There are so many rumors about layoffs on this forum. But none of them are based on facts.
Please focus on facts. For example, let‘s talk about the enshittification of the company culture and the effects on staff turnover. That is something that can be grounded on facts and board actions.
Thanks.
@vv yes of course. More important things like diverting money from SAP's revenue to the personal accounts of area executives, group executives and the executive board.
Trust me. I am in a position of knowledge.
Layoffs are not on the agenda. There are more important things.
@kk you are so right. SAP needs layoffs but at the useless management layers and not the many hardworking and talented people that I’ve seen made redundant. SAP is dying from the inside, and it’s very sad to watch. It’s like a real life example of “The Emperor has no clothes” - everyone just smiles, agrees and nods at their manager to keep their job. All the well paid execs at SAP are all about keeping their money, power and position - not about risk taking, innovative or creativity.
@s0 Because SAP is a public company, CK and the executive board is obliged to share layoff information with the stakeholders with voting rights. This mostly include institutional investors and this information usually gets leaked. Also, layoffs within Germany at least have to be signed off by the Works Council and documented as an agreement. The supervisory board and HR is also part of this discussion. So there are multiple ways for this to be leaked.
@qq do you think that if CK made that decision he will share it with anybody before public annoucement?
Of course not!
Poeple here are only discussing signs and indicators so they get prepared (fix resume, take courses... revive some connections outside... etc)
I think SAP's situation is different from the competition because of OnPrem and a lot of customers are still holding on it. SAP would love to get rid of it as well as all (old, experienced and seen as expensive) resources attached to it BUT it currently cannot because nobody can replace these resources and AI is so expensive to train on these products with little ROI...so they're waiting, let the situation rot and hoping that customers will move to Cloud solutions and then take the opportunity to layoffs.
@qq there are no big layoffs. Only silent quitting by people who are burnt out. And a bad culture of giving low WHAT and HOW scores to reduce salary appraisals. Lowering of benefits year on year. And more and more employees being put on PIPs. It's not similar to the previous SAP layoffs. And in many ways it is much much worse.
I am well-connected, and I have heard absolutely zilch about new layoffs.
Stay calm and carry on. There is nothing to worry about today.
It might be different in the future, the future is unpredictable. But do not let unfounded fears ruin the present for you.
@kx yeah but at the same time there are more people supporting the leadership than those against. You even see that in the unfiltered. More than half think that we are cooked but a majority won't complete the survey or won't give anything less than Agree. If the unfiltered scores for the leadership were to tank, there would be so much attention to it. Even media covers the SAP unfiltered. That's why they are trying to remove it. We have power as employees but most of them want to be a part of the problem than a part of the solution because it is easier.
I would argue that most just come here to vent because they feel that their gripes internally fall on deaf ears.
SAP has some amazing talent that will never meet its full potential because they are held back by very poor leadership.
Truth be told, most of you are only complicating this. The only main reason we are all here is because of money. And working hard has never gotten anyone rich here. So we need work work smart. Tell your boss that they are amazing and do everything they ask for even if it is of no use to the company. And then you'll find yourself getting better WHAT and HOW scores which nets you more money. Promotions are not hard either if you know who to be friends with. Let us not forget that 9 out of 10 advertised jobs have preferred candidates. In some areas like mine, 10 out of 10 have preferred candidates. So do what you need to do. Nobody believes the HR nonsense that our executives spout about this being a great place of work and all that. It was maybe true 12 years ago but sure hasn't been in a very long time.
Okay, here's are some truths. And many of you won't like it but I'll still say it.
SAP's top management consists entirely of a specific set of people. Most of them studied nearby and joined SAP as a working student. They have no experience working in a different company and this is the only culture they know. Other colleagues are for them friends and family. And sometimes even more than that. They support each other and anyone outside of this group is always seen as an outsider no matter how good they are or what they do. And here is the kicker. These colleagues tend to promote their friends. They tend to give more money during salary appraisals to each other. They tend to keep the "outsiders" out as much as possible. You also see this in the board actually. They unanimously ousted Mohd Alam who was the only non-German and non-Christian and non-white person. He had his flaws but things were much better under his leadership than they were under Juergen Mueller's who was a therapist without a the. SAP has become this bubble that everyone is proud of but the company is actually failing. We have amazing colleagues from acquisitions as well as other companies who wish to contribute but they rarely get an opportunity for growth if they do. This is what is wrong with SAP's culture. No matter how many new values HR creates, as long as this "friends and family" business model exists, SAP can never grow. If we are not afraid of the unknown and if we embrace true innovation, we would end up getting more for what we invest. A lot of energy and time is wasted at SAP in cajoling the egos of the people in power who are contributing to SAP's downfall. A lot of time and money goes in useless meetings and get togethers that do nothing to actually bring us together. So many of these people tag along at Sapphire just because they want to travel. So many of them travel without reason to other countries even when distributed teams cannot. We give away millions every year to consulting companies who do nothing more than create a few PPTs of what we already know about this company.
The biggest reason SAP is failing is because of the old guard that refuses to let go. And they are trying to move as much money as possible from SAP to their own pockets. We need real reform.
Maybe area and group executive bonuses should also be part of performance management and have the same percentage cap in increases. Maybe the executive board should be paid a bonus in RSUs that vest 2-3 years from now and not cash that they can take and disappear. Maybe we call out and tone down the rampant s-xism and racism which is so common at every SAP location now and even on this forum.
We need layoffs. We need to lay off these useless employees who have been here for decades but have nothing to show for it. It's the truth but every new layoff only gets rid of many more talented people than these useless fu--s.
@fh SAP is supporting Mistral and Blue for deployment but they're not yet good enough to replace Anthropic and AWS, Google.. etc.
It's a dilemma that SAP is stuck to.
SAP has a lot of business overseas so it has to do both..
We are losing money because they don't want to deploy
@fh I won't be surprised if Christian Klein is doing this to pressure European governments into using Palantir. After all, SAP played a big role in UK's NHS adopting Palantir without much oversight. And now the private health data of all British residents is available to with US tech companies. While Europe has GDPR and a few other protections, SAP has enough connections within these governments to help Palantir dismantle our democracies. I don't want an Europe where Flock cameras are everywhere for physical surveillance and Palantir has complete access of Europeans for online surveillance. And it breaks my heart that SAP is actually going against European companies to help this fascist ideology. Christian and the rest of the board should rethink this. And the supervisory board should feel ashamed that they are not holding the executive board accountable at all.
@fh And according to the WSJ, the German economy is in the tank and needs all the help it can get!
Here's a fact for you. We are losing millions of euros in potential revenue from EU governments because the SAP leadership is refusing to deploy European alternatives such as Mistral (for Joule) and Hetzner (instead of AWS and Azure). It's actually insane how SAP's leadership is beholden to American companies and want to share profits with Anthropic, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, etc. I understand that the market for the EU government sector is comparatively smaller than others but it is substantial enough to warrant a significant investment on our part. We can easily not have to do any layoffs and instead hire more employees if we accepted European alternatives. But CK and his board do not want this on ideological reasons because they consider American tech companies as allies and working with European technology partners as a betrayal of their trust. Some of SAP's partners are planning to create custom solutions to make SAP products work on managed private cloud on Hetzner but that's not a viable solution. And Mistral already works with large corporations such as Airbus, BMW and ASML. So SAP has no real reasons besides ideology in not choosing them.
The SAP executives privatize the profits (bonuses) and socialize the losses (layoffs).
If you ever bought into the culture of SAP, I have some magic beans to seel!
@be Yes but this won't stop our executive board from claiming victory and laying off as many employees as possible. The results or customers truly don't matter here. All that matters is their bonuses.
Good luck training AI with human behaviours because if anything, human decisions are highly contextualized. Just because you tell an AI to make a sales decision, or a product decision because of XYZ, if the external market conditions change drastically and all the humans have been laid off, the slop rate will shoot through the roof because the AI will not know what to do with this outlier event. How would AI react against quantum computing competitors who have developed a vastly superior Agentic ERP system to SAP? It would crash out. Just an example of why AI fails in volatile market environments such as the tech space. You have competitors using AI to out-AI their AI competitors. What a joke this economy has become.
Consumers are sick and tired of the high slop rates. AI is only good for summarizing and making basic presentations, mix and merged images/videos based on NLP keywords, and suggestions. At the end of the day, the data that it is being trained on...will always have to come from a human (as a customer, a manager's decisions based on new market factors, analyst data and feedback, etc.).
As an employee, getting an AI to summarize and give me relevant suggestions on how to write content is pi$$ing me off because it was recommending outdated product names and solutions for customers which led me to go and spend more time researching the relevant products. Without human intervention this would have been a catastrophe.
Our area is asking us to document everything and I hate it. I agree with documenting important information such as tracking of tickets in Jira, ACDs, decisions, etc. But we are now asked to also document everything from an AI perspective. For example, when we arrive to a certain decision after checking some facts we have to document this in a sharepoint page with a sentence that starts with "I think" ??? "because of the reasons" ???. The idea is to allow AI to learn from our decision-making. I hate this because I want to use AI for tasks like summarizing long texts, creating presentations, research etc. I don't want to train AI to replace me in decision making or where I actually add value as a human. But our managers are he-l bent on getting ready to replace as many employees as possible. This isn't what the company should be focused on. We are here to bring value to our customers. We aren't here to train AI so Palantir and Anthropic can improve their products to assist mass layoffs. I hate how our leadership is approaching this from a layoff readiness perspective instead of customer benefit perspective.