SAP

• Nice work environment, friendly coworkers, big monitors, and decent hardware for programming.
• Not too much stress related to delivery.
• Stock plan, RRSP matching, and other good benefits.
• Good place to put in your time and go home after.

Everything is “enterprisey” – everything moves slowly, with lots of red tape and politics in the way of doing the right thing.

There was a long-term vision of building a giant monolithic database to compete with Oracle, but written in JavaScript.

Separate, lengthy legal approvals were needed for every software library, including basics like jQuery.

I was at meetings where we were told customers didn’t buy our software because it was good or usable, but because they were contractually obligated to.

If you have passion for and take pride in what you build, this is not a place for you.

• Get rid of unnecessary red tape in the way of developers doing the right thing.
• Listen to your customers. If you don't build what they want, they will do their best to get out from under your thumb.
• Sometimes it's better to build something quick and usable to satisfy customers instead of burying it in layers of enterprise junk.
• Adapt to the changing world. Cloud is the way of the future, not super specialized monolithic databases that have to run on custom on-premise hardware.