Business Objects Reviews in Vancouver, BC Area

Pros

business object is a good place to work at. people are nice there, and the pay is not bad. recommended.

Cons

the raise is not big each year even your performance is over average. also office politics is another factor that affects promotion and raise.

Advice to Senior Management

building a good relationship with both your supervisor and your team members are equally important to your career path in business object.

Pros

team work environment
technical knowledge sharing
regonized by managment
well and detail employee training program
work life balance
fun place to work

Cons

company decision is unclear
lay off emplyoees when company being bought.
salary is lower than average on job market
internal paper works

Advice to Senior Management

keep the employees. company is expanding. finance is good yet employees are still being laid off after the merging with SAP.

Pros

Great office location, relaxed working environment, smart people, teams that get work done on time and with good quality. Not much overtime required.

Cons

Not much training. Innovation is "encouraged" but most decisions come from top down. Cross site development is difficult. Projects take sometimes years to complete / ship.

Advice to Senior Management

It seems like the organization is always undergoing changes in management and structure. After several times of going through change and not seeing much difference I am wondering if there is really much benefit to restructuring so much.

Pros

Good pay. Good benefits. Some good people. Office has a gym/games room.

Cons

Aggressive performance metrics based on closure of customer incidents. All incidents are counted the same regardless of difficulty. This leads to some employees working the system by insisting all customers create new incident's for each small question.

Mandatory "on call" overtime which is payed at a flat rate regardless of how much work is actually done.

No raise in 2 years.

Rare to find opportunities to advance.

Advice to Senior Management

Put more reliance on customer satisfaction, and less on incidents closed. Make after hours support optional.

Pros

If you are straight out of college, entry-level or don't have experience selling to larger companies Bobj is a good place to get your footing in the technology sales industry.

The Vancouver office is very well equipped with parking on the roof (pay), multiple kitchens, a lounge, a sleeping room and a full-sized gym with yoga room, onsite massage therapy and games room.

Cons

SAP has not handled this acquisition well. Two years later, we still don't know what products we can sell and how to sell them. We cannot even provide a price quote to our prospects without confirming with multiple groups that the pricing policy is the same as the week before and approvals are the same. Commissions are rarely paid on time and correctly, and our on target earnings are 30k less than they were last year. Nobody in this office has any power to influence the decisions that affect our jobs and our productivity. There are too many roadblocks to doing our jobs - it's like this company is trying to make it impossible for us to sell.

Advice to Senior Management

Ask front-line employees how they would recomment improvements be made

Pros

Business Objects was a medium sized tech firm. It was a great place to work if you wanted to experience Big Company life without having to take a position at a large company.

This was a great place to implement ideas, if you were willing to follow through on them yourself. Even our interns were developing features in our products (perhaps 10% of the engineering staff were interns, most of whom were working on shippable features).

Really good salary for new grads.

The Vancouver office is very well located. (From what I can tell, most of their big offices have great locations).

People are very friendly and easy to get along with.

Cons

There's not a lot of community recognition. If you drop the name at a party, you'll almost always get blank stares. This is even more true now that they have been purchased by SAP -- the brand recognition in the tech community of either Business Objects or SAP is unfortunately low.

The salary, at least in Vancouver, is really high for new graduates, and really low for people with some experience. It was very common for someone to start working at BOBJ right out of school and make 10k more than their peers at other companies. However, in three years, they would be make 20-40k less than the same people elsewhere.

The product is made for the business sector, this may not be interesting for many purely technical people.

There are very, very few perks for working for this employer. You come to the office, you do some work, you go home and get a cheque in the mail. They do offer bike storage, a gym and a foosball table, but that's about it.

Over time, the office has lost more and more benefits. Stock options are gone, stock purchase plans are gone, health benefits are getting worse every year, retirement benefits get worse every year, bonus payout formulas are constantly readjusted to lower the payout (or so it seems), company bar-b-q's are being cancelled, etc. All of the good reasons for working here are systematically being removed, and there is no replacement.

There is very little company loyalty amongst employees.

In the development side of the business there is a huge stigma associated with being a Software Developer. There are basically two kinds of people: Developers, and everyone else (QA, translation staff, IT, PgM, Tech Writers, etc.). If you weren't a developer, you were looked down upon -- this was especially noticeable during bonus time or salary review time.

Advice to Senior Management

People don't stay here long term for a reason. You should really look at how you can increase long term retention.

Pros

Flexibility for work-life balance, working from home and time off for family. Benefits kick in before 3 month probationary period is over, opportunity for advancement.

Cons

SAP acquisition has changed the culture and cost many people their jobs.

Advice to Senior Management

n/a

Pros

Environment wise, it's a pretty good place to work. People are friendly. The work is pretty easy, and good if your more laid back. Comes with a games room with a pool table, ping pong table, Xbox 360, PS2, and a large gym.

Cons

Career advancement wise (at least for software), I don't believe it's a great place to work.
Some technical managers are more concerned with managing people issues rather than setting goals in creating well written software. As a software developer, I have plenty of reservations about a lot of the band aid solutions that go into the product, just to make something work. It's like 75% of the employees have never taken a software engineering course... or an English course for that matter.

Advice to Senior Management

I see management give out tasks but never follow up on them. This leads to poor quality work, or tasks simply to keep employees busy. My advice? It wouldn't hurt to micro manage a bit more.

Pros

Many opportunities; quick promotions for the right 'kind' of employees; lucrative industry. There are many different teams, technology groups, and career paths one can pursue. A large, mature sales organization would appeal to those interested in sales/marketing. They have some decent coin to spend when needed.

Cons

Many managers; series of mergers led to disorganization; politics heavier than usual. You need to love large corporate environments, with the facade of a hip tech company, to fit in at BOBJ. Having said this, their are many different groups and each one is somewhat unique - if you find your right niche you will enjoy your time.

Advice to Senior Management

Streamline procedures, consider experience when promoting staff.