Thread regarding SAS Institute layoffs

@nnk+1qk7UpRX

"...The cult-of-personality that surrounded that man was something I had never seen before when I joined SAS in the early 2000s. It was extraordinary and bizarre and probably contributed to his arrogant belief that anything not created from the ground up by SAS, wasn't good enough. How wrong he was!..."

The ever-present, always watchful SAS Cheerleading Squad. That place was so crazy with that "we're the greatest" cr-p it truly was bizarre.

SAS had an internal website (Scene Around SAS?) where employees would upload pictures they had taken on campus. The pictures were always complimentary, with loads of praise from the SAS Cheerleading Squad.

One incident has stuck with me over the years:

One afternoon, while walking on the trails between buildings T and U, I came across the largest copperhead snake I'd ever seen. It was sitting on a trail sunning itself. I took some pictures.

I thought long and hard about uploading the pictures to Scene Around SAS. The Sesame Street song "One of these things is not like the others, one of these things doesn't belong..." played in my head. Uploading the pictures felt so tempting, and so naughty...

But ultimately, I decided not to do it. I knew the SAS Cheerleading Squad would come out in full force, either in the comments section or within the lunch gossip groups, and condemn me for "breaking the rules" -- "We must have all positive messages, all the time!" Talk about walking on eggshells.

I then thought long and hard about whether to report the snake to security, so that it wouldn't bite one of the SAS Cheerleading Squad members while they were out on their daily gossip walks.

"Eff-it!", I thought. "Reality has dangerous things in it, the SAS Campus is not a suspension of reality." I did nothing. The snake moved off the trail and into the leaves on its own accord. It was quite an interesting moment.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSsGutZVtxzRkNdB-O87MZ_MMQdla5QHJnvEA&usqp=CAU

Spoken out of the mouth of one of the smartest feminist scholars who has lived in contemporary times

wqh+1qk7UpRX
Couldn't agree more RE demise of SAS lies with one person.

JG is the one who made blunders time and time again, when he had 20+ years to figure out a way to stay relevant - because that's how long it's been since the writing was on the wall for SAS.

The cult-of-personality that surrounded that man was something I had never seen before when I joined SAS in the early 2000s. It was extraordinary and bizarre and probably contributed to his arrogant belief that anything not created from the ground up by SAS, wasn't good enough. How wrong he was!

"...ironically, sas leaders were in a key position to understand that things were changing from proprietary tech to commoditized and open source tech, "data is the new oil", and "data is the new code". things won't move backward...."

As summarized from "The Power Broker":

"A mass transit system would help alleviate traffic congestion in New York. Mr. Moses, I suggest we build a new mass transit line instead of a highway."

"No, that mass transit stuff is a passing fad. We will build another highway. We'll name it something catchy. It will be a big success."

Sound familiar? Read the book and you will understand that the demise of SAS lies with one person and one person only.

To a certain extent, data science tools have been comodotized by open source with first R and then Python dominating.

And it's probably fair to say that SAS was never going to stop the rise of open source, even if it had kept SAS free for academia.

However, there is one company in particular that shows us what SAS could have become, and that's Databricks. Founded in 2013 by some guys who helped develop Apache Spark, it now has a pre-IPO valuation of over $40b. They have nailed the scalability challenge by building a commercial product on top of a scalable platform - Spark.

Imagine what SAS could have been had they not insisted on trying to build their own proprietary engine (Lasr, then CAS), and instead had hired some of those bright young things from Apache Spark and built products on top of that platform as Databricks has done.

Sadly, that didn't happen because of the insular and arrogant culture that JG created at SAS.

if you were a top first year student at MIT in CS/AI, perhaps about to drop out to start your AI startup, what would YOU study and bet your career and startup on? would it be tools that were once the leader among some previous generation of users and pre-google companies? of course not.

this is the way the technology industry goes. most of the smartest people in the world always work outside your specific org. change is the only constant.

someone will always create something better. laypeople seem surprised OpenAI didn't come out of somewhere like google. why would anyone be surprised SAS is going the way of Unix or Cobol or Blackberry?

ironically, sas leaders were in a key position to understand that things were changing from proprietary tech to commoditized and open source tech, "data is the new oil", and "data is the new code". things won't move backward.

Frankly, majority of people doing data science use Python and/or R, and SQL. They don't need and don't want to use SAS at all. I don't think SAS can do anything to change those people's minds.

@vmg+1qk7UpRX
I am angry too (and weeping) looking at that data growth chart you posted.
SAS was the leader, the king of data analytics that could process tons and tons of data of any kinds and we dropped the ball and totally missed that explosive data growth with so many missteps and failures in the hands of bad management. The Big Guy should know that he won't have a legacy to leave behind because the sycophants destroyed it.

By 2030 all the remaining (youngest) baby boomers will be over 65 and out of the workforce totally. SAS will cease to exist by then because younger generations will not be using SAS if they can help it.

Solid statistical analysis used to be the cornerstone in research. I suppose the sloppy science used these days in pharma and big tech with home made tools in R and Python are easily modified and are more useful in the hands of less experienced when it's all about sales - never mind unearthing what the data actually says - that could be bad for business! Part of the demise of science in general.

As @emb+1qk7UpRX says, the ball was dropped in licensing SAS to academia. I believe it is free or cheap now, but there was a period when it was not. Understandably, that pushed all the universities toward R and Python.

In this market, R and Python were going to win eventually, anyway, because they’re free or cheap for non-academic users. Aside from free academic licenses, there's not much SAS could have done to beat that.

In the business intelligence market, SAS could have built products that people want to use. Tableau, PowerBI, QlikTech, and others have been quite successful. Viya-based products have not.

There’s a chart here that makes me angry. It shows the explosive growth of data in recent years. We’ve lived through a glorious opportunity for companies that analyze data. SAS promoted people who missed that opportunity.

https://explodingtopics.com/blog/data-generated-per-day#


About 6 or 7 years ago, I made the point of following such threads on reddit for over a year & I collected all the negative comments about SAS. I shared this info with a certain person who was in a position to help mitigate the issue and their response was basically, "its the internet, everyone has an opinion". Their observation wasn't technically wrong, but the solution to do absolutely nothing sure didn't help.

New SAS customers are more rare now than ever. Some of the reasons for that are self induced:

1. Viya is not attractive to potential new SAS customers. Unattractive software that wins speed awards is still unattractive. The paucity of Viya job openings is enough proof of that.
2. An existing V9 customer has a horribly complex migration path to Viya. Because SAS chose to not make that an easy migration. Many have determined that ditching SAS altogether is the least nasty solution.
3. SAS discourages new customers who want V9 instead of Vija. Instead, SAS steers them towards Viya. If they wanted Viya, they would not be talking to SAS about a subscription to V9.

In a nutshell, those are significant reasons SAS is dying.

Here's the curriculum for the 10-month Master of Science Analytics (MSA) program at NC State University. They teach "Advanced R Programming" and "Advanced Python". I do not see SAS in the curriculum for MSA.

https://analytics.ncsu.edu/?page_id=123

It's sad to see this because NC State University was the birthplace of SAS and so close to the company.

If you'd like to learn Python, check out the free MIT courses on YouTube taught by Ana Bell.

The NC State Advanced Analytics program may be SAS-based. I could be wrong though.

SAS made a mistake for not giving away SAS to academia (universities) years ago for free license or at least made it so dirt cheap for them that they'd have an incentive to use it and train a whole new generation of college graduates. By the time SAS wised up, it was too little too late. People moved on to free open source languages at uni and left SAS behind.

SAS programming class is out of vogue, and a lot of people don't like taking it at universities. They'd rather take Python or R. Even at SAS the company they ask people (developers and testers) to learn Python but some people won't and don't want to learn it. Lazy much?

"What class are you taking?"

SAS programming class.

What class are you taking?