One year @ SAP

It’s been a great year working with awesome people, awesome managers and I can easily say that this is the best place I’ve ever worked.

When I was looking for a new position I was mostly looking mostly for the right culture fit then good location & similar pay.

There were tons of companies interested in hiring me. I even started filling my whiteboard with the list of companies that were in the pipe and in which interview stage I was. At some point I had almost 20 in flight.

Although there was a lot of interest it was very challenging because most positions were either a long commute to downtown Seattle, others were really awful places to work and there were some that just could not wrap their minds around my previous/expected salary against their non-competitive budget.

I even laugh at one of the recruiters when she told me that my salary was a red flag when I had like 8+ other companies which had no problem with it.

Most of the people I talked were just really bad interviewers.

I was about to give up so I started considering the bad culture of Uber, long commute to Facebook or other smaller companies in downtown Seattle which had a startup culture. I even started considering giving up on the culture and try the forbidden Microsoft which is a no-no in culture.

Most interviews were a bust except Facebook which I decided not move forward once I got the offer from SAP is in downtown Bellevue.

Then I was contacted by an SAP recruiter and I was very hesitant about another political Microsoft like culture so I put them on the back burner. But I did agreed to a phone call with hiring manager just to respectfully let him know that I would not move forward because of the culture fit but when I asked questions he gave me a 180 degree view of what I though the culture would be and so far it has been true.

I was convinced once I talked to the team and told me that it’s a brand new team mostly people convinced from startups to start a project with great innovation inside the company and operate like a startup.

It’s the best of everything worlds team awesome culture, great commute to downtown Bellevue and I even got a decent bump on compensation so I could not be happier.

We’ve grown fast so I’m trying to keep a watchful eye for the politics rolling in.

So far has been a really awesome with the best people I’ve ever worked.

Fun note

As mentioned before looking for new position some people were just really bad interviewers.

On one instance after the full loop I did not get hired just because I have not done enough Node.JS.

Been a senior software engineer I just though that “these guys were just amateurs because a language is a tool but the concepts remain the same”. 

For instance I  started working @ SAP using Node.JS and on my first project my manager told me that he is a good developer but my code was on another level and my response was: “Dude this is the first time I code in TypeScript for Node!”