Has R fluency overtaken SAS in terms of being more popular as a hiring requirement? Seems like when I first graduated (was a while ago, life went in a different direction and I wasn't an analyst for long), almost all the job listings wanted SAS? While R had only got limited traction outside academia, as it was still relatively young.
 A: Based on the positions I have seen advertised in searches for statistical jobs, yes, fluency in R (or Python) is now more valuable as a job skill than fluency in SAS.  However, there are certainly still many positions where fluency in SAS is desirable or even required.  Most large organisations that employ a data analytics team will have staff specialising in a range of languages, and some aim to be able to have a skill base that can cover all the major statistical languages.
There are still quite a few analysis jobs in government and large corporations that use SAS as the primary language.  For some of these institutions, they started using SAS in the 1980s (or even the late 1970s), and so they have a lot of existing code in this language.  As a rule, the longer an institution has been doing large-scale data analysis, the more likely it is that they have substantial amounts of coding (and ongoing need for) SAS.
I expect that SAS coding will remain valuable, but (at the time of writing) the majority of positions that specify statistical languages now specify R.
