Tag: SAS Institute

Anyone Need a Good SAS Programmer?

My current company, despite my objections and expertise, is phasing out SAS, and I think it is a misguided decision.

I am only about three years away from semi-retirement, but you won’t find a more motivated worker.  Not only am I a “virtuoso” SAS programmer with many years of programming and data analytics experience, but I’m also very good at teaching and mentoring others in the use of SAS—something I almost never get to do in my current position.

I need a change.

I have “big city” job skills in a small town where there appear to be no other employers who would be able to make use of my SAS expertise.  And, at this stage of my life, I can’t relocate and am unwilling to commute, so working from home appears to be the only option.

I’m looking at potential opportunities as an “encore career” and would really like to do something that directly benefits society.  I loved my 21 years at the Iowa Department of Transportation, and would love to be a public servant once again, or to work for a nonprofit organization. Or work on scientific projects—true science, not data “science”. Or, data for good projects.  Both salary and number of work hours (up to full time) are completely negotiable.  I’m at a point now in my career where I can be more flexible for the right opportunity.

I have my own personal SAS Analytics Pro license, so could do work for you even if you don’t have SAS.

SAS is a great product, and SAS Institute is a great company.  And SAS keeps getting better all the time.

In Praise of SAS

Some say that SAS is difficult to learn, but, like many things, it is not difficult at all if you have a good teacher who has a thorough understanding of the subject matter and a passion for teaching it. That would be me.

In Praise of SAS

I’ve been writing programs in SAS since 1985. Back then, it was SAS 5.15 on an IBM mainframe computer (remember JCL, TSO, ISPF?) at the Iowa Department of Transportation. Today, it is SAS 9.4, under Windows 10 at home and Linux at work.

I love this language. It is elegant. It is beautiful. I’ve become an expert. I’ve never had a computational problem to solve, a data manipulation to do, a process to automate, or a report to write that I couldn’t do with SAS.

New features are being added all the time, and I am constantly learning and improving to keep up with it all. And the legacy code still runs just fine. Peace of mind. The company behind this success story is SAS Institute, based in Cary, North Carolina. SAS Institute has the best technical support of any company I have ever dealt with, and that is as true today as it was in 1985, and all the years in between. Again, peace of mind.

I’ve heard from multiple sources that SAS Institute is a fabulous place to work, and it shows in their software, their customer service, and the passion their employees have for making SAS software the best it can be—and helping us solve just about any analytics problem. Inspiring. And you won’t find a more passionate user community anywhere. At least not with any company that has been around as long as SAS has (since 1976).

SAS Institute is the world’s largest private software company, and being privately owned has much to do with their success and consistency, I believe. No greedy shareholders to please. SAS Institute need answer only to their customers, and to their employees. That’s the way it should be.

Computer languages have come in and out of vogue over the years: FORTRAN, PL/I, Pascal, C, C++, Perl, Java, R, Python, etc., and with each new language that comes along, SAS absorbs the best elements and moves forward to the next challenge.

Python is currently very popular, as is open source in general, and I have no doubt that SAS will incorporate the most valuable functionality of Python and open source (already in progress) and keep tooling along like a well-oiled machine. In another ten years, SAS will be incorporating another new language that will have supplanted Python as the programming language du jour.

You’ve got to admire a company like that. In an era when everyone wants — even expects — “stuff for free”, the old adage “you get what you pay for” still applies. Yes, SAS is expensive—and I’m hoping their mature “core” product will come down in price—but I can’t complain too loudly because quality, longevity, and dependability costs money. It always has.

I’ve noticed that our younger open source programmers use a lot of different tools to do their work. One big advantage of SAS is that I can do most of my work using one tool – SAS. SAS provides a beautifully integrated and far-reaching data analytics environment.