Best Places To Work In IT 2010 205
CWmike writes "These top-rated IT workplaces combine choice benefits with hot technologies and on-target training. Computerworld's 17th annual report highlights the employers firing on all cylinders. The Employer Scorecard ranks IT firms based on best benefits, retention, training, diversity, and career development. Also read what IT staffs have to say about job satisfaction. How's your workplace, IT folk?" Read below for a quick look at the top 10 IT workplaces according to this survey.
1. USAA; 2. Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.; 3. JM Family Enterprises Inc.; 4. General Mills Inc.; 5. University of Pennsylvania; 6. SAS Institute Inc.; 7. Quicken Loans Inc.; 8. Verizon Wireless; 9. Securian Financial Group Inc.; 10. Salesforce.com Inc.
missing from the list (Score:5, Insightful)
Independent contractor
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That must have been ranked 0 and fell off the list.
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Remember when Walmart also had a strong "Buy American!" policy?
No. At the time Walmart started their strong "Buy American" advertising campaign, they were already starting to buy from/set up overseas manufacturers with cheap labor practices.
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You as an independent contractor can offer me nothing as a potential employer.
Verizon? (Score:2)
I'm stunned. You'd think given this earlier story [slashdot.org] they wouldn't be anywhere near the top.
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I'm guessing it's an IT staff vs. Sales staff discrepancy.
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UserFriendly's law: a company can be a good workplace for IT staff or a good workplace for salespeople. You cannot have both at once.
Amen, amen, amen.
Find an example contrary to this and I'll mail you a greenback.
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Valve does outside sales? To whom?
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I think Verizon must have offered a $500 bonus for filling in the survey as "happy world".
I work in my mom's basement (Score:2, Funny)
you insensitive clod!
The best place (Score:4, Insightful)
In 2010, the best place is the place that will hire you.
In 2010, the best place chooses you!
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Not if you are willing and able to relocate.
What now? (Score:2)
I just looked at the map for a second but why on earth is Oakland 200 miles North of San Francisco when the two cities are basically right next to each other?
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Probably the same reason Cleveland, OH and Columbus, OH aren't quite in the right spot either. Someone guessed? Threw a dart at a real map until they got "close enough."
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Done it, I live in Sonoma County. Oakland still doesn't add up to 200 miles north by any sane measurement.
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Probably just so they'd be easier to click on...
Either that or a conspiracy to load Oakland up on rollers and slide it away in the night!
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Cary NC is an adjacent suburb southwest of Raleigh NC. The map shows it some 100 miles NORTHwest of Raleigh.
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They were referring to the socioeconomic difference.
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Awesome, so I'm looking at some kind of future map that defies what we know of current plate lines!? I was hoping something like this would be labeled with the locations of the human concentration camps so I could know where I will be living after the great robot revolution
Norton Healthcare (Score:5, Funny)
Con: 66% of IT Staff also claimed to be Night Elves
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Racist!
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Have you worked in healthcare? How about in a female-dominated work environment?
It takes a very special kind of male to work with a bunch of women. Everything you do will likely be taken as offensive; everything you don't do will likewise have fault found with it. If you enjoy catty office politics and grudges for trivial non-intended offenses, go right ahead...
Of course, the same could probably be said for the kind of person who thinks of themselves as a Night Elf.
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I think having a relationship with almost any female provides plenty of training for that already.
Observations and Questions (Score:3, Interesting)
2. Moreover, most companies on the list don't have much business outside the U.S. Interesting.
3. There's a very wide variation in IT's percentage of the total company workforce, and there doesn't seem to be any pattern to that variability. Considering that the biggest part of the IT budget is typically salaries and benefits, it would be interesting to know why some companies consume so much more IT labor than others, even within the same industries.
4. Do any of these companies' IT workers enjoy the benefits of a collective bargaining agreement, or are they "at-will" employees?
5. IT contractors and temporary workers aren't mentioned, nor are outsourcing agreements. Are those workers excluded from the survey? It looks like it. Some (or many) of the company's IT workers may not actually work for the company, and they may be miserable, while IT employees who get paychecks directly from the company might be thrilled.
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Yes the elite coasts too, what have they got that the fly over states do not?
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#1 USAA is out of San Antonio.
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"Elite coasts" because elite now means "where the jobs are"?
The reason less people live in the flyover states is because they don't have companies (generally, USAA is in San Antonio) that rank high in these lists, so there's no reason to move or stay there.
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Time-in starts when they walk in the building, and time-out is when they exit the building?
They only have to clear 40 hours per week to be in the good graces of management?
And they aren't measured by the quality of their output?
Sounds like they got it pretty easy to me.
Outsourcing... (Score:2)
I wonder what they consider "IT"? As I know in the top 25, some of those firms outsource significant portions of their IT infrastructure out to 3rd parties such as IBM Global Services or EDS/HP....
Best? Why just best? (Score:2, Insightful)
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no one would complete the surveys
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Bullshit criteria (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow - the biggest criteria of them all - typical salary - isn't even on the list.
I'd rather have a lot more bucks and crappy benefits than a bunch of 'great' benefits which I may never even use but also serve to tie employees to the employer and reduce upward career mobility.
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It's funny (to me) that you say this because I recently watched a video that told me money isn't a motivator [youtube.com]. I'm sure it's someone trying to pitch their ideology on me. I don't know about you, but I'll gladly take a raise. I have a house to buy and I don't want to go "cheap."
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It's funny (to me) that you say this because I recently watched a video that told me money isn't a motivator. I'm sure it's someone trying to pitch their ideology on me. I don't know about you, but I'll gladly take a raise. I have a house to buy and I don't want to go "cheap."
You should watch that video again because you missed the interesting part:
If you don't pay people enough money, they won't be motivated. The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough so that they're not thinking about the money, they're thinking about the work
(mostly quoted from the linked video)
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I think it is implied that these companies also pay competitive wages.
The USAA page, for example, said employees get two week's salary as a Christmas bonus and everyone got an 18.8% bonus. Even if they paid slightly lower average wages, those "benefits" equalize the equation.
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Past a certain income point, way below that of the sort of jobs we're talking about here, extra money ceases to make you any happier. It doesn't even improve your living standards, it just gives you slightly higher grades of the same luxuries, which you get used to so lose their lustre anyway.
So in fact, not only is salary not the most important point, it's not important at all.
Bad places to work (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked at a company that was in the top 50 on the Fortune 500. They were renowned for their tolerance and diversity. I was fired from that place for being gay. Don't believe everything you read, folks. The best places to work won't be found through survey questions; The best place to work, is a place you can respect and that respects you.
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I'd mod you insightful but I already posted.
I find the best places to work are small companies, the big ones are often full of ignorant professional manager types, political types, and useless people who get promoted for hanging around for a long time.
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Family companies can be horrible places to work if you are not in the actual family. They can expect you to put in a lot of time for free, delay paychecks for weeks for the hours you are being paid for and not even understand why their employees are upset, especially when it's no secret that the pay is being held up so the mone
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You sure it was not because you were hitting on co workers?
Assuming most workplaces have workers of both sexes: would you have asked the same question if gp would have stated to be straight instead of gay?
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Yes. A lot of large companies have extremely strict rules about harassment. One of my recent employers (extremely large, high profile company everyone here has heard about, and is pretty high in the list) would basically instantly fire you if you so much as flirted with someone. Tolerance was literally zero.
"Hey miss XYZ, you look lovely today". If no complain you're okay. If there is (and there's witness or proof), you're gone.
Re:Bad places to work (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been working as a freelancer in IT for large banks in London for a couple of years now and all of them have Charity programs.
The common thing to all those programs is that employees are expected to donate their own personal time and/or money to make the company look good. I have yet to see one in which the company donated worker-hours to charity.
It's all PR on the cheap: that's the way they work.
Thus I'm not at all surprised when their "Diversity" programs tend to really be about projecting an image of "forward thinking and hip" to attract young (and easilly impressed) employees and pre-emptivelly avoid anti-discrimination laws and lawsuits, not about being inclusive.
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Well, then stop being so damn happy!
Obviously you're too young to realize that organizations want sad and dreary workers. Thats why google is wrong [slashdot.org]
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Were you fired for being gay, or hitting on all the other guys? I say this because most of the people I've known who are openly sexual (ie in preference of one gender or another) have been obnoxious poon/dick hounds, commonly treading on "sexual harassment" terms several times a day.
I've known a couple people who were gay who weren't like this: I, and most others, did not know they were gay until some time later.
Re:Bad places to work (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, companies fire people for being gay so they can get sued. I'm also really really sure that your statement with zero context is 100% factually correct.
Sexual orientation is not a protected class in most states, and there is no federal statute, so you can't sue for being fired for being gay.
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Yes, companies fire people for being gay so they can get sued. I'm also really really sure that your statement with zero context is 100% factually correct.
Sexual orientation is not a protected class in most states, and there is no federal statute, so you can't sue for being fired for being gay.
Further, many of the states are 'at will', which means they can fire you and simply not give any reason whatsoever. You'll get unemployment, but that's a small compensation for discrimination.
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Poeple frequently get fired for trivial reasons (Score:2)
You need truly incompetant management for it to be obvious to a court that they have fired somebody because they are gay or whatever the real reason is - but then again a definition
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It seems you stopped reading once sentence too soon:
Don't believe everything you read, folks.
She's not asking you to believe her, per se. She's simply stating that YMMV, which I'd tend to agree with in basically every case.
Without these types of details, your anecdote is quite worthless.
Indeed, as your assessment of it, except within the actual context of what she was trying to say.
Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
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Google provides a whole bunch of perks, but it also expects you to essentially never leave the office(which is part of why they provide all those perks in the first place. In addition, not everyone at Google is going to be a super genius designing new ideas, someone will be supporting their server farms, desktops, and all the usual crap. I would hazard a guess that the top tier Google employees are probably quite happy, but that their infrastructure IT staff are probably fairly miserable.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't say that their infrastructure IT staff are miserable.
Overworked, maybe... Often frustrated... Over-ambitious but unable to effect change, frequently.
Occasionally awakened by their pager, repeatedly, from 3am for the 4th night in a row.... Been there.
But I wouldn't ever use the word miserable.
(Former Google SRE)
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I dunno man, that description sounds like a crap job to me. But maybe Google manages to only hire masochists, so nobody dislikes it?
If nothing else, I think I would put "employer woke me up at 3am four nights in a row" somewhere on my list of: how you know you need a new job.
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To be honest that sounds like any 24 hour systems support role to me, pretty standard fare. Not a great job but someone has to do it and for that line it is a fact of life. Given a sufficiently large organisation someone is in a position where they're going to be paged at weird hours and depending on how your on call works (different people for different days, different people per week, etc) four nights in a row doesn't sound that hard.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
I suppose I've been pampered, but I've never really worked at or known people who've worked at an organization like that, except at very small startups (and there, you know what you're getting, because you know nobody else is on staff). At big engineering firms, there's generally enough staff that, unless it's a totally anomalous disaster (say, the current BP mess), normal operations staff should be able to handle any reasonable contingency. If you need 24-hour staffing, you hire 24-hour staffing: you have shifts of people set up so that someone is always in the office, on the clock, able to handle any likely scenarios. Occasionally, you do have to page people and wake them up when they're off work, but it had better be a genuine once-in-a-decade emergency if you do that, not some "oh the server is down" BS that happens every other month.
Maybe it's a difference between tech-engineering and real engineering? I know people with 40+ year careers in chemical engineering who've been woken up at night probably twice in their entire careers, and those were genuine emergencies. I think they would've been looking for new jobs, and considered their employers incompetent, if people were being woken up multiple times per year for supposed "emergencies". That's the sign of an engineering firm that doesn't know how to handle routine operations.
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Maybe it's a difference between tech-engineering and real engineering? I know people with 40+ year careers in chemical engineering who've been woken up at night probably twice in their entire careers, and those were genuine emergencies. I think they would've been looking for new jobs, and considered their employers incompetent, if people were being woken up multiple times per year for supposed "emergencies". That's the sign of an engineering firm that doesn't know how to handle routine operations.
A tech firm that goes to the same lengths to ensure 100% problem-free operation would get out-innovated by every other firm. In chemical engineering, the cost of failure is very high. In tech engineering, the cost of failure is very low -- just restart the server.
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Is that really the case with Google, though? It's not making do with a few employees, or slim margins. They have 20,000 employees on staff. Twenty thousand! Surely with that kind of payroll they can afford to keep their operations group staffed up 24/7?
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Is that really the case with Google, though? It's not making do with a few employees, or slim margins. They have 20,000 employees on staff. Twenty thousand! Surely with that kind of payroll they can afford to keep their operations group staffed up 24/7?
I had missed that the thrust of your comment was about getting paged because of not having enough staff, not because something went offline. I imagine the real reason is that it comes down to money: it's cheaper to have redundancy in place to handle a partial failure and page people to come in to fix occasional problems as they are needed rather than paying people to sit idle for a lot of the time just in case something goes wrong.
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In a place as large as Google with as many servers as they have, you should really have enough people on call that you don't end up getting called that many days in a row(for that matter, your systems shouldn't go down that many days in a row) except on rare occasions.
I do not work for nor have I ever worked for Google, but the impression I've always gotten is that their top tier engineering talent practically sleeps there, can you imagine what they make the grunts do?
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One might think that in a place the size of Google, they would have some people working nights to take care of issues at night. It's not like they're a Mom'N'Pop where there wouldn't be enough stuff for them to do when there isn't a critical issue.
Engineering != IT (Score:2)
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Well, the difference here is that you're looking at those that develop IT (Microsoft, Google, even Amazon to an extent) and those that leverage IT in non-engineering businesses (the article's list). A more interesting list would be the Top 10 or Top 100 places to work in engineering.
The Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For [cnn.com] is probabl
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I don't know how this survey works, but my company had to apply for the survey of "Best Companies to Work For" which publishes a similar list. They had to distribute a survey to employees and submit supporting materials.
So, it's possible that many companies simply didn't bother applying to Computer World's survey and that this is really the "Top 100 Companies Who Chose to Participate in Our Survey"
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Gaming companies? Like EA, who was sued for forcing employees to work 100 hour weeks with no compensation other than their expected 40-to-60-hour-a-week salary?
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What makes you think that being a bigger company makes them better to work for? Many of these big firms expect long hours, and they've shot their IPO loads already so the financial rewards aren't that great either.
And gaming companies? Those are notoriously bad places to work.
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The United States Postal Service is a better place to work IT than Google? Ya right.
Ever worked for Google?
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Google over the Post Office for IT work, are you kidding me?
"You don't know what it's like out there! I've *worked* in the private sector. They expect *results*."
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One of the top 50 ?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sigh of relief (Score:2)
For every person that looked at this list to further their career, I wonder how many looked at it just to verify that, no, thankfully, their job is *not* as good as it gets.
Bottom 10 (Score:2)
The thing with these types of survey... (Score:4, Insightful)
Opinion from 15 years on the field, 10 companies (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been working in IT as a Software Developer for 15 years now, worked for 10 companies in 3 different countries (i've been a freelancer/contractor for the last 7 years) and across 4 different industries (IT Services, IT Products, Finance, Publishing)
I can tell you that, if you're a really gifted Software Developer in the beginning of your career, the best places to work don't even appear in these surveys:
- In my experience, the best place to start in IT as a Software Developer is a small IT consultancy
In big companies, bureaucracy is rife and mind-numbing - things like getting access to a development Linux machine for example can take from several days (if all you need is an account on an existing machine) to months (if you need a new machine). In a small company you can set-up your own machine (dual boot ur desktop: no prob) or just have a chat with you friendly local sysadmin (often another developer) to get access to one - in a big company you have to fill-in one or more request forms and if it's only getting a new account in an existing machine if you're lucky it will end up in the queue for some guy in India to do at the end of the following week.
In small companies, if you're good you'll be noticed (you're not just another number in a ledger) and they'll give you all kinds of challenging stuff to do - in the beginning of your career this is the fastest way to get exposures to all kinds of technologies. In a large company you're stuck in a corner doing a limited number of things, probably working on an existing, long lived system, whose only educational value is to be an example of how not to design/code software and you won't easilly become known in other teams as being a really good coder and thus getting a chance to work on other systems.
Working in an IT company is better that in a non-IT one for a very simple reason:
- In an IT company (especially services) you are in a profit-centre: the group you are in contributes directly or in a very straightforward way to the company's revenues and profit. They'll be a lot more keen on best practices (including such basic ones as promoting code reuse) and actual development processes (for example Agile) usually with a much beter approach to preparing for a project before coding even starts.
- In a non-IT company you're in a cost-centre: the group you are in costs money and does not visibly contribute to the company's bottom line. There will much less emphasys in optimizing the software development process (since it's results are not as easy to measure) and, especially in large companies, you are much less likelly to find widespread code-reuse programs or any kind of formal or semi-formal software development process (large company's CTOs are often promoted from infrastructure groups - i.e. setting up networks, installing systems - or the business, and are better know for their self-promotion or golfing skills than for their strategic approach to IT).
As for the difference between IT Products and IT Services companies, the former just have a much smaller variance of technologies you might be exposed to (since they concentrate on a couple of products) while the later, having many projects for many client will have a lot more opportunities for learning new technologies.
I strongly advise you to keep away from large well know IT Consultancies since:
- They're sweat shops
- They outsource most of the low level work to India and as an entry level developer you will end up doing only local installation/maintenance tasks (that cannot be outsourced) and/or being trained as a Consultant (which is more of salesman than a techie).
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I work for a Fortune 10 company, it was Fortune 100 but then got aquired. I see absolutely no difference between when we sold outsourcing, and when we added software sales as a division.
The points you made apply, we weren't a profit center but now we are, but no change in attitude or anything else. The software development process was already in place and mature. Code reuse was emphasized, estimation was measured and tracked, everything you claim about smaller companies was there despite it being a cost
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I think one of the reasons a company like USAA is on this list is because they generally LACK the giant corporation bureaucracy you've described above, but yet can provide the benefits of being a giant corporation.
What are those "best benefits"? (Score:5, Interesting)
When I read that the University of Pennsylvania has the best benefit, I said "oh really? like what?". So I went to look further. Does it say anything about typical salary? Nope. Vacation time? Nope. Retirement account (401a,403b) matching? Nope. Anything about how good their health insurance is? Nope. Do they offer free tuition for my family? It doesn't say. This article just says "best benefits" and then offers absolutely zero explanation of exactly why it got that ranking (other than mentioning free tuition for career related course, which is the norm for almost any college or university).
We came in on the list. (Score:2)
They go on and on about a series of awards - given out for various accomplishments. And the "low" turnover last year. Well sure, they cut our salary, but we stayed anyway to keep from becoming unemployed --- that's your low turnover.
But the company across the street came in 11 places ahead of us? Are the people that created this list insane? The place across the way doesn't pay well, but talks about big bonuses in their writeup. Then they go on about them paying for tuition for people - my question is
Fairfax County is in Fredericksburg now? (Score:2)
according to their interactive map.
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You can get your own Computer World site ;)
Though it is odd that they consider themselves "the leading source of technology news and information for IT influencers worldwide [computerworld.com]" but only mention in a few places that this was "a random sample of their U.S.-based full- and part-time IT staffs. [computerworld.com]"
Re:Outside the US? (Score:5, Funny)
(There doesn't appear to be a right answer here, so I'll go for vaguely funny.) Those of us in the US wonder why you're such a grouch?
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Personally, I am very surprised that Google wasn't on that list.
When I worked at Google, it had a lot of stuff going for it: Reasonable pay, free food, free snacks, free massages, relaxed work environment (as long as you don't mind dodging the occasional finger-rocket or nerf dart), bunch of smart people and a lot more benefits not listed here.
I would say that Google is an excellent place to work for 99.9% of hard-core nerds.
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When you're on a high-end IT salary, stuff like 'free food' isn't a perk. One problem with working for Google is that you'll end up being paid several orders of magnitude less than people no more talented or hard-working who just got in at the right time and were showered in options. That's got to cause a lot of resentment when you're writing brilliant new algorithms and have less money than the toilet cleaner.
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So the answer is
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Anyway, back when I was studying to be a professional engineer I noticed that over in computer science more than half the students were female. Out in the workforce I eventually wandered into IT and most places had zero to two percent female programmers. Where did all those girls go?
1950's answer: Didn't you know college is for finding someone to marry?
Today's answer: Every place I've been has had a 50% male-female split for programmers, and 75%male/25%female split for sysadmins. Maybe your businesses had poor benefits and/or inflexible hours?
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I keep hearing this (about consultants) but I find it hard to believe that anyone but the most successful consultants make four times what a systems engineer makes at a run-of-the-mill software company. With that logic, your consultancy would have to be clearing about $500,000 a year (to cover the benefits as well).
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As a customer of theirs, and having seen the level of superb customer service they offer, it comes as no surprise that they'd be a great place to work as well.
It'd be nice if I actually lived close enough to one of their locations to apply. I'm stuck in the morass that is the Charlotte-Mecklenburg area, where it seems all IT is either not hiring, or wants 80hr work weeks as the norm.
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guess they're not from the east coast either ... they put fairfax county down near fredericksburg and DC is out by annapolis (both about 40 miles off target).