SAP

• People are usually nice; you can virtually reach out to anyone in the company in various locations by email or phone, and someone can help you out.

• Benefits and stock options are available, but recently the transportation benefit was capped at $120, which means people who park at the office need to pay the difference from their pockets.

• It's a pretty stable company; the only major layoff happened in 2008.

• There's occasional international travel (Germany!), an IT conference program, trips to customers, and top talent fellowships with relocation.

• If you work hard (50-60 hours a week), management usually notices and gives different perks.

• Challenging projects can lead to good customer exposure or experience working with customers directly.

• Underperformance is not addressed. Every team has 1-2 slackers, and it is sometimes very hard to achieve goals if several people simply come to work to collect the paycheck. In other companies, these people would not survive, but the manager would not address the issues because of fear of losing headcount.

• My team/manager does not allow working from home.

• Scrum teams with many different roles but not so many developers ;-))

• A fat layer of product and solution management shields from customers.

• A lot of talented, motivated developers have left the team since no progression in their careers happened.

• The technical level of expertise of employees is lower when you compare with other top IT companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple (feedback from ex-SAP employees).

• Montreal is still a small location on the outskirts of the SAP empire. Everything happens in Walldorf, Germany, which means if you reached T4 level (expert), your career is mainly finished, since there are no positions of T5 level in Montreal.

• Constant fight over projects with other locations. Walldorf dictates most decisions on architecture and product level.

• Having Sun Life as a provider of medical insurance results in wasted time fighting over medical expenses (a lot of claims are rejected).

• Consolidate development teams in Montreal to work on a focused area; do not distribute the teams across multiple industries, departments, or products.

While we have around 600-700 developers, Montreal has no power since every team is stuffed on heterogeneous, disconnected projects. Why should we split projects between Montreal, Walldorf, and Bangalore when we have the manpower to do it solely here?

• Offer more positions of T5 level or clearly guide on the path to achieve the next level.