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I’ve spent too long over the years working with businesses who use SAP to not get a clear picture of how it works there.

They are an extremely formulaic organisation. Progression paths are clearly defined, and practically everything is run by a management system. This sounds good, in principal, and does result in a general baseline of reliability.

The flip side of this is that everyone is promoted to the limit of their competence, product development and implementation are rapidly spinning revolving doors, from top to bottom, and roles, not people, own products and decisions.

The result is a sort of methodical malcoordination, and seemingly insane decisions being taken at every juncture - unless you view them all through the lens of an emergent process driven by a simple set of rules and constraints: cover your ass, don’t do it if it isn’t explicitly ordered, always follow the management system.

It’s terrible. It’s just that it’s very reliably terrible, and that has its own appeal to other reliably terrible corporations. It’s all minmax, least worst, etc. - quality does not matter in the corporate world - consistency does.

> I’ve skimmed over the code and it was processing hardcoded index positions. I repeat the person who did that had no concept of a loop. Since the query was returning more than 250 results the remaining rows were being ignored.

Unrelated, but this reminds me of a time when I had to write some code in some proprietery programming language in some industrial automation project to program a PLC. The language was similar to Visual Basic but lacked support for basic things such as for loops. I spent some time creating a "meta-language" that would compile code down to this language with added support for loops and some other stuff. Then I would paste the compiled code in the proprietary software each time I had to change anything.

That's odd most of these PLC are programmable with IEC 61131-3 languages,e.g. Structured Text which has For-loops. That said i did my fair share of metaprogramming as these usually lack dynamic allocation.

Most PLCs these days support 1131! My whole career in industrial automation was on older PLCs that were produced before 1131 existed. (And long before they added the "6"!) Lots of them are still running factories today. Not one of them supported anything like a for loop. The only loop is the whole program scan loop.

> Certified. SAP. Partner.

IME (not sap but adjacent) partners cert and “levels” only has to do with how much you earn for the company.

Competence only comes into play if you’re so egregiously incompetent you start sinking projects and costing product rep’, and neither is really a concern for SAP.

I've gone through 3 certification processes for a company. First was gained via licence sales, second via spend on training by the vendor, third via 3 blog posts about the vendor.

It is amazing that some how SAP has made Oracle software half decent in comparison - and that isn't saying much for either of them.

I see this all the time, and on our UN*X servers, everything remotely related to SAP is 777, even text files. Not matter how many times I tell them not to do that, it happens anyway.

Good help the company if someone every gets access to the SAP servers.

I worked for a company that uses Syteline ERP and it was a similar horroshow.

I worked for a company that uses Microsoft Navision. The consultant/dev wold remote work via Teamviewer directly on the production system. Build in editor had no syntax highlighting. No version control possible, since the code is in the database. (Unless the dev copied the code into Notepad and saved it separately.) Certain reports would block all clients company-wide. To print something one would need to click ~6 buttons with super long mouse movements. I programmed AutoHotkey-Scripts to ease the pain. "Fun" times :-)

Syteline would take HOURS to run a report that generated estimates on how much material needed to be ordered for the next month. Year end reconciliation would take over 12 hours. It was just absurdly slow.

"generated estimates on how much material needed to be ordered for the next month" depending on how they doing it could be aching to training AI. IMHO this process taking hours is normal

Nah, it is just basic math based on the quantity and type of product that is ordered.

> Company had to pay the partner for support. I’ve skimmed over the code and it was processing hardcoded index positions. I repeat the person who did that had no concept of a loop.

This is not a SAP-specific problem. I've seen highly paid programmers with veteran-like CVs deliver absolute crap in the PHP world. If there's a shortage of good programmers, you'll get this kind of thing. Moreso if it's in a un-sexy field of work like SAP.