SAP Concur Software Design Engineer I reviews

Development Majority of code being developed in obsolete ASP vbscript copy&paste way Insane abuse of technologies - only right use of C# is by latest fashion putting everything in app_code and untyped variables Innovation - movement to C# MVC3 (yes, not MVC4) being pretty much copy paste of ASP code to C# reintroducing same spaghetti issues, lack of 5 minutes thinking before coding and even making things worse Software architects - absent, those supplying their function have poor knowledge of language and zero knowledge about architecture Controlled by technically challenged - many development senior managers/directors have development skills of underperforming student of first year tech university degree (lack of knowledge of data types, elementary problems of combinatorics, uniqueness, no clue about paralellism, difference between application and business logic etc. etc.) Database - No normal forms, decomposition, proper use of relations, indexing, primary keys. It's big, it's slow and 99% redundant. Attribute names (columns) don't reflect in what's stored in them often. Design patterns - according to dev directors useless Reinventing the wheel - frequent, though Concur wheel is more a triangle. Coding standards - absent, and fixing code structure is forbidden. Thousands lines methods, hungarian notation, spaghetti code, lots of classes in one cs file, public static everything Documentation - non-existant, some laughable bits in one-note Common sense - lots of problems can be properly solved with common sense... correctly. In this Concur forces anti-common sense Features, features - features are always more important than bugfixes Zero support for reasonable (read any) automated testing (or well, any sense making testing) Resulting web pages are completely invalid - violating HTML rules, terrible accessibility (table inside table inside table inside table), css styles often hardcoded in element style attribute instead of css file. In fact it's close to miracle browsers are able to render Concur output in quirk mode. You are not allowed to point out problems. No matter how careful you are with your tone you always insult some technically challenged superior because you point out severe problems in his hacks (concur doesn't develop, concur hacks). Corporate You kill your career if you were good enough to pass first year in tech university, if you failed it it's place for you. Extreme ammount of favorism, promoting good shoe kissers and those who sit in the company for longer time... regardless if they are underskilled enough not to pass trial period anywhere else. If you work hard you are ignored, don't expect any promotions unless you keep kissing the right shoes. Recruiting They lie you big time, claiming they use modern technologies etc. Well, if ASP vbscript is considered modern, then they speak the truth.

Concur is using an obsolete technology stack and is not making any progress toward getting rid of it. Its a career dead end for developers. There are over a million lines of classic asp in the legacy code base with thousands of new lines of vbs added every month. It is quite spaghetti. Very few people understand it, and even people who have worked there for many years can't answer questions about features that they wrote. New hires are going to struggle and spend days writing one line fixes for simple customer cases, because debugging the code is a nightmare. It is not cleanly structured, meaning business logic and UI logic are mixed together inside functions that span thousands of lines. There are no coding standards or conventions in the asp code base so even reading it is difficult.