SAP

The company's long-term prospects are looking great. The Vancouver location, especially, has lots of opportunity because it's home to the development of SAP's most successful "homemade" (non-acquisition) cloud product, SAP Analytics Cloud. The product is also part of the core strategy now.

It's a very respectful, healthy place to work. The company has really good values, resulting in everyone being professional, respectful, and nice to each other.

There are lots of really smart people to work with and learn from.

There's lots of really challenging, interesting work to go around. There's also lots of movement towards newer technologies. There will be no shortage of demand for development work, or opportunities to challenge yourself if that's what you want to do.

Good work-life balance is promoted. Devs aren't on-call all the time. There's no expectation to be constantly crunching, unlike other places.

High performers are recognized and rewarded. There are lots of opportunities for advancement.

People with ideas and opinions on how things can improve are encouraged to share, especially if you're willing to be part of the solution.

• SAP is in the "A-tier" of compensation, but not "S-tier". There are a few other companies in Vancouver that pay the top of the top (about 2.5x the average), whereas SAP is in the level below that (2x the average). The kind of talent at SAP is about the same, so you do take a pay cut in exchange for better work-life balance. This also causes issues with losing some really good talent to competitors.

• Culture changes as the product in Vancouver Labs starts to mature. Less startup-like perks, less free-flow spending on miscellaneous things like free food, events, etc.

• Technology challenges such as old frameworks that can be difficult to work with (SAP UI5), technical debt, etc. There is still lots of work left to overcome these challenges, all the while needing to balance the need for aggressive product growth.

SAP is a top-tier company that wants to attract top-tier talent, but we haven't reached the level of compensation needed to truly stay competitive with other top-tier companies in Vancouver. With the market only getting hotter, we need to start adjusting our pay to move into the next tier and take away any reason why a top-tier candidate (or current employees) would choose another company over SAP.