Plenty of programmers dream of SAP level salaries.

Do you know that several JVM optimizations have been contributed by them?

I for one, rather work with SAP than dealing with npm ecosystem.

The fact that you bring up salaries perfectly represents everything wrong with SAP.

A job is more than a money maker, it's a platform for expressing yourself.

SAP wouldn't understand that though, so they hire the mediocre (to write Java, a language explicitly designed to cater to less capable programmers) to produce joyless, soulless stuff. Of course they pay well, they have big customers with no taste for good work, but plenty of money, nobody in their right mind would take on a SAP job if the money wouldn't make up for the grueling tedium.

If you think that it's either SAP or node, oh boy, thats a false dicotomy of hilarious proportions.

And BTW, I've heard that Cobol salaries are quite high too.

Artists express themselves, Software Engineers get the job done and go home.

Yeah, ironically COBOL is more modern than C in language features, yet C seems to still be quite appreciated for a 50 years old language.

The way you get the job done is also an expression of yourself. There is never only one way to do things.

The issue is that if you work for a company like SAP, you most likely don't have enough personal flavour to come to interesting or meaningfull solutions. If you don't have passion, be it even for correctness, you'll build mediocre things.

Germany paid SAP millions for their Covid tracking app. Reaearchers had already worked out a protocol for them, apple and google had already implemented it. All they had to do was write a simple frontend and be done.

But politicians decided that such a big and important job, needs to go to big and important companies like SAP and T-SYSTEMS, for millions of euros.

SAP tried to be cool and agile, they even forced their employees to create github profiles (something none of the had done prior).

In the end they delivered a month too late, with critical bugs. And millions of server maintenance fees.

A system that was already 90% implemented, with network requirements that can be satisfied by fiber to the home connections, or a single S3 instance.

Why? Because they used mediocre people, who didn't have enough passion to create github profiles. Because they used the least common denominator, Java, and reinvented stuff that was already implemented. And because everybody just wanted to get the job done and go home, no expression of self involved.

But hey, I heard they pay good.

We are building the noosphere here. We don't all have to wear that mantle, but some of us should have hopes and ambitions in our jobs. They don't even have to be consuming, but simply seeing this as an ongoing continual project seems due. We're coming close to RFC10000. No one goes home. We strive to open possibilities for humanity so we can all each keep exploring & going further.

Edit: oh good to see you again pjmlp, after last week. We fell to different sides then too, but I have continually enjoyed your writing, & again, while I talk & disagree, I would also not say you are wrong. You are more than correct, in the vast amount of cases. But I would suggest that this field in particular must also be heads up looking up & about, that just a job doesn't fully describe us all.