ABAP Programmer vs J2EE Developer

[Hendy Setyo Mulyo]

Hi All,

I am just wondering the job market of SAP ABAP Programming. How is the salary of ABAP Programmer compared to J2EE Developer with the same level of experience? Is J2EE Developer's pay higher or...?
Anyone please share about this.
Thanks.

[Tim Holloway]

Having good SAP credentials is a license to steal. Even in this lowly backwater where I live (which is almost cheap enough to offshore to), a SAP person should easily be able to pull $120K.

On the other hand, I actually never get to hear the SAP success stories. Presumably there are some, or it wouldn't be so popular. What I do hear, however, is things like Fortune-500 corporations being effectively shut down for days when SAP goes sour.

When that happens, I suspect a lot of very important people come looking for someone to kill, so it may be a lot of that money goes towards antacids and painkillers.

[Arvind Mahendra]

For indian IT it may well be the next big as at those rates it has outsourced written all over it. BUt From what I thought Sap was trying to convert some of their stuff from ABAP to Java as SAP has just too many competitors now like oracle and SAP implementations are supposed to be losing mkt share. With Java programmers aplenty it would make them more competitive. As far as 'success stories' I agree with Tim, according to training institutes everyone who walks out of a training prog in SAP gets placed with a top MNC and then becomes obscenely wealthy. The reality though is quite different I think. I don't know of anyone personally in SAP technical side which is of interest to us namely EP or XI and one person I do know came back to Java soon enough. But then again I'm also sure there are alot of people who managed to build a good career in it too. I do know someone who is happy and doing well in SAP Basis though but his salary is only slightly higher than what you might see of J2EE guys with same # of years.

[Hendy Setyo Mulyo]

Originally posted by Arvind Birla:
I do know someone who is happy and doing well in SAP Basis though but his salary is only slightly higher than what you might see of J2EE guys with same # of years.

I do think the same way as you do. I guess for the technical stuff, J2EE Developer is still one of the highest paid job. So far I only know that SAP Functional is the one that definitely much much higher than J2EE.