Emotionally harmful place to work
Pros
Subsidised canteen with great food Nice campus in Marlow Generous pension and benefits
Cons
Not a global company despite claims to being one. For example, you will struggle to ever take advantage of an opportunity abroad. SAS doesn't know how to help you if you want to work abroad with the company because they are not a progressive employer. CEO, Jim Goodnight, should have retired a decade ago. Every one of his actions harms the company. For example, he tried to fire the entire sales organisation because he thought Engineers could do a salesperson's job. Ultimately for young and enthusiastic professionals, seeing the CEO on stage will not fill you with confidence about the company's prospect. This point on the CEO is not intended to take away any of his achievements back in his hay days, which are highly notable, but one of the greatest skills is knowing when to pass on the torch. Jim will never do that....ever. R&D is going in the wrong direction. Not embracing open source, which is resulting in products coming out R&D that businesses simply do not want. Most of SAS UK's customers are either reducing or simply maintaining their SAS environments and there are close to zero net-new name clients being brought in. SAS UK HR is the only HR organisation that made me feel alone. What I mean by this is HR at SAS UK will never side with you, they will rarely ever meet with you, they will only as some of the reviews on this page have accurately explained communicate with you via email. Should you ask for a meeting face to face or a phone call they will say that they do not deal with employees and only work on strategic matters with mid to senior management. You are made to feel a complete absence of trust. SAS is certainly not the place to start your career or to join as an experienced professional. Reason being is SAS UK is highly disorganised due to a poorly put together leadership team that distances themselves at every opportunity from the clear performance bottlenecks that hold the business back from competing on not just the predictive analytics front but even as a great place to work. The company keeps going on about millenials and you'll have senior leaders sending you silly videos of Simon Sinek suggesting you have no idea who you are.... The company is currently being sued on multiple fronts by employees who were fired for calling the problems out that exist and suggesting solutions to solving them.
