I am the COO of Salesforce. Two of the top ten jobs on Indeed are Salesforce Admin and Salesforce Developer, and the jobs are distributed around the world. We have a ton of stories of folks transitioning into the ecosystem and developing an extremely successful career.
Notably, our certifications are freely available at https://www.trailhead.com/. You can get started, learn, and get credentials for free. It is a great place to start, and we purposely made our learning and credentialing free so we could make it as easy as possible for folks pivoting mid-career into Salesforce.
I would be happy to point you in the right direction. My email is [email protected].
Everyone says that but I have not experienced it. In practice, I think this impacts backend extension developers more than people targeting LLVM IR. My experience covers version 7-11, but perhaps it used to be worse?
At FriendFeed, when we first introduced real-time comments and likes (pretty sure we were the first social network to do this), we did it with long-polling via an iFrame because web sockets did not exist. It actually worked pretty well!