Pros
SAP in General is a good company with wonderful benefits. It gives the employees room to grow and gives them wonderful extra time to help your family cope with any troubles in life. SAP also tries to fulfill best in employment salary and bonus structures.
Kontras
While SAP as a company offers great benefits, the problem is within the Product Support division. People who may apply for Support engineering role should look elsewhere due to the reasons below. In Product Support there are two main tasks (i.e. could be inhumane too), that is so tough that it requires you or forces you to work nights and weekends. I) First task: Man the Expert Chat Channel. Why is this so tough? First there is not a lot of people who may help here (or it adds a lot more work to your daily requirements). If you somehow walk away to go to the bathroom or you are helping other customers online, there would be a flag or an alarm to management that there is nobody manning the chat (Or you are not manning the chat). This makes employees start to feel anxious to the point that SAP Product Support becomes a very stressful environment (i.e. unhealthy). - If going to the bathroom gives an employee stress then this is simply a requirement that is inhumane (HR issue) - This makes employees very stress to the point that they may quit the company (which happens a lot in SAP) - Turn over is pretty big - This task also adds to the overwhelming number of requirements that the support engineer needs to do daily - This is also going to be recorded in a report that is available to management - how long did you logon to Chat? They can use this number against you. For example: If the support engineer needs to help 5 different customers daily with their issues technically that may last 1 to 2 hours each (in a web session call or deep dive session), this chat (i.e. you may get between 1 to 3+ per day) will add another 30 min to 2 hours each on top of the already scheduled 5 customers (10+ hours). This will either push other important customers aside for the next day (lower customer satisfaction) or would make the support engineer work beyond normal working hours to fulfill the requirement. SAP is wondering why they are not getting high scores in Customer Satisfaction, it could be that the process they placed could be stressing their employees to be the best they could be. If you do this daily, you would have tired and highly stressed support engineers which will then be burned out. This may show up in our customer satisfaction results as your engineers are not fully rested and can only give 5 minutes to each new customers (i.e. ping pong effect). II) Second Task: You are also required to work nights and weekends (Saturday and Sunday). This is one of the hardest one that is given to any support engineer. Yes they may ask you to take some other days off or may even give you money but it also takes away the most important thing a person needs and that is time with family and time to recharge oneself. We can argue that the chat + weekend support makes an engineers life hard. Wait til you miss a call or work during the weekend, this is where you would feel what hell is like at work. These 2 tasks from product support is one of the most challenging thing to swallow (your mindset needs to be a zombie). If given the opportunity to work for another company or division in SAP that do not have these requirement, I would say sign me up immediately! Last issue is as soon as you get to a particular level, there is no more growth. You have maxed out. Your contained within your level per budget limitation. If you can work in SAP in another division, that is good. Within Product Support, it is tough.