Ask HN: What do you think about SAP?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13284864

by ffggvv • 10 years ago

1 7 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It's worth a career in SAP?

jamesmp982• 10 years ago

I think it really depends. Recently, niche fields like SAP have seemed attractive to me. They are not too hard to pick up, generally high paying, and may even make it easier getting a job. However, I began to think.

I would say yes if you have experience developing enterprise applications. And by experience, I mean you've spent the last 5 years doing it for a living. SAP is primarily used by large enterprises, so people hiring for SAP positions probably will not hire self-taught a SAP developer with no on-the-job SAP experience or without experience working with enterprise software.

I, for example, would be screwed. I am 100% self-taught developer (i.e. no degree) with no experience in SAP or developing enterprise applications. While I could pick those things up with relative ease, I'd have nothing to show that I can work with those technologies (and please don't say side-projects)

To sum it up. Have you been involved with enterprise-ish stuff? If so, I'd say try it, if not, I'd stay away from it.

ffggvv2• 10 years ago

I worked with SAP for the last 6 months. I'm not sure whether to continue...

dozzie3• 10 years ago

SAP, with all their wealth, is a company that will stay around for a long, long time, and it will stay in the place where it makes plenty of money. With this, it seems to be a very stable, predictable, and well-paid career.

On the other hand, it makes a very boring career, unless you like to dig in business processes and talk to customers, with IT/technology being merely a supporting tool.

If you find your work boring, my advice for you is to look for a different job, because your job won't become more interesting (technology-wise) in the future.

dozzie3• 10 years ago

[...] people hiring for SAP positions probably will not hire self-taught a SAP developer with no on-the-job SAP experience or without experience working with enterprise software.

They will hire even a fresh graduate with no experience whatsoever, but I think you misunderstand the landscape around the SAP ERP.

From what I hear, a company that has SAP deployed is not allowed by the contract to develop their own extensions and modules. Instead, they are to hire external consultancy that has SAP's approval. So it's SAP consultancy shops that would or would not hire a programmer to write for SAP ERP. (I may be wrong here, because ERP systems are very far from my field. I just happened to work in the vicinity of an ERP system a decade ago.)

Having that said, two of my friends were hired by such a company. They had no programming experience, they had just finished part-time CS studies (which in my country are tought of as of worse quality than full-time studies), and for both of them the studies were retraining from some other, unrelated field (architecture and HR, respectively). Of course they were tasked with grunt work, exactly as one would expect, but they got into the field of writing for SAP ERP, so it certainly is possible.

jamesmp982• 10 years ago

Wow that's an odd contract. I was assuming the OP was referring to SAP HANA. My mistake :P

Ask HN: What do you think about SAP?

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