An average tech company on the continues decline
Pros
Pay and benefits are still good and some learning is possible.
Cons
SAP used to be a good company, from the employee and product point of view, however, it continues to decline in both areas. 1) Pay – still good overall, however, it comes with a price of high demands, long working hours and negatively impacted work / life balance. 2) Benefits – look god on “paper”, however, in reality hard to utilize. Time off is negatively affected by high demands, learning advancement hard to get as it is linked to manager’s budget / performance, and the rest is similar to other tech companies. 3) Management / company structure – different in various parts, however, overall highly hierarchical and focused on German top management. Company rewards qualities that in many cases lead to promoting “bad” managers. Leadership and vision are negatively affected as many in top positions left the company. The current top management is just supervising the operation. 4) Job security – relatively low if you are outside of EU. German / European employees are unionized and protected by EU law, so any workforce changes only affect those outside of EU. Layoffs often happen behind the scenes. 5) Products / innovation - SAP used to innovate internally, however, for some time the focus has been on just acquiring. The acquisitions had a varying level of success, yet almost none went well. The result is a suite of disjoined products requiring ongoing fixes, corrections and many time re-architecting. Switch to the subscription model shifted the burden of those issues to SAP employees. 6) People - the company has been steadily losing top talent / performers. 6) Other – financials are heavily influenced by outside investors. You can still learn something for your next step; however, plan than next step early.
