Thread regarding SAS Institute layoffs

Every Televangelist needs a stage.

@2xv -- The company is a mix of stupidity and insight. Good luck separating the wheat from the chaff.

@2x8 This site is a mix of stupidity and insight. A person could write a good history of SAS by mining data on this site.

But what a task to separate the wheat from the chaff!

@2v3 Anonymous sites. Where stupidity gets its time in the spotlight.

Where are my good boy points!?!?!

@2eb Such a meaningless response.

oh look the even-out voting person is back again. 🙄

Lost your job? Hashtag saslife on LinkedIn.

@2e4

You don't get your good boy points from your manager if you post anonymously here, my friend. You need to hashtag saslife on LinkedIn with something like that.

“ you couldn't be more wrong.

Most of us came here with energy, enthusiasm and with good skills and the ability to do our jobs well.”

My wife say I can definitely be more wrong…

Its easy to blame others if you lost all those things. But you can’t put it all on everyone else in any credible way.

Myself and plenty of others still manage to have energy, enthusiasm, good skills and abilities. Nobody can take those things from me other than me.

Gossip plays a part in every company. It's a major feature of SAS culture.

@263 -- Optics.

@24k you couldn't be more wrong.

Most of us came here with energy, enthusiasm and with good skills and the ability to do our jobs well.

Since the executives stopped communicating and starting talking about cost-cutting while laying off people yet the executives travel around the world constantly staying in 5-star hotels and eating at top tier restaurants more now than ever before, it rings hollow.

This company is dying a little more every day. Had the company not kept all its sycophants in leadership positions for far too long, things could have been different:

It's very hard to do good work when no one is communicating and gossip fills the void where information, even if it's bad news, should be.

@24e I don’t have sympathy for whether those folks got that way overnight or not. If they got that way it is not something that you can just put all the blame on other people. There was something in them all along.

Not everyone goes that path and they work in the same conditions. I see it in every group I look at regardless of manager. There are skilled and/or motivated people and there are others who are unmotivated and it shows. For the latter it really doesn’t matter what their skill level is.

@248 yes and no. because in the majority of cases those people didn't get that way overnight. SAS is run like a high school and the proof is in the pudding. a popularity contest is not a strategy for running a profitable company.

@226 i agree. But I’d also prefer people doing the work that are skilled, motivated, tenacious or preferably all three. Get rid of all the people on here who are perfectly ok doing as little as possible and feel entitled to pay that the bulk of the worlds population would ki-l for.

They are just as bad as the folks in management who su-k at their jobs.

Produce fealty, not results.

It's not just a manager problem. It's a director and senior director and VP and EVP problem. It's a program manager and program lead and all the other silly job titles that are code for attends meetings on which they cheerlead and put emojis and funny comments in the chat and doesn't produce any actual work product problem.

How about less of those people and more people to do the work?

Develop a relationship of fealty to a pet, progeny, or other favored holdover, and you can stay and collect an allowance, too!

It might be time for End-of-Life.

Don’t you dare say that!

@1v6 Certainly, slacker employees deserve to be laid off.

But the manager who rewards their slackness -- who pays them for producing little or nothing -- deserves it even more.

@1ty yeah sure just managers. None of you collect a paycheck with minimal effort or retire in place would deserve it?

When the Evil Day comes, most of the employees won't deserve it -- but some of the managers will.

@1mw If I were a private equity buyer, I'd feel confident that by putting both SAS9 and JMP in maintenance mode, and shipping most of that maintenance overseas, I'd have two profitable cash cows I could milk for years.

With Viya... I dunno. It's newer, so maintenance costs are probably greater. Also -- could I even put it in maintenance mode? If Viya needs new features, that doesn't fit private equity's business model so well. It might be time for End-of-Life.

@1he I would think that if this were the strategy, the cash cow to milk is SAS 9, not Viya. Seems like money invested in Viya is purely speculative.

And to think, some of JG's heirs are secret love children, and light as a feather...

@1bq

they know those assets are declining and there is likely no strategic fit from some strategic buyer, so the playbook is always to squeeze more profits out as soon as possible. cut to the bone, raise prices, whatever will work in the very short term. fast death rather than slow death is part of the plan. then they have moved on to the next acquisition. good luck in the meantime, all

@1g6 JG's heirs will own 2/3 of the company. JS will still only own 1/3.

WRONG!!! Cofounder JS is set to take the helm after JG

“ The best time to sell a declining asset is ASAP.”

And the person who thinks they know that time is a fool. I could list you hundreds/thousands of examples in history where selling that decline asset would have been proven wrong by time.

Unless you can see the future of course in which case carry on.

JG is SAS. When he dies, it dies.

@19p An astute individual investor would certainly do better to diversify.

An acquiring company might purchase SAS as a strategic fit. IBM made multiple offers years ago. But today the most valuable parts of SAS are replicated in Open Source, so this option is off the table.

Private equity, or a company like Broadcom that operates as private equity, would buy SAS at an agreeable price. Clearly, Broadcom didn't get one.

Even if SAS IPOs, some company of that kind will eventually be the final owner. As you say, they'll cut to the bone to recoup their investment.

AI can generate code and analyze data. Both features can reduce the number of SAS licenses customers need, so AI erodes the value of SAS. The best time to sell a declining asset is ASAP.

@193 ... exactly. There are certainly multiple ways to structure an acquisition but I'm guessing anyone who acquires SAS is going to have to put up a lot of cash or very valuable stock upfront. That delays the breakeven point on the investment by years and that's assuming the result the new acquired organization is cut to the bone so it can produce at least $1B annually in absolute net profit.

Isn't it a fair observation that virtually any astute investor would rather target a multi billion dollar initial investment towards a diversity of positions that generate a much quicker and greater ROI?

Perhaps there are tax and other incentives for acquiring a legacy enterprise software cash flow like SAS. Certainly this has been historical strategy, but the acceleration of AI has fundamentally changed the game. This is undeniable.

Innovate. Oh the irony.

@18c it is another example of a public company using other people’s money. They have made an acquisition that SAS could not afford.

The only path for SAS was to innovate.

One more reason why investors are likely to pass on SAS:

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/spacex-to-acquire-cursor-for-60b-in-stock-days-after-blockbuster-ipo/

… too much opportunity cost left on the table

In its glory days, SAS indeed had elements of a Montessori workplace: an extraordinarily pleasant work environment, top-flight benefits, and mostly good middle management.

Then middle management changed. This happened partly because of the Peter Principle and the Dunning-Kruger effect, but also because of a strong preference for sycophants.

That's not unusual among founders. Their ideas have worked in the past, so they tend to promote people who support their ideas. This is not simple egotism; it's a desire to repeat what worked.

The company had two additional problems:

1. SAS was always privately held. Public companies have vast resources, drawn from other people's money. They can invest $10B in AI, while SAS invests $1B.

Once large public companies began competing with SAS, the only way to succeed was to innovate: to develop products that competitors did not have.

1. SAS could not innovate because it could not eliminate incompetence. Every company makes some bad hires. But at SAS, people who should have been pushed out were retained for years, producing little while blocking others.

Worse, when these people were promoted to management, they stifled innovation. As another poster has written, the company's principal product became office politics.

The saddest aspect is that this decline was avoidable. As @wf says, "We did not have to be put on a track to obscurity."

But now the company is reducing headcount 2-3% annually to maintain profitability, and this won't change.

It's best for each of us to honor the past without clinging to it, to recognize our situation, and to make plans accordingly.

@132 “It really was a great place to work.”

Was

I think Dr. Goodnight was sincere in caring about his employees and I'll forever be grateful for the work environment he fostered. It really was a great place to work.

In my opinion, this company was built in JG's image. It's his Montessori workplace experiment. When he's gone, it's gone. Then, after it's gone, everyone will talk about their memories of the workplace Utopia that once was.