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Comment by carstenhag | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, it sounds 100% like SAP / ABAP. A lot of terribly outdated stuff. But it can do everything you can imagine. If it can't, there's 1-2 recommended products that expand features on top of SAP.

The moment your business wants to do things a way that isn't SAP's way, you completely butcher everything though. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17541092

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My first internship was as a Dynamics AX dev. Me and another guy. Our mentor was a super-duper senior architect something something. He once asked us what we were planning on doing, career-wise, and we were kinda surprised; obviously we were working towards becoming Dynamics AX devs, and were hoping for a job at that place.

He got a somewhat wistful look in his eyes, and said (more to himself than to us) he wished he could go back and choose not to do that.

I'll never forget that. He was earning an insane amount of money, working super high-level at one of the largest IT firms in the country.

I think a lot of ERP stuff is like that - pays well but few people regard it as fun - not least of which is that end up with knowledge of very niche technologies that don't really progress very rapidly.

Edit: Mind you for job security and cash generating potential they are can be pretty good - years ago I knew of people on £3000 a day in the UK working on very niche financial systems - but you basically had to have a lot of domain knowledge (financial consolidation) and decent development skills.

Honestly, I do mostly web development and unless you're really interested in the product (which is far from a given) why do you care if it's an ERP or ecommerce or some travel application?

My guess: If you are implementing any type of software, you usually see an UI, input and output. For SAP and ERP you can also have this.

But it's really ugly, messy, and you might have to implement 5 corner cases of what the german government has thought of to complicate the lives' of everyone in regards to capital gains taxes in combination with church taxes, in a year in which you got married but one of the two left the church the same year. Oh, and what if you also got a kid that year and moved cities? And during implementation there is another law passed to change stuff?

In other words: So out of the world that noone finds it interesting anymore :D

Part of the problem is that the final output from SAP is typically financial reports that need to conform to standards. That limits the design flexibility of any modules or core components that touch anything that might need to be accounted for. Anyone who has done custom systems development in this space are painfully aware of this. This is aside from the non-business logic parts ie counterintuitive development idiosyncrasies.

SAP was in such a lucky position in tech history... they did solve a problem that was extra profitable for them, but they got greedy and sedentary on the glut...

And then it just became too expensive for their clients to move away. (i hate that company)

but the marketplace for displacement in this space is still ripe, else we wouldnt be seeing startups like this.

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