Interview with SAP

I just got back from my interview at SAP America. SAP is the world’s third largest software company with about 38,000 employees and 36,000 customers. I was interviewing for a paid 6-month internship as an Application Developer for their SAP Enterprise Portal group.

SAP Americas Corporate HQSAP Americas Corporate HQSAP Americas Corporate HQ

About a half hour drive west from my apartment in Philadelphia, getting there would be no problem (compared to the nightmare of traffic trying to get to Unisys, Siemens, and a couple other big Drexel coop hirers). My first impression of the place was good: a campus much nicer looking than Drexel, a parking garage with only a few open spaces, and a shuttle to move people between buildings throughout the day.

I was told I’d be meeting with David, who I had met before at an information session on Drexel’s campus, and Lenny, who I’d be working with if I got the job. Unfortunately David was too busy to take part in the interview, so it was just Lenny and myself. Lenny was a very soft spoken guy without a whole lot to say. He let me know what the job was, that he’d be the one assigning the day-to-day tasks. He asked a bit about what I’d done before and I briefly described the application I worked on for The Math Forum as it was written in Java, and this position would primarily be Java work as well. He also asked if I had any database experience and I tried to get across how much I do have, both from job experience working with Oracle and Postgres, to my own database intensive web apps.

That’s where things seemed to get a little awkward. He asked several times what I thought I’d get out of an internship for SAP, what I thought I’d learn there. The way he asked each time gave me the impression he might think I’m a bit overqualified for the job and couldn’t get much out of it. He let me know that I wouldn’t be doing a lot of database design, but more writing small apps to add to Enterprise Portal and modifying what’s already there. I tried to be clear that I just enjoy web development over other software development so working on Enterprise Portal would be a good fit, and that I’d like some experience with SAP’s solutions, such as Web DynPro and NetWeaver.

The interview was pretty brief, I was in and out in about 20 minutes, taking the shuttle back to the parking garage. I’m not sure where I stand with SAP; Lenny was pretty hard to read. I’m also not sure if SAP is a good match for me, as the job did sound pretty simplistic compared to what I’m used to. On the other hand, it could be a way into a company I might want to work for after graduating in a more challenging position, or at least a good way to get SAP’s software onto my resume. I’ll follow up with a thank-you letter as another chance to get across why I’m right for the job.

I mailed Google Friday morning with my available times for the phone interviews they want to do, and I’m still waiting to hear back about that.

Posted on December 18, 2006 in Personal

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  • Usamah M. Ali

    It’s very nice to know the man behind The Math Forum :-)

    During college days, and when I was a math fanatic, I was crawling The Math Forum more than Googlebot does. Oh the good old days, now PHP & MySQL has driven me away from Riemann Hypotheses & Prime Numbers.

    Would you mind telling us more about the development of TMF, Dan?

    Anyway, it’s really nice to meet you online.

  • Dan

    I probably didn’t contribute to The Math Forum you used. I was there in 2005 as a software developer. The first 3 months I spent working on a new version of the software to run the Ask Dr. Math service. I had a lot of fun doing that.. Java with Struts framework, Hibernate ORM, and a pretty complex data model for what would seem a simple service. That was put aside unfinished after the lead software architect quit, I don’t know if it ever made it to use. I wrote the p.erl cart / payment system for purchasing on the site, but the requirements were changing almost daily so doubt it looks the same as I left it.Other than that, most of the work I did there isn’t something visible on the site… I helped with the coding and preparation needed to make most of the site available by login only instead of public when they started charging for access. I also helped with their transition from Sybase to Postgres on most of the databases.

    Hmm.. the only good story I have from working at TMF.. the DBA, project manager, secretary were all off. In the office were just me and two other programmers. That afternoon the hard drive crashed on one of the servers and the website went down. The Math forum is an extremely popular website so any downtime is really significant for them.

    Since there were no CD burners there, I ran to my apartment and brought back a Knoppix live CD to boot the server, figure out the hard drive crashed, then we spent a few hours going through boxes in the server room finding a working hard drive to get the server back up. A few hours later we figured out how to get the backups off the tapes they were stored on since the backup software didn’t work and wouldn’t do the restore automatically. In the meantime I set up Apache on a Dell workstation there and redirected all the site traffic to a temporary site there. Eventually we got it all back up, very late at night.

  • http://www._.com Shital

    Hello,

    I am a Masters student, and I want to apply for an internship or full-time position in SAP Enterprise Portal. I am trained for the same. Could you please let me know about any positions if availbale?

    Thanks,
    Shital