Ask HN: List of most payed programming languages: Why is ABAP not on the list?

5 points by picibucor 10 years ago | 3 comments

I was searching for the most payed programming languages, and I found that none of the lists contained ABAP (language of SAP).

I asked a friend who is a head-hunter and according to him companies paying a "fortune" to ABAP-programmers (if they could find any).

How well-known is SAP in the USA?

HenryTheHorse 10 years ago |

> How well-known is SAP in the USA?

Extremely.

SAP runs in almost every industrial, manufacturing and consumer goods company in the US (and around the world).

ABAP is an important skill to those companies running SAP (in particular: running SAP ERP, because ABAP is not the stack for SAP's other products). But unlike Java and .NET, you will never see companies hiring ABAP programmers in the dozens, because the ERP platform is driven by extensive configuration rules rather than just coding.

ABAP is not the tool to drive major custom development - and chances are, such large-scale custom development has already been done in the early 2000s and now they are all in support mode.

edimaudo 10 years ago |

It depends on who wrote the article. ABAP is a niche programming language as a lot of companies these days rarely buy SAP products.

logn 10 years ago | |

SAP owns lots of products and companies and many of those are written in Java, so it's possible you're just not aware it's them. E.g., Crystal Reports.

Also, it's not that companies "rarely buy SAP products" but rather that many of their customers are large corps who are on very long upgrade cycles for boring but essential products. They make a lot of their money from consultants servicing these customers. This isn't the type of thing that you hear about in the news. In recent years they've been trying to grow their mid-market reach.