An elite few built world-class skills because they carefully curated their careers over a long period of time while continuing to up-skill on their own time+dime. Many had to put up with less than ideal, to downright awful managers for certain seasons to see this thru. SAS Has fallen far from its former greatness and that can be laid directly at the feet of its founder and chief cultural architect. Proceed at your own risk.
A former SAS “lifer”
The OP has a point. Taken from @uuun+1j17zNi6.
Another problem with SAS that I haven’t seen mentioned is its relentless focus not only on sales, but on product-specific sales. This wouldn’t seem to be a problem, except for the fact that SAS seldom sells individual products. Rather, it sells often ad hoc groups of products at a negotiated aggregate discount. As such, the money received from a customer seldom matches up with a single product; instead it corresponds to perhaps a dozen products. It’s up to the salesperson to allocate the bottom-line figure among the constituent products. I never (25 yrs as a product manager) saw any evidence of any constraints on this allocation, and so salespeople would throw as much of the funds as possible to the product(s) with the biggest bonus attached.
In one notable case, there were ten products on an invoice. Nine analytic products they were doing the heavy lifting for the solution we built for the customer were listed at ZERO dollars each. One banking solution (which carried a hefty incentive, as assigned by sales management) was assigned the total value of the invoice.
SAS management knows the per-product revenue figures are garbage (I personally told them this repeatedly), but they still insist on using those figures for decision-making and they also refuse to take any action at all to improve the accuracy of those figures.
Indeed, SAS R&D was not insular in the '80s. And in the '70s, Tony Barr's original architecture was brilliant. For its first 20 years, SAS R&D worked pretty close to the state of the art.
That changed in the early 90s, when we moved to object-oriented programming. Management decided that, rather than use one of the industry-standard languages, we had to invent our own.
Now that's insular. And that decision led directly to the disaster of Version 7.
It's true that Product Management focuses companies away from Research and toward Sales. That's had a big effect, starting in the late '90s.
By that time, SAS R&D culture had already changed.
In reply to:
Post from TheLayoff.com
The SAS R&D culture of the 80’s thru mid-90’s was not insular — there was copious collaboration with other tech companies, especially HW vendors. Many of us Devs were engaged in basic research and also very aware of emerging technologies. SAS publicly boasted of having the highest per-capita R&D spend in the industry. This significantly diminished between the late 90’s and 2010 — corresponding to the rise of Product Management and highly paid “Sales G-ns” (who often move companies every 3-4 years). True innovation fell off precipitously; basic research all but died. These are facts, I was there.
that people think limited R&D investment in favor of sales focus were the problems just shows how bad (non-existent) the management was. there was a failure in all aspects. in order to have long-term investment, you of course have to have revenue (or a giant venture investment). you cannot survive with "linear R&D" or linear product improvements when there is always a disruptive innovation coming from outside. "do not focus on short term sales" and "spend more on R&D" wouldn't have enough funding and wouldn't create open source analytics packages (that ultimately render SAS obsolete) or an interesting AI. SAS liked to say it "listened to its users" but that is one of the innovator's dilemma problems in a nutshell. Re-making a bad product on a new, proprietary stack with a new UI for existing user bases to learn: the market doesn't want that, and existing users didn't want that. But R&D/product/marketing/sales all listened but heard the exact wrong thing. So in the real world we have no choice but to put you into the "legacy box" - keep the old UI until certain segments of our users don't need those tools (due to retirement?). Clearly reject the garbage stacks and garbage re-made UIs with less functionality - products reflective of the incompetent fiefdoms. There are some great tools from other vendors available now. They aren't necessarily better than tools from SAS a generation ago. If SAS had strong management with some basic level of competence (a little would still be better than none), possibly it could've evolved its successful tools to use modern stacks and still be competitive instead of constantly re-making newer garbage versions and garbage proprietary stacks when the world has moved on. Looks like it's promoted the same types of jokers after pushing others out so all the value will continue to be destroyed. If they keep the blinders on forever, it's just a sad situation.
@SAS-O-Matic I'll bet we did work together. I agree with all you wrote.
"The greatest value SAS Software delivers today and corresponding revenue comes from software designed before the company became a product/marketing driven organization."
Many talented people remain at SAS. However, the best must compromise with the rest. Those compromises never produced a second revenue stream to replace the original one.
Good on you for raising the issue with JG. I'm not surprised the focus turned to sales. That shows one reason why the best R&D contributors were not rewarded.
I always thought another reason was that many R&D managers could not tell the difference between the best and the rest.
Nothing will change now, until the IPO. Then, everything will change.
Replying primarily to OldSASer. I have no doubt that we know each other and probably have worked together directly. You are correct … it is quite a feat that a privately held software company like SAS has not only remained for 46+ years, but grew for most of that time. I was there for most of that ride and it was pretty amazing.
The biggest problem I see (and it happens everywhere) is developing effective management during high growth. No doubt this is especially challenging at privately held companies with a small number of founders, who become extravagantly wealthy yet remain involved to at least some degree in the day in and day out operations of the business. This is SAS to the “T”.
I had a couple of personal conversations with JG over the years regarding ways that R&D in particular could be improved and expertise developed in deeper and more effective ways. Of course, he didn’t have much to say in a way of response and it was always around doing something that had a shorter term impact our revenue. So from my calculus, the two biggest fails were #1 not having enough vision/investment of resources in longer-term research interests and staff development, #2 Shifting focus away from keeping SAS an R&D driven organization.
The plain fact is is the greatest value SAS Software delivers today and corresponding revenue comes from software designed before the company became a product/marketing driven organization. Instead, the investment should have been made in paying top employees better, keeping the management hierarchy flatter (which can be done when you pay well enough to hire the most competent developers and other staff) and focus on building a better long-term foundation rather than squandering resources on failed solutions and organizational window dressing.
Ultimately, anyone who significantly contributed over decades to build SAS should of had a bigger piece of the action. The fact that this did not occur may be why some employees were dubbed “the retired in place” because they no longer cared about “moving the needle”. The cumulative effect of this over time absolutely diminished productivity and innovation. It was the double-edge sword of not having enough skills to move to a tech company that provided equity, yet being valuable enough to the aging SAS technical infrastructure to be kept around to stoke the legacy revenue stream.
There is a marked difference in the mentality of someone joining SAS today and someone who literally helped build the company from the ground up starting back in the 80s. The later crowd are part of computing history and I’m proud to be among them. SAS In many ways pioneered the benefits and workplace amenities that are now coming into culture period this goes all the way back to the early 80s.
The problem is that the SAS founders are from a different generation and JG in particular was/is not able to understand the need for accelerated compensation among his best employees (especially within R&D). The founders tolerated ineffective directors and managers along with a “not invented here” culture that for too long isolated SAS practically speaking from the open source movement which is currently eating SAS’ lunch.
As is the case with any career, you have to build your own skills and capabilities. As someone coming into SAS, I expect that to happen.
Will I stay 20 years? Sounds fantastic, but nobody does that these days. We're all flipping jobs into something later.
Thank you for posting. I don't claim the "world-class skills"; but otherwise, that succinctly describes my experience.
It was still a great achievement to keep a software company going for more than 40 years. Hundreds of people actually became SAS "lifers": they got lifetime employment.
SAS is frustrating because it could have been better. But some places are worse. I would not want to be at Twitter or Facebook right now.