User:StaceyHamilton/BlogEntry: 2009 January 16 10:34:55 EST
From sasCommunity
Guest blogger Stephenie Joyner tells the tale of the first time she was hired at SAS:
The choice was clear: I could “bend” the truth and pretend to know more than I did, or I could run my first SAS job so that I wouldn't have to lie in the interview.
In 1982, I applied for a technical writing position at SAS. I didn’t have the required SAS experience listed in the job description, but I knew I could learn quickly if given the opportunity. The weekend before my interview, I decided that I needed to become a SAS user—fast!
In the days before laptops and the Internet, getting access to SAS was not nearly as easy as it is today. I wasn’t attending a university, and I didn’t have SAS where I worked, but I had a friend who did. I invited him to my house, and he brought with him a remarkable piece of hardware—a TI Silent 700—that would enable me to run a SAS job.
The TI Silent 700. A terminal with an acoustical modem and a printer for output. It was a kind of portable teletype.
See the things that look like cupholders? That’s where you placed the telephone receiver to use the modem! Using this “miracle machine,” I wrote a SAS program, dialed into the mainframe computers at TUCC† to access SAS software, and ran the SAS job remotely. WooHoo! I had just run my first SAS job!
During my interview the next day, the hiring manager asked if I had ever used SAS. I nonchalantly (and truthfully) replied, “Oh yes, I have run a few jobs on my own, and I think SAS is great software and it’s really easy to use." I’m pretty sure that statement helped me get my first job at SAS.
Although lots of things have changed since then, SAS is still great software and it’s still easy to use. We’d love to hear about your first experiences with SAS. How did you get access? Why did you use it? Did it help you get a job? Share your stories with us.
†Triangle University Computing Center at the Research Triangle Park, NC. In the dark ages, when computers took up entire rooms and required several people to maintain them, many companies bought computer time from TUCC (and places like it) rather than purchasing and maintaining their own computers.
