So much for all you end of the month doom and gloomers.
Time for the November chicken littles to get the ball rolling again.
27 replies (most recent on top)
YW … there are a few typos in that post but I think most people get the points. I’m also referring to “TRUE Principal Devs” … not senior-levels who stuck around long enough or had managers who promoted to keep the team happy. Outside of SAS, Principal Engineers are Director-level individual contributors, who often have significant autonomy/authority over the technical direction of projects and are there to advise managers on the best course of action when significant architectural and implementation decisions are made, especially at the tactical level.
JG allowed a culture of micromanaging the morphed R&D significantly into a software manufacturing organization. Directors and middle level managers were promoted to keep the (mostly MVA) cash cow milk flowing. This led to the cultural apathy and malaise that has been discussed so much here on these forum threads.
I worked with “Principal” Devs who were more concerned with having well-defined, working APIs that they could consume (without an in-depth understanding of the bigger picture), rather than engaging in a technical/architectural exchange that could actually move products forward, making the more usable and more integrate with enterprise software developed at other vendors.
More validating posts.
The three letter hint -- Starts with a Ewe, ends with a D'oh!
Once sat in a customer advisory board meeting. VDMML was being previewed to some high-power Statistician customers. "Don't do this!" seemed to be the common refrain. "You are messing with things you don't know about". These pleas were ignored, and did not seem to be investigated further. The project seemed like a vanity effort, rather than a customer-focused effort. Maybe I'm wrong.
I'm sure the product is a smashing success, and the pipeline is overflowing.
Thank you for the best explanation of Viya I have ever heard.
The same explanation applies to the applications divisions where I worked as a Principal developer. We were coders, nothing more. Research and open discussion were not tolerated; all ideas came down from above.
That model only works when the people at the top are brilliant. That's true of JMP, an innovation 30 years ago that's still selling well. But other SAS applications have the same conditions you described:
"From the late 90s on, even Principal level Devs in R&D were discouraged and eventually even prohibited from spending regular work hours doing basic research. Micromanaging... became the norm — Division heads made the major decisions and design ideas trickled down... we did what we had to do to survive at work... and got our chief fulfillment through family life, community and hobbies."
“I worked in presales, outside of the US, and we found any dealings we had with the folks in Cary (particularly in what was then called SSOD and then "Global Hosting"), was incredibly frustrating.”
Nothing has changed except leadership. Takes months to get anything done and way more expensive than it should be.
"The fact that by 2012, SAS R&D had significantly neglected ongoing basic research into platform technologies, Oliver’s drive to get something running ASAP (including constraints coming straight from JG) were a big reason why these important initiatives did not occur."
You nailed it!
11 years later (since 2012), SAS is still not on the right track. How sad!
Having been intimately involved in many of the beginnings of what became the CAS/Viya infrastructure, my observation is simple. From the late 90s on, even Principal level Devs in R&D were discouraged and eventually even prohibited from spending regular work hours doing basic research. Micromanaging within the platform division became the norm — Division heads made the major decisions and design ideas trickled down. On balance, core products internals had gotten so complex, with so many maintenance releases/etc., that simply maintaining the code and moving a few new features forward with each release was enough work for most of us. Some of us spent late evenings and weekends coming up with new ideas and trying to keep up with trends/learning.
Many Who has been around since the halcyon R&D days of 80s became disillusioned wit Innovation being so diminished due to lack o Research opportunities to gain new insights, yet because the company was growing continuously throughout these years, from 2000 until ~2012, we did what we had to do to survive at work (because after all we were Devs at SAS — one of the best workplaces in the world, where almost no one ever leaves or gets fired) and got our chief fulfillment through family life, community and hobbies. Only a relative handful of people were truly keeping up with what was going on with West Coast tech WRT to public services, etc. Fewer still Had deep technical understanding of the ramifications of Linux, Distributed computing/data infrastructure, and there was virtually no open sores contribution as part of any SAS initiatives.
Pretty much only technical division heads attended non-SAS conferences of any significance outside of SAS’ standard presence at SAS, INFORMS, etc. for the STAT/OR/ETS, etc. PhDs.
So, by the time the cloud, containers, etc. reached critical mass, SAS R&D was mostly impoverished WRT technical insights necessary to bake integration with these things into CAS/Viya. Then rapidly accelerating automated deployment mechanisms like Docker, Kubernetes, DevOps, GitOps, etc. seemed to come out of nowhere. Sure, some astute Java developers, a handful of folks who came in with the Security Intel acquisition that brought Bryan Harris back, And a tiny quorum of elite long-term R&D geeks, knew quite a bit about these things … yet some of the most key people designing and building the Viya infrastructure did not.
It’s not that we were not smart enough nor motivated enough, It’s just that the direction for the internal design was not centered and how we were going to make it easy to configure and deploy at the big cloud vendors. There were some work with ANSIBLE and related Components, but IIRC most of this was directed toward on-premise install/deploy early on (2014-2017).
Much of the ensuing fiasco could’ve been mitigated if a significant portion of the early CAS effort had begun with true basic research/learning Into how the entire infrastructure and Viya product suites built atop would best integrate into modern cloud deployment mechanisms. Also, a clearer vision for the data and storage layer design, rather than primarily focusing on overcoming limitations in Its predecessor LASR. The fact that by 2012, SAS R&D had significantly neglected ongoing basic research into platform technologies, Oliver’s drive to get something running ASAP (including constraints coming straight from JG) were a big reason why these important initiatives did not occur.
Further elucidation most appreciated … providing you don’t blow a head gasket writing it! The three letter name really has me perplexed and curious.
Thank you. That is validating.
Yes, I did work in Cary. Right sm--k dab in the middle of that Viya VA/VS/VDMML mess. It was all that I describe in my previous post. Right at the confluence of The Big German, a 3-letter-named d-bag, and a whole host of other curious and treacherous folk. It was a vanity-laced, empire-building, gang-who-couldn't-shoot-straight, clusterf@ck, to say the very least. And now those people are running the show.
The Sales people had an impossible job, peddling this load of bloated buffoonery. I felt so bad for them.
P.S. Thank you to the other poster for your apology.
"I don't recall seeing any close customer focus, or any real customer metrics." @6dbh+1ppxBUjK
I find this comment particularly insightful. I'm assuming the author is someone who worked in Cary like many posters here. I worked in presales, outside of the US, and we found any dealings we had with the folks in Cary (particularly in what was then called SSOD and then "Global Hosting"), was incredibly frustrating.
The quotes we got back were ridiculous. Several hundred thousand dollars and several months of effort just to stand up a distributed Viya VA/VS/VDMML environment. We would claim this was "Cloud" so customers expected us to be like other cloud vendors and that provisioning was highly automated and might take 48 hours at most.
I'm sure it wasn't entirely SSOD/Global Hosting's fault...I guess that the architecture of Viya back then didn't really support proper SaaS delivery model, but that was a massive disconnect to the messages that SAS Marketing was putting out to the market.
I can't count how many deals we lost because of this. We were constantly having to apologise to our customers - we were a laughing stock. It was embarrassing. I knew it was time to leave, so I did. No regrets.
@6dbh+1ppxBUjK I’ll apologize for the whiny comment. There is a ton of that on here and your initial message seemed short and blame shifting enough that it just rubbed me wrong.
I agree that there is nuance to it. If you stay at ANY one company for the length most of stay at SAS there is always going to be some complacency and skill rot that creeps unless you go out of your way to keep pushing the edges.
Why not throw a party? The big man just said there are thousands more VIYA sites and on track for revenue growth that hasn’t been seen in over a decade. Everything is great!
In limited cases SAS provided folks with rare and valuable skills, that although not mainstream Tech, subsequently got them hired into lucrative specialized positions at growing companies with a nice work cultures. However, as others have said, individuals still must carefully curate and manage their SAS careers and continue learning on their own.
Some of it is also the “luck of the draw” WRT who your manager was/is within SAS. Many are either powerless or don’t care to do much for you, yet it’s pretty much like that everywhere, SAS just seems to have a special “homegrown“ flavor of it.
In other news, I heard the company recently threw a big outdoor party in an attempt to help build teamwork and camaraderie amongst all the other dysfunctional bullsh-t.
Not all interviews are technical or about technical skills. Many interviews have questions about customer-focused efforts and large scale improvement processes. Interview teams are looking for quantifiable, customer-based metrics. "As a result of some change that I (or we) made, something improved by X%."
Maybe I was one of those "not so great" employees, but I don't recall seeing any efforts within SAS where metrics were attached. I don't recall seeing any close customer focus, or any real customer metrics. I don't recall seeing any cohesive, large-scale improvement programs. Instead, I saw a lot of daily political nonsense, empire-building, vanity-product-tweaking, rework, games, and waste.
Call my post whiny if you wish, but being honest while navigating interview questions like these is a real challenge if you've had a lengthy career at SAS.
Tech folks at SAS develop proprietary skills, which are not highly marketable. This is absolutely fair: SAS has no obligation to make it easy to leave SAS.
Tech folks who want a career outside SAS must learn marketable skills — if necessary, “on their own time and their own dime”. Many of us did this, in order to continue our careers outside SAS.
In the current environment, people who don’t take responsibility for their own careers will indeed struggle.
@6muz+1ppxBUjK Noticed in what way? Whiny posts on layoffs.com? Not a great indicator imho. I personally know many people who left and are doing quite well.
People who are good do fine anywhere. People who aren’t blame SAS for ki-ling their career.
SAS, where careers go to die. Has anyone else noticed the number of SAS people who struggled with their careers post SAS?
Technical support is undergoing “reorganization” right now.
What's the latest reorg?
The Art department is safe.
If it's not already occurring, don't you think that at least some former employees of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc. will be saying similar things about the mindfuks they experienced?
Yes. Thank you. It's good to have someplace validating after spending so many years in that colossal mind-f@ck.
"Time for the November chicken littles to get the ball rolling again."
Or .. the VRBP-hopefuls to start talking buyouts again.
This site provides therapy. If you experienced trumped-up charges, gaslighting, and other forms of abuse, this site makes clear that others did too.
Indeed, it is a train wreck; and in slow motion. This will take years to play out.
@wwo+1ppxBUjK When you say there were two layoffs in building Q what does that mean? In my mind when you are talking about 2 individuals that isn’t layoffs which have a larger more widespread connotation to me.
To me that is individuals being fired. But either way it su-ks for those involved.
This entire series of layoff threads is like listening to multiple seasons of bad SportsTalk on the radio. You have the one "expert", the host, giving us all the background and color commentary on the team and the strategy, while all the others try to get some comment in or convince the host.
It's all pretty laughable, and just like SportsTalk radio, I walk away thinking "who the F cares about any of this? Lots of players don't play on this team anymore, so what does this have to do with anything?" Yet it continues, (and I continue to call in).
Watching the train wreck of SAS makes the trumped up charges feel less personal and targeting.
I see SAS people on linkedin with the #opentowork banner and October SAS employment end dates. Not every laid off person is going to come and post on this site.
“There were at least 2 layoffs last week (end of Oct) in Bldg Q.”
Well, I'm sure they got some whale-sized deals out of the SAS Championship, which has saved the day ... hahaha