Questions asked internally are not anonymous. Ask yours here instead!
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@zk correct. 15 minutes of content stretched to last 2hrs.
@z4 oh please. This morning was not 20 minutes of content crammed into two hours.
@yy I sincerely hope this is sarcasm. In 35+ years at SAS, every last division-wide meeting I ever attended could at best be described as “twenty minutes of content crammed into two hours.”
The energy in the room at today's Town Hall was nothing short of electric. Getting everyone together under one roof reminded me why I love working here, and the leadership team knocked it out of the park from start to finish.
The product demos were easily the highlight of the day. Seeing the bleeding-edge features our teams have been quietly building, and watching them perform live without a hitch, gave me genuine chills. The level of technical craftsmanship, speed, and sheer creativity on display was jaw-dropping. It’s one thing to read about our roadmap in a slide deck, but seeing the future of our platform come to life right in front of us made the vision feel unstoppable.
Beyond the tech, the transparency and authenticity during the Q&A session set a gold standard for company culture. Leadership didn't shy away from the tough questions; they answered everything with honesty, humor, and a clear sense of purpose. You could practically feel the trust and alignment across the room.
Between the inspiring talks, the spontaneous hallway brainstorming, and finally catching up with remote teammates face-to-face, this event was an absolute home run. I’m walking away with a full notebook, a massive sense of pride in what we’re building, and more excitement for the year ahead than ever before. Huge kudos to the organizers for pulling off an unforgettable experience!
@dt "We’ve been collecting data on individual performance and velocity for years. When will this finally be used to get rid of the dead weight?"
Never. This has been true throughout the history of SAS. In the glory days, if you could get hired, you were guaranteed not to get fired. Performance metrics might get you a somewhat higher salary, but were never used to get rid of dead weight.
Nowadays, when such metrics would be most useful, SAS still isn't using them. Instead, the company reduces headcount primarily on a basis of salary. In these days of cost-cutting, that is the metric that matters.
@gb “the ability of management to place capable but underutilized personnel on priority efforts is at its peak.”
SAS has spent the past ten years laying off, buying out, and pushing out more than 2500 of its most experienced employees. The ability of management to place capable people is not “at its peak” — it peaked before they left.
Questions asked internally are not anonymous
I think it's telling that I wouldn't be surprised if the company were actually tracking who asked what, while claiming anonymity.
R&D townhalls/q&as/etc. are useless. We're never going to get straight answers from the inept leadership.
I mean sh-t, SAS is totally irrelevant, yet tries to act like everyone has heard of the company. A member of senior leadership asked "who?" when I asked them what the plan was to compete with companies like Databricks. That's how much of a joke our EL is.
enterprise level software
What does this even mean in an environment where enterprises will run all sorts of insecure open source software and trust in AI on top of that?
We’ve been collecting data on individual performance and velocity for years.
With the company’s focus on training, the skills database is full by now and the ability of management to place capable but underutilized personnel on priority efforts is at its peak. This matrix management has proven itself time and time again and has definitely been enabled by the gathered metrics. Things are working as planned.
@dy then my “anonymous” question is: if we know who the dead weight is why doesn’t management DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
@dt I have no confidence in such metrics. Ask managers who the dead weight is. They know. I know plenty of people who probably show up horribly on the collected metrics despite being the backbones that keep 90% of people moving on a daily basis by fighting the fires no one else wants to or are capable of.
We’ve been collecting data on individual performance and velocity for years. When will this finally be used to get rid of the dead weight?
@cw Do things right. Do things well. Establish trust with your customer base.
For enterprise level software that is the selling point and will continue to be the selling point. It is why enterprise software still exists and thrives in a world of open source.
What is the plan to address externally vibe-coded and reverse-engineered replacements for proprietary software? This capability could be the downfall of all traditional software companies. Ignore it?
My question is why the need for anonymity? You are going to get anonymous answers worth next to nothing.
When will we rebrand to be “leaders in super intelligence” /s