I came across this blog in the SAP community titled “Building your career as an SAP Cloud Developer”, and I was fixin’ for a fight. Eager to demolish what Markus Haug laid out as a foolhardy developer career path. Then I realized his perspective was not “you should construct your developer career around SAP BTP” but “as a developer, here is how to add BTP to your toolkit”…and my ire subsided. It’s actually a handy little guide to learning BTP stuff.
Don’t get me wrong – BTP itself does get some of my ire. I think SAP should have better information available with respect to things like Tobias Hofmann’s excellent critique of BTP messaging. And for the life of me I can’t figure out the actual value of ABAP as a runtime in the cloud.
But what I really want to put out into the world – and what Markus helped me get to in a roundabout way – is an exhortation to my fellow developers. Don’t let yourself get trapped in the role of “I’m an X Developer” where X is some value like ABAP, Java, SAPUI5, and so on. Create a role for yourself that shouts to the world “I’m a developer who happens to be skilled in X, and I’ll add Y and Z along the way as I need them to get things done”. And to my fellow devs who do SAP: spend time learning technologies outside of SAP. If you want to make yourself a better SAP developer, then for every SAP-centric skill you add to your bag, add a non-SAP skill. The best, most awesomest, nerds-I-most-admire-who-happen-to-do-SAP all have incredible non-SAP skill sets. PM
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