Pros
While I do acknowledge this can be a good place to start your career, with SAP being a big name in the world of IT, and for the first year or so it had a very laid back and college like atmosphere. . .it will proceed steadily and rapidly downhill from here. So I very much encourage you to ignore all the 'here less than 1 year' reviews that can be seen here. - Free meals, when in the office - Somewhat flexible, depending on what shift you are working - Opportunities to travel
Cons
- Shockingly low salary in comparison to what everybody else in the market will offer - This links in to the fact that you will be the whipping boys for the German HQ and the US office, everything they don't want the Irish have to pick up and you are the cheap labour - Complete lack of organisation, usually only finding out what your assignment for the next week is on a Friday or Saturday. . .not uncommon to come in on Monday morning only to be reassigned for the evening shift - Complete lack of training besides the basics, self learning encouraged, you will be given a 600 page document, meant to be taught by an instructor, and told to start reading that every time you have 15 minutes free. . .once you have completed this you are now an expert and expected to perform services to high paying customer. In fact you would be lucky to have read the document to be thrown onto any service. - Opportunities to travel, while this can be good there are also some glaring negatives; onsite to customers when you have no training (the phrase thrown under the bus comes to mind) and again very last minute travel, not uncommon to be asked on a Friday to travel to the US on Sunday - Constant promises of improvements in things like the pension (currently employer only offer 2% max. contribution) and benefits that never come to fruition - Constant cost cutting that will immediately come to fruition, no internal travel for trainings, COE is now covering the roles of other SAP departments getting rid of these employees who cost a lot more then the Irish COE but not relaying any extra pay to COE for the increased work and responsibility - Middle management have now built a web of lies. . .it very much appears to be how can we trick you into doing something we know you wouldn't want to do. . .We need you for a service for 2 weeks in Toronto, oh sorry we meant 6 weeks in Ohio, change you flights we have already booked you on the service. This also links to my next point. - Extremely wishy washy performance KPI's, management will use this to shoot you down and not put you up promotion levels even if they have promised it. . .an example being you may have traveled 6 months of the year onsite to customers constantly but sorry you didn't do enough knowledge transfer to new hires, or you were too many days out of office. . .being your allowed holidays - Very poor and untrained middle management. Most of promotion comes internally within SAP, which is fine as long as the employee has the correct qualities (leadership, etc.) however the vast majority of management don't, and because they were promoted within there is virtually no previous experience of management outside of SAP meaning the same bad habits and bad practices never change, i.e. my point about organisation - Management will stick together and blame the employment, whether there is any fault there or not. . .situation is very much turning into an 'us versus them situation', not much in terms of working together with management - Your career, because of all of this, will stagnate and if you spend too long in the company you will begin to run the risk that all you know is SAP meaning any new role that you will go for will have to be SAP related Have an escape plan ready