We spend all of our time doing Agile busywork. Product Management sends 100 people to a two day bootcamp on Innovation to blame us for not having any ideas for sellable products. SF programmers are going to be laid off because PM is too busy working on their powerpoint vision slides to talk to customers. Lectures on how you are not doing your part because the dashboard says so. Lets set up some meetings to talk about it. Does Goodnight know what is happening?
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Here's the equivalent magic quadrant from Gartner.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/google-is-a-leader-in-the-2024-gartner-magic-quadrant-for-data-science-and-machine-learning-platforms
Similarly, SAS on the verge of slipping off the leaders quadrant. Quite a decline...in Jan 2021, SAS was at the top of the "ability to execute" scale, and has now slipped to 9th place.
As much as I think the analyst reports can be somewhat dubious, I think they have fairly reflected SAS's decline over the years. Turn the clock back to 2008 and SAS battled it out with SPSS for the very top position in "data mining", had the strongest "completeness of vision" for BI Platforms, and featured as a leader in a number of others like data integration, data quality, and campaign management.
Sadly those days are long gone.
@eerz+1u2ZwtzZ SAS & Databricks barely made the Leader quadrant. Palantir & C3 well ahead in that group.
https://www.sas.com/en_us/news/analyst-viewpoints/forrester-names-sas-leader-in-ai-ml-platforms.html
i doubt my management would want viya, but i bet they'd be interested in altair, sadly. sas is just some weird legacy thing in the corner of the back office to them. lowering expenses is all that interests them: reduce the software expenses, layoffs, everything. i'm too worried about my own job to worry about our vendors, but our cost pressure if it's like the rest of the market is surely pressuring you.
what i read on these threads is "we are doing lots of stupid, useless stuff internally" - if that's the case, i'd be even more worried about layoffs if you are in one of those groups. hope you find something useful that helps your customers, company, career...
"One year of agile under this product management team and SAS is no longer the leading vendor of SAS"
Do not make it sound like Agile is the problem. Agile is just the messenger delivering the bad news. The bad news is that the market does not want Viya.
makes it sound like "agile" caused a downfall in only one year and things were fine a year ago, but there has been a lot more going on (or not going on) causing the long slow decline, like all the comments in these threads mention. this last bit sounds like the tip of the iceberg.
The 2024 Forrester Wave AI/ML platform results prove that agile and product management is failing SAS. SAS barely makes the leader quadrant with databricks top right and now Altair ahead of SAS. While SAS industry solutions spend their time at innovation retreats and making agile dashboards, databricks has delievered an entire set of solutions for every industry this year. Worse, SAS is no longer the leading company selling software using the SAS9 language. Altair's SAS Workbench with SAS, Python, R, and SQL now places them ahead of SAS. One year of agile under this product management team and SAS is no longer the leading vendor of SAS.
Related to the most current comments on this thread and a couple of others. SAS Management, especially Director level and above, mostly failed to cultivate deep expertise and opportunities for growth in those directly under them, and the level below that. Instead they played everything “close to the vest”, without optimally leveraging the A player talent working for them.
In R&D especially, several “chief lieutenants” rose to power and then proceeded to either have big titles with no or few direct reports, or build significant hierarchies with lots of micromanaging. They played their careers well and essentially agreed with most if not all of JG’s strategic direction. A few of the best and brightest who worked for them were “thrown under the proverbial bus” when they pointed out the folly of technical decisions some of these executives made.
SAS Slowly lost its stature as any sort of real industry innovation leader, especially by 2005 with the rise of the big cloud vendors, (whose business model, exponential growth and practice of hiring the best quickly changed the game). However, the convoluted proprietary SAS V9 tech stack continued to become even more bloated.
OS fundamentally understood this and defined a new architecture, greatly simplified with the ability to deploy natively in the cloud without carrying the previous bloat with it. Plenty is already been said about why this apparently is not succeeding. Just pointing out that he had the courage, intelligence and work ethic to at least try to reverse many dysfunctional actions and trends of the previous 15 years.
The root cause is: SAS promoted people who did not know how to create new revenue streams. The people who knew how, SAS did not promote.
This policy maintained the original revenue stream, but prevented new ones.
Some of us would gladly come back to help, if this changed. But this policy has continued for 50 years. It isn’t going to change.
SAS' biggest problem is their biggest money maker(V9) is aging out(declining revenue stream) and the stuff SAS created(Viya)) to replace V9 has proven to be unappealing in the market place.
… And to think there was/is a known and simple solution to the whole quagmire you are describing. If SAS is listening here’s why several hundred of your best and brightest have walked over the past 5 years. Some took VRBO packages but MANY left for considerably better compensation, a more productive work environment and equity.
Don’ts:
Don’t hire window dressing. Don’t hire people into bullsh-t jobs that don’t build nor contribute to anything of substance in the company. For most of SAS R&D and other product divisions, Agile was/is a horrible fit for the homegrown innovation culture that built SAS. Don’t do Agile! Don’t tolerate micromanaging nor slackers either.
Dos:
Do provide a tiered equity structure based on level in the organization, base salary, proven experience/productivity, etc. Do pay competitive wages that recognize expected differences between entry-level, 5 years, 10 to 15 years of relevant experience and the BEST 20+ year veterans. Address the salary compression that erodes these difference when it comes to compensation for long-term highly skilled/productive employees. Do eliminate the rigid hierarchical management structure where Principal and in some cases even Distinguished developers report to line level managers, instead of a Director, Senior Director or Vice President. TRUE Principal devs are SME leaders who have earned the right to not be treated like sheep, yet managing them this way is a significant reason why SAS has not been effectively innovating.
“Meetings, slides, strategy, planning, dashboards, vision, brainstorms, whiteboards ... and nobody is actually getting anything DONE. Everything cycles and people make comments, nothing gets resolved, it's a nightmare.
Somebody needs to get control of this situation. It's so out of hand.”
Meanwhile, those that could have gotten things done were encouraged to leave and are largely gone, leaving a whole new problem:
“The bigger problem I've seen is high turnover rates in the industry. The people who built and know the system leave. There wasn't a sufficient window for KT (knowledge transfer), so you're left with a bunch of new devs who only have a surface level understanding of the code and architecture. Productivity drops severely because every new feature requires several hours of reading code / reverse engineering. Then these new features often break other things because the devs don't know the intricacies of the system, so many more hours are spent fixing the bugs.”. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41356103]
"Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making."
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2016-letter-to-shareholders
SAS arguably did some of what Bezos said would help fend off Day 2 by trying to listen to customers (increasingly not very well), but sadly did none of the other essentials.
“SAS had potential, unrealized. It got mismanaged, the Peter Principle applied …”
Are you saying that the cofounders rose to their own respective levels of incompetence? I was there for pretty much the whole ride and have one simple observation. SAS might be fabulously successful today had the company continued to operate with humility on the innovation principles that made it great in the first place. Hubris is SAS’ chief downfall.
JG should’ve figured out how to create a simpler, flatter organization where the truly best employees were identified, empowered to make and implement key innovation decisions, and given equity. There should’ve been consequences for creating bloated divisions, nearly duplicate technologies (often with ambiguous feature differences) and loser products. It comes down to increasingly poor management from the top down.
To borrow a Bezos/Amazonian metaphor: SAS has long been a “Day Two” company — stale and sadly growing more irrelevant with each passing year.
To paraphrase an insightful SAS employee: “this place is one giant dysfunctional family”.
“SAS wastes so much money paying people to sit and listen to calls that they don't need to be on when they could be working instead.”
I don’t think you understand. There are people whose job is to sit and listen in on calls. The fat in Marketing is stunning.
The best way to treat SAS is to acknowledge that it is over.
SAS was the number one product for data analysis -- twenty years ago. Since then, the amount of data in the world has grown 1,000 times.
In the tailwind of this magnificent opportunity, the id--ts in charge actually managed to shrink the company.
SAS had potential, unrealized. It got mismanaged, the Peter Principle applied, the resources wasted in vanity projects by sycophants and incompetents.
The best leaders -- many of them still at the company -- could have built products that the market wanted. But the politics prevented them.
SAS was a great company in its day. The best we can do now is to acknowledge that good times don't last forever.
Focus on your own careers and your families, and make your plans.
“Wish I could just skip useless meetings my managers insist I attend. The amount of them is staggering. SAS wastes so much money paying people to sit and listen to calls that they don't need to be on when they could be working instead.”
Over the last ten years of my time at SAS, just about every meeting that had more than twenty people in it was what I liked to call “Fifteen minutes of content crammed into two hours.” Just about every last one could have been covered in an email.
The rationale was allegedly that leadership had to be sure everyone heard the information that was presented. They never seem to grasp that hearing does not necessarily equate to listening. Thus, simply being present in a meeting is the equivalent of a “read receipt” on an email, just with more time wasted. And neither signifies that the relevant content was digested or retained by the participant.
“SAS decided to treat like Viya like a dr-g and give away free samples.”
Good luck with that. It didn’t work for Version 7. Now SAS has open source competition.
“This where we are and this is what is up for sale.”
If there’s an IPO, Viya will be up for sale. SAS can honestly say that its revenues have grown — although from a low base.
If there’s a private sale, Viya revenues are too small to consider. The buyer will be a serial acquirer of declining revenue streams. They’ll pay $5-10B for the SAS V9 revenue stream, and that will be their only interest.
The most important vote is voting with your feet. Thinking that Viya is SAS' savior is hopeless at best and delusional at worst. Customers voted with their feet enough times. Enough means often enough so that SAS should know by now that Viya is barking up the wrong tree.
Disagree? Consider .... Few customers bought into it. So SAS decided to treat like Viya like a dr-g and give away free samples. Hoping to gain addicts. Solid short term plan, but quickly proved to be a flop. Either the Viya buzz was not worthwhile or it was too complicated to administer. Pick your poison. So Viya sat. And collected dust. And the market kept rolling towards open source while SAS determined their best strategy was to double down on Viya. How many times have we heard the optimistic "the pipeline is ripe". When your best strategy is to double down on something you can not even give away, what does that suggest for a long term success plan?
There is no doubt that OS is a smart guy. His Achilles's Heel was building something that a) costs too much, b) is too hard to administer, and most importantly: c) too few customers see a need for Viya.
This where we are and this is what is up for sale.
The nutjobs here couldn't even make any money with a yard sale, definitely wouldn't have the first clue about how to run SAS.
Let's show some respect for our execs, they've earned it. Launching a GoFundMe in appreciation of them later this week and look forward to contributions
Wish I could just skip useless meetings my managers insist I attend. The amount of them is staggering. SAS wastes so much money paying people to sit and listen to calls that they don't need to be on when they could be working instead.
The content in @4hkt+1u2ZwtzZ is a succinct summary of why no one is “flattering themselves” regarding the momentum Viya had 4 years ago when OS still reigned.
In 2020, OS Had a solid vision with a lot of forward momentum regarding Viya. The current problems are well summarized by @4hkt+1u2ZwtzZ. As of August 2024, it’s delusional to think that Version 9, or even hard compatibility between it and Viya represents the future of SAS.
Hard truth: SAS could eliminate 75% of the current marketing department, including likely its most senior leadership and be the better for it. It is foolhardy to think that brainstorming, strategizing, and creating decks and fancier talks (that nobody apparently listens to) is going to do anything arrest the decline.
JG Could have funded those 200 requested Viya positions by eliminating corporate window dressing, useless marketing suits, and incompetent R&D clowns. Sadly, this same scenario has been repeated over and over in the last 25 years with other initiatives. Acquire a technology or kickoff a major new initiative and then just when it’s starting to cook, throttle back the resources it needs to break out.
I heard the forester demanded a big pay bump during the Covid lockdown. Like he saw other executives at other companies moving around and getting bigger paychecks so he FAFOed.
Don't know if it's true. It was a common practice at that time.
"Why did OS leave SAS and why did JG let him leave so easily?"
I was told that OS requested ~200 more developers to build out Viya.
JG would not support that, so OS left.
It's a rumor. Just wondering whether anyone else heard the same.
“get this ship sailing again”
Stop flattering yourself. Viya never made the ship sail in the first place so "again" is a nonstarter.
By the bye, the defects system is no longer used by R&D
Looks like a forester has entered the chat
If OS returns and creates the CORRECT organizational structure where TRUE Principal and Distinguished (just ki-l that title and make them Senior Principals) Devs report at least to Director/Senior Director (who are actually worthy of the title in 2024) level then I (and likely others) who innovated the core of Viya might also consider returning for the right price.
Dump Agile and all incompetents so SAS can fund true professionals and “get this ship sailing” again!
Why did OS leave SAS and why did JG let him leave so easily?
Was it because of money or disagreements on directions/visions for SAS?
Did JG protect too many unproductive managers that OS want to get rid of and they disagree?
Returning to Agile would be the biggest regression DEFECT in the history of SAS. Agile was the cause of the longest period of stagnation at SAS during the dead years people write about here. When OS took over, he ki-led Agile. He told programmers that if their managers invited them to useless meetings they could skip them. If managers complained he would fire their manager. That started the most productive new period that created Viya, in memory, ML, no code GUI, and everything that is not SAS9 that SAS is now betting on for it's future. With OS in 2020, SAS had a partnership with NVIDIA to be sure that CAS ran fast in CUDA. OS had partnerships with other hosting and hardware vendors. JG was so happy with OS he started talking about him as the new CEO. Viya didn't sell because SAS was locked in with Microsoft Azure so cut it's potential market down to 25%. Sales were still getting paid for selling old SAS to existing customers and full price for services. The best people left SAS in the pandemic for higher paying jobs and then OS left too. If OS had stayed, he could have made Viya run on any platform including spark and databricks. SAS would have been the market leader ML engine in NVIDIA CUDA. Instead SAS is going back to Agile. More meetings is the strategy for efficiency. No wonder no one wants to come back to the office. At home they can turn off the sound. Did SAS pay McKinsey and Forrester for that advice? OS should send JG an email with just a number in the subject line stating how much he wants. He could come back like Steve Jobs and fix this by the end of the week. Think of what SAS could do if every fluffy meeting was instantly deleted from everyones' calendars. Explain to OS why you sent working programmers to a visioning retreat. I dare you. I cannot believe SAS went back to Agile. Someone please go into DEFECTS and assign the Agile regression no ship bug to whomever did it.
def an issue where i'm working now (financial services, not software) as well. competent leaders who can help cut out the b.s. and not add more of it are incredibly rare indeed.
I hope the moderator deletes all political comments!
The OP posted about process hurting productivity: That’s not unique to SAS.
Agile methodologies, particularly Scrum, are slowing development across our industry. A few companies have recognized this, and abandoned Agile. But. they are a minority, and SAS is very much in the majority.
There.s a great question, floating somewhere around the Internet, that I’m misquoting here:
“In what other industry would you pay professionals six figures, yet require them to account for every little task, rather than trusting them to do their jobs?”
The answer is: in no other industry. Nobody else treats professionals in this way
But to avoid this foolishness, you have to work for a leader who understands that it’s disrespectful and inefficient. That person must also be brave enough to go against the herd.
Such leaders are rare. So change comes slowly.
Innovation Air (SAS corporate jets) not Innovation Airlines.
the coordinator had one of the biggest do-nothing bullsh-t jobs. probably is working on the GCC
Did you hear that JG? @3gst+1u2ZwtzZ Says to sell JMP and IA immediately.
Better jump to that I guess.
"moved JMP and Innovation Airlines into subsidiaries"
Neither have anything to do with the core business of SAS. Sell both asap.
@2yaa+1u2ZwtzZ 100%
But with that said prepare to be downvoted by the armchair quarterbacks.
From all the evidence we have, JG very much knows what is happening.
He has hired expensive consultants to clean up the books, moved JMP and Innovation Airlines into subsidiaries, advertised a possible IPO, and conducted layoffs to cut costs. These are all actions that prepare a company for sale.
We feel that other actions should be taken, to increase productivity, save money, etc. But he is taking actions that address his priorities, not ours.
People ask why there are vice presidents and directors with no direct reports. When sales are down and you decide to spend $200,000 on a innovation brainstorming retreat, one call and you are vice president of nothing. You can't sue because you weren't fired and you can't get severance because you were not layed off, you're just vice president of no one. Some people think that JG is Joe Biden but he's not.
It sounds a lot like what we have to do in IT with ServiceNow - lots of process, not much progress.
@jpq+1u2ZwtzZ I agree. It's so bad in marketing right now. Too much busy work, too many meetings, too many planning sessions and decision by group that nothing is getting done. It is all starting from the "leadership" down. No real strategy. Trying to do any and everything and getting nothing accomplished at all.