SAP

Work-life balance

Beautiful campus in Palo Alto

Healthy Company Culture & Values

Good Early Talent Programs

Great food on campus

• Terrible compensation at SAP Silicon Valley/Bay Area. Even though I have always been a top performer in my team (I've been an SAP Catalyst several times), even with my promotions/progressions, I have stayed at 70% of my level's median salary. Raises have been around 3-4%. My only option (I'm bound to SAP through my Visa and slow GC processing) was to switch to a company SAP acquired, which I did. Suddenly, it was the most normal thing in the world to be paid 100% of my level's median salary.

• Slow Green Card processing. I'm not affected by this, but many of my peers complain about it. SAP uses Fragomen for Visa processing, and they are terribly slow. Expect a single email to be answered by Fragomen after 4 weeks, sometimes two months. Now figure how many years some people wait to just get their GC process started.

• Incompetent people and product management. Most managers have no idea how cloud software is built and how dev teams have to be organized.

• Reporting lines across the ocean and back.

• Terrible product quality. I do not know a single SAP product that I enjoy using. Everything is just hacked together.

• In the very end, no real value-creating work. Software development at SAP is mainly about stitching together acquisitions with our core. All the newer stuff (machine learning, IoT, blockchain, etc.) is done with comparatively low investment (politically and with resources), mostly driven by non-technical people instead of "value engineering".

• I haven't seen a single "innovation" project succeed at SAP within the past 5 years (Leonardo, etc.). Everything is just stitched together somehow with no real strategy.

Let incompetent people go, pay better than Google, and hire the best in the industry. Change people manager roles to engineering manager roles, up to the CTO.