SAS reviews

Given events of 2020 I have to speak up, to not would be cowardly and further enable these behaviours. Replace #BLM for systemic prejudice and micro aggressions, and COVID-19 pandemic for a virus that is a toxic culture. Privilege counts - middle class background, leaver, resident of Marlow/Henley. If you do not fit the mould you are an outsider. A company steeped in Dixie history and mentality goes someway to explaining the pattern. Culture and Vlaues are excellent on paper but are not lived. Large focus on retaining and improving "A Great Place To Work" status but at the expense of living the values day to day. The culture is very narrow minded and toxic. Gossip is rife and encouraged, if you do not participate you are shunned. Teasing of anyone that does not join in is the norm. People do not realise how offensive they are mocking non-traditional names, dress codes, eating habits is only half of it, open expression of (questionable) views on politics, race and sexuality are astonishing and this includes Senior Management who should know better. Lack of focus on work at expense of playing these games that border on and often cross into bullying. Senior Management is questionable at all levels. Hiring Manger replaced within weeks of joining reporting to another manager with a completely different management style. Having worked in multi national companies in a long career I have never been so poorly managed as I was here. If the face does not fit you will know about it, being micro managed until you can't breathe and are put in a corner and either leave or be made left with nothing but idle gossip to fill the void - judging by other reviews and subsequent conversations this seems to happen time and time again. Witnessed first hand passive aggressive beahviour of senior management with hostility, veiled threats and reluctance to help - almost wanting you to fail.

Products are released before they are ready, with far too many defects. Product management is not good at listening to feedback from the field on what improvements are needed. Struggling to make the transition to the cloud - the SAS Viya platform is still not cloud native after promising this when the platform was released 3 years ago. Strategy to counter the rise of open source analytics does not appear to be working as most data scientists under the age of 40 have no interest in using SAS and would rather stick to Python, R, Spark, etc. or vendor tools that sit on top of them. Very poor services capability to help customers achieve business outcomes on the products - professional services is predominantly focused on installing, configuring and walking away. Key capability areas that SAS was once well regarded in (data management and BI) have been under-invested in to the point where the organisation appears to have literally given up competing.