It's a good place to work. As with any large enterprise, there's quite some politics going on between org units and teams, but my direct managers are committed

It's a good place to work. As with any large enterprise, there's quite some politics going on between org units and teams, but my direct managers are committed to shielding the team from most of it so that we can stay productive. As for whether SAP software is "impossibly hard to manage and develop for", I cannot comment on it much since I'm working in cloud infrastructure, so I'm mostly dealing with Docker, Kubernetes, Openstack, etc. I've seen a bit of SAP software, and IMO a good way to think about it is that an SAP system is kind of like a separate operating system. It's a completely different world. And just like I (a Unix guy) would be completely lost if you asked me to manage a Windows Server system or develop for it, same with the SAP system. Most people only ever learn to use it in the same way most people who come in contract are only users with no deep admin/dev knowledge. So the question is if you can find someone who has deep-enough knowledge of the system to implement or configure what you need. That's hard especially for the kernel. If you're running Linux, it's not that hard to hire someone with kernel development experience. For the SAP kernel, it's next to impossible. All these guys work for SAP.