I would fully agree with that, my generalization was kind of the opposite - if you work at a small company you are unlikely to use or work with SAP.
My other generalization was that HN was focused on startups, their technical culture, the cool and interesting, and almost by the definition not on boring bread and butter aspects. Does not mean that people/users themselves do not work there - I have spent twenty years on PeopleSoft/Oracle myself, but that is not why i come here and yes, the overall zeitgeist on HN toward e.g. Oracle is pretty consistent :->
FWIW, comment was not meant to be dismissive. I was genuinely fascinated, late at the night, at the notion that IT industry professionals might not be exposed to a behemoth such as SAP or even ERPs at large, and was pondering as to how that might come to be; there's absolutely personal bias & hubris in it, which is why I tried to understand where it came from and what's the diff between background of my friends and colleagues, vs perhaps some other IT professionals :)
The fact that you are arguing against this might be why you are getting downvoted. The original comment was saying “if you are in a small org you probably haven’t worked with SAP”, which is not the same thing.
Edit for further clarification: I can see how it might look like they were arguing what you stated, but it was more of a Bayesian inference. Many HN readers are at a small company, therefore a plausible reason that an arbitrary HN reader might not have heard of SAP would be that they are in the large pool of HN readers that are {in small companies and, therefore, do not work with SAP}
Since you are in the machine learning silo, your perspective may be a little skewed.
It would not surprise me if KP were using ECC for their finances or some other area the parent comment is not familiar with.
https://www.erpsoftwareblog.com/2012/11/why-does-microsoft-h...
What would be the point of Google writing their own financial consolidation software?
I.e. HR & Payroll legislative rules and best practices, business & organizational process transformation etc, are not what Google Engineers and IT necessarily have experience in, and if they allow hubris to override that fact, it might not go great.
Internets indicate that Google uses Oracle, Apple uses SAP.
This info may be outdated - for example, Facebook claims they built their own ERP just recently; I do wonder what that "backend database" part is though, or how much HR/Pay/Finance, as opposed to inventory/datacentre management, is custom: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/15/how-facebook-does-it/
You're either using SAP and you don't know it or you're using Oracle.
EDIT: just looked at your linkedin profile. I can see that your company literally has SAP consultants working for them full time. I don't know which SAP products you are using but you definitely are an SAP customer.
Or you're using NetSuite (which nowadays is Oracle, granted, but a rather different product from what most people think of when they talk about Oracle or SAP in an ERP context), or you're using Microsoft's ERP (Dynamics something or other? Never used it), or you're using something developed in-house (very likely running on an AS/400). Or hell, you might be running multiple ERPs in a weird limbo state mid-transition (e.g. Thermo Fisher, which was using AS/400 and SAP (or maybe it was Manhattan? Or both? My memory's fuzzy...) - the latter of which might very well have been partially implemented on AS/400 in order to integrate with the existing ERP - as of a couple years ago when I was working for them).
It's worth noting, too, that there are plenty of large and arguably-dysfunctional companies not using an ERP at all, or (like with my current employer) it's relegated to very specific uses because other functionality got offloaded to other systems (for example, it's relatively common to run a WMS separate from the ERP and integrate between the two, as it is with an eCommerce system; in my employer's case, all three are separate).
That’s pretty dismissive. I work at a company with ~80B in revenue, I never interacted or heard of SAP in work context. In fact it is only incidentally that I’ve heard of them previously. There are hundred of thousands of engineers working in companies with 10-11 digit capitalizations that will never interact or hear about SAP.
Edit: to clarify because I am getting a bunch of downvotes. My point is not about SAP’s penetration, it is that lots of engineers (even in companies that use SAP) might not encounter SAP products. The perspective “of you haven’t worked with SAP you are in a small org” is wrong.