Pros
I worked there straight out of college back in the early 90s. At the time it was much smaller with great benefits if not the greatest salary. But i felt like being part of a family. I took advantage of the onsite gym, child care, and enjoyed a private office. And the 35 hour week plus a week off at Christmas was nice too.
Cons
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.
