Thread regarding SAP layoffs

@bz SAP has never understood how to manage money and have used layoffs as a shortcut to inflate the stock price. They only care about painting a picture for customers to buy a product that doesn’t work and won’t receive timely updates. SAP does not care about employees or customers, and it’s starting to show in the churn.

@yv The problem with this is who buys the goods and services produced. you would need to reduce the population drastically to reach an equilibrum and then ussher in a shocialist utopia as nobody would need to work.

What is quite funny though is the people who are pushing for this reality, like the ebay mafia, also bemoan the low birth rates amoungs educated (white) women and keep calling for increasing birth rates (amoungs white women) to avoid there racist nightmares.

@wg That is illogical. The money for executive bonuses is literally coming from paying engineers and others less. SAP has a good cash flow and can at least pay all employees 2% above inflation. But instead, SAP chooses to pay less than inflation to employees but a lot more money to executives and give handouts for layoffs. Because the ratio of executives to employees is low, it is cheaper to pay CK 18 million and give executives 10% year on year increases if they give only 2,4% to all other employees. In an ideal world, CK and executives and all employees should get around 4-7 percent salary increase depending on their performance - lower 4% for low performance and higher 7% and stock options for higher performance. But that does not happen. Majority of executives get 10% every year and also stock options which were originally supposed to be handed out to acquisition employees.

@wj There is hire freez in high cost centers and in some departments.
By hire freez I mean permanent job contract, temporary is still possible.

I heard that now they only hire T1 and T2

From Palantir CEO at Davos -
AI will make immigration unnecessary.
https://example.com/2sjw64wp

Tesla, Ford and Hyundai have started using robots powered by AI to run manufacturing and factory work round the clock.
https://example.com/2v6spb3n

Global elite is planning to reduce white and blue collar jobs from both the ends and with global uncertainty and changing world order, I won't be surprised if they have planned controlled population reduction with recurring ongoing wars, low child births and in general forming the basis of demoralized subdued society.

1-2 generations ago: 1 earning person can raise a family with wife and 3 kids, give them a good decent life with own house, car and good debt free education. We all know the reality now. Everyone has to work in a family to afford a decent life, live in match box apartments, childcare and healthcare is expensive, food makes us sick, plastics everywhere. Digitalization was supposed to improve easy of life but guess the same story is being sold for AI as well which we will know after 10-20 years the after effects of this, where power will be more consolidated and powerful even becoming more powerful.

More and more people are fundamentally questioning the jobs they do without any meaning and purpose and are a cog in a wheel ready to be replaced.

@sb there is literally 2000 plus jobs posting in LinkedIn, didn't check internal posting yet, should be more. I agree with most of part you said. But there is no hire freeze.

@wa I don't mind executives earning millions and celebrating their success, as long as engineers who perform well receive equitable pay increases and clear paths for promotion...which not always happening especially in the recent years...

@ve are all of those d0u€h€ bags in Davos now, skiing and partying like rock stars?

@ve I fully agree with you

@tw Agreed.

@tr And yet support for AfD has almost doubled in the last two years.

@tt Too late to repeat any of this. He is already in and his actions are already causing damage far and wide. And Americans are powerless to do anything about it.

@tn you might not believe in them but DA, CK and the rest of the executive board and HRBP and all executives at SAP believe in them. And the share price dropped by a lot. They have no choice but to cause a distraction by laying off SAP employees.

@tb I repeat without the enhanced vote of the electoral college this clown and his 'agenda', or should I say his anti constitutional agenda would be nowhere near.

I don’t believe in layoffs. They would do more harm than good.

@tb Yes and a majority of people in Germany also want exactly what is going on in the US right now. It is only a matter of time that Musk buys enough politicians to put AfD in power. After all, most CEOs like CK are already his and Thiel's friends.

@t8 he won the popular vote so it does not matter that he won the electoral college, too. Try accepting that he won and the majority of people voted for him and his agenda.

@sb Post script: The electoral college system only exists in the US. If this was gone this orange issue wouldn't be a topic of conversation within a thread dedicated to SAP layoffs

@sb I completely respect what you say. Outside the USA the world and it's dog knew that reelection was nailed on, we took it seriously why the D party didn't is a mystery to me Mr Bidon's ego got in the way of a good alternative. I will continue to call out the likes of this troll.

@qy and @qk It is easy to brush off what the troll says but you need to be careful. Here in the US, we didn't take things seriously and everything has been going downhill since the election. 32% of Americans voted for the GOP and Trump to be in power. And in recent German polls, AfD hovers around 26%. It won't be impossible to fathom that they may come in power and enact what this id--t keeps posting here. So please be vigilant.

From an SAP perspective, if the executive board and HRBP want layoffs, they will target the most vulnerable groups first. Hiring has already stopped in most locations and we aren't hiring anyone in India and low-cost locations either. The only real job postings are internal. Signavio is doing great as a business area and it is growing at a rapid pace but they are getting rid of Signavio employees there. I know at least three VPs who were ousted in the last year. And they got rid of all female VPs which was a crazy thing to do. Apparently their head of Engineering thinks that only men can be a manager of managers. There are supposed to be layoffs there despite record growth.

With the stock price below 200, we will absolutely have layoffs. Be be vigilant and stand up for each other in Europe. We failed at this in the US and now things are very bad.

@qy Agreed! Whoever it is has no life.

@qk Mate, instead of trolling, you should be writing thrillers, you have the imagination

@q4 Externals are temporary with limited contracts. They need them to do the work after laying off employees. The executive board needs to keep this grift running till they leave in a few years. So they will first go after employees that are the easiest to exploit - immigrants. A majority of SAP is already against having immigrants in the company and no one will complain. Also this is what the US administration wants from SAP, Germany and Europe. With the growing fear of tarriffs, this is the best way for SAP to show that they stand in solidarity with the US, their greatest market. And then CK and DA will help Trump and Musk by supporting AfD in the upcoming elections. Win win for everybody besides immigrants.

If layoff is inevitable, shouldn't it start from external?

SAP wants a LOT of people to leave - but under a PIP so they do not have to part with a hefty severance package. SAP will be around 50,000 people in 4 years, and 30,000 will not be in Europe or the US. When your market share is shrinking and you have no innovation or new products, you cut to the bone and sustain yourself on the maintenance and cloud subscription revenue. It's what will happen bar some magic beans that CK or DA find, and I can bet that DA wants CK out so he can put in some crony he can manipulate. DA knows nothing about building companies, only cost cutting and out sourcing so that is what he will do, and he will get even richer doing it.

There will be layoffs - but if Q4 is as bas as suspected - massive layoffs. Layoffs have zero to do with performance. Some of the very best people were laid off in the 2024 reaping - people who were hard working, dedicated and part of the reason SAP was so successful. The people who remain are overpaid senior managers who add no value and just collect their over-inflated salaries. They exist to protect one another and that is their sole purpose. SAP is a dying dinosaur that will be extinct in 10 years when more agile companies and startups out-compete them. Ask yourself why Oracle and Workday in the same market with essentially the same product doing better. The market is finally realizing that SAP has no future, except to drastically cut costs and limp along with the customers who cannot extricate themselves from legacy SAP systems.

I don’t think there will be any layoffs.

@jj people leads will always be better development managers than employees who have an engineering background. You should be ashamed of writing such things about your manager on an online forum. I hope they find who you are and can punish you in the new performance management system. Shame on you.

@jj These are lies. There is no such thing as a people lead in Signavio and there never was. Stop spreading lies and rumors. If you can't be professional at work, leave SAP.

@j9 Yes I am new to SAP but not new to the industry. I joined as part of Signavio and they made some HR coaches our development managers. None of them have any experience or can even understand the day-to-day work of engineers or designers or QA or others in the team. But they are still evaluating us and our salary increments and whether we get laid off or not depends on our rapport with them. I do not know how the rest of SAP is but I am told that acquisitions act very differently compared to established areas at SAP. Most of us are based in Berlin but our management is entirely based at the HQ and we have no means to contact them. Only these new development managers get financed to visit the HQ every quarter and they share what management wants from employees in other locations. We're very disconnected. But hey, it's still better than our Indian teams where employees are literally threatened into giving a good unfiltered survey. There is one manager is manipulative and she physically stands behind her reports as they fill the unfiltered survey. And guess what she has been with SAP for more than ten years and she tells us that this is how things work at SAP. I appreciate you sharing your view here but my experience and that of my team is drastically different from yours and many other employees. I don't think anything will get any better till these people leads who turned into development managers actually leave somehow. I practically have no support when I have technical questions. And we're not allowed to take part in the mentoring or coaching program because they think it is a waste of time. The only coaches or mentors we are allowed are from an internal Signavio program where some 15 people have nominated themselves as experts. And they give feedback to our manager. So if I get stuck at work and need help and ask one of these coaches, they will tell my manager and there can be negative repercussions because she will think that I am a bad engineer and then I will get a bad score in performance management. It's not a good environment to grow. And although others say that things are different at SAP but colleagues from SAP took over our entire management and fired all Signavio top management and they are the one who want this culture.

@e2 And how can SAP Joule, SAP AI internal processes cut down Product Managers, Devs and QA when the reliability of AI solutions for the past 3+ years has been atrocious across the industry? There are companies who thought they could replace everyone with AI and it backfired because:

1. Customers still overwhelmingly want to talk to real humans when troubleshooting,

2. AI can code, but there is still a human in the loop to make sure that the AI code ties together between APIs, etc.,

3. The quality of the code has been terrible still, even with full automation,

4. If that is the case, then there is no need for any PM, Devs and QAs whether they are in low-cost or high-cost locations. So the opening of the India offices is a sunk cost/waste of money.

Recently, CK published an article where nearly every CEO is clueless about AI disruption across the workforce and its future impacts. We are in an AI bubble which has too much money chasing too little impact. Even with these mass layoffs and full max of AI implementation, how come productivity globally still stinks?

@gr It's clear you're new to SAP...
Naïve thinking, learn from experienced guys who have +20 years at SAP.

• People get laid off because their product moved to low cost center.
• People get laid off because SAP acquired a company that does the same as the product they work on.
• People get laid off because SAP think now that your salary is too high or you're too old
• People were put in PIP because their manager was asked to downsize his team and they don't want to pay severance

The easiest way is to put an engineer on a project with no KT and expect from him/her the same as an experienced engineer, he/she will obviously can't reach the target out for him and the result...PIP !

These are all real life examples.

It doesn't mean that all managers are bad but they're not all good either they just do what they're told so they can keep their place.

There will be no layoffs.

I am not sure why employees are so worried about layoffs. If you listen to your manager and do everything they ask you to, you’ll never get laid off at SAP. Only colleagues who defy their manager’s expectations will be in trouble. Performance Management gives the ultimate power to managers because anyone who has low performance multiple quarters in the row can be put on a PIP. The only way for you to be safe is to have a good rapport with your manager. Your actual performance and contribution to SAP has nothing to do with layoffs.

@e1 If they plan to target product managers across SAP, that explains why HPOM was so important for them. It only created more disruption and normalized reorganisations every quarter. They're already starting with the rhetoric that there are too many product managers and developers at SAP and that these jobs can be done by Joule AI. So I won't be surprised if they also want to start letting go of product managers this year although they promised that HPOM was not an optimization exercise. IT and Support and QA will also be in the layoffs most likely. But they will only lay of HRBP next year because they need the HR people now to execute layoffs without fuss. That is why HR is the safest job at SAP for the next few years.

@cs The executive board has specified multiple times that even if SAP is doing well, they want at least 2 percent of SAP employees gone every year. So we can expect that minimum every year but most likely as high as 7 percent because they're developing Joule with the sole purpose to lay off IT and support functions such as QA, Product Management and Technical Support. To actually sell Joule to customers, they have to show how well they could improve operational efficiency within SAP by laying off as many SAP employees as possible. And to show that this is done using data, they created the new performance management. So it is not only easy to lay off employees but also easy to show that our customers can lay off employees and use SAP AI instead. This is the SAP business case for Sapphire 2027.

I don’t think there will be layoffs.

@bz Won't be surprised if this is what the executives are trying to achieve. If there is a good solution in the market, SAP will just acquire it. And every time there is an acquisition, their management gets replaced by long-term SAP employees who get promoted and make sh-t loads of stock options which should be reserved for the acquired employees. Rinse repeat every year. SAP is not in the business of building great products. It is in the business of acquiring great companies. And the strong network of employees at the HQ will never take VERP. They are making too much money on this grift and they will wait to be laid off. Many of them get on an average a salary appraisal and stock of 7 to 10% a year because they change their roles often or get promoted often. And the Betriebsrat rubber stamps this madness every single time. There is no one to stop them.

@aa Every single quarter we assign someone work to do, and then they get laid off. And then someone gets reassigned the work, then they get laid off or take VERP. Then realize we have capacity constraints and people are overworked - and nothing gets done. March 2026 is going to be a headcount bloodbath. If SAP offers severance there is a line of people waiting to take it especially the long-termed colleagues.

What a disaster this has become. Under resourced and still mass layoffs. Our product releases are too slow, too delayed and competitors who don't have this cost cut mentality still appear to be winning. If we halve the headcount at SAP, do they think the stock price will still grow as it takes 5 years to release a basic innovation for a customer? We will be outbid by smaller ERP startups.

@at Commenting from the US perspective, I believe severance payouts/benefits in 2024 and 2025 were the same? i.e. 2025 US separation agreements referred back to the 'US employee Separation Plan' published in 2024.

Were the payouts/benefits given to impacted employees in the US in 2024 (and/or 2023) better than what was provided in 2025?

For 2026, my understanding is that the new performance management program will help SAP avoid/reduce the amount they payout as they will now be factoring performance rankings into the decisions (algorithms) which they were not doing previously. Hence, probably will hear about/see more folks ending up on PIP's than in recent years.

And for those that get impacted by RIF through no fault of their own, I guess we'll have to see if the severance payout amounts are more or less compared to the last few years.