Pros
- People are usually nice, you can virtually reach out to anyone in the company in various locations by email/phone, someone can help you out - Benefits, stock options, but recently transportation benefit was capped at 120$ which means people who park in the office need to pay the difference from their pocket - Pretty stable company, the only major layoff happened in 2008 - Occasional international travel (Germany;-)), IT conference program, trips to customers, top talent fellowships with relocation - If you work hard (50-60 h week), usually the management realizes and gives different perks - Challenging projects, you might get good customer exposure or experience working with customers directly
Cons
- Underperformance is not addressed, every team has 1-2 slackers, sometimes very hard to achieve goals if several people simply come to work to collect the paycheck. In other companies these people would not survive but the manager would not address the issues because of fear to lose headcount. - My team/manager doesn't allow working from home - Scrum teams with many different roles but not so many developers ;-)) - Fat layer of product and solution management, shielding from customers - A lot of talented, motivated developers have left the team since no progression in the career happened - Technical level of expertise of employees is lower if you compare with other top IT companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple (feedback from ex-SAP employees) - Montreal is still a small location on the outskirts of SAP empire, everything happens in Walldorf, Germany which means if you reached T4 level (expert) your career is mainly finished, since there are no positions of T5 level in Montreal - Constant fight over projects with other locations, Walldorf dictates most of decisions on architecture and product level - Having sunlife as a provider of medical insurance results in wasted time fighting over medical expenses (a lot of claims are rejected)