Thread regarding SAS Institute layoffs

@2ea "You may fool some people with your belief that management is infallible, but you’re really only fooling yourself."

Oddly enough I don't ever remember saying that. And I certainly don't believe it.

Could this be another indicator of you making sh-t up based on little to no information?????

I've seen great managers and sh-t managers both at SAS and another BIG tech company. The bad ones at the other company where levels beyond the badness at SAS.

The bad ones at SAS tend to be more about not being well suited for people management. Not so much about being cutthroat. But I'm sure there are some there.

@2ea "If your team is warning you about little traps being set, maybe they don’t want you to leave. Maybe they see value in your contributions, or else they don’t warn you.
I’ll concede your point that employment is at will. The trumped up charge sheet is simply cover."

Lets hear your concrete (verifiable without doxxing) points that you personally went through. What were the warnings about little traps? What did your trumped up charge sheet actually say?

Accountability isn't something a person gets to judge themselves on.
People who take no accountability will forever be the martyr/hero in their own eyes.
People who take accountability will usually be "I am inadequate" people in their own eyes (but not in everyone elses).

Accountability is tough. Sure is. When the dogs don’t like your dogfood, blame the employees, not the dogfood.

Managers don’t start off with the trumped up charge sheet. They start by trying to make you quit. When that doesn’t work, add in the trumped up charge sheet.

You may fool some people with your belief that management is infallible, but you’re really only fooling yourself.

If your team is warning you about little traps being set, maybe they don’t want you to leave. Maybe they see value in your contributions, or else they don’t warn you.

I’ll concede your point that employment is at will. The trumped up charge sheet is simply cover.

But in the end, we get back to this thread - a big personality comes on the scene, shuffles the board, settles some scores, then try some new variation of the same recipe, to breathe life into a dying product stack.

Accountability is tough, indeed.

@2cs “ When your work team warns you that an incompetent manager is setting little traps for you, the end result is the trumped up charge sheet. They need this to legally sever you from the organization.”

They don’t need that to legally sever you from the company. Take some responsibility.

They aren’t out to get you just for the fun of it. Maybe there is a reason.

What are you doing today Bob? Oh I have to manufacture a couple trumped up charge sheets today.

If we polled employees what % do you think would say they felt managers we making sh-t up with intent of firing them?
.1%?

Accountability is tough.

Having lived through it, many observed that for a long time (prior to the current HR generation), the attitude was "managers were put in power and are therefore implicitly trusted".

Yes, HR's hands may have been tied in certain cases but the plain fact is ... and this is sadly true in many places in corporate America ... many people rose to power who were not competent, good managers. The tragedy is many of them magy have remained in management long enough to do serious damage to not only the careers of others but SAS' long-term trajectory as well.

For a long time, SAS did very little to develop management and cull out those who really were not fit for it. This was no doubt in part a consequence of very rapid growth for the first 10 to 15 years post incorporation (1976) and success of the product with very little competition.

For all the technical innovation that SAS did in those days and the forward thinking model Jim created for a modern tech culture, the company unfortunately evolved significantlyunder a stodgy hierarchical military/government/corporate type paradigm.

That su-ked the life out of a lot of what could've been effective internal entrepreneurship and real R&D research that could've generated better products. By the 2000s when the Internet/cloud revolution went exponential, SAS was largely unable to capture that momentum, and some observed this was largely due to the entrenched management culture.

A few well established tech leaders arose as well as a couple of de facto R&D rock stars. However, the best they were able to do was stretch the existing SAS architecture/services to conform to relatively small aspects of the overall tech trends that were completely changing the game at scale.

You're absolutely correct. This was and is an executive management problem, based in an aging architecture and language paradigm racing toward irrelevance.

As many have pointed out, if Viya it's not the answer, then what is SAS going to do? ... because the legacy SAS architecture and language is ultimately not going to survive the astonishingly fast onslaught of AI.

@2ct if HR had a say then things would look very different IMO. Do you think they want to deal with the headaches of having incompetent leaders which stand in the way of them being able to do a good job? All decisions like this sit with the Exec leadership.

@2cs Actually, since North Carolina is at-will state, employers can fire employees at any time for almost any reason, as long as it is not illegal. The paperwork is a backstop, but not necessary.

SAS could be a $5B+ company today if they had fired incompetent managers, directors, etc. across the past 25 years instead of allowing them to sabatoge competent employees.

HR actually enables this sad phenomenon.

When your work team warns you that an incompetent manager is setting little traps for you, the end result is the trumped up charge sheet. They need this to legally sever you from the organization.

Blame employees all you like, but this is how the organization settles scores and “manages change”.

"White collar youngsters flinging data about."

Most white collar youngsters do not use SAS. Sadly, the downturn in SAS Education offerings back up that reality.

I just saw an ad for SAS Viya on TV last night. It was short but very hip. White collar youngsters flinging data about. SAS must be gearing up for a big sales push of Viya. I wonder if a Super Bowl ad is in the works.

@20h Sure it did.

@20d “You are sad.”

You are ignorant. That happened to us.

@1yq - We’ve never had a layoff. However, we’re finalizing our trumped up charge sheets, so you’ll notice more exits at the end of the month.

@1hp How many were laid off?

I always got the impression that Shoddy was part of the delusion-generation machine, and part of the whole "we are genius tech-bros" culture problem

@1js One d in his name. And according to his own LinkedIn profile, he’s been at SAS for a little more than 7 years. I worked in his division. My opinion of him is decidedly mixed.

@1js using real names gets things deleted. thanks cuz now it will be deleted. I was wondering if it would be mentioned or if people knew.

@1jf

Respect toward this gentleman's name is warranted. Shaddi served SAS for going on 10 years. He inherited a mess upon moving SAS from another significant local tech player.

@1hp Details?

"Sales layoffs happening again"

Is the headcount too high for the sluggish Viya sales?

is nobody gonna say anything about Shoddy leaving? are we pretending again?

Sales layoffs happening again.

"the Forester believed incompatibility was an advantage."

Another way to look at incompatibility is that it prompted customers to flee SAS.

"the Forester believed incompatibility was an advantage."

Wow, if the above is true, then it is also true that the Forester has a complete lack of understanding of the operational aspects of how deeply that software integrates into a business organization. Totally tone deaf.

Again, if true, then his departure was a blessing. Sadly, it seems it was too little too late.

“Big Jim got tired of the Forester's antics of saying V9 will be compatible with Viya but not seeing progress in that direction.”



I’ve been told, from people who worked with him, that the Forester believed incompatibility was an advantage. He believed he was building the successor to SAS, and that his new CAS syntax was superior. So he made little effort at compatibility, even though JHG requested it.

Why did JHG tolerate this insubordination? The Forester was JHG’s chosen successor. An experienced leader, like JHG, would pragmatically tolerate flaws, for a limited time, in hopes of eventual success.

"But for the Forester, COO was still a good job, almost certainly paying more than academia. Also, he was designated successor. I have wondered why he left."

Reasons for the Forester's departure could be:

1. It is well known that the Forester asked Big Jim for 200 new positions for Viya. The Forester's request was denied. What we do not know is the Forester's reaction to "no". I've been around him enough to know that his ego is HUGE and can imagine he did not like hearing anyone saying "no" to him. Maybe he bluffed Big Jim by demanding the 200 positions or else he departs. Big Jim is not afraid to say "there's the door".
2. Big Jim got tired of the Forester's antics of saying V9 will be compatible with Viya but not seeing progress in that direction. And that could be one reason the Forester was asked to voluntarily leave in order to save face. Or maybe he was asked to voluntarily leave for other reasons.
3. Least likely, the Forester was fired.

The Forester's post SAS technology gig did not last long before he reverted back to academia. Blame usually is not totally on one party. Perhaps the Forester realize that academia is the highest ascension of his comfortt zone? If so, that could be his reason for returning to academia.

I have several close friends in C-level roles and have worked closely with various C-level folks over the years. All have a personality and level of gravitas beyond the Forester. That leads me to firmly believe the Forester was a poor choice for a C-level role. No disrespect to the Forester, but he is a good example of the Peter Principal.

The story of Forrester's departure is shrouded in some degree of mystery but the detail I've heard more than once is:

Circa late 2020 , Forrester asked for something approaching 200 new senior (mostly engineering) positions to rapidly scale Viya clouded native and advanced ML features.

Being very conservative, JHG denied his request.

I have no doubt that SAS could've eliminated enough existing positions to finance the new request -- given the sufficient duplication of effort, waste, bullsh-t jobs and downright laziness that many of us had witnessed for years.

SAS get a few layoffs in small doses and there has been acceleration in the years since, but still not what it would've taken to have a truly focused effort on attempting to make Viya more successful by replacing stale workforce with surgically selected, relevant new talent.

@wp The best qualified would certainly have not come, because they would have wanted an equity position, or at least a large salary. They can get this level of compensation in Silicon Valley, so that's where they go.

But for the Forester, COO was still a good job, almost certainly paying more than academia. Also, he was designated successor. I have wondered why he left.

Not sure if anyone "truly qualified" to be CTO of SAS would've taken the job or lasted for long anyway.

The reason is simple and should be perfectly clear -- anyone in that position cannot make a major strategic change or set any technical direction contrary to the founder's ultimate wish -- which was ensure seems to be the conservative ongoing of the legacy product and its evolution to Viya.

The Photographer was old-school SAS, tight with the family and knew how to play the game.

The Forrester was cut out of a very similar academic mold as JHG and as some have pointed out, may have been a son he wished he would've had.

Forrester was involved directly with JHG in several major initiatives leading up to CAS/Viya. In many ways this was the evolution of trust and shared technical vision. This has been discussed in innumerable previous threads/posts. In many ways it was actually a quite reasonable direction for SAS 15 years ago, especially given the founder's very conservative business outlook and the belief that one can only plan about two years ahead in the tech world.

For the past 25 years, JHG has not been willing to scale SAS to massive modern cloud and now AI plays. He took the conservative approach of continuing to evolve what SAS was/is based on MVA and later TK architectures. Just about anything else would've required a major rethinking of SAS as a language and computing environment. So SAS attempted to get into vertical product markets most mostly using the existing/slowly evolving architecture and infrastructure.

The inventor's dilemma writ large!

I am not qualified to be CTO of a $3B software company.

And yet, if I had been offered that job, I would have taken it.

The Photographer and the Forester did the best they could.

@pe A.S.

TP - The Photographer.

Who was The Photographer? Initials please.

What kind of image does that guy project for you and your company? How can you take the company seriously with that choice?

Are you suggesting that looks override intelligence, ability, and ethics when making such a choice?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that The Photographer had the latter but even The Penguin posed serious competition to The Batman.

If you owned a company, and you had the choice of internal executives, why would you choose The Photographer?

What kind of image does that guy project for you and your company? How can you take the company seriously with that choice?

"Those two educated fools su-ked the life out of SAS."

They did not know what they did not know.

The Forester takes a lot of heat for being an academic, but SAS was founded by academics. Software engineering barely existed at the time, but Tony Barr delivered an elegant design, better than our competitors.

That design, and JG’s successful expansion of the business worldwide, are arguably the two main reasons for SAS’s success.

After that, software engineering evolved and grew, while we did not keep pace. And we were limited by the Innovator’s Dilemma; e.g. we could never fully embrace Open Source without cannibalizing revenues.

There were other areas not limited by the Innovator’s Dilemma, where we could have innovated but did not. Those missed opportunities are, IMO, the main reason for the decline.

“ Often wrong, but never in doubt” is a defining characteristic for a ‘leader’ at this company.”

In all fairness that is probably a defining characteristic of many very successful businessmen both tech and non tech.

Statistician JG is not formally trained in CS/CE or modern Software Engineering either. The original SAS language and processing flow was designed by a Physicist/Statistician (Tony Barr) — understandable given the era (late 1960s to mid 1970s).

Given this likely represents 75%+ of average annual revenue over the past 50 years, is it surprising SAS has not allowed 21st century Software Design and Engineering methodology to overhaul it’s primary identity as an established data manipulation language and analytics toolset? Instead, SAS has created new products and abstractions around the legacy language and data flow. CAS/Viya was an attempt to find middle ground and see how that has worked out.

The inventor’s dilemma sure seems to apply here!

But they had HUGE personalities and beliefs in their abilities. “Often wrong, but never in doubt” is a defining characteristic for a ‘leader’ at this company.