Revenue flat. Seeking “outside help” to cut costs. What does that sound like to you?
117 replies (most recent on top)
The best job security at SAS is to be a friend or relative of the owners, or a handmaiden to one of those folks.
Best job security at SAS presently iis a job role that directly pulls in revenue exceeding your salary and benefts. If your job does not do that, then the next best job role is one that highly supports known revenue generation and can not be accomplished mostly with AI..
Good luck to all!
My guess is no sooner than the week of February 24. They need to get otl back online first. Also looks like lots of planning and meetings the week before. Good luck to everyone!
5% layoffs at Meta today...meanwhile, no news here.
Meanwhile, back on topic, is there any new layoff news?
“DEI has plenty do with the d-mbing down of America.”
Yes, but not in the way you likely meant. Largely this phenomenon is focused on the opposition.
In Baseball, the Great American Game, you are asked to Hit, Run, and Throw. If you can do any two of those three, you can play.
In Soccer, the Game of the World, you are asked to be good with your feet, and to plan ahead. If you can do those things, you can play.
In Basketball and Football, you must be of abnormal size to play. I'm a healthy American male, over six feet, but I'm too small for these games.
We have created games of freaks. The players are willing participants in the Freak Show. I’m glad they are well paid.
That's a good point. Basketball teams are racist against short people.
If DEI was great, we would see it on a college or pro basketball court.
DEI has plenty do with the d-mbing down of America. The CCP and Putin love its practice in the USA, yet do you see it in their countries?
DEI has nothing to do with the decline of SAS -- or America.
In both cases, we are simply spending beyond our means, so painful cuts are necessary.
One of today's headlines:
Pam Bondi Instructs Trump DOJ to Criminally Investigate Companies That Do DEI
You are clearly not a past or present employee, or you would have better knowledge.
These outlandish claims about DEI are really telling. SAS is still way behind similar tech companies in minorities in leadership and overall percentage of employees. The entire “DEI” operation at SAS is one white woman and a couple of people who primarily recruit at HBCUs. That’s it.
If you’re gonna blame “DEI” for the company’s fates, you’re either comically misinformed or just a Trump supporter using black and brown people as a scapegoat for problems they didn’t create.
“An initial 40% reduction in staff size… including all DEI related initiatives, any remaining wasteful bureaucratic mid/back office positions, etc. and anyone who is not an A player…”
DEI is surely a small part of that 40%.
This plan would work, but it won’t be implemented. Viya was management's last big bet. Now they are not trying to “right the ship”, but to sell it.
If DEI has only happened at the intern/new hire process and the mandated social engineering courses of the last 5 years, then DEI is not the problem. The company has been on decline far before the past 5 years. And intern and new hires have very little say in the decisions that have been made over the years. They have very little power to shift anything. That starts with JG and senior leaders at the company. Which I guess are all merit hires since they have been here longer than 5 years?
Well, THAT was some verbal vomit.
“ Let me guess, you don't even work at SAS but giving your 2 cents on how the company should be ran.”
unless one of us is the big guy, all these comments are from armchair quarterbacks. now think about how stupid it is if you're armchair quarterbacking the other armchair quarterback. you're not even armchair quarterbacking the real quarterback. you're trying to control the fictitious quarterback. the context of the discussion is stupid company decisions. for all you know the other quarterbacks did help to run SAS or other companies so probably have some smart comments and probably made many mistakes. arguing you work there so your 2 cents should count more .... basically shows partly how those stupid decisions are made. close off and do not listen to the rest of the world.
“ Ha, ha, hahaha, if you only knew 🤦♂️”
said every anonymous person ever.
“ Let me guess, you don't even work at SAS but giving your 2 cents on how the company should be ran.” …. Ha, ha, hahaha, if you only knew 🤦♂️
Such initiatives are primarily occurring in the intern/new hire process and the politically motivated, internally mandated social engineering courses that we have been forced to take over the past five years. The DEI department salaries and budget could be used more effectively on alternative initiatives that actually make the company successful, rather than a bunch of virtue signaling that is doing absolutely nothing to address the core problems of SAS’ decline.
@1by+1jj760v28 agree with parts of this. We definitely need a new CEO who can weather this transition, products and technologies that customers actually want, and open source technologies. I laugh at the DEI Initiatives remark because where are they? Did you see the stage at company kickoff? Have you looked at the senior leaders in the company? Let me guess, you don't even work at SAS but giving your 2 cents on how the company should be ran.
If the owners desire, SAS can be saved by doing the following:
JG steps away from daily operations and hires a CEO, preferably 50 years old or younger, empowered to do whatever is necessary to make the company successful — up to and including completely reconfiguring the C-suite with new players. Come up with a reality based strategy to build relevant data management and analytics centric solutions around an AI-rich framework. Assemble that framework and initially build three or four new solutions that can integrate to achieve synergy towards solving difficult customer problems that matter. Don’t start out by mandating software components already invented by SAS and for the love of all that is rational, don’t limit the effort to the technology the leaders already know. Open source the framework and use restrictive licensing to make sure it cannot be unfairly monetized against SAS’ interests.
Let’s face it “righting the ship“ is going to require a number of downright painful stages
An initial 40% reduction in staff size. Including all DEI related initiatives, any remaining wasteful bureaucratic mid/back office positions, etc. And anyone who is not an A player in an area that still matters. Stop tolerating incompetence or mediocrity. Ki-l Agile and. return to sane project management.
Keep a skeleton crew of the best veteran talent to maintain the V9 revenue stream by doing critical security and/or significant customer-demanded fixes and any reasonably-scoped new features that keep large revenue customers happy.
Close as many buildings as possible and colocate staff for maximum productivity. Require RTO five days a week except for extremely high value employees already remote or in a customer facing roles that requires you being in their geography where it is not cost-effective to maintain a SAS office.
Selectively hire A players with the correct skill sets to build out the new strategy outlined above. No one should care what they look like, who they’re related to or where they went to school. If they have the goods, hire them.
Offer everyone left some sort of conditional equity contingent upon the success of new products and the cost-effective maintenance of the V9 revenue stream.
They OWN it instead of playing in it.
You mean run an organization by putting the best players in the game? Meritocracy works fine for the NBA. Very weird that meritocracy is shunned by DEI advocates.
Yeah and how many white guys are in the NBA?????
"We should get rid of all the DEI hires and promotions from the last few years. Last ones in, first ones out. That will save the company from having to do major layoffs and save us some money."
You mean run an organization by putting the best players in the game? Meritocracy works fine for the NBA. Very weird that meritocracy is shunned by DEI advocates.
"We should get rid of all the DEI hires and promotions from the last few years. Last ones in, first ones out. That will save the company from having to do major layoffs and save us some money."
Let's start with you, pal.
We should get rid of all the DEI hires and promotions from the last few years. Last ones in, first ones out. That will save the company from having to do major layoffs and save us some money.
Thanks for that article reference. The comments were quite informative. Lots of parallels there.
Ars had a good thread on Broadcom's acquisition of VMWare yesterday. I suspect this comment is specific to SAS's circumstances:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/01/a-long-costly-road-ahead-for-customers-abandoning-broadcoms-vmware/?comments=1&post=43465419
I suspect that Broadcom evaluated the situation, crunched some numbers, and concluded that it would not be able to "extract money from [SAS] customers more quickly than customers can change solution", because SAS has so much competition, including competition from FOSS.
Tightening the sc--ws isn't a successful strategy if your customers have been actively looking for a migration path to a lower-cost replacement for YEARS and migration initiatives are already in place. So they probably offered much less than Goodnight believes the company is worth, or outright concluded that it couldn't be done. If SAS licenses were for two, three, or five years it might be a different story, but since SAS renewals are basically annual, there's a really short time for any acquisition to squeeze blood from the stone. And I wouldn't be surprised if Broadcom heavily discounted all revenue from non-regulated SAS customers, because regulated customers are the most reliable renewals and many of them pass their costs on (indirectly or directly) to the US taxpayer.
I wonder how much intellectual property is being stolen by the CCP using the office in Beijing.
And today, tarrifs threatened on chip exports from Taiwan! The President reasoned that computer chip production companies "left us and went to Taiwan," and that he wants them back. The president reckons tariffs ranging from "25%, 50% or even a 100% tax" will incentivize semiconductor producers to return in strength and numbers to U.S. shores.
Does NVIDIA use Taiwanese chips? How does this hurt the Chinese AI front, not at all is my guess.
Soon, the globe will be disrupted by a new, hot, World War.
You gotta give the Chinese credit for being very good as a global disruptor.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/28/tech/deepseek-trump-ai/index.html
probably not since that news is supposedly about efficiency of LLMs with possibly far less need for massive quantities of the highest end GPUs. If anything, if a new AI startup's LLM was able to match or do better than the current state of the art (on certain tests) after only 6 months of work and $6 million investment, it seems talk of something with a decade of development and limited traction is ... you can decide
“ Why do you think the Broadcom deal fell through? I bet it had nothing to do with any concerns about Broadcom ki-ling the SAS culture (as JG would like people to think), and everything to do with Broadcom's bankers uncovering just how misaligned the founders expectations were, compared to the reality of the actual numbers after due diligence.”
It doesn’t matter why you or I THINK the Broadcom deal fell through. The only thing that matters is what actually happened. You have no idea despite your willingness to constantly tell everyone here why.
Boy you guys love throwing other departments under the bus. I WAS an employee there for over 25 years. When the axeman cometh...he cometh with a sharpe axe and no tree is sacred...especially the one you are sitting in.
Did the AI news and stock dive today change anything? For better or worse?
BroadCom buys declining enterprise software companies. They have bought over a hundred of these. Private equity does the same.
Buyers like that are interested only in the $3B annual recurring revenue stream. Viya and AI represent potential growth, but those firms aren’t buying growth.
They’re buying the certainty of existing revenues, and the certainty that they know how to extract profits more efficiently. That’s their business model.
SAS may correctly judge that the IPO market will pay for potential growth. They can hope to get a better price this way — at least as long as the AI bubble continues.
You're bringing up an issue of delusion and denial. These are difficult concepts to understand unless you've spent a long time with these characters and reality tested their assertions.
Broadcom visiting SAS was probably like someone going on an online date. You haven't met before, and when you do, you realize you've been conned. Your date used deceptive glamour photography and filters to "lure" you out. You meet and realize you were deceived -- reality didn't match the pretty picture the other person painted. Their deception wasted your time and resources. That may be the case here.
There's a reason why 12 step groups encourage their members to say "Hi, I'm [whomever], and I'm a [whatever the problem is]." It's to force you to admit that you have problem so that recognize you are deluding yourself and others by continually denying the problem.
During my time at SAS, I can't recall any acknowledgement of any problems or concerns. Each year end tally of sales was presented in some nebulous manner, and the pipeline was always "promising".