ABAP will always hold a special, quirky little place in my heart. It's very powerful, but also totally frustrating. The language is a COBOL-like language made by Germans with a keyword graveyard as big as Berlin. The ABAP community (in my experience, online and offline) is totally unacademic: algorithmic complexity is a foreign concept, "code clarity" meant "hitting the Pretty Printer button every few years" (which was a nice feature), and there's no remote concept of best practices.
On the bright side, it makes for a good income, and the debugger is a gem.
The only advantage that I see is that for the most part, every program will look almost the same regarding standard SAP tables.
No offense, but this is probably a big reason for the perception that SAP is a giant slow resource hog. Developers are abstracted so far away from the hardware that they have no way of knowing that their simple little program is resulting in 1500 database queries per page load.
Feel free to share any other thoughts on the matter
For parent maybe this would be interesting: https://open.sap.com/courses/cp7
It's easy to get into, much smaller system in both scope and complexity, and tons of free documentation. Get a couple of certifications, do the trailhead stuff, contact some consulting firms to tell them you're available for work and it should be easy to find work.
Getting into SAP and finding work can be challenging. They have a lot of new things from what I see but the majority of the SAP work you'll find is old non-cloud stuff that you'll basically need to have worked with at a company before to learn.
I went from SAP dev inhouse -> SAP dev consulting then jumped on the Salesforce wagon around 2011.
SAP work was enjoyable to me, partly because I was working in the manufacturing space, which I found interesting. Software-wise, it felt like I was 20 years behind everything, working on a mainframe.
Salesforce, I just immediately hated. It was just limits after limits and some crappy java-like language and html templating that took forever to deploy. It's gotten a bit better with lightning but you'll see the shit underneath pretty quickly. I also found the projects also extremely boring. Going from controlling machines and automated warehouses with SAP to projects about collecting email addresses and creating contacts felt like I made the wrong move.
tldr -- avoid getting locked into proprietary-land if you can help it
All in all though Salesforce is pretty accessible for learning. Plenty of resources out there, and I know SF consultants make nice money.
I learned ABAP in a literally one weekend and was able to make stuff really quickly. For the most part, you could just "loop at <giant_table_name>" extract what you want and show it on a screen using one of their existing ui components. There was not much UI to worry about and you know the user is getting a proper input box (for example) with a working typeahead. Honestly, I thought it was a very decent developer experience. I could focus on what I needed to do and not worry about how pretty the thing looks or if I'm querying the database optimally. I ended up writing a very complex genetic algorithm implementation to calculate optimal schedules and it was a joy.
Yes, the table names were basically in german, and abbreviated, and most things were only 8 chars long for some legacy reasons, but it really wasn't that hard to learn that VBAK was sales_orders and VBAP was sales_order_items and move on.
For the most part, the users were totally fine with SAP. It was hyper-focused for the tasks they needed. It was consistent and easily documentable. It didn't crash, it loaded super fast, it didn't eat up gigs of memory. You just load up the gui application and you don't even need a mouse once you know the shortcuts.
Having spent the last 10 years building web and mobile apps, working with salesforce and others, I miss ABAP very often.