Thread regarding SAP layoffs

I come here just to watvh everyone argue. Especially the one who is always claiming that somebody representing the AfD is here. I bet that person spends all day complaining about inequality at the office. It's a l great way to fit in to SAP culture without offering any real value.

I hope that SAP will still hire Indians in waldorf. I am ready to work there. I would be a very good employee.

@a2 exactly. People in the regions whove done full implementations and know their area of the ERP / LoB solutions from memory in huge depth, will get cut while certain MUs are a nightmare as its T2-T3s on major customers with no clue what to do.

We need a T5 clean out in any case outside tech focused areas like presales. Theres an absurd number of people at T5, give themselves VP title, have no reports and really no hard KPIs who just tag their names to things eg big deals.

@c8 Worthless AfD drivel. Do your initials start with T? Stay away from here.

@af To appoint HR as product mgr is desdroying SAP.

@cm fully agree, in SAP there seems to be millons of chief of staff...but what are they doing?

@cm as @ca said, a made up title for a clueless person, who felt the need to have his 5 min of grandiosity.

@c8 your racism, toxicity, and sense of superiority and entitlement is what makes SAP a toxic place to work. I truly hope lays off find you, and if not, life will put rubbish like you in its place. FYI, the Signavians that harassed women were all white “Civilized” Germans.

@c8 with due respect just because you work with Executives is not evidence that every statement you made reflects SAPs company policy, they are your opinion. Secondly why would you announce your role and tenure in a public site while making discriminatory and prejudiced statements about groups of people? I’ve worked with many Executives globally in SAP your communication style is abhorrent with no regard for the company’s confidentiality and reputation. Being a T4 T5 or T6 Executive you should know that everyone is replaceable, having the Chief of Staff title doesn’t give you immunity nor the respect from people.

@c8 There is so much wrong with this post I can only assume it's a made up person in a role and some compulsion to "share".

Any hire not based on merit is dooming this company. Or any company for that matter.

I'm an executive as well, and also vibe code. Your view on coding with AI is about 10 months behind reality.

@OP your observations are very different from upper management in most areas and likely so. As a T3, you obviously have no clue how a large organization works and cannot comprehend the difficult decisions needed to be made at that level. I moved into a chief of staff role for a large area some months ago and I regularly work with important executives so I can share my perspective on this.

Design - We need more designers because SAP products are too vague and customers do not understand our value proposition well. The intention here is that we have a design leadership in every area that collaborates to create a unified SAP suite that helps us in the long term. And we are adding a several design headcounts on lower levels to bring this vision into reality in individual apps and features. It is not an easy task and obviously we need manpower.

Developers - We don't need more. In my area, around 50% of the work is already done by AI. We have Engineering VPs for each sub area and heads under them for each sub sub area that contains several teams. We have literally increased our capacity by around 100% just because of AI. Developers are already an overpaid resource that need high upkeep and do not create as much value as you may think they do. A lot of what we do now in B2B is sales and marketing and not really new product development. Autonomous Enterprise isn't something new - it is just a new marketing name around already established semester plans that had to be slightly changed to accommodate for layoffs.

Development Managers - I know which area you are talking about. We have too many men and immigrants taking over jobs that should be with Germans. It is a German company after all. We kept the people leads as development managers because that allows us to keep women in leadership positions that matter. And this brought our women in leadership numbers to the highest at SAP. Obviously you don't want the immigrant developers to become development managers everywhere. They only care about their kind and rarely treat women with disrespect. It is just not their culture and so not their fault. It is up to us civilized people to teach them our ways. And the best way to do this is by having German development managers for international teams. It has nothing to do with technical know how - this is not important for this role.

QA - We don't need more QA. We need more QA automation and AI to tie this automation across business units at SAP. This role will slowly be phased out with Fuji anyway.

Support - The time of human support is long gone. Most of the support tasks will now move to customer success and pre sales and professional services and similar adjacent roles. And they will have a lot of content and AI agents to help them perform better than these support people ever could. Support was one of those roles where jobs went away from Germany and France to poor countries in Asia. And we get to stop this by using AI. It's not cheaper but it is definitely better to use AI to prevent the great replacement.

Executives literally run the company. Without them, we would be nowhere. You can replace all other roles like developers and support and QA and the company will run just fine. This is true for most of SAP with an exception of a few areas like on prem maintenance where critical subject matter expertise exists. But our board and HR have already decided to let go of these product lines and these people. Soon everything at SAP would be possible to do with just executives, a few important roles and AI. This is the future and you need to adapt or leave. I hope this opens your eyes a bit to the thinking at the executive level.

@ac that is not the main reason. Juergen Mueller had mentioned before he departed that the main reason is that in the future if we have to do layoffs then it is easier for non-technical HR-focused managers to navigate the nitty-gritty of hiring third-party consultants in their place. So the main reason was always to make layoffs easier. HPOM deviated so much from Marty Cagan's teachings that even he distanced himself from it. If you have a non-technical people lead as a manager, you should be worried for your job. Performance Management gives these managers full control over your career at SAP and they continue to parrot the narrative that all SAP teams increased productivity by 50% since they started using AI.

The goal of putting a non technical manager on a technical team (developers) is to cut off the empathy.

Since the manager isn't technical he/she won't understand the difficulty of a task so he/she will put crazy pressure to get things done no matter how even where cost is quality.

The performance rating is biased as well as the manager won't distinguish between a good developer and a less good developer.. etc.

HPOM was an optimization exercise after all. once they bring together expensive and "unnecessary as in can be replaced by AI" resources in specific roles, it is easy to let go of the entire role across the company. That's the easiest kind of layoff that even the works council cannot really fight much against. This narrative that AI can replace more than 50% of our work is incorrect and dangerous. And 100% yes to letting go of these people leads or non-technical development managers. This is disallowing actual developers to grow within the company. I have never seen so much hate against techies in any other tech company.

I agree they will probably fire the wrong people. The experienced ones. Because they are expensive, and they don‘t listen to them anyways.

Simply look at how they had to reinvent extensibility in S/4HANA Public Cloud. Our „geniuses“ thought that side-by-side extensibility is sufficient. Now they had to do an embarrassing about-face and reintroduce BAdI-like features.

The expensive experts are a treasure trove of experience and knowledge. But they are ignored and relegated to the back benches by a boy group from the same university (near Berlin).