The best company to work for
2010-03-01
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="285" caption="Jim Goodnight
on the SAS campus"]
[/caption]
Fortune released their 100 best companies to work for survey last month and
the winner was a company that not everybody would have heard of, SAS. Not the
airline which is better known but the privately owned software company in
North Carolina.
If thinking about cool tech companies to work for, most people would think of
high-profile Google but SAS beats Google by 3 places and in fact Google
modeled their people policies on the older SAS (founded 1976).
Besides being privately held, there are a couple of other peculiarities about
SAS such as the founder CEO who has been the CEO since he founded the company
and still enjoys huge respect in the industry.
106,000 pieces of art, a hotel on campus (equivalent to a Four Seasons) hotel,
masseurs and a day hospital for day-to-day medical visits all make up the
uniqueness the company. Another peculiarity is the average weekly work hours
which are 35, well below the minimum 60 hour work weeks in Silicon Value. Jim
Goodnight, a programmer himself, understands that after 7 or 8 hours it's hard
to stay productive.
The company has always had a no layoff policy although people can get fired
for poor performance. Talking about GE and Jack Welch, Goodnight disputes
Welch's claim that he fired the lowest 10% of GE staff each year. "He said
that in his book but I don't believe he ever did it... you would end up with a
hugely unmotivated staff and it would cost a fortune to fire that many people
every year", says Goodnight.
You can view
a detailed interview with Dr. Jim Goodnight and Rich
Karlgaard
the Publisher of Forbes
Magazine recorded in November 2009. The
Fortune
article
announcing the 100 best companies gives more details and
lists the other
companies
.