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Lots of politics and German-focused

Software Developer
Current Employee
Has worked at SAP for 2 years
December 24, 2017
Singapore, Singapore
3.0
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

Great benefit and health insurance.

Great middle-level manager (at least mine is).

Work-life balance.

Got interesting products, the latest technologies to work on.

Culture is friendly, warm.

Actively engage employees.

The company is steering in the right innovation direction.

Nice, smart colleagues.

Very stable.

Cons

I love this company, but it's not without its problems. Hopefully, someone can read this and help to improve SAP.

  1. Politics is prevalent. Favoritism is popular.
  2. Seniority still favors over meritocracy.
  3. Discrimination is pretty prevalent. There is a big difference in treatment between German/White/Germany-office employees and all others:
    • Same job but German/white people always got higher titles even they are hired at the same time, in the same department and doing the same things. It applies to everyone in my department. Needless to say, the salary will be different.
    • Slow promotion for non-German/non-white employees.
    • A number of people just got promoted to managers because they are German. I know a few German managers who are doing very little, know literally nothing about the field they're managing, always on vacation but still got promoted quickly to director and VP. It's so crazy. Germans employees sometimes are pretty arrogant and don't value the opinions of their colleagues. The above reason also makes the product uncompetitive because the weak managers who oversee the products have little knowledge in the relevant fields.
  4. Heavy processes which really slow down innovation.
  5. Inadequate equipment. E.g.: impossible to request for 2 monitors.
Advice to Management

Treat employees equally.

Remove unnecessary processes.

Benchmark managers by their competency and leadership, not by their relationships and races.

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