Extracted from a thread began on @OP+1jgxdnf0h
207 replies (most recent on top)
because apparently Einstein it’s what SAS is still counting on
Is there anything else to count on? Or is that the only card left to play?
“A 100 million company growing at a steady 10% clip with moderate margins (10%) or a 3 billion company with consistently flat growth and a moderate margin (5-10%)?”
I’d want to know which company will be more profitable in future.
“Flat growth” means revenues are declining against costs, therefore profit margin is declining. I’d want to know the rate of decline.
Depends entirely on how much I paid for said company.
Hint it is a very easy answer…
Only to someone having access to a fully baked GAAP system.
Likely that is NOT you Mr Hint.
“ why all this talk about Viya?” … because apparently Einstein it’s what SAS is still counting on:
https://www.sas.com/en_us/home.html
“ Flat at 3 BILLION for years is still flat. You should try facing reality instead of living your life inside a fantasy.”
Which would you rather have? A 100 million company growing at a steady 10% clip with moderate margins (10%) or a 3 billion company with consistently flat growth and a moderate margin (5-10%)?
Hint it is a very easy answer…
YOU should try facing reality…
Why all the talk about Viya? It failed so long ago that most people know the many reasons for Viya's failure.
Hard sad lessons learned are Viya's legacy. Talking about them ad naseum won't make money for SAS
The next owner of SAS will not care whether revenues are flat or declining.
Either way, they’re declining against costs.
"Flat at 3 BILLION…"
Flat at 3 BILLION for years is still flat. You should try facing reality instead of living your life inside a fantasy.
Does trolling this site count as "research" at Virginia Tech(VT)?
Do certain professors at VT encourage their students to write gibberish on this site on behalf of said prof?
"Your so vain, you probably think this song is about you."
Content vs. handwriting, no? You're a prof, allegedly smart ... can you tell a student by their writing?
CAS was demonstrably bad and cost the company billions. Its failure was your responsibility and not the gym staff, Biden or previous leaders.
Own it, it'll help with your NPD ;)
If the positive Viya talk on this site translated into meaningful revenue SAS would be making way more than 3 billion.
But sadly that is not reality.
@1cx+1jk94kx0x Here we go. Now you can add BS dime store handwriting analysis degree to sit alongside your rugratz psychology participation award.
Hi Oliver
Apart from your distinctive writing style (I read the LASR doc) noone but yourself would refer to you as a genius among geniuses, a man among men or imply you belong with the bold and beautiful. Ba-f.
My goodness, you were king of the world 10 years and now you're reduced to being a sock puppet trolling an internet layoff thread. You'd be pathetic if you generated sympathy but all I'm feeling is schaben, err schadenfraude.
Alles klar, herr komissar?
Was CB the person who was "oh, so nice!"
Ah, Company Man! May you ever be shielded by the warmth of JG’s bosom.
“ trumped up charge sheet arrived soon after.”
Oh brother. Nobody has time to trump up a charge sheet.
If the glove fits…
"Is Viya king of the hill with respect to receiving the highest investment?"
Few know the labor alone price tag of Viya. And the ones who do know probably will remain quiet. Based on Viya's extended development time, it is easy to speculate that Viya was the most expensive development effort in the history of SAS.
“ Yet, revenue remained flat.”
Flat at 3 BILLION…
"Initial Products: the V’s -> VA, VS, VDMML, SAS Studio Client, etc."
"Prior to rising a CTO/COO, OS was eventually put in charge of all R&D. Hopefully this got the entire organization, pulling in more of a unified direction. Others please comment on their experience with this."
Uh, no. Worked on one of those V's, a vanity project for a real piece of work. Folks talked big about integrating CAS, but none actually investigated it; the talk was all posturing and hot air. When the CAS server and the product team were brought together to link up, calibrate, and organize a path forward per the product needs and OS mandate (all products use CAS server), the product team were all deer in the headlights.
No good deed goes unpunished, as they say, and the trumped up charge sheet arrived soon after.
Did CB ever run the ACL or was it just OS all along? CB disappeared from the limelight awfully fast.
But we all got iPads!
Was Armistead ever _in charge_ of Oliver? Don’t recollect that ever being the case.
Sounds like you're a bit mad about it, though. How's that working out for you?
Oh, just fine. About the same as AS - pushed out into insignificance to make way for the next best thing.
Fact is "Project X" was something Armistead came up with in conversation with Goodnight, and since he was _in charge_ it became the company's strategic direction. Armistead was passionate about it. The resources which built Viya reported to Armistead. Armistead championed the next generation of SAS. Even though his name probably isn't on a single line of code.
Sounds like you're a bit mad about it, though. How's that working out for you?
History buff here. Is Viya king of the hill with respect to receiving the highest investment?
Not attempting to implicate anyone as “slow walking”. Considerable collaboration between the solutions teams, CAS devs, and various micro services teams was necessary. Some new design patterns had to be considered and additional features implemented in CAS code, etc.. This all took time and was/is part of the overall R&D process, especially the “R” part.
However, on balance, there were some SAS R&D devs (Including at the Principal level) who simply wanted to be handed a clean, well documented set of APIs they could invoke, without having to get deeply involved in the process of defining exactly what they needed from those APIs. From the Dev perspective, CAS was not intended as a black box and to their credit, the CAS team did a good job documenting APIs, explaining how things worked, and making themselves available to answer questions — something that OS mandated.
Prior to rising a CTO/COO, OS was eventually put in charge of all R&D. Hopefully this got the entire organization, pulling in more of a unified direction. Others please comment on their experience with this.
they slowly attempted migration to utilize the core architecture described above
Efforts were always bifurcated or worse. Nobody that I know was able to disregard their primary duties and also take on work from some new priority because there were always many priorities. You make it sound like the workers slow-walked things. That was never, in my experience, the case. Attention and focus was just further divided because older primary responsibilities were never jettisoned. Maybe this is the failure of the development and testing managers - the ones implicated in prior posts.
For the 13,000th time, nobody “invented“ Viya — it was a branding term, introduced in early 2016, acting as an umbrella for what is supposed to be the next generation of SAS. The initial rollout was based on the following.
The core: CAS, Microservices (first Java then converted to Go), and the Computer Server for running more traditional SAS macro, data step, and PROCS. This included an extensive set of native CAS data management + additional actions for CAS Data Step (mandated by JG), ML, Text Analytics, and other advanced analytics components. The idea was to demonstrate the scaleability, performance, and fault-tolerant/failover provided by CAS and related infrastructure.
Initial Products: the V’s -> VA, VS, VDMML, SAS Studio Client, etc.
Other products were in various stages of R&D as they slowly attempted migration to utilize the core architecture described above. CAS was mandated as the central compute server for this effort, but as we have heard, this was not always followed by various product organizations.
Perhaps the OP can get back to their multi part Viya/CAS evolution series where more of this and what followed, will hopefully clearer.
"That AS guy kept up with changes in technological direction by reading 1000 articles a day on Pulse"
Yet, revenue remained flat.
That AS guy kept up with changes in technological direction by reading 1000 articles a day on Pulse. Let’s see you do better.
Oliver didn't invent Viya. Armistead did
OH. That explains why I constantly saw “sapp” all throughout the code.
Well, good to know there are other people to blame.
Now some they do, and some they don't. And some you just can't tell.
And some they will and some they won't. With some it's just as well.
Viya, Oliver, Armistead, and ultimately JG had their chances to move the revenue needle for well over 10 years.
The reason for no movement of revenue is that enough SAS customers do not see Viya as value add proposition.. And because Viya has no full compatibility with V9, the V9 customers were motivated to consider alternatives to SAS. V9 customers who have not already left SAS surely must have a feeling that the SAS game clock is ticking as they formulate future plans(of how they will exit SAS).
Outside looking in, it looks like SAS unintentionally earned a self inflicted plan to fail. Now the big push is to find a buyer who wants to buy into that mess.
Really hope I am seeing this all the wrong way....
Enough people have posted of the Big German’s good nature that it’s clear he was personable and well liked by his team.
Enough people have posted of his arrogance and refusal to listen that it’s clear he gave a negative impression to others.
That negative impression is why he gets more than his share of the blame. The blame for Viya should be fairly distributed, but he attracted it to himself.
We are not going to agree on the causes and characteristics of this man’s essential nature. For every post attacking him, someone with a different experience will defend him.
We can have this argument forever without reaching a conclusion. It’s more constructive to discuss the motivations behind Viya, and where it is going today.
Several posts have made clear that compatibility with SAS was not an initial requirement. Viya was apparently intended to replicate the success of 50 years ago, in a new, modern architecture — even though Open Source had entered the market.
One of the more enlightening posts here is Viya’s description as a joint effort of JG, OS, and AS. That may partly explain why SAS has not changed course on Viya, five years after the Big German left.
And many Americans are oblivious to their own stupidity and bad behavior. So, maybe he picked it up here while being assimilated.
Many Europeans are generally more direct and far less “gushing with friendliness” (perhaps unless a few drinks in) than your typical white-bread sanguine American. In biz and tech they are typically more interested in getting things done expeditiously than getting to know people on a personal level. That said, Oliver eventually got to know his team members pretty well and definitely hung out with us at social events, talked about sports, cars, common interests, etc.
Isn’t “mortification“ often associated with Christian/religious repentance rituals? I was unaware of its as a term in more general populous psychology. Perhaps I need to read more Brené Brown books 😉
Oliver could certainly be stern and stoic was his default, at least some of which can be culturally understood from his country of origin. I’ve had bartenders in Germany respond with surliness approximating the worst I ever experienced with Oliver (in any context) when simply asked for a certain dark beer they didn’t have.
Seems the real question is: if JG did not hold Oliver accountable for improving his less than congenial behaviors, then who would’ve had the authority and responsibility to?
Having worked for each of them directly, Oliver was consistently more advanced than AmiG when it came to appropriate and temperate responses. Both rose through the R&D ranks by demonstrating extraordinary work ethic and ability to innovate new things “outside the box” of mainstream R&D thinking. Both gained the attention of and favor with JG relatively early in their SAS careers. Given their perceived and potential value to the long-term technical and business interests of SAS, would it not of made sense for JG to hold them accountable for unprofessional behaviors and do something0 like requiring sessions with an executive psychologist/coach tasked with grooming the best raw talent into effective leaders that can have the best impact on their organizations?
One might consider the broader implications of even asking such a question in the SAS organizational context! it certainly applied beyond Oliver and Ami.
Nobody is diagnosing anyone. It seems the focus is on the "n-word", and not the "m-word" (mortification). Put the two together -- it's not a diagnosis, its the description of an internal ego deflation process.
We can call him a fu--ing egotistical a--hole if you prefer. It's not clinical, but its still an accurate description of how others experienced him.
Oliver has returned and is writing about his favorite subject: himself.