Avantages
If you live close enough to work on campus (Cary, NC) then SAS is a great place to work, one of the best. 4 day cares, car wash, fitness center, health center, dry cleaner, barber, masseuse, multiple cafeterias and lots of other perks make working in Cary amazing, and people in those positions rarely leave. The benefits package on it's own is pretty good. After your first full year employees get a few thousand dollars from profit sharing. Once you're in you can move laterally within the company fairly easily. Everyone but the sales organization clocks 35 hours a week. Longtime SAS customers/user are loyal and intelligent.
Inconvénients
Benefits are being trimmed down and are now on par with any large company. Regional offices are "out of the good-old-boy network" and don't have the perks that make SAS the "#1 Place to Work" (a la Fortune). Dr. Goodnight has let others take control of key areas of the company and they're taking a once great private company that cares about it's customers and employees down the path of all the other publicly traded companies. Gone are the days of caring about customer satisfaction and success. Sell and move on, sell and move on.