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What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

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Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#191

Post by tinus_hn »

wheels wrote: post #63
meibo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Answer from former SAP employee (may have changed in the last 15 years): Two main reasons: - It's actually terminal software, that's translated into a GUI from a text interface on the fly. - The people that buy SAP never have to use SAP. Its interface is not a selling point.

I wish we were actually allowed to use the text interface but all we get is some halfway reasonable, halfway terrible web ui.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#192

Post by drunkpotato »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #183
dandare wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UX is horrible because: a) Engineering: Nobody will rewrite 20 year old views just to improve the UX. In many cases, nobody even dares to touch the 20 years old spaghetti code. b) Sales: The buyer is not the user. The buyer (playing golf with a sales rep) doesn't give a damn about the actual productivity of what he is buying. c) Management: There is a solid economical rationale in not giving a fcuk about UX. Over…

> The buyer is not the user. The buyer (playing golf with a sales rep) doesn't give a damn about the actual productivity of what he is buying I see this trotted out a lot but are all large companies really that oblivious? Do none of the decision makers talk with the people that work for them? Surely those executives aren't so divorced from reality and common sense that they don't see a problem when people complain th…

It’s not “execs dumb and bad,” it’s that execs have different priorities than you think they do, which I think is partially dandare’s point.

Executives at a large company are divorced from your reality at your level of the job.

Incidentally, that’s part of the fun of working at smaller companies, though the variance is higher there’s also the potential to work more closely with good earnest executives who also want the company to succeed.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#193

Post by ssdspoimdsjvv »

forinti wrote: post #173
lqet wrote: post #171

My mother works for a fairly large textile lab. For decades, they used an internally developed system for lab reports (they had a few programmers and admins they called the "nerds" that did nothing else than extend and maintain the system). The company switched to a SAP solution a few years ago. Chaos ensued. The SAP solution missed so many edge cases that a huge number of lab reports were either inaccurate or comple…

What was the motivation to switch to SAP? Was the in-house solution lacking?

In-house tooling requires a dedicated team, not just developers but also analysts, testers, etc. Often a company inside the company.

If the software needs to change due to industry changes or regulations or something like that, it will probably be a lot more expensive to implement it yourself compared to using an off-the-shelf tool developed by a company who's sole purpose it is to respond to those kind of changes.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#195

Post by urlwolf »

SAP is a mystery to me. Customers hate it with the passion of a burning sun. Yet they don't switch. Why? Is what they are doing so hard no competitor has managed to dethrone them? It's the only company I know that is universally hated by their customers.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#196

Post by justsomehnguy »

logifail wrote: post #58
theplumber wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Now, I get it, once you have to deal with taxes and payroll in multiple countries it gets messy, but why wouldn't you consider that a core part of your business worth investing into? It may work using an open source model. However you don't really want to invest into non-core business(es). It takes away money, talent and energy that you would better put into doing what you do best. I've experienced this first hand…

> However you don't really want to invest into non-core business(es) The problem is who gets to decide what is "core" to your business? Look at airlines, once the McKinsey types were let loose it turned out none of the stuff we think is core is needed at an airline; no need for in-house staff, catering, baggage handling, check-in, maintenance or even [owning] any actual aircraft. So much easier to operate without all…

> So much easier to operate without all that stuff to look after!

But only if there are someone who can and would provide you with all that stuff.

> Taken to the extreme presuambly one would end up with nothing but

This is the premise of 'The 4-hour Workweek'. It was a quite entertaining read.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#197

Post by Havoc »

fabfabfab wrote: post #64
_glass wrote: post #27

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 espec…

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.

And then plan fails due to insufficient foozball table count

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#198

Post by 656565656565 »

taway19920706 wrote: post #181
wheels wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, yes. It was basically like translating an ncurses (semi-GUI command line thing) into a UI. There were attempts to move away from that model, but at least when I worked for SAP, most actual deployments were still text-to-UI. It was basically a way of slapping some varnish on what was fundamentally an old-school mainframe system.

It's the same today - S/4HANA is still accessible from the GUI and DIAG is still used. Web applications (which SAP is pushing customers towards) are freed from this, of course (they talk native http to the SAP application server). Remember that back in the late 90s SAP had a native GUI that ran on Windows, OS/2 and Unix (Motif-based) and each had their own native controls (a native Windows listbox is implemented diff…

and experienced users can move very quickly through screens like a terminal but Fiori UI5 is the root of all evil

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#199

Post by justsomehnguy »

thinkingemote wrote: post #97

Curious: does SAP have modules for illegal activities, both dealing with it e.g, official bribes, internal corruption, employee theft, cyber ransoms etc, and for actual illegal stuff like money laundering, or for "off the books accounting", special operations etc.

> and for actual illegal stuff like money laundering, or for "off the books accounting",

It would be quite hard to write such things for SAP (it's too monolithic, even if you find people to write such things the moment they come for you they would have the access to all your illegal data) , but I knew of people who ran two sets of accounting bases, though that was mostly for tax evasion purposes.

Re: What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)

#200

Post by ornornor »

lqet wrote: post #176
forinti wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the motivation to switch to SAP? Was the in-house solution lacking?

AFAIK, they introduced SAP elsewhere in the company, and it became difficult/too expensive to manage the communication between the old system and the SAP system. I can imagine too well how the conversation between the SAP people and the company went because I also took part in similar conversations with clients in a previous job a long time ago: client asks you if software X can do thing Y. Both you and the person re…

> The complexity of the task is eventually discovered in production.

I’m amazed that this is what happens every. Single. Time. And yet we plow ahead with this kind of projects like we have no idea it’s the usual outcome.

A couple years and millions over budget later, we rediscover this axiom. I really don’t get it. And try to warn about this, you’re labeled as not a team player or whatever and paint crosshairs on your back for the next round of layoffs. It’s just soul sucking.

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