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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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Came to read about commandos being the best employer. Left disappointed. Watched "Who Dares, Wins" to recover.
I've worked for a top rated corp. What a joke. On paper, they looked good. But if you didn't conform to the culture it sucked. Official policies mean little, it all come down to the managers in your local department.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
That's sort of the whole point of their corporate culture, though, and why the employees like it there, isn't it? The expectation is that neither management/owners nor employees will treat it as a purely mercenary endeavor, so employees aren't using it as a springboard to the next job that offers a 5% higher salary, and management isn't going to screw over employees at the first opportunity.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
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.
Wait, there are companies in *other countries*?
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)
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 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
How does it feel to be a slave to your corporate masters?