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SAS Named Best Company To Work For In 2010
theodp writes "If you're in the market for a new job, Fortune has just published its list of 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2010. Topping the list this year is SAS (SAS jobs), the largest privately held software company, which Fortune notes is populated with more statisticians than engineers or MBAs, and led by a Ph.D. founder whose first love is programming. Google (jobs), which once viewed SAS as model for employee perks, took the #4 spot, and Microsoft (jobs) checked in at #51."
Microsoft made the list, but Amazon didn't? I and a bunch of other Microsofties who've jumped ship in the past couple years would all strongly disagree.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I was Mobil employee (pre Exxon merger days). Probably one of the best companies I have ever worked for. Progressive work environment, friendly people, ideas were treated with respect, and about as diverse friendly as you can get. They did everything right, but were bought out by Exxon. I've never seen such an about turn in such a short amount of time. It was much like I imagine going from a free country to the iron heel of some repressive regime.
Obviously if your a fortune 500 company, there must be a way to meld a happy work environment with a profitable one? Why isn't this more the rule than the exception?
YMMV, but having previously worked for both Google and SAS I can attest to both being wonderful working environments. A good working environment and having motivated people in your office really lifts general mood and ambition.
M&Ms.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
I checked the list twice.
Where's Apple?
...Just ahead of the WalMart and the New York City Landfill err. Sanitation Engineering Department. Its not a good time for msfties, with stock flat for ....2 decades now... overpaid execs continuously crowing 'back in my day blah blah blah blah', perks evaporating like week old pepsi, valuable skill sets that need to include 'thrown chair avoidance', and marketing bunnies insisting 'we don't give a crap if its done, it has to ship tomorrow. You stay here all night and call me at home every 90 minutes with your progress till 11:30, but don't call me from 8:30-10:30 as I will be in the hot tub.' Its no surprise that the parking lot suffers a traffic jam every day at 4:31 pm. Would you work there if you could get a job at HP, or Intel, or Oracle or Google or Chrysler or Wal*Mart?
The SAS is certainly an elite outfit, probably better than the Green Berets. If the US military did have "the Unit' as portrayed by the CBS TV series then that would be the equivalent.
Of course you have to be a Brit to join it, its not like the French Foreign Legion.
I wish them the best of luck in finding and killing Bin Laden.
The Special Air Service is part of the armed forces.
Hey, anyone know where one could find similar little blurbs for companies not on that list? Employee pay by job and all that that?
Have any of you ever seen the SAS Language and Programs???
I had a sig, but
God damn the slash preview code sucks.... I meant to add that the SAS stuff is JUNK, pure JUNK.
I had a sig, but
As someone who lives about 1 mile away from SAS, knows lots of people who work there, and has talked to a lot of local business owners about SAS, and has eaten in their 'cafeteria'(gourmet restaurant for employees). SAS is an amazing place to work. At the same time many of the people who work there are not motivated like people in places like Google or other silicon valley type companies. SAS has a few cash cow products that they maintain and beyond that there is not much innovation. Jim Goodnight is a control freak about what the company does and is surrounded by 'yes men' executives. Many people who start to work there never leave and it functions as a self sustaining source of money with low work hours for all involved. That being said I do like the statistics software from them that I have used(JMP)
I have worked for several companies over the years. The best job I have ever had is with my current employer. Why? They are a "private" company. Note SAS is a "private" company. Huge public companies are always a slave to earnings and pleasing shareholders. Thats why a company like Intel can show record profits or increases and yet they lay off 5,000 people. The moral of the story. Try getting a job with a good private company.
Their JMP Statistical software is nice despite the the annoying scripting syntax. For a piece of software which is so full of features it is very lightweight and bug free. great for analyzing large amounts of data.
Fortune's methodology is completely bogus because it doesn't interview former employees. I used to work for #2 but quit when I learned that I would get paid 1/2 as much for selling stocks and mutual funds that were not recommended by the company.
SAS may be a good place to earn money, but that will change in a flash .... specially if they don't have other products in the works.
Companies that relies on just a few products, die slow miserable deaths in short periods of time. Software products have a very short lifespan and unless the product line evolves, they easily become obsolete. A company can't survive without new customers and just on support contracts for an obsolete product.
Amazon, in Seattle? You think they should be on the list at all? You've really drank the kool-aid haven't you?
Why don't you spend some time at the A9 campus in Palo Alto and see how it compares to the PacMed campus, you will be surprised at the huge difference in company culture.
(posted anonymous to protect the guilty)
The Presidency has been rated one of the worst jobs due to the massive responsibility, stress, constant criticism, and threat of being assassinated. The illegal 'perks' you're obviously trying to joke about got Clinton impeached and nearly booted out of office. If that had occurred he may have lost some of the other perks he is entitled to while simultaneously finding himself in a rather unsavory place in history.
I wonder if that includes working at the MS store in malls or not. Sometimes working behind the scene's its a whole lot better then in the front. Company's like Microsoft are very large with MANY different types of job types to fill, from sales to coders and many things between and I'm guessing each one one have it's own ups and downs
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
... if you're a full-time employee. I found it a little difficult to work there as a contractor. The people I worked with were great, but there was friction because they were pretty much all expecting to be lifers and I considered it a short-term gig. The culture there (at least, when I was there around 2000) was very uncomfortable with the "mercenary" mindset of "do job, get paid, leave."
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
I think if SAS dies, it's more likely to be a long, leisurely death. Their lock-in for business software is quite high--- it's a huge pain in the ass to completely transition a large company from SAS to anything else. Even if they stopped getting new customers altogether, I think their market share would decline only slowly.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I've worked for a top rated corp. What a joke. On paper, they looked good. But if you didn't conform to the culture it sucked. Official policies mean little, it all come down to the managers in your local department.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2010/size/
...and their fitness program is to take the stairs so you don't have to worry about being fired in an elevator.
That is one of the most interesting articles about Apple I've read.
Funny that Apple is the only major company that hasn't jumped in on the Netbook bandwagon.
sorry for being OT
"die slow miserable deaths in short periods of time"
Can you explain how you die a slow death in a short period of time?
what about the rest of the world?
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
Popular science/math/statistics applications generally have a very high market persistence... They are like well entrenched programming languages, which is actually what they are. People and organizations have invested an incredible amount of effort into software development, training, etc, to abandon a software packages like this one overnight. SAS software is a kludge of GUI tools written around a core SAS engine that was written at the time when modern computers didn't exist (and it shows), and yet this software is still going strong pretty amazingly. More recently, GNU R and STATA have become viable competitors for the raw statistics portion of SAS (they can't touch its business applications), and SAS might have lost a small market share in that area, but I really doubt it's on its way to die. Only time will show.
Yes.. very odd, non-conventional programming paradigms. The core of the systems seems to have been invented at the time when modern computers didn't exist.
The good thing about SAS is that it implements tons of statistics procedures (a lot more than say MATLAB) which are relatively easier to access than the same functions in GNU R. Doing any kind of standard (e.g. any Masters-level) statistics or econometrics in it is a breeze and this is why so many businesses are standardized on SAS. Academic statisticians and economists tend to like SAS too for things that are already implemented in it. But programming your own custom procedures in SAS is a pain in a butt..
SAS also beats other software in management of large data sets. The DATA step is odd, but it works where R or MATLAB would not work.
It's gonna be used in my applied stats course next semester. Took me a few minutes to even put the two together, and had never heard of it before the professor mentioned it. All I know about them is that they offer certification.
open source modern art: laser taggi
At SAS - yes I work there - we grew our business every year for the last thirty years. Please explain to me how we were able to do this without innovation. We also put more money back into R&D than any other IT vendor that I am aware of.
We now offer a range of targeted solution, campaign management, telco retention, supply management you name it that allows to rapidily employ our analytical engine (BTW fully Grid enabled if you wish) to specific business problems.
Goes to show that just because you ate in our cafeteria doesn't mean you understand what we are selling these days.
whose first love is programming
I did an SAS course around 20 years ago. Had to support it on my SunOS system. Then, it was basically an OS360 environment ported to X11. It was horrible to look at and no single "modern" -that was 1992- concept was to be seen. The "concept" of supporting both STDOUT and STDERR was wildly exotic.
Most SAS users I met were completely clueless about programming and were basically summoned by their depts to perform some wild additions on homogeneous data sets. The statistical functions were probably used by the small base of power users. Back then I'd had wager that a handful of Perl scripts -that was Perl 4 back then- would have solved most problems at a fraction of the cost and would have constituted in more generally trained developers. However, in SAS' niche, product decisions are hardly ever taken by tech savvy people but mostly by accountants that are overwhelmed by (non-)features from ads.
Anyway, the software was sold and SAS made loads of money out of it. Good for them. Stating that the founder's first love is programming is stretching it a bit.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
SAS might be a great company to work for, but in my experience they are not a great company to deal with as a techie. If I was a customer/target of the other SAS organisation alluded to in other posts, at least I'd know when a project involving them had been completed.
That's not Spanish but Russian - part of the the current anthem to be exact.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Pager how quaint the US telecoms infrastructure is
Now, they used to be fantastic tech companies to work for. Don't tell me the offshoring model, management consultancy groups and the global recession has just made them as boring to work for as every other corporate?
All my life. Until today.
"die slow miserable deaths in short periods of time"
Can you explain how you die a slow death in a short period of time?
A man is in hospital, dying of terminal cancer. The doctor tells him he has only 24 hours to live, but if he'd like, the doctor can arrange for a banjo player to come and join him.
"Why would I want to have a banjo player with me?" he asks.
"Because", replied the doctor, "with the banjo playing your last 24 hours will feel like forever!"
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.
Then there's the minor point that you don't work for a company, you work for a boss and if that person is an idiot, it doesn't matter how high or low in the rankings some place is, that boss can make your work life a living hell. Obviously the opposite applies: a good boss in a bad company can improve things.
Finally, this list is not confined to IT jobs: it applies to the cleaners as well as the managing director. So there's no indication of a correlation between the likelihood of having a good or bad IT job in a "good" company - the spread is just too broad.
The very last point is that this only lists companies in america and has nothing to say about the other 95% of the world.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I can predict that the "hardest" SAS related part of the course will be
1) Getting your data into SAS
2) Transforming your data so that it is ready for analysis.
Once your data is in the format expected by the statistical functions, then all you probably will have to do is call a statistical procedure and read the output. A 2-line long procedure call may involve an incredibly complex statistical estimator and give you output complete with estimates, standard errors, and graphs..
This is actually easier than doing the same homework in matlab. Sure in matlab its easier to get 1+1, but it has very few statistics functions beyond probability distributions and the most elementary stuff, so you have to code all statistics routines yourself.
Sorry to be posting this as anonymous, but i've worked for Accenture for about two years. The fact that is even listed makes me doubt about the value of that list.
On the other hand, you get a massive salary, all expenses paid, and even if you're absolutely terrible at the job you can't be fired for four years.
I was actually a bit surprised that my employer didn't make the list. And then I realized just how fortunate I am to think such a thing. Quite an epiphany.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
It's getting harder and harder in the US to find jobs at these "good places to work." I happen to work at one that never made this list...it's a European company with significant US operations. They have their problems, but one thing they do know how to do is keep engineer types happy and producing decent-quality work.
One thing that might help SAS is that it looks like they're a private company. They also have a huge niche market in academia, government and high-end business analytics. These two things appear to be what it takes to keep the pressure off the board to cut salaries, jobs and perks every time they need to top up the quarterly numbers. If you either always make money, or have a founder/CEO who's willing to dig into his own deep pockets during a downturn, this means you can spend a few extra bucks to attract and retain non-idiot employees. In turn, those employees will work harder for you, and make more money for the company.
I've seen (and worked in) the converse of this also. Companies that treat their employees like dirt generally experience high turnover unless the employees don't have a choice. I worked at an outsourcer at the beginning of my career who was like that...they kept burning through the same pool of low-skilled contractors who end up causing more problems than they fix, especially in a managed-services environment. Everyone who was smart realized they were a crappy place to work, got skilled and moved on.
Companies are social structures as well as business structures. In the past, there was a completely paternal relationship -- just do your job and everything will be taken care of for you. Some employers now take the role of "abusive parent" when it comes to employment. People at the top need to realize that if morale is in the dumps, their employees are either going to leave or not produce results for them.
A lot of people will say that all these perks are designed to squeeze every minute of productivity out of someone...and they're right! If someone doesn't have to sit in traffic to go to lunch because the cafeteria's right there, or be late to work because they had to drop their kid off at daycare, that's more productive work time. I think it works out, especially when you consider that happier employees tend to be more stable and less likely to disappear on you.
Goldman Sachs Group
I'll bet it is.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
How does it feel to be a slave to your corporate masters?
Yes-men everywhere, rampant nepotism, and a level of incompetence at the officer level I've never seen in my professional career. (This is the only place I've worked where I had a sneaking, sinking suspicion I was the smartest guy in the room.)
The company made the top 20 worst places to work in America this year.
I don't think a company's work environment is driven by private vs public; it might be size driven (larger companies trend public) but I'm in a public company now and couldn't be happier.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I'm fortunate to have a good job that pays well, but I'm envious of the cheap on-site day care at SAS. I can get non-subsidized child-care through my employer, but it will cost me over $3k/month (mostly post-tax) for two toddlers once my wife goes back to work full-time.
Did any FLOSS companies make the list?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I've used SPSS for a psych class, figured SAS was similar. I do basic stats stuff in python and am actively encouraged to learn R, so doing it in matlab probably wouldn't phase me.
open source modern art: laser taggi
nothing in the job title says you get to be on-call for no extra money, learn to negotiate
And I look around and wonder "how did we ever get rated as a top company?" My training (scale 0 - 10) = 2, New equipment = 2, career growth = 3. All I can say is if this is the way it is in one of the highest rated firms in the world, I feel sorry for everyone else. My guess is these listings are just another popularity contest. Some firms think its important to win, so they make the effort to be on the list.