SAP

• You can chill a lot and coast along. Variable comp parts are very minimal, and firings are pretty uncommon despite bad performance. TLDR: Perfect company for coasting and retirement.
• Perks are OK (but not great).

Working for SAP, especially if you are in the Bay Area and want to have a career with a meaningful purpose or compensation, is one of the worst life choices you can make.

There are a ton of problems at SAP, but I believe many of them are symptoms of an extremely below-market compensation and incentive structure that nurtures and rewards a culture of mediocrity.

The key problem areas are: Compensation (Note this is from the perspective of Engineering):

• The compensation at SAP Palo Alto is severely below market. New Grads often get only around ~100k TC (total incl. bonus and stock!), and even as a seasoned engineer and high performer, it is extremely difficult to get 200k total comp. Most folks I know earn between 100-150k (again incl. bonus and stocks) and have around 5 YoE and are usually pretty high performing. While "100-150k" sounds like a lot somewhere else, this is ridiculously bad for a company of SAP's size in the Bay Area when you are a high performer. Almost every startup, no matter how small, will pay you more base than what SAP offers as total comp and give you a generous stock option package on top. Most bigger companies of SAP's size will pay you at least 1.5x, often times 2x than SAP (FANG would go even 2.5x-3x if you get lucky). Furthermore, the salary progression is very slow. If you progress as a high performer, you often get only between 2-4% salary increase per year. During a promotion, you will normally get at max only get 10/11% more, often times less than that. Note, typically you can get a promotion earliest every 2 years. On top of that, almost everyone with your YoE gets paid the same, no matter how good or bad you're performing. I.e., if you perform 10x to the worst person in your team, you're probably still just earning about the same, max 10% more. Managers get a very small bonus and salary raise pool that they have to distribute between folks. Furthermore, the pool size doesn't depend on the performance of the team. If you are in a team with only high performers, the pool size is the same as in teams with only low performers. Altogether, the comp level is extremely low and the system does not reward performance, therefore everybody is just coasting and the whole atmosphere is very demoralizing.

Extremely political and bad decision-making: Most of the middle management is extremely political and just trying to keep their job / justify their existence and increase their teams' headcount instead of actually making the right technology and product decisions in the interest of the company. I had one SVP even admitting this to me and saying that at SAP, "SVPs are like dukes fighting to keep power over their own little kingdom." If you want to experience GoT in real life, be SAP's guest. Often, multiple organizations worldwide work on a very similar problem, but instead of joining forces, they're just making up arbitrary differences to avoid a conflict and keep their SVPs independent. Important technology decisions are made by SVPs and Architects in committees where 90% of the people haven't written a single line of code in decades. Every tech decision is affected by the "not-invented-here syndrome," and instead of reusing existing proven OSS tech for non-differentiated components, a bad SAP-copy of a technology is developed because leaders believe they can easier sell proprietary SAP tech for top $$$ to their customers. This works in the beginning with some naive SAP fanboy customers but never leads to an industry-leading product or technology and long-term always leads to the same result: SAP losing in favor of a much better and cheaper competitor. In general, whoever makes the best PPT slides and talks the loudest gets to make decisions and promotions. SAP is a sales machine and not a tech company, unfortunately.

Immigration Policies: The immigration policies at SAP are an absolute nightmare. First of all, you have to beg your manager and HR to file H1Bs and GCs. For GCs, you have to be 3 years with the company until they start the process, unless you get an exception approval. If you leave the company within 1 year after getting the GC, you have to pay back all the lawyer and filing expenses. The immigration team (HR and Lawyers) are extremely unresponsive and often times don't answer for weeks or months to your emails. You basically have to beg your manager to follow up with HR / immigration on your behalf, and even your manager doesn't get answers for weeks at times. Furthermore, they have some weird policies like that you have to be in a particular T-level (career level at SAP) to file a GC in a particular category. For example, for GC EB-3, you have to be in T2. If you are already in T3, this means in some cases your manager has to temporarily demote you to T2 in order to start the GC process, which is just another way of keeping your comp down. Many folks I know are visa-trapped inside SAP on an L1 or E1 visa, and SAP uses the visa trap to keep folks inside the company on their subpar comp. Those folks would leave the company within a blink of an eye once they get the right visa.

Subpar Technology and Engineering: The engineering and technology at SAP is pretty bad overall. Because of the politics, often times bad tech decisions are made, and because of the bad comp, SAP can't get the right talent to consistently create good tech. A lot of the core technologies that you have to use in your day-to-day work were developed and are pushed by the HQ in Walldorf, where people live in their own bubble and rarely hear or acknowledge tech industry trends before it's too late. Over-engineering is a serious problem as well.

For context, I just want to add that I've worked at SAP multiple years, both in Walldorf HQ and in Palo Alto. The experiences described not only represent my personal ones but are consistent with the experiences of my network in multiple teams and locations, incl. US, Germany, and India. The only location which I would mildly recommend is SAP Germany due to very good perks and OK-ish comp (that being said, there are much better alternatives there too). It honestly appears like a miracle to me that SAP has a 4.4 Glassdoor rating and is rated as a Best Place to Work, but that can probably be explained with SAP being very good at marketing bad stuff as gold.

• Pay market salaries and reward your performers for real.
• Don't enslave employees with restrictive and slow visa filing policies and treat them as humans.
• Fire the bottom 50% and pay the remaining folks 2x to stay competitive. No kidding.