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At a Software Powerhouse, the Good Life Is Under Siege

nytimes.com

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Re: At a Software Powerhouse, the Good Life Is Under Siege

#11

Post by zzleeper »

physcab wrote: post #5
hyperbovine wrote: post #2

I think the article misses an important point: SAS is a generational thing, and the influence of generation that cut their teeth on SAS and VAX mainframes in the 1980s is waning. There's a reason why the SAS ads you see in the airports are all targeted at management--because that's where all those people work now. And soon they will retire. They would never dare advertise to the poor analysts who are forced to actual…

I haven't seen SAS code before. I'll take your word that it's ugly. However, if SAS can adopt new standards, I hardly see them waning. Companies will always be thirsty for better ways to understand their customers, and now with the ease at which new internet companies are started and more people become connected, the demand for those services is only going to increase. If SAS can continue to outperform by investing i…

It's not ugly. It's hideous. I use Stata (commercial) and R (free), and both have a much better language.

The only reason why people I know use SAS is to deal with very-big datasets directly, instead of having to partition the data by hand.

Re: At a Software Powerhouse, the Good Life Is Under Siege

#12

Post by bayareaguy »

hyperbovine wrote: post #2

I think the article misses an important point: SAS is a generational thing, and the influence of generation that cut their teeth on SAS and VAX mainframes in the 1980s is waning. There's a reason why the SAS ads you see in the airports are all targeted at management--because that's where all those people work now. And soon they will retire. They would never dare advertise to the poor analysts who are forced to actual…

There are a few areas where SAS is unrivaled--it can crunch huge data and exploit parallel processing

So is their real competition Hadoop and the other Map/Reduce frameworks?

Re: At a Software Powerhouse, the Good Life Is Under Siege

#15

Post by codexon »

joe_the_user wrote: post #7

One thing that's not mention prominently in the article is that while SAS provides many perks to its employees, it actually has a history of paying salaries significantly below industry standards.

It doesn't seem to be as low as you suggest.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/SAS-Institute-Salaries-E3807...

Re: At a Software Powerhouse, the Good Life Is Under Siege

#16

Post by tom_b »

JMiao wrote: post #9
joe_the_user wrote: post #7

One thing that's not mention prominently in the article is that while SAS provides many perks to its employees, it actually has a history of paying salaries significantly below industry standards.

could that be a result of a lower cost of living in cary, north carolina?

Not really. IBM has a huge presence, still over 8500+ employees I think and has traditionally paid at the higher end of software developer salaries on average. And until Nortel imploded this decade, they were also in the mix as a top-paying, always-hiring type of place here.

Basically, SAS has always paid significantly less than others in the park (RTP). I think it's always been pushed as more of a lifestyle place - SAS is still privately held, so it was supposed to be a little more "sane" than big, quarterly focused IT companies.

I do know folks who have worked there and have enjoyed significant work flexibility (eg, working from home from other states) but also have worked with ex-SAS'ers who left because of what I understand to be a laid-back to the point of not getting work done atmosphere.

While cost of living is good in NC, here in the Raleigh/Durham/Cary/Chapel Hill area, it's definitely significantly higher than other places in NC. It's much cheaper than the biggest metro areas (SV, Boston, NY, DC) but after that it tends to run higher than you might think, particularly if you are shopping for homes in areas with "good" school districts.

Re: At a Software Powerhouse, the Good Life Is Under Siege

#17

Post by tectonic »

utnick wrote: post #14

can someone who knows explain what SAS is and why it is useful( without buzzwords ) Is it a scripting language that deals with data? How is it better than SQL?

I think it's closer to a language for easily expressing and computing statistics, like R, with a very powerful set of existing methods. Anyone?

Re: At a Software Powerhouse, the Good Life Is Under Siege

#18

Post by tom_b »

physcab wrote: post #3

I really enjoyed that article. The active M&A in business intelligence software companies shows just how big Big Data is for business, and how big the market is for new startups to tailor specific techniques for niche industries. However, now that the secret is out, its going to be more difficult to prove that your secret sauce is superior than your competitors. The winners in this market will be those who can delive…

BI software and enterprise software in general is a huge opportunity for startups - I know PG and YC had it as one of the RFS listings at one point.

I'm not sure that the winners will be those can deliver results fast and exhibit quick adaptability. In general, I agree that the Hacker News community is more than technically capable enough to do better than the big BI offerings. But I've been surprised (or shown my naivete if you prefer) at how much "old school" networking still accounts for sales in this space. To succeed, you are aiming at mid-level and higher execs who are used to (seriously) being wined and dined in a way that I think most hardcore tech companies would be surprised at.

Figuring out how to circumvent the normal sales channels is probably at least as important as whatever tech you put in front of people for enterprise software. I've seen how successful some companies are at simply pushing software out to their existing customer channel and making $$ off of that.

All that said, and I still have my eye on a little slice of that pie chart . . .

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