Slashdot Mirror
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."
Maybe they have to be nice to their employees to compensate for their embarrassing programming language.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
According to this review:
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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)
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.
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.