Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchallis | Hacker News Reader

Creative destruction in practice. Older firms like Oracle / SAP reducing headcount, while newer firms are adding headcount with a net increase in high quality jobs.

View on HN

SAP isn't a "Bay Area tech company" though.

I think the only thing these workers have in common are area code 650 phones. A consultant for SAP, a cloud architect at Oracle, a fraud analyst at Paypal and a Whole Foods shopper at Instacart have essentially zero overlap in their day to day activities.

But it did say this: "For SAP, Oracle and PayPal, the majority of the employment reductions will be in software jobs."

When you drive down to San Jose you'll see several companies with a SAP logo who have been bought in the last 10 years in the HR space, e.g. SuccessFactors (2011).

And if your company uses SuccessFactors you can see how little they’ve invested in engineering lately.

It always amazes how bad enterprise systems can be. My company uses SuccessFactors and also a thing called Windchill. After seeing how convoluted Windchill is you will think that SuccessFactors is actually quite decent. Kronos is also a great case study in terrible design.

Working at a startup that does b2b software it's pretty clear. "Tail wags the dog" development and placing the highest priority on C-level personal relationships

It's the old problem where the decision makers never use what they buy. I hear that's also the problem with a lot of medical software.

I think it’s caused by a few things:

- Enterprise software CEOs are more likely to come from Sales than their consumer counterparts.

- Enterprise software has more lock-in. Ones the market is saturated, their best financial move frequently is to milk the existing base rather than improve things. (This is why one should avoid long term contracts like the plague)

I know the SAP HANA team got cut heavily.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com