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

The developer experience is terrible, simple template changes need a your modules to be "upgraded" which means every change takes several seconds at least.

The quality of the app ecosystem is so bad you almost can't install any non-core apps if you want to be able to maintain your project. And apps are incredibly expensive (250€ for a GDPR compliant cookie banner). Most apps have quite few downloads so you don't know if you get what you're paying for.

The documentation is partially non-existing and you're supposed to read odoo's code to know how things works - which is true, but quite time consuming.

If you google technical questions you find odoo forum entries (which could be ok) that often contain just links to youtube videos or simply bad and out-of-date answers.

Here's a link to a forum post (full disclaimer - of me) about some of the things that kept me from getting things done with odoo: https://www.odoo.com/de_DE/forum/hilfe-1/rant-developing-wit...

These issues are just the tip of the iceberg. I honestly wonder how people working on/with odoo deal with this. Things literally take multiples of the time they should and the whole process is a PITA.

Funny sidenote: If you google odoo developer experience and try to find what others have to say about this, you get their conferences since they're called "odoo developer experience".

That's true but TBH, even those that are wildly successful aren't actually that great. I've implemented Workday as a replacement for the user-facing portions of SAP's HR and while it looks good, it's nowhere near as flexible. There's a lot of stuff I would expect to be available in Workday and just isn't. That surprised me as Workday is pretty much the HR market leader.

TLDR; Opportunities are there for new companies to do ERP better. It's not easy though...

And if you managed to get it down to only 10% of its current size, it'd still be several times larger than the Linux kernel.

SAP makes copious amounts of money, so naturally people have tried to replace it. So far, they have not succeeded.

I do however often work adjacent to SAP or have to integrate with it, and since I've been at this for a few years now, I've gotten to try a bunch of their stuff.

SAP's biggest problem is honestly just that they are absolutely terrible engineers, while they suffer from the worst Not Invented Here syndrome I've ever seen. They nearly always want to build their own thing instead of using something that already exists.

Do you want to build web applications that interact with SAP systems? Well, SAP uses OData almost exclusively for all of its backend stuff, and practically no one else uses it. This means all developer tooling, like libraries and such, are almost non-existent. So what do you do? You use SAP's UI5.. which is easily the worst-made UI library out there that anyone has ever built. It's technical debt personified.

No one knows UI5 except people who work in this business, so companies are forced to hire consultancies like mine, because no normal web developer has ever worked with it(nor would they want to look at it in their spare time). I can scarcely begin to imagine how many man-hours SAP has wasted on building out this gigantic turd, or how many hours they could have saved by going with, say, React, and instead building libraries and tooling around that.

This sort of thing permeates everything SAP does. Everything they do is some of the worst stuff I've ever seen.

But hey, it pays great money, and the company I work for has great benefits and lots of freedom. All other things equal, I don't think there are many tech companies out there that could offer me a more rewarding job. But that doesn't change the fact that observing SAP from close-up is like watching an on-going technical trainwreck that never ends.

I've worked alongside consultants from Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, etc over the years and, while many of them are very competent, I would /never/ engage one of those large system integrators (SIs) on any project I was involved in. There are many excellent individuals working for those companies, but the companies themselves are terrible and you will struggle to get any of the excellent people involved during your implementation. The experts will appear during the early stages of the consulting sales cycle but will be nowhere to be seen during the implementation.

Unfortunately this is the dirty little secret of SAP implementations. Many SAP customers think "I'll pay top dollar and get a good SI" but they end up getting the latest round of juniors doing the implementation. Seen it many a time.