So I was reading up on the latest SAS layoffs and ended up at comprehensive.io where average salary ranges are displayed by job title. I had always heard that SAS underpays but I thought the perks made up for it, sort of. At least there wasn’t any layoffs. Now that has changed. Some will say that it is because NC is a cheaper area to live. While that used to be the case the area is now one of the most expensive in the south east. The founders made a lot of money from our hard work and it hurts that they weren’t more magnanimous with the company’s earnings. Now things are slowing down so let’s get rid of our greatest assets. Sad.
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"We’ve had a lot taken away that were suppose to compensate for the lesser salary than other places. Many of those perks are gone."
What perks are left that you can't get somewhere else, and are they worth staying for? Post-COVID the only perk that I really cared about was the health insurance. The campus is beautiful and I had a private office, but that didn't matter anymore because I preferred to ditch the commute and work from home. So I left. The health insurance that I have is pricier, but the near 50% salary increase more than makes up for it.
I have heard that a "cheap" high deductible plan has been introduced. It makes sense for the younger demographic. But a current employee suspects that SAS will "force" everyone to this by raising the Cadillac Plan premiums. They said they saw this happen at a previous employer. That's kind of the way it is where I work now.
I am a half lifer at SAS. I was given the speech by HR why I should leave my job and come to SAS. I left a great job for this great job. He told me about the 35 hr work week (which we still have), the FREE insurance (which we now pay for), the great benefit package of H/C with no OOP, etc. (not any more), the raises (I finally got a 2.9% raise this year after NONE for 3…ok but I guess I still was employed during covid), the bonuses were a pittance (remember they took away the contribution bonus to the 401k). Now my position is not coding, or statistics, it is an educated position….but I know of ppl that got bonuses 4x the amount that did similar jobs? And it was never my performance because I always excelled. Well any how. We’ve had a lot taken away that were suppose to compensate for the lesser salary than other places. Many of those perks are gone. They’re replacing quality people with a wokeness agenda, and if you don’t mesh or your x-years of dedication and experience are not obsolete, you are shown the door.
@2xqs, we don't use names because of the website rules. Names and other personal identifiers are not allowed here, mods can ban you for that. I'm not sure if the same rule applies to names of c-suits, but it's better to be safe than sorry.
Salary is where it’s at! You’re correct. Due to _salary compression_ the “solid citizens” with many years to decades of experience were in some cases, making less than their considerably younger counterparts, who even in some cases were at lower titles. I personally know of several of the highest R&D performers (with widely varying years of experience) who left for as much as 2X (including stock grants) what SAS paid them.
Covid and work from home policies brought much of this to light. You can’t build great products without the best engineers, and you can’t hire or retain them with substandard compensation.
I never cared too much about who was in charge just kept my head down and wrote my code. The Photographer seemed too full of himself and unpolished. The Forester was sharp and I had high hopes. These folks were supposed to get us there but quitters never win. Now things seem adrift with laying off staff. But the point of this thread was salary I think. I know young people making well in excess to what I made at SAS in a handful of years of experience. Working from home! Bonuses are nice but raises are where it is at.
Claiming some moral high ground must make you feel superior to others.
If I had a great set of abs, made efforts to showcase them at work, and others noticed and commented, would their comments be 'demeaning'?
If I felt I were the smartest person in the room, perhaps like the Forester, and I let everyone know I felt that way, when others noticed that tendency about me and commented about it, would their comments be 'demeaning'?
They are simply observations about human behavior, nothing more. Get off your high horse.
"He has a PhD in Forestry"
My first thought was that Forrester was a misspelling. But it happened so many times in these threads that I figured there must be something else behind the nickname here. Go with your gut., huh?
Did make me realize it's been awhile since I've seen a Forrester golden quadrant in an email blast.
Here I am again, decoding. The Forrester = Oliver Schabenberger. Folks, this is anonymous. Please consider just using names.
"After all these years, that's it? You can view Visual Analytics reports on an iPad?"
But hey, there's an SDK, so customers can build their own!
"... Believe me, many of us worked for years and tried our best...."
And then we were punished for our sins by the Golgafrinchum B Ark class, still there and active today.
From @2ahr+1nMZhzjI
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However, he had no education in building or managing large software projects. That would have been useful.
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Now SAS has an army of Agile coaches, scrum masters, and assorted credentialed project managers. Many of these folks have had all kinds of education on what it’s supposed to mean to manage large software projects, yet how are things working out?
Oliver was a constant learner, and I virtually guarantee you his more “quiet years” spent absorbing MVA and TK when he was developing mixed model PROCs, building out the embedded process database analytics, LASR etc. gave him a depth of understanding of how most of R&D operated that virtually no software engineering or project management curriculum can prepare anyone for.
in spite of having deep academic roots and employing a few hundred PhD’s, SAS R&D on the whole has never been about academic formality when it comes to software design, engineering, deployment, etc. A subset of us pursued such on our own, yet we’re never encouraged by management (including Director/VP level technical management) to bring that to bear directly/formally on our larger efforts to build and ship SAS products. There were a few de facto “architects” during the MVA committees, but nothing that approached the kind of formality but other large software or or traditional engineering concerns utilized for large projects.
I still maintain that Oliver was as prepared as anyone in the history of SAS to take on the role he did. Had he remained in the role of CTO alone and continued his sole focus on leading R&D, I personally believe Viya would be much more successful today — especially if several of the other issues addressed on this and other threads had been taken into consideration so as to prevent such a massive brain drain. Sadly, we will never know.
As far as new products to generate additional revenue goes, that’s exactly what CAS/Viya was designed to provide the architectural foundation for. The problem is over the past 3 years, SAS lost the very people who could’ve made that happen. Believe me, many of us worked for years and tried our best.
@1zfs+1nMZhzjI "The blame for SAS's imminent demise falls squarely on JHG and his management style."
Yup.
I agree that the Forester is an intelligent person. However, he had no education in building or managing large software projects. That would have been useful.
I'm sure he's a good statistician and mathematician. But it's not like we were short of those.
He is not the smartest person I ever worked with. But I didn't care how smart he was. I wanted him to succeed, as I wanted his predecessors to succeed.
He failed. His main legacy, Viya, is not what the market wanted. We needed new revenue streams, and it was his job to find them. That's true of his predecessors also.
It's been observed that the ultimate responsibility rests with the owner of the company. He chooses his CTOs.
At some point, you have to say, when three in a row fail, it's not really their fault. They were put in positions for which they were not qualified.
The Forrester is a biostatistician with a very deep applied math background courtesy his European educational history (he grew up in Germany) plus American graduate school. He has a PhD in Forestry yet all-based and heavy analytical math.
He's the smartest person I've ever worked with.
So, I got The Photographer easily. And I'm reasonably certain from all the context that The Forrester was Segway Guy, right?. But I can't figure out how he got labeled the Forrester. An obsession with quadrants?
For the benefit of those who are not steeped in SAS history, “the photographer” mentioned in these comments was/is a gentleman named Armistead Sapp. For a brief time that was still too long for some of us, he was in charge of SAS R&D. He had the notion that complex, industrial-grade analytic software and solutions should update just as automatically, just as incrementally, and just as often as, say, a Sudoku game running on iOS. There were many folks inside and outside SAS who saw that notion as unrealistic and even misguided.
After all these years, that's it? You can view Visual Analytics reports on an iPad?
The amount of goo that sticky photographer guy put people through with his nonsense, and years later, that's all there is to show for it?
Again, there's where your compensation offsets went - delusion and waste.
@1qsx+1nMZhzjI But those apps are only to "View and interact with SAS® Visual Analytics reports" - and even so, squint happens. I have yet to talk to any customer who is building models on iPads. Ironically the opposite happens now - people build their models on theatrical-sized screens. (And yes I have screen envy.)
Visual SAS apps
https://support.sas.com/en/software/visual-analytics-apps-support.html
Sappy acolytes. Ah, yes. Ruined plenty, in my opinion.
I had forgotten all about the iPads. "iPads for All" and "Mobile First!" were the order of the day. Think of all the wasted time from people arguing about migrating complex desktop analytics software into mobile-device ready software. Like anyone was going to build a model on their iPad. Wrong tool for the job. At least in my opinion.
And then there were the Art Museum excursions.
Lots of waste. Lots and lots of it.
Did the software ever move to mobile devices as the Photographer and his acolytes envisioned?
Several of us were squarely in the middle of the conflict you describe. Let’s just call it “a tale of two buildings” (R&S). In my observation Forrester possessed the deepest knowledge/understanding of historical V9 significance AND the need for a new Parallel Computing architecture that could take SAS into the future while providing a high performance engine (CAS) in support of ML advances, Visual Analytics, etc. as well as providing a platform for deployment as a service such that open source client languages like Python could invoke the power of state-of-the-art highly parallelized algorithms and pay fractionally. Given this was concocted 10 years ago it was a reasonable strategy for that time and the degree of success/good reputation that SAS still generally held in the industry and among our customers.
Photographer was attempting to simultaneously being executive for two Major organizations with R&D being the largest, yet education being the closest to existing SAS customers. This was way too much span of control for any individual and especially the photographer, given how many seeming “interests” he had. Yet again, a good ole two-for-one executive bargain!
This R&S conflict was a massive distraction from achieving cohesion between the old and the new as we built what became Viya. JHG should have never tolerated it. Photographer would send his “administratively-gifted” (project managers with iPads) acolytes Into highly technical meetings where CFs would ensue. This resulted in fist-pounding declarations that “this is a CF” folloed by other of Photographer’s surreptitiously placed acolytes being ejected from Forrester’s meetings. From the standpoint of a highly-technical R&D veteran, this would have been comical comical if not so sad.
The guy with the sticky last name. Tree drippings.
So who is the photographer?
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Who the he-l was “the photographer”? When did this drama come about? After the Forrester left?
1 minute ago by Anonymous | no reactions
Post ID: @1guh+1nMZhzjI
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Never mind, goes with root beer. I get it now.
Who the he-l was “the photographer”? When did this drama come about? After the Forrester left?
The claim that some great leaders could have increased revenue comes up in several threads. Regardless of whether those folks were still at SAS or not, it would not have helped. To think so, is delusional, in my opinion.
The blame for SAS's imminent demise falls squarely on JHG and his management style. What other corporate leader would put someone like the Photographer in charge of R&D? Remember the "walk into any R&D policy"? Some managers actually followed that policy, destroying the credibility of their departments at that point. What a great labor/competency deal there.
Then you have these same managers who followed the Photographer's advice, actively work to disregard the Forester's R&D direction in order to build their own little "walk on" fiefdoms in spite of the Forester's best efforts to get everyone on the same page. Add to that, those on Corporate Conservatorships, incompetent and unproductive at any speed, darn near crawling into laps in photo ops in order to make a name for themselves. Are these people of curious parentage? Why are they still there leading departments and absorbing large chunks of the salary budget? Perhaps competent employees would be paid better if salary wasn't eaten up by these Corporate Conservatorship "allowances". What other company engages in this behavior?
All this craziness rotted away the core and credibility of SAS. No great leaders nor modern innovation efforts will save SAS from it's own internal rot. Perhaps this craziness is why you aren't paid as well as you'd like. Got to pay for all those ongoing Corporate Conservatorships.
... I agree completely, with the one provision that many of the "leaders" you identify were/are not managers.
By definition, most SAS employees were not underpaid. We stayed there, didn't we? Therefore, it was not in the owners' interest to pay us more.
There has certainly been a "brain drain" recently. But for many years, the combination of pay + perks kept us at SAS, ready to build and market any product desired.
The decline in SAS revenues could only have been halted by creating new revenue streams. We had a few dozen people who could have done that. It would have been in the owners' best interest to identify those leaders, give them authority, and pay them well.
That's the greatest tragedy of SAS. Not that the rank and file were underpaid; we were paid well enough to stay there. But the leaders who could have carried the company forward -- they were incentivized to leave.
Fair enough. I hear what you're saying and don't disagree.
That's a fair assessment. Some of us who are or were long term "builders" of SAS. Our love for the company, the culture we were part of and the work we did is/was a significant part of our personal identity.
Perhaps this was a naïve approach to the workplace and we should've just seen it as a "job", yet for most with deep roots in SAS culture, it was much more than a job. The founders understood this and certainly helped engender it. Many of us were and still are deeply appreciative of all of this. I have no ill will toward the founders and I'm grateful to walk they provided for me. I freely took the salary SAS gave me and at a critical time in my career was even able to negotiate a decent increase. However ...
The "however" comes down to myself anf many others having given so much extra to keep SAS moving toward success for longer than it would have, given the looming consequences caused by considerable internal incompetence at SAS and rapid changes in industry/market dynamics over the past 15 years or so.
Several hundred of the most competent and committed people have left SAS in the past 3 to 5 years -- the very people who were helping most to keep these consequences from sending SAS into a spiraling demise.
Make no mistake about it, the founders, and especially JG love a good bargain. They saw folks performing at the top of their game for a minimum of 20% less than they can make elsewhere as a bargain -- not as the key players keeping SAS moving forward (instead of the slow death we witness today).
Let's say that the top 500 employees (most are now gone ) had been recognized for their true value to SAS and compensated accordingly with 20% upward salary adjustments and larger bonuses (a "super performes" category).
Again I assert, that taking this action to retai critical talent costs far less than the current loss of SAS company value which at this point will likely continue and be irreparable.
I’m not saying things are all rosey and mistakes weren’t made. I’m not “siding with a Billionaire”. It just ticks me off to hear people complain about salaries that they’ve taken and saying “he should have shared some of his money with us”. They have a choice. Some of the comments made it sound like people were chained to their desk with no choices. That’s what I was lashing out about.
ID: @vtd+1nMZhzjI
Hundreds of people gave hundreds-to-thousands of extra hours (beyond the 35/wk expected of them) of their lives over 3 to 4 decades for SAS to grow incrementally and create capital for the founders. Yes, for a while some of this was shared through the 15% profit sharing with no match required. It was also not managed very well during some of the stock market's most profitable years prior to the 401K being handed over to Fidelity. Many of us managed our money well and are in a good place.
Nobody's whining, just pointing out facts! Also, many of us did not stay at SAS. We built our skills and left for more lucrative employment situations receiving compensation commensurate with our level of contribution. As a result, over the past three years, SAS has suffered a tremendous brain drain, particularly in R&D.
Just saying that for a fraction of the probable loss and sale/IPO value, SAS could've kept many of its brightest and most highly performing employees. We were already accustomed to the dysfunctional management culture, and had been navigating that for years and years.
Side with the billionaire founders all you want but they didn't build SAS alone and their less-than-optimal business and compensation decisions are in large part responsible for its decline.
If you feel you are underpaid at present, then perhaps it's time to move on. SAS is in extreme cost-cutting mode and sales are dwindling. The 'good ole days' of SAS are over, and it will only get more lean from here.
Fidelity Select had a 6x return over 10 years? I made the wrong choice.
While I agree we’re making about 20% less than industry, you’re free to ‘vote with your feet’. If I were earlier in my career I’d of left long ago…
I put 4 kids through daycare at SAS. When they moved on to public school I invested the money I spent daycare into my 401k. Now I'm LOADED
Bully
"The sale value for SAS has likely declined by $2-3B in the last two years alone. Sharing a fraction of this with consistiently high performers might have generated a more favorable outcome. "
"Well, I agree that the fair thing to have done would've been to have shared more of the spoils with the people who really made SAS happen, this did not occur. "
What a bunch of whiners! It isn't YOUR money to give away!!! Did you put anything of value on the table when DrG started the company? Did your crystal ball tell you that the company was going to go down $2-3B in 2 years (if it indeed did)? Did you VOLUNTARILY accept a paycheck in return for your time here at SAS? Then quit yer bi--hing!!!
Every one of us has a choice to make every day. "Is it worth our time and attention to get out of bed and go to work for company X today?" If you did, then that answers the question, and you don't have a right to bi--h about pay. You signed up for the deal - live with it, or quit!
SAS is not the SAS of old, but ge-z, quit blaming everyone else for your decision to stay and quit crying about wages. There's multiple doors on every building, please use one if you don't like what you're getting paid.
"By JG's calculus if you began working for SAS in the 80s, stayed for 30+ years, lived extremely frugally, purchased-paid off and stayed in the same house, drove inexpensive cars for a couple hundred thousand miles and got into conservative investments over time, then you should've retired with at least $1 million in longer term investments plus plenty of "dry powder" cash to live on top of your severance, buyout package, and/or Social Security. "
Almost no other companies were giving out 15% retirement with 0 match needed!! If you've worked here for 30 plus years and DONT have $1 million in your 401K then you're not serious about investing! Heck, the last 10 years in Fidelity Select and your investment of $100,000 would now be worth over $620,000. So, I'm glad you drove new cars and bought a house you probably couldn't afford, but dont blame DrG...Blame yourself....
Something to consider - Where else will you find a company who puts a big personality like the Tree Dripper in charge, who then tells everyone that they could 'try out a new job' in whatever department, regardless of qualifications?
Those shenanigans have to be worth something in compensation, right? Right?!?
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It is not unfair that wealth is not being shared. The owners have no obligation to do that, and they never promised it. When we agreed to work for them, we made a deal, and it was a fair deal, and a good deal at the time.
Whether this layoff is fair is a different question.
9m ago by Anonymous
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Post ID: @ild+1nMZhzjI
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... and what is the cumulative effect of both being under compensated and now the layoffs?
The sale value for SAS has likely declined by $2-3B in the last two years alone. Sharing a fraction of this with consistiently high performers might have generated a more favorable outcome.