When Shai Agassi gave his keynote at the JavaOne conference he nicely summed up how developers are viewing SAP and their fellow SAP developers:
"Most of you in the audience know SAP as the German Giant, the one that you don't really know what we do, but we are big, and we do stuff for companies that you don't want to work for."
He got a good chuckle from the audience. (Check out the Webcast)
That is how SAP developers are being perceived, doing stuff for the big corporations, but not the real interesting, cutting edge developments like in open source projects.
Maybe the SAP Developer has the last laugh. Read this article from the JobCenter section of the Dallas Morning News: Recruiters treat SAP pros as a precious commodity Quote:
"One programmer he recently placed ran SAP operations at a company but didn't feel that his personal ethics matched that of other company executives. When recruiters contacted him about an opportunity, he opted for a similar job that paid around $840,000. "
Personally I think this number is a bit high, but it is good to know that we are working in a field where people are in demand even during this downturn. If you follow the posts here at the SAP Developer Network, you will find that the things that happen within and around the SAP NetWeaver Platform are quite fascinating. Where else can you go within a weekend from a user base of Going Live with ESS and all of them are using your stuff.