SAS : best place to work!

Apr 18, 2011 by Clinovo    No Comments    Posted under: Business Best Practices

Once again, SAS has been elected as one of the 10 best places to work. A chance for me to evoke SAS history and the role of SAS programmers in companies.

SAS, as a language, was conceived in 1966 at North Carolina State University by a graduate student to address some complicated statistical analyses that he was working on. Later on, The SAS Institute was created in 1976, once they figured out, “Hey, maybe we can sell this and make some money?!”

Over the years, SAS has become an integrated system of software products used in biotech, financial, insurance, marketing, and retail industries, just to name a few. SAS is now used at more than 50,000 sites in over 100 countries, including 93 of the top 100 companies on the 2010 FORTUNE Global 500® list

SAS allows businesses to transform data about customers, performance, financials and more into information and predictive insight to support solid and coherent decisions.

I have been a SAS programmer in the health sector for the last 15 years. I have worked in several biotech companies and CROs. I now managed a team of SAS programmers at Clinovo.

From my experience as a SAS programmer and managing SAS programmers, I found out how important it is for a company to understand SAS programmers’ needs in terms of career and work content. SAS cannot be all taught. It comes with experience. You need to be at the right time at the right place.

Each programmer is different. Introvert, communicator,  extrovert, listener…each of us has his own personality and needs. It is a challenge for a company to identify SAS programmer profiles and provide them the right work experience that will uplift their skills and contribute to the company’s success.