So many people who haven't been performing at a reasonable for years/decades are dragging this company down. They haven't kept their skills fresh, and even when given the opportunity to train, turned it down.
And everyone acts all surprised when we lay off testers who were make 150ish with zero tech skills? We should have done that years ago.
Time to cut all the deadweight.
ChatGPT - "Name some Directors or above at SAS who aren't functionally useless"
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from @bdpn+1oLfd13U:
"
Unfortunately, SAS is heavy with middle management. Directors with very few direct reports under them and no one else under the direct reports.
"
SAS needs to be flattened. A lot of this middle-management is leftover bloat based on earlier nations that any particular manager should have no more than 5-7 direct reports. This caused the management hierarchy to add levels starting back in the early 90s on the company was growing fast.
from @btop+1oLfd13U:
"
can name exactly one person who is director or above who is NOT functionally useless. when your position could be eliminated without any impact on daily business operations, doesn't that qualify as functionally useless?
And yet all these people retain their jobs and their sizable paychecks are protected. The paychecks of the people above them are protected. When expenses need to be cut, the ones getting cut are the worker bees at the bottom. meanwhile several layers of managers and strategy folk are added all over the place, but they too do not actually do anything.
Is this agile logic again?
"
The sad truth is many of these managers/directors do not have useful modern technical skills to contribute to making actual progress on getting anything of real value done.
So, I guess when you're a middle level manager or director in this position , then reading a few books on "Agile" (or some other non-first principles derivative BS djour) and championing a corresponding strategy for SAS is a good CYA strategy, at least for a while.
Unfortunately, SAS is heavy with middle management.
Directors with very few direct reports under them and no one else under the direct reports.
"cutting as many functionally useless people as possible" would do wonders for the company's coffers. I can name exactly one person who is director or above who is NOT functionally useless. when your position could be eliminated without any impact on daily business operations, doesn't that qualify as functionally useless?
And yet all these people retain their jobs and their sizable paychecks are protected. The paychecks of the people above them are protected. When expenses need to be cut, the ones getting cut are the worker bees at the bottom. meanwhile several layers of managers and strategy folk are added all over the place, but they too do not actually do anything.
Is this agile logic again?
To some owners, a more attractive alternative would be to “cut as many functionally useless employees as possible” and put the savings into their own pockets.
In a public company, responsible to shareholders, one alternative or the other would be done.
In this forum, it’s hard to say a good word about the good Doctor — it always draws down votes. But by industry standards, these have been small layoffs with generous severance.packages.
I’ve been laid off, from other companies, so I don’t mean to minimize anyone’s pain. But hard as it is, no other owner would treat SAS employees so gently.
From @bapd+1oLfd13U:
“
There are many naysayers across these posts, and I know this will be controversial to say, but I believe that SAS's tech stack is currently healthier, more cohesive, and coherent than it has been in decades.
“
If your assertion is limited to Viya infrastructure – i.e. CAS, Compute Server, and Viya micro services stack, versus all of the other piece parts that came before it, then I would agree. Yet, there’s a problem with many customers being very slow, or outright refusing to migrate from Version 9 to Viya. How about products like Risk and Fraud? Have they been able to move to Viya and migrate a significant number of their existing customers?
Then there is the ongoing “burr in the customer saddle” of not providing a native Windows ( and ideally a native macOS) SAS EG client that is native to and fully integrated with Viya.
If your assertion is solid, SAS executives should consider going “Elon mode“ and cut as many functionally useless current employees as possible (from all over SAS) to fund the salaries of state-of-the-art teams to:
Doing these things would prove that SAS executives are actually functioning in reality.
I suspect that there are many of us in your situation. Without an incentive to retire early (i.e. a package deal), we might as well continue to stay.
You are not alone. When I read that post below about what it takes to succeed outside SAS I think, well, I am done. I dont have the energy or care enough about it to take on a challenge like that. "Luckily" I am older so I can probably scrape by at SAS till the hammer drops and then call it a career.
Sigh! These threads are depressing. Both from a future-of-SAS perspective and from a good-heavens-my-skills-in-modern-technology-su-k-and-I-deserve-to-be-laid-off perspective :-(
Thank you for adding some good balance to this discussion.
You are correct that rank and file SAS R&D employees (in particular) have been encouraged, even mandated to learn/use many of these technologies under Bryan Harris’ leadership.
Some of the comments here are the experiences of long term (15-30 years) employees attempting to leave SAS — mostly in the past 3 to 5 years while R&D has been in a long transition to modern a DevOps based infrastructure, etc.. in the same 3 to 5 years, to varying degrees many have being “stuck” working on legacy SAS technology, where growth in these skills is not as much a day-to-day requirement. Other employees can’t seem to find the time/energy to concurrently learn these skills on their own for various practical reasons, including the effort it takes to continually “save the day” at SAS.
Historically, there have been teams at SAS working with common industry technologies and “open source”, etc. Such often lived outside outside or required minimal intersection with the MVA/TK C-language SDS build/test standard common to most of R&D. These people have found it easier to leave SAS, without a lengthy, self imposed season of modernizing their skills.
Many people are "stuck" in roles without exposure to these technologies, but it's worth mentioning that the company has been pushing employees to become engineers with a broader skillset for years.
I don't know what people consider to be advanced git, but an engineer at SAS today could easily have day-to-day work that involves merging, rebasing, handling pull requests, stashing, using hooks, tags, and working with refs.
Many teams handle their own builds using standard tools like Gradle. Docker has been taught through class offerings (mandated and optional) for years. This is also true of Kubernetes, and many teams write their own manifests. Standard dev environments are offered as containers. It's hard to imagine how one could get by as a developer or tester without knowing how to use a terminal. There are teams using Rust, C++, Java, Python, Go, and other languages that would be beneficial at other companies. I constantly consider scalability, memory usage, and optimization of code I write. I don't do this because SAS instructed me to. I just consider it to be a part of my job description and essential to staying relevant in the field.
Many products at SAS were shielded from these somewhat major transitions in tech over the past 3-5 years (and the groundwork was being laid earlier). The reasons behind this have been discussed ad nauseam, but I think that every individual is ultimately responsible for their own careers. Some people at SAS seem to forget this while blaming others for their own position. I get the frustration, and the longer that one does this, the longer they will feel locked in. However, it's never too late to start learning.
I believe there are a lot of opportunities to grow your skills at SAS. Unlike at some other companies, it often requires a lot of personal drive. There are many naysayers across these posts, and I know this will be controversial to say, but I believe that SAS's tech stack is currently healthier, more cohesive, and coherent than it has been in decades. Is it too late? Maybe. But sometimes, I read these posts and I wonder if the vitriol is a final gasp from people who left before the change or who are stuck struggling to adapt to it.
brtf+1oLfd13U
Spot on. I moved to another tech company late in my career after a long career at SAS. Here are some takeaways:
For many common development jobs you need to be fairly strong in SQL and if you’re doing anything database specific you should be able to deploy PostgreSQL or in some cases MariaDB/MySQL.
One definitely needs a working knowledge of basic data structure/algorithms, their complexities, and the ability to quickly whiteboard solutions involving these things.
Perhaps the most fundamental skill is to be very quick with basic statistics and solving “back of the envelope” scalability problems in your head. This is some white important in Junior roles but critical in anything Staff+. Also the ability to capture CSV output from a variety of measurement tools and quickly transform them and do summary spread sheets/graphs in Excel.
So, unlike the more highly specialized jobs in SAS R&D, for most “software engineering jobs, being fluid and versatile is more important than being super deep in one or two things — unless of course you are a world-class expert in these super deep areas and that’s what they are hiring you for. Even in that case, from what I’ve seen, a significant portion of the above skills is still necessary to succeed.
A good plan prior to interviewing is at least 40 hours a week of study/preparation for 6 to 9 months in many of the listed skills if you are not already supremely confident in them. That’s what the competition for the jobs you want will already have under their belt.
Having a career at SAS feels like an albatross around your neck. What a waste of an education and time working.
If you have spent 10+ years at SAS expect a long time finding another job, especially if you are over 40. Most smaller companies actually consider this kind of a resume as negative.
And it is. Learning how to write software the SAS way puts you at a disadvantage. Instead of learning how to handle the entire process you are instead more like a worker in an automobile plant. You learn one area of the process while others handle the rest.
Good luck.
From : asli+1oLfd13U
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The tragedy is that upper management very much wanted new revenue streams. We tried to enter Retail, Financial, Education, Computer Security, Energy, and other markets — even Video Games. Yet with few exceptions, the people chosen to lead these efforts did not have the skills to succeed.
"
In the case of several of these product verticals, there was an even bigger problem -- one that ultimately impacted SAS' ability to grow its core analytics market share as well...
Lack of a truly cogent, comprehensive and flexible platform architecture for the Internet and cloud age -- after MVA had reached its growth potential in the prior paradigm of multi-vendor hosting on local, predominantly single machine customer installations.
Enter the 2000s where the major managerial players in R&D often did not play well together, lacked the collective insight/talent to take on this mammoth task (one that know single individual could've possibly succeeded as chief architect at) or were simply too busy, polishing the horns on their division/products.
This timing coincided perfectly with the rise of product management and the corresponding decline of most individual contributors doing any significant basic research to advance the SAS core architecture.
Consequently, a mishmash of fifedom developed components like SPDE, TKTS, (and no doubt others others that I cannot quickly recall) attempted to fill in gaps while MVA was extended with TK (Threaded Kernel) in order to better exploit multicore/multithreaded host capabilities.
Then the in-database initiatives, LASR, the SAS Metadata Server and ultimately a Java-based, mid tier and web stack came into the picture. These things helped create piecemeal new features and capabilities needed by existing and a relatively handful of new customers.
However, as cool, as some of these features were, they did not add up to an architectural evolution. It would enable the kind of flexibility and power necessary to serve as the underlying computing base for products that could generate _significant_ new revenue.
Hence, a lot of the product teams wound up, building their own platform capabilities, including custom access control subsystems (rather than using the Metadata servers generalized API for such), using external open source, databases, etc. all because the SAS architectural platform failed to provide the core set of services they needed.
Also, consider that these custom implementations created compatibility issues between products, required custom documentation and specialized tech support. This is highly inefficient and antithetical to the good design.
I find that frequently those wanting to remove the deadweight don't realize that THEY are the deadweight... good luck when your number comes up!
Stymied progress, lack of critical thinking, and emphasis on loyalty over competence are all symptoms of poorly qualified management. Most SAS managers weren’t bad people. They would encourage progress, think critically, and reward competence if they could recognize it. But they can’t, so they don’t.
The software industry is filled with poor managers, because it’s rare to find people with both strong technical skills and strong people skills.
But SAS was unusual in its promotion of technically under-qualified people, whose primary skill was their willingness to say “yes” to their superiors. These people were mostly competent to maintain an established revenue stream — but not to innovate and create new ones.
The tragedy is that upper management very much wanted new revenue streams. We tried to enter Retail, Financial, Education, Computer Security, Energy, and other markets — even Video Games. Yet with few exceptions, the people chosen to lead these efforts did not have the skills to succeed.
SAS has well-qualified managers still employed there. I worked for some of them, and I would again. But they are a minority who must compromise with the majority — on board Golgafrinchan Ark B.
Yeah, I can't disagree with you. SAS is privately-held, and Goodnight is the literal Old Man and free to do as he pleases with his company.
When I was hired into SAS, I wanted to work at the SAS I had heard and read about, the SAS that HR still advertises to new hires. And for a while, I feel like I did. The work was challenging but interesting, competence was rewarded, and there was no "rats eating rats" mentality caused by fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the future of the company. SAS was #1 in the Great Place to Work survey two years running!
To your point, maybe, that SAS no longer exists. The work turned stale and desperate, like we were fighting a holding action against an enemy we couldn't even see, loyalty became more important than competence, and the rats got hungry as raises, bonuses, and promotions dried up. It's a shame.
One of the fascinating, yet horrifying things I witnessed at SAS was how seemingly off-handed comments made by leaders were taken as marching orders by middle management, without critical thought, and without additional clarification.
"Customers think the software is old and tired", went the complaint.
"I wonder what ideas interns at the local college could come up with?", the senior leader asked, off-handedly.
The next thing you know, an entire department is decimated, and long-term employees are replaced with interns. The interns came up with few new ideas, and the problem wasn't solved. The software is still old and tired.
But the middle management who ran with this comment, without clarification, and without critical thought, were eventually promoted, and now run their own little fiefdoms.
The lack of critical thought and clarification is so concerning that let's hope one of the current crop of leaders doesn't get on stage and shout "We need to set the competition alight!". If they did, about a dozen middle managers would be arrested for conspiracy to commit arson. That's how mindlessly they behave.
Mindless decision-making by sycophants is just one of the many reasons why SAS is in this predicament, and why it won't get any better.
Unfortunately, SAS slowly departed from the radical culture of innovation that made it successful in the first place … a culture that included people of color, g-y people, considerable international talent and a significant number of women who functioned in some of the most important R&D positions in SAS history.
Copious prior posts (that I and others authored) have addressed the history of suboptimal to downright poor management decisions made by largely “older white men” … exclusively in the case of the most senior executives. However, there is dubious correlation between the possibility that initiatives driven by “senior women and men of color” could’ve made any significant difference to the overall outcome. At the end of the day the buck stops with Dr. G.
Interesting perspective, but under those "old, flaccid, white men" SAS revenue has gone from what, $3.6 billion to less than $3 billion, even with six years or so of increasingly desperate "reduce expenses" austerity measures? The reduce expenses arc went from "limit travel" to "no travel" to "early retirement" to layoffs, with "outsource" spanning the entire arc. Dave Mac was 100 percent right about that, and the inflection point.
I don't think the facts agree with your interpretation of events. Who's making the hiring decisions? Who's deciding what internal projects to fund? Who's deciding the strategic direction of the company? Who decided to "dilute [SAS's] research/innovation roots and allowed too many 'quick buck' manipulative business types to influence direction", if that's the problem? The average individual contributor is safe from any accusation that they contributed to those decisions.
The first three paragraphs of your post contain a lot of salient truth. However, it’s objectively doubtful that possibly deprecated contributions based on the race or gender of now departed employees have magnified contemporary woes at SAS.
Over the past 25 years, SAS progressively diluted its research/innovation roots and allowed too many “quick buck” manipulative business types to influence direction. That, along with tolerating lackluster R&D employees/leaders (Including not cultivating nearly enough effective/mature leadership) is a better explanation of SAS’ woes. It is probable that some of the “diversity” mentioned in your final paragraph fit in this category. As for the “flaccid older white men” — po-p on them all you want but without their efforts building and sustaining core SAS products, the salaries of the people you suggest are victims would have never been funded.
If you mean the good Dr., I don't know that I can agree with you. He was a shrewd, competent, and yes imperfect executive who knew his employees by name and sat in on hiring interviews (at least in the early days), and who led the company to four decades of growth, put Cary on the map, and made many early SAS employees millionaires. That's enough success for any one life.
But he was revered by SAS's old guard, who expected him to swoop in and save the company right up until the downward spiral started in 2015 or so, which was part of the problem. He's tired and ready to let it all go, but failed to cultivate a ready bench of subordinates able to take the reins when he retires. His several heir apparents have all left the company, thus the IPO.
If you mean his various VPs over the years, I don't know that I can agree with you either. Some of them, the best ones, were loyal to the idea of SAS, if not its implementation.
If, however, you mean the current crop I don't think I can disagree. The company's senior leadership is essentially old, flaccid, white men and the one token white woman they keep around so SAS can claim "diversity" in its senior leadership. They've successfully driven all the senior women and men of color out of their positions at SAS by systematically dismantling what those people built, drove off all of the SAS old guard by making it clear that they're better off taking the offer (whatever offer), and outsourced SAS functions to third parties with no interest in the company beyond what the contract requires.
"No, the real problem is the one thing all of those failed attempts have in common: incompetent managers, directors, and senior directors."
I think the incompetence extends higher, beyond senior directors.
My experience was exactly the same!
My experience at SAS was nothing more than a series of stymied attempts at progress. Each time I'd make headway towards improving a product, someone in management would pull the rug out from under those efforts, resetting things back to baseline. My entire career at SAS was simply an exercise in futility and frustration.
This is the unfortunate recipe for producing "dead weight".
Wow. What an insufferable person you must be. I can name several people at SAS with this exact attitude, so we may know each other. Of course, those people all think they're A players, but they're actually bench warmers compared to the people who have left SAS since 2018 or so and whose offices they now work from one or two days a week. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is real.
Most of the best and brightest have already left SAS, and usually for greener pastures in mature companies in growth markets. Those SAS employees left behind are near retirement age but unable to retire and haven't qualified for any of the early retirement offers, those determined to ride it out in the hope of receiving some equity stake in the company, or those too incompetent or toxic to get a job anywhere else. You're probably in the latter category, proving my point.
Make no mistake. SAS has been in a self-imposed downward spiral for the better part of five years now. It's interesting that so much of the discussion here (and elsewhere) has fixated on "employees are the problem". It's interesting because either this is rats eating rats behavior, or it's part of a "social media strategy" to redirect attention away from the failures of SAS management, HR, and senior leadership and their decisions.
Or maybe you're a troll. I don't think it matters, really, because the real problem is the idea that Goodnight's employees have failed SAS, and not the other way around. Goodnight let the current crop of middle-managers-rising-to-the-level-of-their-own-incompetence convince him that a re-org would finally give them the tools they need to accomplish their objectives, and when that didn't work another re-org, and then when that didn't work another... all to carefully bury their failures because they just didn't have the right corporate structure to get anything done, or exactly the right people in the right positions, or the right number of people in the right departments, or...
No, the real problem is the one thing all of those failed attempts have in common: incompetent managers, directors, and senior directors.
But you'd better hope and pray that he doesn't wake up and replace current management with competent management, or your clever "everyone here is lazy, incompetent, or stupid but me" ruse will be thin armor, as it should be. An actual meritocracy is the one thing someone with that attitude won't survive.
Yes, HR is safe. These strange bedfellows protect all the other strange bedfellows. Hence, the company suffers.
HR is safe. VP and Sr. Director/Director titles are rampant in that group, many with little to no direct reports either. That department has battled high turnover and negative working environments for years. A flush/restart is desperately needed, but it keeps flying under the radar somehow.
Epic Games says it will lay off more than 800 workers at the Cary video game company
BY BRIAN GORDON UPDATED SEPTEMBER 28, 2023 1:45 PM
Epic Games, the Triangle-based developer of popular games like Fortnite and Gears of War, will lay off around 830 employees, roughly 16% of its total staff, according to an email that Epic CEO Tim Sweeney sent to staff members Thursday. “For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn, investing in the next evolution of Epic and growing Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators,” Sweeney wrote. “I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic.”
In December, Epic told The News & Observer it had more than 1,000 employees report to its Cary headquarters. The company declined to share how many of this week’s cuts affected workers based in Cary. In his email to employees Thursday, Sweeney said there would be no further job cuts, writing “these changes financially stabilize the business.” Epic will also sell Bandcamp, a music distribution platform Epic acquired in March 2022, Sweeney wrote.
STILL HAS EYES TOWARD THE METAVERSE
Sweeney cofounded Epic in 1991, and he is today among the wealthiest people in North Carolina. His company, one of the largest private video game developers, scored its biggest success in 2017 when it released Fortnite. Set in a vibrant animated landscape, the battle royale game is played by millions of people globally at any given time. On Thursday, Sweeney said the layoffs will not hinder the company’s development goals, highlighting that around two-thirds of the cuts “were in teams outside of core development.” But he did say product delays could occur.
“Some of our products and initiatives will land on schedule, and some may not ship when planned because they are under-resourced for the time being,” he wrote. In recent years, Epic has worked to offer customers experiences in the metaverse, a broad term for a network of immersive virtual spaces where users interact. In April 2022, the Fortnite creator raised $2 billion between Sony and the Lego Group’s parent company Kirkbi, which Epic said would be used to build a kid-focused metaverse.
Despite citing the transition to the metaverse as a cause of this week’s cuts, Sweeney ended his email by expressing his goal to make Epic Games “a leading metaverse company.” Epic’s layoff announcement comes the day after the company asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review its antitrust case against Apple and its App Store policies. The company, which was valued at $31.5 billion last year, also plans to build a new campus on the former site of Cary Towne Center. Epic has previously shared its goal to open its new headquarters there by 2025.
Errie parallels?
https://stocks.apple.com/AMCmTMWBnSmKh8kIdNGaNAg
I am a reporter for The News & Observer where I cover technology. I'm looking to confirm reports of job cuts at SAS this week (in the Professional Services Division and any other departments.) Looking to speak with current or affected employees to confirm. Can be kept completely anonymous (no name or identifying information would be published.)
Feel free to reach me at bgordon@newsobserver.com or 919-861-1238.
"What is the selling point of Viya"?
"Great products sell themselves." - Kevin Systrom
use cases
That depends on their used cases.
I can well believe that V9 is bloated. But what's the selling point of Viya? If we're urging customers to switch, won't they just switch to R or Python?
A similar response was given by a somewhat infamous former R&D Director known for creating a climate of micromanaging and for being a very clever politician (being a former IBMer, he came by that honestly 😀).
He was asked the question “how many people work for you?”. His response was “about half of them”. FWIW he did inherit a lot of people from an era in the late 90s to early 2000s when SAS hired a significant number of B and C players (the old adage A individual contributors become managers and hire Bs who themselves eventually hire Cs). By the time he came to prominence, SAS R&D had all but stopped doing the collective basic research that fueled so much earlier success. Instead of allowing, smart people to focus outward on what was going on in the greater world of computing (and how SAS could better integrate with it), the v9 platform became even more proprietary (Metadata Server, mid-tier and convoluted web stack) under his reign.
To be fair, we are all human and I’m sure he was doing the best he could give him his own aspirations in the growing political climate at SAS. He basically presided over the era of R&D becoming a little r and big D — more of a software manufacturing concern, built on homegrown testing/build frameworks, cranking out releases, and becoming less architecturally elegant with each passing year. Oliver recognized this and it ultimately motivated building CAS/Viya as rapidly growing public cloud infrastructure was shown to be a poor fit for the bloated V9 stack.
An old timer employee once asked me if I knew how many people worked at SAS Cary. I said I wasn’t sure. He said “about half of them”.
@3gps+1oLfd13U is correct about this.
I will point out that some of us of similar vintage and SAS history did not so behave due to our own personal integrity, work ethic and pride of having built something significant going back to the 1980s. We retired on our own apart from any offered package and in some cases matriculated to considerably more money/success at other tech companies.
It is sad that too many other SAS old-timers “coasted” and/or rode political coattails with very little vision or zest to make the difference at SAS that we attempted to make. Thankfully, some of us saw the decline, due to organizational dysfunction and managerial chicanery beginning to unfold a decade ago and started preparing various exit strategies.
“It's always been at least 10% who are just doing the bare minimum!”
I know of so many employees who fit this bill and the 10% is way conservative, it has to be way more.
A large number of employees who are near the retirement age or past the retirement are just holding on to the job and biding their time, and they make upward of $180K. They have no work to do and this is an easy life for them. They qualified for the VRBP program for the past 2-3 times it was offered but they declined it. They come 1-2 times per week to office, just to socialize, go to the cafeteria and the gym. On remote days, just login in the morning, do their house chores and other stuff, and logout in the evening.
Their managers are aware of this but they want to protect these employees in order to keep their count of direct reports, else the managers might lose their role. The Directors are also aware of this. The management reasoning is these employees are there to maintain “critical infrastructure” and no other employees have this skill set.
These employees know that they will get the same months of severance if they are laid off, so that why not continue until SAS pushes them out. This employee population is getting huge now and perhaps contributing to the downfall of SAS.