This site is often filled with responses from the jilted and jaded. Does anyone still believe the company has a viable path forward? Are the right people still in place to execute that turnaround, or is it time for employees to start planning their exit?
There is a lot of complacency abounds with people openly stating they are just hanging around for the paycheck. Does anyone have faith? I'm by no means the "Company Man", but I would like to still believe that there is a path forward.
"Inflation… uncontrollable and applies to every businesss in the world. That same inflation applies to your personal financials."
If my wages were "stable" for the last 13 years, I'd be in seriously worse shape at year 13 than I was at year 1. While SAS can lay off employees to cut costs overall, acting like "stable" revenues for over a decade is not a sign of trouble is just silly.
@46b “ Every metric mentioned is declining. You can call the situation "stable", if you like.”
Incorrect. Not even close to right.
Revenue is stable+. Not dropping and actually increasing this year and last year.
Margins. Increasing
Expenses. Dropping
Inflation… uncontrollable and applies to every businesss in the world. That same inflation applies to your personal financials.
@468 "Revenue stable" -- only if you ignore inflation. But to any business, inflation matters.
Every metric mentioned is declining. You can call the situation "stable", if you like.
But calling it "stable" does not make it so.
@467 First it was any company that reduces headcount is in deline.
“ We can consider other metrics. Travel to conferences used to be more frequent. Computer workstations fully loaded used to be easier to get. SAS parties used to be fancier and more frequent.”
Now any company that reduces expenses other ways is in decline.
Revenue stable. Profitable. And at net margin higher than inflation…. Stable.
Numbers are numbers. Your emotions don’t change that.
Is SAS having to act more like most businesses to stay in that zone. Yes. Will it succeed longer term at remaining stable with fewer levers to pull? Time will tell.
@462 Those are two clear metrics: SAS revenues aren't keeping up with inflation, and SAS headcount is declining.
We can consider other metrics. Travel to conferences used to be more frequent. Computer workstations fully loaded used to be easier to get. SAS parties used to be fancier and more frequent.
You can call all these metrics "stable", if you like -- but in reality, they are all declining. Pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.
@449 I wish I had put in a Vegas bet that the next comment would be “but inflation…”
@441 SAS revenues vs. inflation have also declined ~20%.
In both cases, a ~20% decline is not "stable"; it's a decline.
@43e That is a myopic view. Many companies reduce headcount for many reason regardless of whether they are growth, stable or decline.
Meta has also dropped close to 20% in the last 4 years. By your logic they are in decline.
@43d The company's headcount has declined ~20%.
That's not "stable"; it's a decline.
@41y But it isn't always some death knell either.
Look at Intel. He-l even IBM to a degree.
But there is a difference between stable and decline. We might be circling the decline plane of existence but not quite there. Stable isn't as se-y as growth. But no company is in growth stage forever.
@3yf I actively avoid using phrases on here that I think could dox me. “The grass is brown everywhere” is one of those phrases.
@3yf I tried to make the same point here: https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1kxgjjj8s. All businesses reach a stage of "Renewal or Decline". All businesses eventually get mismanaged, fail to renew, and therefore decline.
We can have interesting discussions about how SAS got to this stage, and what people should do now. But I don't see any rational argument to deny which stage SAS is in.
I say this with fondness in my heart for what SAS used to be, as a product and as a company. It has been mismanaged into irrelevance.
Similar sentiments have been expressed on this site by employees of many other tech companies (such as Intel and Oracle). Take that with some salt but mismanagement, whether through greed or incompetence, abounds. The grass is brown all around.
I left several years ago. For most of my career, SAS was the #1 product for data analysis. We didn't promote our best leaders, but that didn't hurt us, because we had little competition.
Once we acquired strong competition, our revenue stopped growing, and our leaders did not know how to create new revenue streams.
"all in for a big chunk of my career. Now out of it and wish I left sooner."
You speak for many of us.
I left x months ago after being exposed to various levels of leadership for an extended period of time and realising that the ELT were incapable of making the tough decisions needed as DRG wouldn’t remove problem people. Too much protectionism and lack of accountability lead me to become disillusioned after being all in for a big chunk of my career. Now out of it and wish I left sooner. It was a good stepping stone for me but too many frustrations to ignore from leadership across the board to stay. Good luck! It could be so much better if there was competent leadership in place that were then allowed to make decisions.
I say this with fondness in my heart for what SAS used to be, as a product and as a company. It has been mismanaged into irrelevance. I left awhile ago and it was clear to me then that SAS was no longer competitively viable. I can tell you from my experience outside of SAS there are, by and large, two opinions of SAS in the analytics community; it is either hated or unknown. My advice is to learn as much as you can, especially about things that will be relevant outside of the SAS ecosystem, and to passively seek out jobs elsewhere.
@1zk cool story. How long did it take you to figure out how to spell that?
@1z9 ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz
@1pp except those aren't the recent numbers for revenue growth.
And you cant use US CPI to judge profitability of a private company. Yes things are more expensive in general but it doesn’t mean the expenses of company X are up by that amount. Maybe they slashed spending by 10%…
2-3% headcount seems right. There should be a bigger layoff…
@1p9
Irrelevant distinction.
'50 year old software companies' is a universe with a tiny enough N as to be meaningless for any comparisons.
The commonality is B2B with little to no consumer advertising and no listed stock.
Hasn’t SAS basically become a science and sociological project supporting a bloated business bureaucracy via a legacy revenue stream, controlled by an aged principal founder too wealthy to need to take effective action?
Brand awareness, while important, is not a number we have. The numbers we have are:
1) Annual revenue growth: ~0% per SAS public statements
2) Annual expense growth: ~2-3% per US CPI
3) Annual headcount reduction: ~2-3% per SAS public statements
2) and 3) are cause and effect.
The companies listed either produce or sell physical items for industrial applications. They do not produce software.
So you arrived at an erroneous conclusion based on an AI-generated response to your prompt that these companies have annual revenue of "$10-20b or more" or "tens of thousands of employees", when they don't. Got it. For your self-awareness (as we say at SAS), my prompt was:
For each of the 15 listed companies, provide total annual revenue and current (2026 or as current as possible) number of US and global employees
As I already said, I'm not going to argue that the companies on your list are actually "low name recognition" companies. Most of them are. If that was your point, that a company can be a low name recognition company and still have billions in revenue, you should have stuck to that. All of the companies on your list have billions in revenue. I would still argue that SAS is well-known in certain circles, which negates the point, but I also disagreed with whoever said that originally in this thread.
@1j9 The prompt was literally "What are examples of companies at least 50 years old with low name recognition" because that was the subject under discussion. The bit about revenue and employees were things I pulled out from the response as being of interest.
As you can see if you actually read the entire copy and paste that you yourself demanded.
Anyway, 'everyday people haven't heard of this company is a 100% irrelevant criteria in the first place.
Everyday people 'hear' of companies primarily as consumers or as investors (or through catastrophic news incidents). SAS is a BTB (and BTG) company with no real direct to consumer products, no path at all for investors to buy in and no major newsworthy corruption scandals.
The whole tangent is remarkably irrelevant to anything.
Interesting, but our mutual friend searched for:
15 examples of low name recognition companies with revenues of $10-20b or more and 'tens of thousands of employees'
not:
examples of companies at least 50 years old with low name recognition
Your list is mostly (11 / 15) companies that either don't have annual revenue of "$10-20b or more" or "tens of thousands of employees". Some of the companies in your list are smaller than SAS, both in terms of revenue and number of employees. And I would argue that companies like Parker Hannifin, Grainger, and Fastenal are more well-known than SAS in certain circles, but I would accept that many of the companies on your list are actually "low name recognition" companies.
And that, of course, was the point. On the Internet anyone can make up any unsourced claim about, well, anything, and try to present their fantasy evidence as if it were fact. Our mutual friend certainly did.
Weirdly, it wasn't that difficult to get a list in "non-formatted tabular output". You just ask for it to be reformatted in your chat session. I wonder why our mutual friend couldn't figure it out?
Certainly quicker than me trying to copy and paste formatted tabular output into a non-tabular non-formatted d-mb text field. I'm not your secretary.
So you can't do it, then? Gotcha.
@1gt I'm going to copy and paste the output I was given since someone can't seem to figure out how to ask the question himself......but it's going to be painful to read because it will lose all formatting and I'm not going to waste time cleaning it up for someone conversing in bad faith
What are examples of companies at least 50 years old with low name recognition
If you mean companies that have been around for at least 50 years, are substantial businesses, but whose names aren't widely recognized by the general public, there are many examples. These are often business-to-business (B2B) manufacturers, industrial suppliers, or firms that sell components rather than consumer products.
Here are some good examples:
Company Founded What it does
Parker Hannifin 1917 Hydraulic, pneumatic, and motion-control systems
W.W. Grainger 1927 Industrial and maintenance supplies
Illinois Tool Works 1912 Makes thousands of specialized industrial products
Timken 1899 Bearings and industrial equipment
Emerson Electric 1890 Automation and commercial technologies
A. O. Smith 1874 Water heaters and water treatment
Carlisle Companies 1917 Roofing and engineered materials
Roper Technologies 1890 Vertical software and industrial technologies
IDEX Corporation 1988 Pumps, valves, and specialty engineered products
Graco 1926 Paint sprayers and industrial pumps
Some lesser-known but very large firms include:
Fastenal (founded 1967)
MSC Industrial Direct (1941)
Lincoln Electric (1895)
Regal Rexnord (through predecessor companies dating to 1955 and earlier)
Pentair (1966)
If you mean "low name recognition despite being huge"
These companies often have:
Revenues of $10–20+ billion.
Tens of thousands of employees.
Products used every day without consumers noticing the company behind them.
For example:
Illinois Tool Works makes products used in auto manufacturing, food equipment, welding, and construction.
Parker Hannifin components are found in aircraft, factory equipment, and heavy machinery.
W.W. Grainger is one of North America's largest industrial distributors, yet many consumers have never heard of it.
Extremely old, very large, but obscure
Some of the best examples are:
McMaster-Carr (1901)
SKF (1907)
Eaton (1911)
Dover Corporation (1955)
Nordson Corporation (1954)
These firms are all decades old, financially significant, and highly respected within their industries, but they have relatively low recognition among the general public because they primarily serve businesses rather than consumers.
@1ec It's seems such a simple thing to bring up Chat-GPT in a separate browser window and ask the same question yourself.
Certainly quicker than me trying to copy and paste formatted tabular output into a non-tabular non-formatted d-mb text field. I'm not your secretary.
@1ec If you can’t instinctively see this as true or do simple google or ai search yourself then you slow and lazy.
CHat-GPT just gave me 15 examples
What were they, the names of these companies? It seems such a simple thing to copy-and-paste them from one tab to another in your browser, but you didn't do that. Weird.
"Name one company that has been around for 50 years that has so little name recognition. Keep living in your bubble that SAS is relevant."
CHat-GPT just gave me 15 examples of low name recognition companies with revenues of $10-20b or more and 'tens of thousands of employees'
I've only heard of two of them but.....that's kind of the point!
@wc "Your jobs will probably continue"
True, for a while. ~20% headcount reduction over 8 years is ~2.5% per year. This axe falls every year, but it can be dodged.
However, any new owner will want to maximize profit. A slow trickle doesn't give them what they want, so they'll do a mass layoff.
May this singularity be long delayed.
There’s some real cr-p systems out there that endure in the wild. If base SAS is integrated with them, it’s easier to pay the annual bill than to switch. Your jobs will probably continue, especially for the pets in the Art Department, which is safe.
@qf Name one company that has been around for 50 years that has so little name recognition. Keep living in your bubble that SAS is relevant.
@qf 20% I should have said, not 25%. Perhaps someone else can provide a more precise figure.
The fact remains: SAS is shrinking. Some people on this site claim SAS is "stable". But a company that shrinks by 2-3% annually is not stable; it is shrinking. It is not a place to have a career, unless you only need one for a few years.
@nq 'Perhaps you meant to write "you continue to get paid for doing your job, while you use your free time to learn, in preparation for your next job"?'
That is better than what I wrote, and close to what I meant.
The idea I tried to convey is that, unless you're near retirement, the purpose of SAS can't be to have a career and earn a living.
SAS has cut headcount by 2-3% annually for about eight years now -- usually through a mix of layoffs, buyouts, and attrition. But last week they cut 2.5% through layoffs alone.
The company is ~25% smaller than it used to be. SAS is going to keep cutting, and anyone who acquires it will cut a lot more.
By all means, give an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. But this employer must be used as a vehicle to acquire marketable skills. People who don't do that are going to get hurt.
@pk I could name countless companies who you could ask about outside their hometown or ask 40 and unders about and get blank stares.
Do you think that is somehow meaningful?