More people want to leave SAP than severance payments are planned | Hacker News Reader

More people want to leave SAP than severance payments are planned

heise.de

> According to the report, a total of 5,300 SAP employees have applied for the programs. That would be more than 20 percent of the Group's entire German workforce. However, only 3200 of these employees are said to be over 55 years old and therefore eligible for early retirement.

Isn't there some concern that they're letting go of a lot of knowledge with these older employees? Tribal knowledge isn't a problem that effects them?

The more cynical side of me thinks that it's going to be quite a mess for those who remain.

Agree. A lot of non documented processes lives only in the heads of certain people. I remember conversations like

"you know how to access the server? ssh it's not working"

"Oh yeah about that, ask Josh in the 3rd floor, he knows how to deal with it, requieres an extra step, and nobody had the time to fix the confluence article"

Then Josh gets layoff or changes jobs and the rest of the team has to deal with it. Good luck for those who remain.

Happens all the time, everywhere, just not all at once. People move around every 2-3 years or so, and take their knowledge, such as it is, with them.

Not really. There's basically a certain swath of people who "move around every 2-3 years or so" and a bunch of people who don't.

The latter are the ones that carry institutional knowledge as the team around them rotates. They tend to earn less but carry more influence, loyalty, and political insight. A big and indiscriminate purge/flight that includes those people can powerfully disrupt that and cause major damage to organizations and teams.

I don't know that that's happening here, but the grandparent is right to be curious.

I’ve yet to see people lacking in ambition gain much influence or political insight in my 25 years in tech. And not even once have I seen loyalty rewarded.

Well, I don't know where your comment about ambition relates to what I said, but otherwise I hope that experience changes for you. That's a long time to be lost in what seems a lonely desert.

I don't know how you managed to equate it to ambition. But for what it's worth, the people I've seen climb to apex positions -- Principal Engg, Architect, Director, etc. tend to be the ones that stayed at the same company for a long time. They tend to have substantial amount of influence that even the higher ups didn't.

I’m a former startup exec and currently a principal engineer. The easiest way to get to where I am is by moving around every 2-3 years, at least within the company (if the company is large enough), but preferably across companies. The best time to move is immediately after a promo. Do not let people treat you like a piece of furniture that’s not going anywhere

The article mentions return to office policies as a reason, but you have to wonder what the severance package was. Anecdotally, a company my friend works at just laid people off, and a majority of the ones that were not let go, wished that they were given the option.

You have to wonder if there's some interesting data with regards to tight (?) labour markets, policy that has nudged severance packages higher, etc.

1.5 month of salary for each year of being at SAP. And people who have been there for 20 years get 33.5 months.

That’s quite high even for Germany where it is difficult to dismiss people. Because it is so difficult, a method often used is a mutual agreement with a severance package above what you would get awarded by a court.

VMware was very generous, 6-12 months based on tenure from folks I know who worked there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com