Thread regarding SAS Institute layoffs

Top 10 language doesn't count for much, and there's a simple explanation...

The average age of a SAS developer is probably 60+ so there's a big wave of retirement happening right now and for those organisations who aren't quite ready to cancel their SAS licenses, they need to replace those folk with someone else to keep the lights on.

I bet the vast majority of those jobs will be maintaining other people's code, with very little in the way of new and interesting development work. It's good news for those people who have built their careers on SAS and don't have any ambition to learn something new, as they can probably wide the wave through to retirement. But for those under the age of 55, you'd be wise to have a plan B.

Given all the doom & gloom I was somewhat surprised to see that SAS is still a top 10 language in the 'jobs listings' category in the 2023 language ratings released this week:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-top-programming-languages-2023

"An alternative way to keep a platform relevant is to develop vertical markets. This was tried. But aside from Fraud and Risk, which the banks purchase, I don’t know of any vertical products that make money."

I don't know of Data Management can be considered a Vertical. They seem to get a lot of attention.

Are they profitable/stable?

Government, Pharma, Finance, Banks, and maybe other industries are indeed slow to move. It seems that THIS is part of the problem - SAS rested on it's laurels and did not do enough to actively keep them as customers. I'm being terse, but I think you get what I'm saying.

Did a similar thing thing happen with Education? The others will follow their path eventually.

The SAS-less Pharma submission should be a wakeup call and scare the daylights out of everyone, but alas, it's probably too late to save that one. It's not like Pharma hasn't been talking about it for like a decade or longer.

"At multiple companies the race is currently on to do a complete dr-g submission that is totally "SAS-less" using a combination R, Python and Databricks."

This is not the first time that I have heard this.

AB keeps getting his large Cyber paycheck because of nepotism. He's a friend of BH/past co-worker.

Or can management be that screwed up that they can't figure out that he should have gotten the axe many years ago?

Linux ki-led Unix companies. However, we could argue it helped Apple, Android, Google, Amazon, various "smart" devices, and many other firms/categories. Perhaps most interesting, it didn't seem to hurt Microsoft (in an open source ki-ling a closed source kind of case). This seems to point to management above all else. Mediocre-skilled management of a steady state cash cow for decades most likely would not have the skillset for a sudden shift to an existential threat kind of state.

Other verticals aren't profitable because of laziness and poor choices. Nothing new has come out for any of them in years.

SAS cut most of the supply chain people right before Covid hit, oops. They keep putting money into retail even though it's not a priority and most stores are losing money. cybersecurity is circling the drain again, is it even still a thing? is this the third or 4th time cyber has bombed? but alex bokaye still gets his big paycheck monthly.

just look at CI 360 to see how bad things are. sas is trying to eat its own dog food there & can barely force it down. CI 360 is the WORST most manual most backwards and most embarrassing excuse for a modern martech stack on this earth. every person in every job who is forced to use it is miserable. modern martech stack my a$$. Jennifer Chase should try using it, maybe then she would understand why everyone hates it. If the person who created CI 360 is reading this you should be ashamed and you should be forced to use it daily as punishment.

I work in pharma - At multiple companies the race is currently on to do a complete dr-g submission that is totally "SAS-less" using a combination R, Python and Databricks.

I've also heard that SAS renewal contract negotiations is like dealing with the mafia ... "You've got a great company here it would be ashame if something happened to your data and processes for dr-g submissions".

An alternative way to keep a platform relevant is to develop vertical markets. This was tried. But aside from Fraud and Risk, which the banks purchase, I don’t know of any vertical products that make money.

The vertical strategy is easier because it does not require innovation. Perhaps when the Harvard Business School case study is written, we’ll learn why it failed.

I heard due to sagging economy, banks and pharma have cut down on SAS licenses and have kept a few for critical departments to serve regulatory requirements. For other functions, they have adopted low priced vendors and open source.

Finance also. Banks are conservative and slow to change.

SAS will remain relevant for some years. After all, FORTRAN is still relevant. But both have declining market shares.

Competing with open source is terribly difficult. How do you beat what is free?

You have to innovate. Tableau did it. Qlik did it. They compete against open source, and they make money — in what should have been our market.

Other people innovated. We didn’t.

Pharmaceuticals and Finance.

Perhaps in the government sector, which is notoriously slow to adapt.