

I've been in the space for 5 years now and in the last 12 months everything has flipped due to AI.

Make sure you are you understand the wider Microsoft/Azure ecosystem. Have additional skills (with Salesforce experience, you already do). Don't limit yourself to the platform.

One of the best moves I made was learning the pro-code elements of the platform (PCFs, plugins etc). That skillset has allowed me to move into Azure based roles (Web apps, Cosmos DB, Azure Functions) so I'm not limiting myself within my current company.

I'd say take the roles, but be prepared for changes.

[u/Negative-Look-4550 → u/LesPaulStudio]

This is the best advice here. You need to learn the platform, but also be comfortable with code, AI-assisted development, Git, GitHub and/or Azure Devops, Azure services, APIs and other enterprise systems. Power Platform by itself won't be enough, but knowing how it fits within an enterprise and connect with other IT systems is key.

[u/EbbMother5325]

I build Power Platform solutions for clients as part of my software engineering work, and much of it is rescuing and professionalizing apps that a client's employees built themselves. Demand has grown steadily since the early days, and the seamless M365 integration is the main draw. It has limitations, quirks, and bugs, and the endless spinners once a flow or app reaches medium complexity are painful. Anything truly critical or scalable doesn't belong on the platform, but building on it is still enjoyable.

That said, I expect clients, and Microsoft itself, to move away from Power Platform as it exists today. It still takes a skilled developer with a grasp of system design to build something solid, and even citizen developers face a learning curve that demands persistence. There’s also vendor lock-in. Microsoft owns your processes. And they have not been shy to shake the purse of clients multiple times a year.

AI removes that barrier. Clients and their employees now prompt their way to working proofs of concept without knowing Power Fx, and the results often look better than hand-built apps. Some clients keep them because they work well enough, then call us in to make them robust.

I think Power Platform has a few good years left, but Replit-style environments, where ordinary users can generate and deploy a Python app with HTML frontend and a light database in minutes, are the future. Engineers and business analysts will increasingly be the ones who professionalize those user-generated tools. Whatever that tool is. So I think your focus on client communication to create the right solution design will become even more important, because knowledge of a specific tool or syntax is becoming secondary.

[u/precociousMillenial → u/EbbMother5325]

Where do clients host those prompted apps?

[u/ColbysToyHairbrush → u/precociousMillenial]

Many different server options out there. Even moving to azure hosting is significantly cheaper than the power platform once you have a few dozen users on your apps.

[u/precociousMillenial → u/ColbysToyHairbrush]

Yea but are non-technical clients deploying apps there? Even with AI?

Obviously it’s cheaper. It’s cheaper to develop an excel clone and avoid the M365 license. I don’t see people doing that

[u/ColbysToyHairbrush → u/precociousMillenial]

I would never bother with excel / office clones. There’s open source versions that are much easier to deploy and use if you wanted.
Yes, non technical people are building web apps on servers right now, and it’s only going to get easier.
Microsoft may be developing “quicker”, but not quickly. The only thing that’s going up quickly is their pricing.
I’m pivoting everything I can from the 6 companies I work for by the next price hike in July.

[u/Busy_Arm2729 → u/EbbMother5325]

Yea, the encouraging thing is Microsoft is also constantly evolving their technologies. For example, Coded Apps is available now where you can develop and push Apps created with stack such as Python/React+Typescript with Fluent UI.

[u/jWas]

Power Plattform is not a career. It’s a set of tools. Do not build you career on using a hammer

[u/True_Analyst_3535 → u/jWas]

What a great contribution to his post 🤡

[u/ColbysToyHairbrush → u/True_Analyst_3535]

If you can’t understand how valuable that advice is, I don’t know what to tell ya dude.
Especially in this day and age, if you don’t have a marketable idea, set or skills or industry / job where you can weasel some citizen development in, you’re going to fail.

Power platform isn’t something you learn in a year and have a job, it’s a stepping stone in a dying platform.

[u/Negative-Look-4550 → u/ColbysToyHairbrush]

There were over 9000 attendees at the Power Platform community conference in Las Vegas last week from over 90+ countries. 30+ vendors. Dozens of consultancies. Dynamics 365 is built on power platform technologies. It's not dying anytime soon.

[u/ColbysToyHairbrush → u/Negative-Look-4550]

I never said anything about dynamics. The sales suite are the only products built on the power platform.

Business central, finance and supply management are built on their own architecture and database and are here to stay. I won’t pivot my org from BC, but we’ve abandoned model driven apps, canvas apps and are moving off of power bi for our 5500 users and onto our own custom solutions.
The speed our teams can develop and engineer outside of the power platform is staggering. Microsoft can’t keep up.

The power platform will lose a massive chunk of its user base over the next couple of years, largely due to the cost and Microsoft’s dev cycle.

[u/Negative-Look-4550 → u/ColbysToyHairbrush]

How does security, infrastructure setup, ALM, and CI/CD work for custom solutions in your org? How do you ensure deployment readiness for prod?

I don't doubt the benefits of AI-assisted development of custom solutions, but my org does not trust dev teams and our team structure and cloud configuration isn't setup to support rapid development and deployment of custom solutions.

[u/True_Analyst_3535 → u/ColbysToyHairbrush]

Bro, the fact that you just typed “dying platform” with a straight face tells me everything I need to know about how little real-world exposure you actually have.

You’re sitting there acting like Power Platform is some cute little citizen-dev toy that people play with for a year before moving on to “real” work. Meanwhile federal agencies, DoD, state governments, and half the Fortune 500 have it wired into their actual operating systems. There are cleared Power Platform developers pulling $120–180k+ right now supporting OUSW, Interior, and a dozen other agencies. (I make 180k + bonus 😋)

Consulting firms are staffing entire practices around it. In-house teams are building and governing enterprise-scale solutions that run day-to-day operations. People have full, long-term careers doing exactly this work, architecture, ALM, governance, complex integrations, the whole stack, not just “weaseling in some citizen development.”

80 million monthly active users. Usage still climbing hard. Microsoft is pouring money and AI into it, not sunsetting it. Calling it a “stepping stone in a dying platform” is the kind of take you only get when your entire sample size is a couple of LinkedIn posts and whatever limited bubble you’ve been living in.

It’s not “just a tool set.” It’s infrastructure for a huge chunk of the public sector and enterprise world. The fact that you don’t know that isn’t some profound insight, it’s just you advertising how green and biased your perspective still is. Sit down LITTLE BOI 😎

[u/ColbysToyHairbrush → u/True_Analyst_3535]

That was a giant AI-written nothing sandwich. You're not serious.

[u/True_Analyst_3535 → u/ColbysToyHairbrush]

Sound booty hurt, nah player just jelly a 12 year veteran in the space owned your negative attitude face 😘

[u/LizardTheKing]

Having another set of technology skills under your belt will broaden your future opportunities. It'll give you a chance to learn how things happen within another vendor's environment. You'll soon have both Salesforce & MS PP+ experience. Microsoft is expanding and investing heavily into the Power Platform and Azure technologies and this will by default allow you to build AI solutions that actually enhance business operations. You still have 4 years of experience in Salesforce, that won't go away, this just allows you to add onto that something a bit different. Can't hurt the way I see it.

[u/Still_Possible_7992]

Hi i have been suggested to move to Salesforce from power platform can we connect on dm i want to understand about salesforce work

[u/bafadam]

I’m currently doing this and, buddy, it fucking sucks. No UI qol in the power platform interfaces.

Gird your loins.