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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."

21 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 Tablizer · · Score: 5, Funny

      the absolute worst syntax/design of any computing language I know

      Maybe they have to be nice to their employees to compensate for their embarrassing programming language.
             

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      Table-ized A.I.
    3. Re:What a joke... by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Informative

      According to this review:

      Pager duty is a major pain. Smaller teams can expect to be on-call at least one week per month, while larger teams spread out the pain longer. Getting paged in the middle of the night for a high-severity problem that take eight hours of investigation to fix is enough to drive many to quit.

      Sounds like they're trying to make routine (as opposed to rare, emergency) use of on-call engineers as a way of maintaining 24/7 staffing without actually paying for 24/7 staffing.

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    4. 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.

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

      The company policy is that the best way to make sure that devs pay attention to defects is to make them the recipient of all the pain they cause. So the devs are in charge not only of writing the code, but also in charge of the service running in production (and on the test network, but that isn't the point here). So if a server goes down- devs take care of it. If a server breaks, devs have to requisition a new one (although a separate team does hardware checking and actually orders it from the supplier, and will also investigate hardware issues upon request). If anything goes wrong with the service itself (due to bugs, bad inputs, etc), the devs take care of it. So the devs share a pager around the team. Exactly how the pager is rotated is decided by the team, but generally its 1 week at a time, round robin. So on an N person team, expect to be on call 1 week in N. When you're on call you're expected to be within 15 minutes of an internet connection and a computer capable of VPNing into the corporate network at all times, and to respond to the page within those 15 minutes (otherwise it pages your boss after 30, then his boss, and on up the line). So basically devs are the 24 hr support crew as well as the developers. Needless to say, most devs don't want to be support, so leave the company very quickly.

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    6. Re:What a joke... by bangzilla · · Score: 4, Informative

      To be on the list companies must submit their name for consideration. Amazon didn't, hence it's not on the list. Better things to do than self promotion I suspect ;-)

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    7. 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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    8. Re:What a joke... by kd6ttl · · Score: 5, Informative

      The SAS data step language was originally modeled after PL/I. Some recent additions (for example, the "object-oriented" interface) appear to have been modeled after C or other more recently fashionable languages.

      If you are speaking of the data step language, it's not correct to say that "[m]ost of the functions automatically apply to a whole recordset at once"; that's a misunderstanding of the default data step iteration over records. Statements in the data step apply to one record at a time, going sequentially or in index order through the input - unless you've done something to make that not happen (which you can do - SAS is very flexible).

      In many ways, SAS follows the same principle of least surprise as Perl and some other languages.

    9. 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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  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. mmmm... by conureman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    M&Ms.

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  4. Where's Apple? by starbugs · · Score: 5, Funny

    I checked the list twice.

    Where's Apple?

    1. Re:Where's Apple? by the+linux+geek · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You answered your own question. Apple is not on the list. Evidently, they are not a particularly wonderful company to work for.

    2. Re:Where's Apple? by martas · · Score: 5, Funny

      well, it would be OK, except for the daily Jobs worship hours...

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      weinersmith
    3. Re:Where's Apple? by zippthorne · · Score: 5, Funny

      Would you say that Apple's employees are worried about their Jobs?

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      Can you be Even More Awesome?!
  5. Who dares wins by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  6. 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)

  7. 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.

  8. Re:You can't survive if you don't evolve with chan by guacamole · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  9. Re:Have any of you ever seen the SAS Language and by guacamole · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.