10 ms·

I am an SAP developer since kind of forever, my first job after university (since 2009). First I hated it, but the deeper I am entrenched, the more I see why yo

by _glass 4y ago

I am an SAP developer since kind of forever, my first job after university (since 2009). First I hated it, but the deeper I am entrenched, the more I see why you choose SAP: Because there really is no alternative. The data model is so complex because it is growing iteratively since the 80s. Hacker News is valuing businesses that adjust to the customer instead of going for some kind of purity. Another complexity especially now is the different paradigm changes in between. ABAP, the programming language of SAP, is quite nice nowadays. CDSViews are a great invention, and so on. There's really a lot of innovation buried in the bad documentation, it's getting better. In summary as bad as it is, I don't see an alternative for all of the backoffice work. SAP is really flexible and supports a lot of different processes. A thing that makes it so costly is a lot of time culture, no small releases, MVP, and so on. But you can be agile with SAP, especially if you move to the cloud.

ilitirit 4y ago
> it's getting better. This should be the SAP tagline. I swear I've heard this since I started working with SAP in maybe 2009(?) as well - I had a brief stint as an ABAP developer.
zxienin 4y ago
> But you can be agile with SAP, especially if you move to the cloud. Does SAP even have ERP in the „real“ cloud?
- _glass 4y ago
  Yes, sure https://www.sap.com/products/erp/s4hana.html https://www.sap.com/products/erp/s4hana.html It's quite nice, even though they do some crazy (also cool) stuff with it https://blogs.sap.com/2021/09/30/steampunk-is-going-all-in/ https://blogs.sap.com/2021/09/30/steampunk-is-going-all-in/
  - zxienin 4y ago
    No, S4HANA is marketed as cloud. Reality is different. How common is „three system landscape“ in cloud, like S4HANA? Elastic scaling? No. TCO footprint of an new tenant? Sigh.
    - _glass 4y ago
      There are two versions, the on-premise landscape and the cloud version. The on-premise version makes sense sometimes. You can even deploy SAP platform to cloud foundry.
    - taway19920706 4y ago
      Indeed, for a long time it seemed like SAP didn't "get" cloud. Having to sign long contracts and speak to an account executive to get access to their cloud platform (rebranded every few months, now "Business Technology Platform", BTP) was the way they did things. Contrast with Google, Amazon, etc. I've not yet used S/4HANA Cloud (only the on-premise version), but it looks to me like it's just a hosted version of standard S/4HANA but with various restrictions on what you can customise etc. No real elasticity, cloud scaling, etc. SAP ERP has been multi-tenant since at least R/3 in 1992 (I never used R/2) so "Cloud ERP" smells to me like "we host it for you and call it cloud". Yes, I am rather cynical at times.
meibo 4y ago
This is a genuine question, I don't mean to rip on you: Why is everything SAP I've used terrible? From payroll, employee/student management to industrial control systems - the UX is horrible and it seems so brittle that you're happy if you're out of there as quickly as possible. I've had to reach out to my school's IT multiple times over the years since random parts of the SAP tool they used break.
- _glass 4y ago
  I think it's mostly the culture surrounding SAP. SAP developers are a lot of times slow to adapt to new technology. For the UI you can use react components https://sap.github.io/ui5-webcomponents-react/?path=/story/getting-started--page https://sap.github.io/ui5-webcomponents-react/?path=/story/g... or you can just generate OData services from CDS Views that are then integrated into your frontend https://blogs.sap.com/2022/02/24/sap-cds-for-new-and-experienced-professionals/ https://blogs.sap.com/2022/02/24/sap-cds-for-new-and-experie.... The problem is that a lot of people use SAP as a front end, which is wrong in my experience.
  - zeroth32 4y ago
    SAP can be quite innovative. I remember SAP circa 2003. The only think that used XMLHttpRequest (AJAX aka dynamic html) was Outlook web frontend, and SAP web UI. GMail that widely popularized dynamic html did not even existed yet.
    - cygx 4y ago
      AJAX and DHTML are not synonyms: The latter predates the former and refers to interactivity via client-side scripting.
    - taway19920706 4y ago
      Did the WebGUI really use AJAX in 2003? IIRC the early versions still used the old standalone (AGate/WGate) ITS, not even the integrated version.
    - pdpi 4y ago
fabfabfab 4y ago
Speaking of purity, the first thing Hacker News would do is try to run SAP on a Kubernetes cluster, refactor crucial bits in Rust and shard the database into sqlite3.db files on per user basis. We'd also recommend you restructure your office for a more open space, bring down the cubicles and make sure the conference rooms are glasswalled and have funny names. Bringing pets to work is mandatory.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  And ironically, the end result would be worse and more complicated, but the people that worked on it would get to write a blog and put it on their CV about it, and move on elsewhere without having to live with their own decisions.
  - jdhzzz 4y ago
    Declare victory and move on...
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Way better than declaring victory and staying for sure.
- _glass 4y ago
  :D You can run SAP in the cloud on Kubernetes: https://cap.cloud.sap/docs/guides/deployment/deploy-to-kyma https://cap.cloud.sap/docs/guides/deployment/deploy-to-kyma Also you can re-write everything in Rust https://blogs.sap.com/2020/07/23/learning-rust-with-cap-part-1/ https://blogs.sap.com/2020/07/23/learning-rust-with-cap-part...
  - davidkunz 4y ago
    Ah, that's my blog post :)
    - taway19920706 4y ago
jasode 4y ago
>, but the deeper I am entrenched, the more I see why you choose SAP: Because there really is no alternative. The data model is so complex because it is growing iteratively since the 80s. Yes, the scope of ERP and SAP is so immense that even other software companies that have competency in the business of programming also buy SAP licenses instead of coding their own home-grown ERP system. E.g. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google all run SAP. Microsoft even has their own ERP software (Dynamics GP acquired from Great Plains Software) and yet they run SAP. Microsoft sells Dynamics GP to mid-tier businesses but they don't use it internally for the consolidated financial accounting of their complex multinational business. And in an interview about Google's early days, one of the employees recommended that they install ERP system like SAP and co-founder Sergei Brin was skeptical saying "Why would they need to buy that when their programmers could just code it themselves?!?" Well, Google did eventually buy Oracle Financials ERP and then eventually switched to SAP: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+migrates+oracle+financial++to+sap https://www.google.com/search?q=google+migrates+oracle+finan... If you're a brand new YC startup, you're not going to need a complex behemoth like SAP ERP. Maybe Quickbooks or some SaaS service for accounting & HR/Payroll is all you need. However, if the business grows enough (i.e. multinational), you'd be wasting money by paying your own staff programmers to re-invent what SAP already does. Just pay the millions in SAP licenses. It's expensive but still cheaper than trying to do it yourself.
tus666 4y ago
Isn't Salesforce the alternative?
- rjtavares 4y ago
  No, it's Oracle.
- stu2b50 4y ago
  Salesforce is a crm not an erp, which is SAP's main offering, to the point where SAP is almost synonymous with its ERP product.
D_Alex 4y ago
I am a project manager and a SAP user. First I hated it. And the more I used it, the more I hated it. It's like a really, really uncomfortable chair, strong, but designed with zero attention to ergonomics.
mdip 4y ago
After participating in the hiring of an SAP developer I realized -- financially speaking, anyway -- that I picked the wrong thing to specialize in. The first time we brought in someone truly experienced in SAP development, we paid him more than any other developer on staff[0]. I appreciate the different take on SAP. Can I ask -- is it still as lucrative to be an SAP developer? [0] This was a global multi-national telecom who ran an in-house developed audio conferencing service (written entirely in C++, interacting with a lot of hardware) ... the skillset of some of our devs was incredible, which made this all the more surprising.
- NamTaf 4y ago
  SAP developers aren't paid because they're more talented than other developers, they're paid because the niche in which they're deeply embedded extracts extreme business value. It may take just as much talent to write interfaces for obscure audio hardware and deal with janky bluetooth edge cases, but that doesn't mint the same $$$$ as a SAP guru who refactors a business process to be more efficient.
- _glass 4y ago
  Depends what you're comparing it to. Even in Germany it's a niche skill set, that has a higher payment than the average Java guy, but with enough skills you can get paid the same for any specialization, e.g. security, cloud-computing. I changed to solution architect recently, which is a bit removed from SAP work itself.
progfix 4y ago
> ABAP, the programming language of SAP, is quite nice nowadays I took a brief look at the ABAP wikipedia article and this insanity [1] stood out to me. I think after a decade of SAP you are too brain-washed to give an objective opinion anymore. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABAP#Spaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABAP#Spaces
- flavius29663 4y ago
  For a regular software developer, ABAP is pure insanity. But it has powerful data manipulation procedures, it's easy to just create and manipulate all your data tables in any way you want.
- bhandziuk 4y ago
  Wow, that's a real landmine
- starik36 4y ago
  Wow. That is pretty insane. I hope there is a tooling to surface a warning when it detects this. But lots of domain specific languages have idiosyncrasies. The Apex language used to program Salesforce is a half-implemented clone of Java from a decade ago. And they didn't cherry pick the best parts.
  - selfmodruntime 4y ago
    Some companies will be forever scarred by the past trend to create an entirely new programming language for their product when an existing one could‘ve been entirely sufficient
- selfmodruntime 4y ago
  Oh my god
slim 4y ago
any pointers for a good introduction to SAP developement ? I need to integrate with SAP for one of our customers
- _glass 4y ago
  maybe this one: https://open.sap.com/courses/abap1 https://open.sap.com/courses/abap1 In general open.sap.com is the site where you can learn stuff. but depending on your customer's stack it might be different.
vezuchyy 4y ago
Hey, I worked for SAP for ten years and I don't agree with you. ABAP is still ugly with all its improvements, version control system and developer experience is awful. CDS views are great until they aren't, then we had this newest feature where you build apps with metadata on top of CDS views and that's where I decided that it's not a software development anymore. I do see how Fiori launchpad is a great thing, how HANA is extremely powerful if you know what you're doing. At the same time I couldn't stand the corporate culture, QA processes and etc anymore. There're innovations and innovative teams but for the most things SAP is doing, software development is not the core competency. Fun fact: I work with Datapath now (if you know what it is then you get an irony)

by _glass 4y ago

ilitirit 4y ago

> it's getting better. This should be the SAP tagline. I swear I've heard this since I started working with SAP in maybe 2009(?) as well - I had a brief stint as an ABAP developer.

zxienin 4y ago

> But you can be agile with SAP, especially if you move to the cloud. Does SAP even have ERP in the „real“ cloud?

_glass 4y ago
Yes, sure https://www.sap.com/products/erp/s4hana.html https://www.sap.com/products/erp/s4hana.html It's quite nice, even though they do some crazy (also cool) stuff with it https://blogs.sap.com/2021/09/30/steampunk-is-going-all-in/ https://blogs.sap.com/2021/09/30/steampunk-is-going-all-in/
- zxienin 4y ago
  No, S4HANA is marketed as cloud. Reality is different. How common is „three system landscape“ in cloud, like S4HANA? Elastic scaling? No. TCO footprint of an new tenant? Sigh.
  - _glass 4y ago
    There are two versions, the on-premise landscape and the cloud version. The on-premise version makes sense sometimes. You can even deploy SAP platform to cloud foundry.
  - taway19920706 4y ago
    Indeed, for a long time it seemed like SAP didn't "get" cloud. Having to sign long contracts and speak to an account executive to get access to their cloud platform (rebranded every few months, now "Business Technology Platform", BTP) was the way they did things. Contrast with Google, Amazon, etc. I've not yet used S/4HANA Cloud (only the on-premise version), but it looks to me like it's just a hosted version of standard S/4HANA but with various restrictions on what you can customise etc. No real elasticity, cloud scaling, etc. SAP ERP has been multi-tenant since at least R/3 in 1992 (I never used R/2) so "Cloud ERP" smells to me like "we host it for you and call it cloud". Yes, I am rather cynical at times.

meibo 4y ago

This is a genuine question, I don't mean to rip on you: Why is everything SAP I've used terrible? From payroll, employee/student management to industrial control systems - the UX is horrible and it seems so brittle that you're happy if you're out of there as quickly as possible. I've had to reach out to my school's IT multiple times over the years since random parts of the SAP tool they used break.

_glass 4y ago
I think it's mostly the culture surrounding SAP. SAP developers are a lot of times slow to adapt to new technology. For the UI you can use react components https://sap.github.io/ui5-webcomponents-react/?path=/story/getting-started--page https://sap.github.io/ui5-webcomponents-react/?path=/story/g... or you can just generate OData services from CDS Views that are then integrated into your frontend https://blogs.sap.com/2022/02/24/sap-cds-for-new-and-experienced-professionals/ https://blogs.sap.com/2022/02/24/sap-cds-for-new-and-experie.... The problem is that a lot of people use SAP as a front end, which is wrong in my experience.
- zeroth32 4y ago
  SAP can be quite innovative. I remember SAP circa 2003. The only think that used XMLHttpRequest (AJAX aka dynamic html) was Outlook web frontend, and SAP web UI. GMail that widely popularized dynamic html did not even existed yet.
  - cygx 4y ago
    AJAX and DHTML are not synonyms: The latter predates the former and refers to interactivity via client-side scripting.
  - taway19920706 4y ago
    Did the WebGUI really use AJAX in 2003? IIRC the early versions still used the old standalone (AGate/WGate) ITS, not even the integrated version.
  - pdpi 4y ago

fabfabfab 4y ago

Speaking of purity, the first thing Hacker News would do is try to run SAP on a Kubernetes cluster, refactor crucial bits in Rust and shard the database into sqlite3.db files on per user basis. We'd also recommend you restructure your office for a more open space, bring down the cubicles and make sure the conference rooms are glasswalled and have funny names. Bringing pets to work is mandatory.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
And ironically, the end result would be worse and more complicated, but the people that worked on it would get to write a blog and put it on their CV about it, and move on elsewhere without having to live with their own decisions.
- jdhzzz 4y ago
  Declare victory and move on...
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Way better than declaring victory and staying for sure.
_glass 4y ago
:D You can run SAP in the cloud on Kubernetes: https://cap.cloud.sap/docs/guides/deployment/deploy-to-kyma https://cap.cloud.sap/docs/guides/deployment/deploy-to-kyma Also you can re-write everything in Rust https://blogs.sap.com/2020/07/23/learning-rust-with-cap-part-1/ https://blogs.sap.com/2020/07/23/learning-rust-with-cap-part...
- davidkunz 4y ago
  Ah, that's my blog post :)
  - taway19920706 4y ago

jasode 4y ago

>, but the deeper I am entrenched, the more I see why you choose SAP: Because there really is no alternative. The data model is so complex because it is growing iteratively since the 80s. Yes, the scope of ERP and SAP is so immense that even other software companies that have competency in the business of programming also buy SAP licenses instead of coding their own home-grown ERP system. E.g. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google all run SAP. Microsoft even has their own ERP software (Dynamics GP acquired from Great Plains Software) and yet they run SAP. Microsoft sells Dynamics GP to mid-tier businesses but they don't use it internally for the consolidated financial accounting of their complex multinational business. And in an interview about Google's early days, one of the employees recommended that they install ERP system like SAP and co-founder Sergei Brin was skeptical saying "Why would they need to buy that when their programmers could just code it themselves?!?" Well, Google did eventually buy Oracle Financials ERP and then eventually switched to SAP: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+migrates+oracle+financial++to+sap https://www.google.com/search?q=google+migrates+oracle+finan... If you're a brand new YC startup, you're not going to need a complex behemoth like SAP ERP. Maybe Quickbooks or some SaaS service for accounting & HR/Payroll is all you need. However, if the business grows enough (i.e. multinational), you'd be wasting money by paying your own staff programmers to re-invent what SAP already does. Just pay the millions in SAP licenses. It's expensive but still cheaper than trying to do it yourself.

tus666 4y ago

Isn't Salesforce the alternative?

rjtavares 4y ago
No, it's Oracle.
stu2b50 4y ago
Salesforce is a crm not an erp, which is SAP's main offering, to the point where SAP is almost synonymous with its ERP product.

D_Alex 4y ago

I am a project manager and a SAP user. First I hated it. And the more I used it, the more I hated it. It's like a really, really uncomfortable chair, strong, but designed with zero attention to ergonomics.

mdip 4y ago

After participating in the hiring of an SAP developer I realized -- financially speaking, anyway -- that I picked the wrong thing to specialize in. The first time we brought in someone truly experienced in SAP development, we paid him more than any other developer on staff[0]. I appreciate the different take on SAP. Can I ask -- is it still as lucrative to be an SAP developer? [0] This was a global multi-national telecom who ran an in-house developed audio conferencing service (written entirely in C++, interacting with a lot of hardware) ... the skillset of some of our devs was incredible, which made this all the more surprising.

NamTaf 4y ago
SAP developers aren't paid because they're more talented than other developers, they're paid because the niche in which they're deeply embedded extracts extreme business value. It may take just as much talent to write interfaces for obscure audio hardware and deal with janky bluetooth edge cases, but that doesn't mint the same $$$$ as a SAP guru who refactors a business process to be more efficient.
_glass 4y ago
Depends what you're comparing it to. Even in Germany it's a niche skill set, that has a higher payment than the average Java guy, but with enough skills you can get paid the same for any specialization, e.g. security, cloud-computing. I changed to solution architect recently, which is a bit removed from SAP work itself.

progfix 4y ago

> ABAP, the programming language of SAP, is quite nice nowadays I took a brief look at the ABAP wikipedia article and this insanity [1] stood out to me. I think after a decade of SAP you are too brain-washed to give an objective opinion anymore. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABAP#Spaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABAP#Spaces

flavius29663 4y ago
For a regular software developer, ABAP is pure insanity. But it has powerful data manipulation procedures, it's easy to just create and manipulate all your data tables in any way you want.
bhandziuk 4y ago
Wow, that's a real landmine
starik36 4y ago
Wow. That is pretty insane. I hope there is a tooling to surface a warning when it detects this. But lots of domain specific languages have idiosyncrasies. The Apex language used to program Salesforce is a half-implemented clone of Java from a decade ago. And they didn't cherry pick the best parts.
- selfmodruntime 4y ago
  Some companies will be forever scarred by the past trend to create an entirely new programming language for their product when an existing one could‘ve been entirely sufficient
selfmodruntime 4y ago
Oh my god

slim 4y ago

any pointers for a good introduction to SAP developement ? I need to integrate with SAP for one of our customers

_glass 4y ago
maybe this one: https://open.sap.com/courses/abap1 https://open.sap.com/courses/abap1 In general open.sap.com is the site where you can learn stuff. but depending on your customer's stack it might be different.

vezuchyy 4y ago

Hey, I worked for SAP for ten years and I don't agree with you. ABAP is still ugly with all its improvements, version control system and developer experience is awful. CDS views are great until they aren't, then we had this newest feature where you build apps with metadata on top of CDS views and that's where I decided that it's not a software development anymore. I do see how Fiori launchpad is a great thing, how HANA is extremely powerful if you know what you're doing. At the same time I couldn't stand the corporate culture, QA processes and etc anymore. There're innovations and innovative teams but for the most things SAP is doing, software development is not the core competency. Fun fact: I work with Datapath now (if you know what it is then you get an irony)