#technology

I heard we are switching back to Microsoft 365 since Google is not streamlined, adds more steps, and prevents simple tasks. Has anyone heard this too?

Can this be true?

Are sales account technical lead positions having some turnover? Would positions be open from time to time be more due to growth or perhaps due to PIPs for not meeting sales goals? I guess this is the probably same across all technology companies in today’s economic environment so not picking on any one company or position here.

https://share.google/u7rF8Z5SbF3w1BSgJ

Laura shared that in a staff meeting with her leadership, she and her peers have been asked to imagine their orgs with 50% less head count. Supposedly big reductions will be starting by end of summer and will be phased through Q4. Srini & Katz have Jeff and team making the rounds with business partners showing how his technology teams can automate a lot of what they do.

Billionaire Jim Goodnight Built An Analytics Profit Machine. AI Is Forcing Its Reinvention.

ByPhoebe Liu,Reporter.

May 15, 2026, 06:30am EDT
Updated May 15, 2026, 10:36am EDT

Unlike most of today’s biggest AI companies, SAS—once America’s largest privately held software company—has always operated slowly, steadily and profitably. Competition from all sides and an upcoming leadership transition will test the company’s longstanding strategy.

Clad in a plain white shirt, Jim Goodnight, billionaire cofounder and CEO of analytics firm SAS, eases into a leather rolling chair in a Cary, North Carolina, meeting room that looks less like a corner office than a geology exhibit. Behind him are glistening gemstones. A clump of pyrite. Purple amethysts. A fossilized dinosaur egg—a 69-million-year-old Hadrosaurus found in the Gobi Desert. A meteorite. “It’s not something you want to get hit in the head by,” he deadpans.

SAS is 50. Its CEO is 83. And like the rocks on display, both are artifacts from an earlier time long before fast-growing, deeply-unprofitable AI shook the world. SAS analyzes large troves of data from its customers in real-time to help them make better business decisions.

“People like to dismiss us by saying, ‘well, that’s legacy software,’” says Goodnight, a statistics pioneer who helped define what analytics would be long before AI became an umbrella term for everything. “But it’s not. We’ve been improving it for 50 years.”

Now SAS has to prove that endurance isn’t the same thing as stagnation.

The company generates just over $3 billion in annual revenue from most of the Fortune 100—including 90% of the financial services companies and all of the health and life sciences firms, plus most every government department. It has stayed private, profitable and debt free.

The AI bo-m is stress-testing that posture. OpenAI, Anthropic and a swarm of newer data-and-analytics rivals are selling the future as a clean break from “legacy” incumbents. Hyperscalers like Microsoft and Amazon are bundling data and AI into cloud contracts. Public-sector competition is heating up. And inside SAS, the next chapter is no longer theoretical: Goodnight has been hinting for years at a leadership transition, including an IPO as a possible succession plan. “When we go public, we need a different CEO,” he says. “You don’t want an old fa-t like me going around trying to sell stock.”

For a company designed to outlast market volatility, an uncomfortable question is suddenly immediate: can SAS modernize fast enough to matter in the AI era—without abandoning the slow, profitable discipline that made it an outlier in the first place? And can it do it without Goodnight?

Goodnight is confident it can; he’s seen this cycle before: the dot-com bo-m, when he considered outside money and passed; the dot-com bust, which rewarded that restraint; failed investments, including an airline; and the 2022 market correction which may have forced SAS to delay its IPO plans. He’s unmoved by the idea that generative AI has rewritten the laws of business.

AI is “just picking the next word in a sentence based on probability,” Goodnight says, correctly, of large language models. “How’s that going to solve anything?” He thinks SAS’ decades of customer trust and “domain expertise,” particularly in finance, healthcare and government services, will help it retain its edge.

Yet Goodnight will likely leave SAS’ future in the age of AI to younger hands.

In recent years, he has ceded more of the daily operating work to a new generation of executives, especially chief technology officer Bryan Harris and chief operating officer Gavin Day. Goodnight says he’s training Harris and Day to take over, though he hasn’t yet decided which of the two he would like as CEO.

The plan they are inheriting is simple to describe and hard to execute: persuade customers that SAS is not the same company it was 50 years ago, sell them on AI that helps them make smarter business decisions instead of merely sounding like it might, and mold the products to meet every customer where it’s needed.

“Incumbency is our biggest headwind,” says Harris.

That incumbency can be seen in SAS’ sprawling North Carolina headquarters. Its 300-acre tree-lined property boasts a day care and doctor’s office, fields dotted with employees playing intramural soccer at lunchtime, one of the state’s few five-star hotels and dozens of docile sheep grazing underneath the company’s solar panels. Turn left from Analytics Drive onto Research Drive and walk down Binary Way, and you’ll be blinded by a shining silver sculpture of the mathematical constant pi. The company’s campus, as they call it, reflects Goodnight’s vision and SAS’ academic origins.

SAS, short for Statistical Analysis System, was born out of North Carolina State University where Goodnight—then a young faculty member fresh out of a statistics PhD—teamed up with Tony Barr in the late 1960s to create software that sifted through and analyzed N.C. State’s agriculture department data. After the tool attracted more than 100 outside customers, Goodnight, Barr, John Sall and Jane Helwig incorporated SAS Institute in 1976. Barr sold his 40% stake for $340,000 in 1979. Helwig, who died in 2021, left and sold her stake a couple of years later. Goodnight now owns two-thirds of SAS, making him worth $13.3 billion and the richest man in North Carolina; Sall owns the remaining third, a $6.5 billion stake.

From the beginning, the company was bootstrapped. Back when SAS software was sold as physical books, all staff—including the founders—would form an assembly line every time a new shipment of books arrived to unload the books into an employee’s basement, a tradition cofounder Sall recalls as “book brigades.”

When the phones from prospective customers stopped ringing, Sall says Goodnight—in keeping with his upbringing as a hardware shopkeeper’s son—forced the cofounders to split up SAS’ potential customers into four (grouped alphabetically) and do the marketing themselves.

The approach worked. SAS was cash-flow positive from day one and generated $600 million (revenue) on an estimated $300 million in operating income by 1996, Forbes previously reported. SAS grew steadily, always prioritizing profitability over the fastest possible growth, Sall says.

Along the way, as evidenced by its campus, SAS built up a reputation as a company that takes care of its employees. Extensive benefits—beginning with free M&Ms (11,000 pounds per week, company-wide) then expanding to on-site doctors and a pharmacy, subsidized on-site childcare and a hair salon—weren’t common in the ’80s and ’90s. It was Goodnight's retention strategy: keep employees happy, keep turnover low and avoid the expensive churn of bonuses and dilutive stock options.

He used to joke that 95% of SAS’ assets, its people, drove out the front gate every night. After the pandemic and a remote-work policy, the line no longer works quite the same way. “I can’t even get ’em to come in,” he says.

Three years ago, Harris brought Goodnight an idea he loved. SAS could use computer vision to analyze video feeds from farms and determine how illnesses spread among chickens. The tool would help farmers keep their flocks healthy. Goodnight ki-led it with a single question: “How much do the cameras cost? The farmers would never pay for that.”

From the perspectives of both customers like those farmers and SAS itself, Goodnight has been laser-focused on cost and profitability for decades. He criticized AI innovation for being 90% wasted dollars, and repeatedly emphasized SAS’ need to get further into the green.

The CEO credits SAS’ durability to that desire to stay profitable, even at the expense of rapid growth. While Anthropic has reportedly grown revenue at roughly 10 times year over year for three years, SAS’ revenue rose 9% last quarter, roughly in line with Morningstar's prediction that software companies will grow at around 10% per year through 2029.

Goodnight thinks the AI companies’ pace “needs to slow down.” But that doesn’t mean SAS has ignored the market. In 2023, the company announced a three-year, $1 billion investment to develop AI-powered products. “It looked like we were going to spend that much anyway, so we announced it,” Goodnight says flatly.

The problem is that SAS is hardly alone here. It is up against rivals that bet on AI first, and more heavily. On the mega-cap side, there’s Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle. Slightly newer entrants: Snowflake, Databricks, Alteryx and others. On the public sector side, Palantir has been siphoning U.S. government contracts from SAS and others. (Palantir’s U.S. government revenue grew by around double SAS’ total government revenue last year.)

SAS’ modus operandi is to meet customers wherever they are most anxious. The company works with nearly every major bank and the Big Four accounting firms, helping them use AI in ways that are secure, traceable and useful for fraud detection and financial risk. Healthcare, government, finance and other regulated industries are natural terrain for a company that has spent decades selling caution as a feature. Even there, the pressure is rising. Anthropic has been hiring industry experts and in May announced a suite of financial-services products that compete directly for the same customers.

“Everyone is in ‘coopetition,’” Harris says. Customers have asked SAS to integrate with its rivals, and the company has happily obliged.

That has made SAS uniquely malleable among its peers. If customers want their data analysis done in the cloud (Microsoft, Amazon, you name it), SAS can do it. If they want it done on premises, SAS will do that too—and in the programming language of your choice. That matters in hospitals and government agencies, especially when sensitive data and regulation collide here and abroad. In the executive building where customers are flown in for meetings, one screen recently read, “Welcome, U.A.E. Government Delegation.”

Harris thinks new revenue streams can come from digital twins—AI-rendered versions of complex physical facilities like manufacturing plants that are used to figure out a facility’s most efficient layout, predict safety incidents without putting workers at risk, and perform virtual testing—via a partnership with Epic Games. Paper products manufacturer Georgia Pacific, for example, uses them to test and train robots in its Savannah River Mill facility, keeping costs down and employees safe. Digital twins currently generate single-digit millions in revenue, but Harris believes the business can grow to $500 million within three or four years.

SAS is also experimenting with quantum computing for ultra-complex transactions, like in fraud detection for banks, that traditional computers can’t handle. Also in SAS’ plans: using data and AI to help sports teams. In December, SAS announced a partnership with Liverpool to use its products to market to the soccer team’s fans better. At SAS’ 50th anniversary conference, the company announced a smattering of new tools that incorporate AI agents.

“SAS has never met a problem they didn’t want to go after,” says IDC research director Kathy Lange, who previously worked at SAS and suggested that the company could benefit from more focus. “It’s a double-edged sword.”

Believing it’s the best way to sell some of his stake without needing to sell SAS for parts, Goodnight still wants an IPO. But five years after SAS first said it was preparing to go public, the window has narrowed, shifted and occasionally looked like a regret chute.“We don't want to go when all the money has been already used for SpaceX,”

The numbers also need work. Before hitting the roadshow, Goodnight wants to meet the Rule of 40, a common software company benchmark in which revenue growth rate and profit margin sum to 40. That might help the company defend its share price in public markets, especially when pitted against fast-growing competition. But with both components sitting at around 10%, Goodnight says SAS isn’t even halfway there.

For CFO Matt Parson, it’s optionality that’s the key here. SAS has to be ready for the public markets, but they can’t be the only path to helping Goodnight and Sall sell some of their stake. Why sell? The founders’ children aren’t planning to take over, but Goodnight and Sall might still like to leave them with some cash. They’ve yet to take much out of SAS: the company pays out a small dividend, but has invested most profits—“many billions of dollars”—back into the business over its lifetime.

In case an IPO isn’t possible, Parson thus wants to prepare the firm for other solutions: an acquisition or outside investment. The company routinely gets acquisition offers, but Goodnight hasn’t entertained any of them. (The last publicly reported bid was Broadcom’s $15-20 billion offer in 2021; it was progressing until Goodnight changed his mind.) A minority investment could be in the cards, according to Parson, if the right partner came along. If SAS can remain profitable, it can also stay as-is for the foreseeable future: private and founder-owned.

Sipping a cup of black coffee, this time in front of a piece of the Berlin Wall he helped smash, Goodnight is risk-adverse as ever. He is ready to stop being the face of the story he created.

“I wish people knew nothing about me,” he says, with a wink

Like AI, Crypto, or whatever fad tech is in style to talk about.

It's all doom and gloom. Is this AI wave really going to affect people?

https://www.dailymail.com/yourmoney/article-15811519/rogue-ai-deletes-company-database.html

No other way to really explain it.

4 places you want to be…

As an academic looking at industry, it appears that Chevron’s attendance of petrotech science meetings is way down the last few years. Does this reflect a shift in focus to other technologies (AI?), or just a declining investment in R&D and staff development?

Fidelity to Cut 800 Staffers as It Overhauls Tech, Product Teams

• (Bloomberg)
• Fidelity Investments is cutting about 800 jobs while restructuring technology and product-delivery teams and planning additional hiring.

  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-07/fidelity-to-cut-800-staffers-as-it-overhauls-tech-product-teams

Fidelity reorganizes its workplace with new hires - and a few cuts

• (Boston.com)
• Boston.com reports Fidelity will cut about 800 jobs worldwide while also hiring thousands as part of a broader restructuring.

  https://www.boston.com/news/business/2026/05/11/fidelity-reorganizes-its-workplace-with-new-hires-and-a-few-cuts/

Fidelity Cuts 800-1,000 Jobs: Reports

• (ThinkAdvisor)
• ThinkAdvisor summarizes reports that Fidelity is cutting 800 to 1,000 jobs tied to technology and product-delivery restructuring.

  https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2026/05/07/fidelity-laying-off-staff/

Fidelity to Cut Around 800 Jobs as It Restructures Technology and Product Teams

• (Hubbis)
• Hubbis reports Fidelity is cutting about 800 global roles while reshaping technology and product-delivery operations.

  https://www.hubbis.com/news/fidelity-to-cut-around-800-jobs-as-it-restructures-technology-and-product-teams

United States $7 Trillion Asset Manager Fidelity Investments to Cut 800 Jobs Representing 1% of Global 80,000 Workforce But Will Hire 2,000 Including in Engineering, Technology & Product Roles

• (Caproasia)
• Caproasia says Fidelity is cutting about 800 jobs while planning thousands of hires in engineering, technology, and product roles.

  https://www.caproasia.com/2026/05/12/united-states-7-trillion-asset-manager-fidelity-investments-to-cut-800-jobs-representing-1-of-global-80000-workforce-but-will-hire-2000-including-in-engineering-technology-product-roles/

Fidelity Investments Layoffs 2026 - 800 Jobs Cut

• (LayoffHedge)
• LayoffHedge tracks the Fidelity layoff round as roughly 800 jobs, about 1% of the company’s global workforce.

  https://layoffhedge.com/company/fidelity-investments

Fidelity Layoffs: Why The Giant Is Cutting 800 Roles While Hiring 3,300

• (AInvest)
• AInvest frames the cuts as part of Fidelity’s shift away from siloed agile teams toward larger technology and product units.

  https://www.ainvest.com/news/fidelity-layoffs-giant-cutting-800-roles-hiring-3-300-2605/

Fidelity to Cut at Least 800 Jobs Globally to Restructure Tech and Product Teams

• (AASTOCKS)
• AASTOCKS reports Fidelity is cutting at least 800 jobs globally as it restructures technology and product teams.

  https://www.aastocks.com/en/mobile/news.aspx?newsid=NOW.1523575&newssource=AAFN

Fidelity plans to cut at least 800 jobs globally to restructure its technology and product teams

• (Futu News)
• Futu News summarizes Bloomberg reporting that Fidelity is trimming about 1% of its workforce to reorganize tech and product teams.

  https://news.futunn.com/en/post/72748081/fidelity-plans-to-cut-at-least-800-jobs-globally-to

Finance Layoffs Tracker

• (TrueUp)
• TrueUp lists Fidelity among recent finance layoffs with about 1,000 roles affected on May 7, 2026.

  https://www.trueup.io/finance/layoffs

For the last couple of months i've spent time following trainings, learning how to build agents etc but Eliza just isn't delivering. Copilot on the other hand is far simpler to use and gets me what i need without giving me a migraine.

General Motors is laying off 500 to 600 information technology workers. These job cuts affect employees globally. The company aims to reorganize its technology operations. GM stated this reorganization requires different skills and reduces overlap. This marks the latest round of white-collar job reductions for the automaker.

https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/general-motors/2026/05/11/general-motors-layoffs-may-2026-job-cuts/90030898007/

Starbucks is laying off 61 corporate tech workers in Seattle. This action results from a technology department reorganization. Affected roles include project managers and systems administrators. The layoffs are scheduled to begin on June 20. All impacted employees will be separated by August 28.

Seattle, Washington

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/starbucks/starbucks-lays-off-61-tech-workers-in-seattle/

Intel use TSMC as its foundry. Hoe come it can not make for itself, but can make for others?

Weaker businesses are to be slashed significantly as the new focus on AI technologies and AI infrastructure.

Why are we pushing to adopt a self destructive technology?
https://youtu.be/F-6la_I-xkQ

Curious to know if the developers / QAs are layoff in this wave. So far I hear Scrum masters and leaders from the unit.

Was in the tech side of 1515 and heard rumor the CTO is leaving?

Is it the streaming CTO (he is gone I thought already) or the CBS CTO?

This place is so confusing.

U.S. layoffs decreased overall in early 2026. The technology sector experienced a rise in job cuts. Tech companies cut 85,411 jobs this year. This is a 33% increase from the same period last year. Artificial intelligence spending is the main reason cited for these layoffs.

https://www.kron4.com/news/technology-ai/layoffs-down-in-2026-except-in-one-field/

Management announced the shift to the "New Technology and Product Model" yesterday, effective June 1. They are framing the 1,000 cuts as a "skills reshuffle" to make room for 2,000 early-career hires.

To those in Tech/Product: How is your leadership actually mapping this? Is your "squad" being dissolved into these larger teams, or is this just a way to cut senior headcount before the RTO mandate hits in September? Curious if anyone has seen the new org charts yet or if we’re all just flying blind until June.

Cloudflare announced layoffs for over a thousand employees. The company cited increased AI usage as a primary reason. Cloudflare's AI usage grew by over 600% in three months. The job cuts are not for cost-cutting or performance assessment. Cloudflare's stock dropped 18% following the announcement.

San Francisco, California

https://www.kron4.com/news/technology-ai/sf-tech-company-cloudflare-to-cut-over-a-thousand-jobs-cites-ai-as-reason/

Click2Expert on steroids!

Why is the stock still hovering near its 52-week lows? With the IBM Think conference in Boston underway, you’d expect all the “good news” coming out of it to provide some lift. It’s essentially a homecoming-style rally for IBM—so why does the stock keep falling instead?

Nike is shutting down three global technology sites. This follows a recent 1,400-person layoff announcement. The firm seeks to centralize its tech work. Key technology hubs will be Beaverton and India. This supports a strategic pivot from direct sales.

Atlanta, Georgia

https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2026/05/nike-to-close-tech-centers-in-atlanta-china-and-poland.html

and what is 100 in the app name? like 100th redesigned app?

Replacing Shobith Varshney. Not sure how the move is going to work itself out, given technology at Citi has a long way to go before it can be called as modernized. That would take a dedicated person

Anyway, I remember some who used to say David is Trim Ryan, given references to London but well... The position could also be a crown of thorns. Good luck to David either way

https://www.snowflake.com/en/blog/datometry-for-snowflake-teradata-migration/

What is it and is Intel developing it?

I keep hearing the spotify model is dead. Nobody talks about what we are moving to, just what we are running away from. Please tell me not back to waterfall.

Come on splunk, get on Webex already…

A major theme for this fiscal year will be to get technical quick or get left behind. In the era of AI there will no longer be an excuse to not create revenue regardless of your organization.

A friend of mine is impacted and he showed me that their Indian section is hiring tech engineers in mass

Principal Software Engineer, ITC, Karnataka, India, Lead Software Engineer, ITC, Karnataka, India, Senior Software Engineer, Global Converse, ITC, Karnataka, India, Lead Information Security Engineer, ITC, Karnataka, India, Software Engineer II, ITC, Karnataka, India, Software Engineer I, ITC, Karnataka, India, Software Engineer II, Blue Yonder TMS, ITC, Karnataka, India, Software Engineer II, O9 IBP, ITC, Karnataka, India.

Nike Careers India: https://careers.nike.com/jobs?location=India

EH is very less educated with a typical boomer mentality that technology is just made of fluffy.
He is not a strategic guy to understand that in tech driven world, although you don't need to be tech company but tech drives your competitive advantage.
These layoffs may save a dime before year-end but long term impacts on Nike's ability to compete against its competitors is eroding fast

We just heard that AI was used to generate an embedded software application that was previously written by a team of 10 software engineers. It took the team 8 months to create the embedded software.

AI completed the task in 22.6 hours. There was a 4.3% error rate that required manual correction. AI is getting better though...

Layoffs are coming especially for anyone that writes software by hand.

SAP strategy is what it has always been: wall off the garden and force the installed base to adopt mediocre software products.

This strategy will fail massively with AI.

1. it is now very easy to get data into snowflake and databricks, there is already massive demand for people who understand the semantics of SAP S4 data.
2. Using AI is so ludicrously complicated it is essentially a joke, you literally need 4-5 extra BTP licenses just to activate the tools, the plumbing alone requires a mini project of several weeks
3. Even if you go through this painful exercise you literally get nothing that you could not have gotten (even for free) outside of the SAP universe and most of these products are much superior to the SAP tools
4. SAP has no control over the LLM models

the only moat for SAP is writing back into the S4. This is the last defense, every other wall has been breached already

Nike's former CTO agrees with this LKDN post that Nike is divesting the wrong things.
These repeated cuts feel less like a thoughtful long-term strategy and more like a short-term push to satisfy board expectations and quarterly metrics. “Win Now” sounds more like reactive cost-cutting than a real competitive investment plan.

In plain English: Nike should stop overreacting with broad, random headcount reductions and instead focus on making strategic investments that strengthen innovation, technology, and long-term market leadership.

Cutting core capabilities, especially in tech during a digitally driven retail era, risks weakening Nike’s ability to compete, rather than positioning it for sustainable growth.

-- Here is the original post --
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aalokrathod_nikes-win-now-strategy-is-starting-to-look-share-7454251646185996288-0mPs

Nike’s Win Now strategy is starting to look like a Cut Now reality.

Nike just cut 1,400 roles, mostly in tech.

Their official statement? It's part of their "Win Now" strategy to position for future growth. And I cannot stop laughing at the sheer audacity of that phrase.

You're firing your entire technology department during the most technology-dependent era in retail history, and calling it "Win Now"? That sounds like a surrender with better branding.

This brings Nike's 2026 total workforce reduction to approximately 2,175 employees when combined with the 775 roles eliminated in January, representing a staged approach to cost optimization that most FP&A teams recognize as "we didn't get the cuts right the first time."

When you do layoffs in multiple tranches within four months, you're not executing a strategy. You're making it up as you go. The tech department specifically? That's the department that's supposed to help you compete with lululemon's digital-first model and On's DTC dominance. But sure, let's cut those people because nothing says "future growth" like dismantling your competitive infrastructure.

From an FP&A perspective, this is textbook "optimize for this quarter's EBITDA, worry about revenue growth later." Which works great until your board asks why market share is hemorrhaging faster than your cost savings can offset.

And can we talk about "Win Now" as a strategy name? That's what you yell at your fantasy football team when you're down by 30 points. Real strategies have timelines, milestones, and don't require firing the people who actually know how your systems work.

The forecast model practically writes itself. Cut costs in Q2, miss revenue targets in Q4, announce "restructuring 3.0" in Q1 2027, rinse, repeat. Nike's not positioning for future growth. They're liquidating future capability to hit current-year numbers.

But hey, at least the PowerPoint probably looked incredible.