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.
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?
I see the SAS lifers have found this thread and are downvoting all the honest and truthful comments about SAS’ future. A little homework for you all, leave Cary and ask someone about SAS, or even better someone under 40. You will then understand via their blank looks that SAS is in serious trouble.
We will be late to market -- again. Not jaded, just honest.
To the OP.. nope, we won't have a fighting chance.
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"?
Whether or not that's what they meant, that's the fact Jack. One of the biggest mistakes SAS has made since Viya moved off v9 is trying to hire expertise. SAS can't pay competitive salaries for those people (and they aren't in the budget in any case), and isn't growing its bench. Rather than teach someone who knows high-performance computing to "do in cloud", SAS division heads expected to hire someone who knows how to do in cloud but doesn't understand high-performance computing, have any history with the company, or even know how to use its software.
"SAS pays people while they learn marketable skills — on your own time and your own dime, probably — but still, you get paid to learn."
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"?
@kj No one cares whether you are grateful.
You compete against third-world countries, grateful or not.
Oh ok. So we should be grateful to not be in a third world country. Eyeroll. Unbelievable.
Getting back to @OP’s question:
Historically, the core competence of SAS was high-performance analytics. That was our market niche.
Now, our market niche is occupied by freeware: R, Python, Spark, etc. Therefore, we need a new market niche.
What is it? If a viable path forward exists, every employee should be able to describe it.
If you can’t describe it, there probably isn’t one.
In that case, every employee should consider SAS a benefactor funding their education.
SAS pays people while they learn marketable skills — on your own time and your own dime, probably — but still, you get paid to learn.
That’s it. That is the deal. It used to be a better deal — but millions of people in third-world countries would love to be in this position.
Those near retirement can wait and hope for a package. Everyone else should be planning their next move.
No executive worth a dollar would ever come to or stay at SAS. When you hear such wisdom from the CEO like “cloud is just a fad” and “open source will never be our competition” you run. Exactly why he has the c-suite team he has, they will just nod their heads and collect the paycheck. Anyone that disagrees with this must have come from Nortel.
A C-team full of yes people - and VPs who are yes people and directors who are yes people - stifles innovation and efficiency. That's true 100x over when said people remain in their roles for decades without being held accountable not only for performance, but for not fixing things that have clearly gone wrong.
Many of us pay for the fact that hard decisions were not made so many times over the previous 10 or so years.
The chickens are coming home to roost as they always do.
@jn I worked at SAS for 18 years and many of them on the 6th floor of C. Any executive that tried to do anything meaningful beyond Goodnight’s rigid view was let go, or more wisely quit. SAS is a dictatorship, and like all dictatorships… they are doomed to fail.
@jm “I see this accusation of Dr. Goodnight thrown around here a lot. But is it really true?”
Not true. But all the anonymous people whom have never been in a room with the man will tell you otherwise.
"none of them will ever have an opinion that differs from him."
I see this accusation of Dr. Goodnight thrown around here a lot. But is it really true?
"no real company would hire any of those hacks."
Now this I readily agree with.