SAP Job Interview

Had my interview today with SAP, and it went quite well, I thought. It was a stinking hot day, which I usually relish since I don't do anything on Fridays, but it meant the prospect of schlepping out to the headquarters in a suit and tie was... unpleasant.

Thankfully, SAP has a reputation for being relatively laid back as far as their dress code goes -- everyone who tells me this also mentions the pressure to perform employees are under, but I guess that's the price you gotta pay for getting to wear thongs at an international software giant. I suspect Google probably has much the same trade-off.

Anyway, for me this just meant I dragged out my least formal shirt and my most formal non-dress pants, forgoing the tie completely and thus affording myself valuable ventilation area.

This has absolutely nothing to do with SAP or jobs of any kind, but my mind just went from thinking about "ventilation area", to thinking about paintballing in Moama in 30° heat (full-body overalls + helmet = rivers of sweat), to thinking about the various forms of heat transfer (convection, conduction, radiation), to thinking about reading that you wouldn't explode in space unprotected, but freeze to death. I think that was rebutted, though... or maybe not. Hmmmm. That's bugging me, now. It'll probably end up being asphyxiation, anyway.

So, adequately ventilated and dressed to the... well, 6's only, I suppose, I showed up at SAP and had a pleasant interview with my prospective boss. He's two levels away from the Financial Director of SAP (i.e. Fin. Director, his boss, him), but we (his employees) are still afforded the informal 'you'; with his boss as well, I think.

First off he described again what I'd be doing: basically, SAP moved some stuff from one software system to another software system (both internal) a year ago, and since then they've been optimizing it. The 'stuff' is information in English for people in SAP's financial departments around the world, and this department I might be working for deals not only with the technical maintenance of these documents, but also the editing and formatting of new documents to make sure they follow SAP guidelines and are accurately translated.

I was given a short piece of text in German to translate into English, which wasn't that hard. I forgot to check to see if I'd used Australian instead of American spelling (they use American), and didn't have too much time to really craft it, but I don't really spend much time crafting these blog posts and most of them turn out alright.. I hope!

Again, a side note: since Blogger introduced a spell-checking feature, I've discovered an average of 1 error per post -- most often only typos. I'm pretty content with that.

My role, as it was described to me, would be a sort of 70/30 split between these two areas (language and technical), which would suit me just fine. I'd be allowed to work up to 20 hours a week during the semester, and up to 40 hours during holidays; hourly wage would be around 11€ (which is pretty good). It's not really a big department -- 6 people -- but that doesn't really bother me. The site is easy to get to (if not exactly close), the hours would fit, and even the expectation of above-average performance (at university as well as at work*) doesn't phase me; I do like a bit of a challenge.

Had a little bit of a chat about my background, asked about my grades (why I only got a 4,0 in FiWi, for example), and was taken to meet the boss's boss (the one just below the Director). She was nice -- didn't get the informal 'you', but apparently I would once employed -- and asked some more questions about why I came to Germany, why this job, stuff like that. I left with quite a positive impression, partly due to the way the conversations went and partly due to the fact that my interviewer plain told me he liked the way our interview went -- now I'm to hear from them on Monday, or Tuesday at the latest.

MLP haven't made any contact in the last week, so right now I'm leaning strongly towards taking this offer should it come along. I'll keep you posted.

*I assume they measure their work standards against other companies: demanding performance above the internal average from all employees is a little too Dilbert-esque to be true.

P.S. Two spelling errors: typed "ie." instead of "i.e." (typo), and forgot to capitalise "English". "Hmmmm" was picking up as well, but I don't accept that. Those 4 "m"'s were deliberate.