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SAS Named Best Company To Work For In 2010

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the must-like-north-carolina dept.

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."

8 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. What a joke... by Skreems · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:What a joke... by AuMatar · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Its the pager. Its a killer. The majority of amazon hires quit in under 2 years, because of the damn thing. Add in the fact that some underhanded teams don't mention it up front (many do, but I knew many people who didn't find out about pager requirements until after they hired on) and it doesn't belong on the list. If they got rid of the damn things it would go by the top.

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    2. Re:What a joke... by Toonol · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's not so much that it has bad syntax, as that its syntax seems to have developed completely independent of any other computer language, and concerns itself with a very different domain of problems. Most of the functions automatically apply to a whole recordset at once, so you can be amazing concise in program certain algorithms... but if you try to write them like you would in any other language, you'll create a miserable mess. It's hard for a 'normal' programmer to wrap their head around, because even the most basic structures are different.

      If SAS had been the only language you programmed in, it would probably make a lot more sense.

    3. Re:What a joke... by ottothecow · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Is that what this is mostly based on? It seems that way because I notice a lot the firms that made it (and keep making it) are companies known for long hours and high stress.

      Goldman Sachs shows up there, lists the most common job as an analyst with about $120k a year in pay. The people I know who went off to work in investment banking are not exactly what I would call happy. They are getting a pile of money, a solid resume, and a ticket to a top business school...but most of them are not planning to return after grad school. There are other finance/Big 4/mgmt. consulting firms on there that have the same sort of characteristics--strong pay and benefits but consistent 80+ hour weeks of stress and deadlines.

      I just don't understand how they make it to the top of the list along with companies like SAS or Google (I've heard long hours...but you get a lot of special perks and a lot of time for your own projects). Are they paying their employees to write good reviews? Are these done like college rankings where you get a boost just for being the company that everyone applies to just to get rejected?

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    4. Re:What a joke... by AuMatar · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If a doctor is on call, he gets paid. Same for a nurse, an electrician, and every other profession. Amazon pays decently, but not well enough that the pager duty is accounted for.

      The idea of pager as PITA just doesn't work. First off, most developers (especially good ones) are going to do it right through professional pride. Secondly, you may or may not be allocated time to do so. Third, I got far more pages from network glitches, user errors, and hardware problems than I ever did from my bugs. Fourth, our systems aren't isolated, other groups can cause pager issues for you. On my team, a decision by another team to include a reorder data feature meant that our service had to allow it too- but that wasn't always possible in our system, so if the customer used it and that caused us to go into an invalid state, we'd get paged. We then had to psychically guess whether the customer would prefer us to cut out illegal commands (possibly losing their data) or reorder the things back. Generally we just paged out to the sales people to ask them. And they wouldn't bother waking up to answer the page, so it was handled next day anyway. That little bug took over 2 years to get the other group to add a confirm feature that asked our service if it was ok to do the reorder before doing it.

      Oh and fifth- it actually gave you incentive not to monitor your service well. Fewer pages. Unless you're a professional and did it anyway, in which case the pager was unnecessary to begin with. Which is probably why no other company does it this way. I've only ever heard of one other company requiring pagers, and they had a massive ops team that took the first crack at pages and all operations work.

      No, they tell you that's the idea of the pager, but it really isn't. The idea of the pager is to save money by not hiring qualified ops people. It probably saves them a few million a year. And all of the short term costs are external, carried by the employee. The company loses out long term, but not in any way that shows up on a balance sheet, so they don't really care.

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      I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
  2. I used to work for a company like this by DJRumpy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  3. Culture of SAS by Theswager · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)

  4. Private companies are better employers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.