SAP is the one of the few software companies who manages to consistently produce the worst possible user experience. They actually made it into an art form. There is nothing about an SAP product that is usable. Its a big steaming pile of shit. I don't even want to know how the code looks like.
What's SAP?
471–480 of 622 posts
Re: What's SAP?
#472I was an ABAP developer around 10 years ago, wrote a bunch of Planning & Scheduling apps/"screens" running in SAPGUI R/3 and APO for a (brand new) manufacturing plant with a new SAP implementation. I learned ABAP in a literally one weekend and was able to make stuff really quickly. For the most part, you could just "loop at " extract what you want and show it on a screen using one of their existing ui components. The…
For someone with a web development freelancing background wanting to get into enterprise software, would you recommend going into SAP? Would Salesforce be a better path? Which one is better for a freelancer working from home (if any)? Feel free to share any other thoughts on the matter
I think definitely Salesforce if you want to work remotely.
It's easy to get into, much smaller system in both scope and complexity, and tons of free documentation. Get a couple of certifications, do the trailhead stuff, contact some consulting firms to tell them you're available for work and it should be easy to find work.
Getting into SAP and finding work can be challenging. They have a lot of new things from what I see but the majority of the SAP work you'll find is old non-cloud stuff that you'll basically need to have worked with at a company before to learn.
I went from SAP dev inhouse -> SAP dev consulting then jumped on the Salesforce wagon around 2011.
SAP work was enjoyable to me, partly because I was working in the manufacturing space, which I found interesting. Software-wise, it felt like I was 20 years behind everything, working on a mainframe.
Salesforce, I just immediately hated. It was just limits after limits and some crappy java-like language and html templating that took forever to deploy. It's gotten a bit better with lightning but you'll see the shit underneath pretty quickly. I also found the projects also extremely boring. Going from controlling machines and automated warehouses with SAP to projects about collecting email addresses and creating contacts felt like I made the wrong move.
tldr -- avoid getting locked into proprietary-land if you can help it
Re: What's SAP?
#473I was an ABAP developer around 10 years ago, wrote a bunch of Planning & Scheduling apps/"screens" running in SAPGUI R/3 and APO for a (brand new) manufacturing plant with a new SAP implementation. I learned ABAP in a literally one weekend and was able to make stuff really quickly. For the most part, you could just "loop at " extract what you want and show it on a screen using one of their existing ui components. The…
> I could focus on what I needed to do and not worry about how pretty the thing looks or if I'm querying the database optimally.
No offense, but this is probably a big reason for the perception that SAP is a giant slow resource hog. Developers are abstracted so far away from the hardware that they have no way of knowing that their simple little program is resulting in 1500 database queries per page load.
Re: What's SAP?
#474>>"But most importantly, SAP’s software was designed to be extensible from the start. For SAP’s original contract with ICI, SAP didn’t build software from scratch, as was the norm at the time, and instead built on top of a previous project. When SAP released their financial accounting software in 1974, their intention was to build additional software modules on top of it and sell them in the future. This extensibility was SAP’s defining feature. The interoperability across client contexts was considered radical at the time because other approaches started from scratch for every client."
SAP's success can be attributed to something similar to what Facebook and Google did, locking the data and knowledge base to itself. The much bragged "extensibility" is limited to SAP own software modules or will be acquired.
Therefore the extensibility is both the strength and the weakest point of SAP. Unlike most of modern software system, there isn't an open ecosystem for competition at its periphery, resulted in a lackluster UI and unfair challenges to non-SAP software to take advantage of those domain knowledge buried inside the SAP.
SAP's integration doctrine is originated from 1960-1970s. With limit evolution this doctrine has largely ignored the changes in computing for several decades, yet it's still growing its dominance.
Re: What's SAP?
#475I was an ABAP developer around 10 years ago, wrote a bunch of Planning & Scheduling apps/"screens" running in SAPGUI R/3 and APO for a (brand new) manufacturing plant with a new SAP implementation. I learned ABAP in a literally one weekend and was able to make stuff really quickly. For the most part, you could just "loop at " extract what you want and show it on a screen using one of their existing ui components. The…
It's funny - I spend years as an SAP ABAP developer and the very day I start my new position apart from SAP, it's on the front page of HN. ABAP will always hold a special, quirky little place in my heart. It's very powerful, but also totally frustrating. The language is a COBOL-like language made by Germans with a keyword graveyard as big as Berlin. The ABAP community (in my experience, online and offline) is totally…
Congrats on your new position. Get ready for some debugger withdrawal. I haven't found anything better since :)
Re: What's SAP?
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
> SAP can do can be done at the local level using intuitive software No they cannot. ERP's are beasts of expert domain knowledge hidden in shitty codebases, but don't be confused for an even a moment to think you can do it yourself. It's a fools errand, and I'd fire or not hire anyone that tried to intentionally do this rather than just build something basic to hedge time until you have to implement something more se…
The correct answer here is "it depends". SAP isn't (just) a giant pile of steaming data model mess because of the thousands of people involved building that software, but really because it can model every tax case in every country in the world. Thought you had a great model for your sales tax that covered US and the EU? Well, enter Brazil and think again, with four slightly different taxes, some of which are applied…
The key insight in what you wrote here, "(biggest client just saw our tooling stack and told us we're 10 years ahead of the ad agencies working in the same space)", is the word client.
If you are going to build your own ERP software, make sure that is the product your company is selling. The same goes for building a new 'web framework' for your web company. Never build a complex product from scratch if that isn't going to be your business. It never works out, because when you have to choose between revenue and improving something in your framework, you'll going to have to chose the former.
Years later, your company, if it is successful in doing what its supposed to do, is going to be paying big $ to retool and replace what you have built. The 2010s were the decade of teams replacing the custom shit they built in the 00s.
Re: What's SAP?
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a third option - customize the ERP to conform to your existing processes. The last place I worked chose that option, they were a medical device company and didn't want to change their processes. Of course it made a huge amount of extra work, much of which was done by expensive contractors.
That option is a long thick gray line. Every ERP will be "customized". It has to be - provide your own chartfields, business units, workflows, decision points, etc. It's the amount of the customization that makes the difference. I've been on ERP implementation projects that were 28 days long, and 5 years long. I am the "expensive contractor", and I have never ever in 20 years met another expensive contractor who did…
Every customization is technical debt you'll have to drag forward on every new release.
Re: What's SAP?
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the big difference is that you can re-implement your website in a new web framework, open source it, and then get traction, etc. You can also do this with ETL frameworks (i.e. Airflow) too. Disruptive software is easier here as developers can run this new framework in parallel, or even as a side project to test it, provide feedback, or even help implement changes upstream. If something goes wrong, it usually…
It's easy to roll your eyes when you hear "disruption" because it's often used as a meaningless buzzword, but it describes a very real dynamic where "lightweight" products can disrupt outcompete heavyweight products in a large chunk of the market ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation ). There are good business reasons that the products became heavyweight, but it leaves an opening where a smaller produ…
And now you see people trying to make JSON schemas and validation and all of the associated headaches that made XML such a pain.
Re: What's SAP?
#479I was an ABAP developer around 10 years ago, wrote a bunch of Planning & Scheduling apps/"screens" running in SAPGUI R/3 and APO for a (brand new) manufacturing plant with a new SAP implementation. I learned ABAP in a literally one weekend and was able to make stuff really quickly. For the most part, you could just "loop at " extract what you want and show it on a screen using one of their existing ui components. The…
For someone with a web development freelancing background wanting to get into enterprise software, would you recommend going into SAP? Would Salesforce be a better path? Which one is better for a freelancer working from home (if any)? Feel free to share any other thoughts on the matter
I’ve worked with Salesforce a little (previous company used it and I worked closely with the SF team). It’s easy enough to get started - Apex is basically a stunted version of Java - but the dev and deploy workflow is very uh, “cloud native”, so working from home initially could be challenging depending on the experience the client has with SF, how many devs they have, etc.
All in all though Salesforce is pretty accessible for learning. Plenty of resources out there, and I know SF consultants make nice money.
Re: What's SAP?
#480I was an ABAP developer around 10 years ago, wrote a bunch of Planning & Scheduling apps/"screens" running in SAPGUI R/3 and APO for a (brand new) manufacturing plant with a new SAP implementation. I learned ABAP in a literally one weekend and was able to make stuff really quickly. For the most part, you could just "loop at " extract what you want and show it on a screen using one of their existing ui components. The…
> I could focus on what I needed to do and not worry about how pretty the thing looks or if I'm querying the database optimally. No offense, but this is probably a big reason for the perception that SAP is a giant slow resource hog. Developers are abstracted so far away from the hardware that they have no way of knowing that their simple little program is resulting in 1500 database queries per page load.
Yeah, of course, as with any higher-level framework/system, someone has to pay for the computing required. If you go try to get a developer instance of SAP to play around with, I believe the minimum requirements was like a 4xl ec2. That's before you even start writing crappy queries :)