SAS reviews

Salaries are way below market and have been stagnant for many years. Promotions are very few and it seems hard to advance, even as a somewhat entry level employee. The IPO news, while exciting, will bring changes that I fear won’t be for the best. Probably controversial but mandating vaccines or you’re forced to resign is ridiculous. Lots of disconnect between upper management and developers. Attrition this year has been ridiculously high for SAS. Lots of knowledge and career SASers have left, and hardly anyone has been hired to replace them. Lots of reason contribute to this but salaries have to be one of them.

Since I had not worked anywhere else in software I failed to realize that the job skills I was obtaining were not commensurate with the rest of the software world. SAS is siloed off from the software development industry and does everything their own way. Which means the things you learn are useless in the real world. You see SAS implements development almost like a factory line in an automobile plant. You learn how to do one small part of the whole application. In today's cloud-oriented world you might learn how to create a single microservice but you won't learn how to create a gradle project, how to build and deploy it in the cloud, how to query a database, etc. Someone else does that. Forget learning Docker containers and Kubernetes, someone else does that. When I left there it took a while to find other work. I thought my resume would make finding a new job a snap. But other employers correctly realized that I didn't have the skill sets needed for modern development. Sure I knew the SAS way of doing things but that didn't impress them. It took me a couple of contract jobs to develop a decent resume.