SAS is a bleeding and bleeding fast. The amount of executive turn over in just within the last 12 months is a clear sign of that. The company has a very strange culture that makes it very challenging to be innovative. This is most likely due to the fact that the average tenure of the company is around 15 years and are comfortable with all the benefits and amenities the company provides. Additionally you have a lot of family members working with family members which creates issues. The old timers also have their club so not feeling accepted and welcome at the company was a common complaint of those who left. The turnover for employees of less then 3 years is incredibly high, you can calculate this for yourself by simply taking a decent size sample from LinkedIn profiles which will show you that turnover is slightly over 50%. The allure of SAS is still strong due to its winning of “Best Places to Work” on multiple occasions. However, those claims are recently only made by lesser publications. The companies standings on places like Glassdoor, Fortune, GreatPlacestoWork, etc. put SAS much lower on the list. The company is incredibly behind regarding Cloud adoption and strategy. They are just now really starting to push their cloud offerings but still rest on the laurels of their on-premise and outrageously priced platform. Their top customers have moved to Python and other open source platforms, they are bleeding. In fact, in the last 3 years the companies revenue is negative from 3 years prior. The comfortable culture here makes it impossible to innovative. The old guard doesn’t want to take any risks that might jeopardize their tenure or subsidized cafeteria lunch breaks. You will not rise the ranks here unless you have family at the top, slept with the boss( not kidding in the slightest), or the old regime dies off in retirement and your their last resort. The average age at the company has to be on the older side, I don’t know for sure but I rarely met young creative minds. The executive team is ancient so that is a good indicator in my opinion. They will brag up and down about how they have never done lay-offs even during the recession. Don’t be naive though, if they want you gone they will let you go and make you sign an agreement for severance. In other words, a gag order. Long story short, this company is stuck in a serious rut and the same regime continues to think the past strategies of wild success will continue to work. They are all talk, no action. There are some really great and smart people here that are being suppressed by the old guard. It really is a shame to see this once behemoth of leading technology slowly wither away obliviously.
