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100 Best Companies To Work For
Misha writes "Fortune.com is publishing a list of 100 Best Companies to Work for. Quite a few tech companies, with a few semi-startups, like Xilinx, who 'protected its employees from a nasty downturn in the industry by refusing to abandon a no-layoff policy. Workers took a 6 percent pay cut, but the CEO led the way with a 20 percent cut.'"
Anyone else notice that glaringly absent from this poll is my employer Hewlett-Packard? Agilent Tech is on there, because they got spun off before the whole massive downslide. They still live the HP Way. Whereas the parent company, and developer of the damn thing, has totally abandoned it. Ask any employee who has been here for more than a few years and they'll tell you the same thing.
Carly is driving us directly into the ground... In my humble opinion. When I started 4 years ago everyone I told said "Oooo... I heard thats a good place to work!". I agreed. But it has slid down ever since.
*sigh*
Jason
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
And Hewlett-Packard Company, once the proud purveyors of the HPWay, are nowhere to be found in the top 100. This is an accurate reflection of the state of affairs, but sad.
Another employee-centric company culture falls prey to the narrow-minded concepts tought in today's business schools.
Each of the companies employs >1000 people. I think it's best to work for a much smaller company, one when you know all coworkers and the CEO says hello to you everyday. I work for such a company and just smile at my friends telling horror stories from the Dilbert side of the reality.
On each of the pages, there are % Minorities and % Women for each company. Why?! Why should this matter. Is this not racist or sexist? Certainly if there was a % White, it would be considered so. Why should the color of a persons skin or their sex be considered over how well they perform their job?
-Vic
Microsoft's hiring process: .364% hiring rate, or one job for every 274 applicants, I'm not sure if I like my chances.
1,312 New Jobs this last year.
360,000 Applicants...
Uh, thats a
Also:
#63 LensCrafters, while not a tech company, this sounded pretty cool:
"Sunglass Hut, a new sister company, joined this year's Visionfest, where managers and execs donned white gloves, top hats, and bow ties to welcome employees, park their cars, and open doors. "
Next time you read something about the principles behind the Fair Trade (anti-globalization) movement -- specifically, The Race to the Bottom *THIS* is exactly what they are talking about.
Labour rights (like not having to work 90 hours straight time, not having to put your hand in a drillpress, unions etc) are things that you will have to GIVE-UP if you intened to be employed in the future... remember, there is always someone more desperate than those in the west... and your Employer would happily exploit them instead of treating you with diginity and respect.
Maybe instead of calling it a "union", we should call it an "employee-owned labor contractor" to deal with all that right-wing anti-union propoganda that's been going around for the past 100 years. After all, in the areas where unions are strong (like the construction trades) that's basically what a union is -- an employee-owned labor contractor, where employers drop by the union hall and say "I need 50 bricklayers for a commercial building at 5th and Dunlap" and voila. The workers are trained by the union through an apprenticeship program, and often the worker's pensions and benefits are administered by the union in this kind of setup, making it seem even more like an employee-owned labor contract organization.
So someone correct me if I'm wrong -- can we just call it an "employee-owned labor contractor" and get around that whole "union label" thing ("unions are for blue-collar workers or incompetents") that keeps unions out of the IT industry?
Regarding outsourcing IT to India -- that's already being done, both via the H1B program and directly. Don't believe that refusing to join a union (err, "employee-owned labor contractor") will preserve your job. It won't. Your employer right now, as you read this message, is investigating outsourcing your job to India. You can bank on it, unless you happen to be your own boss.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
President Bush just put A76 on the Federal Register, meaning that between 425,000 and 850,000 Federal jobs will be outsourced in the next 10 years. Ten percent of those jobs will be outsourced in FY2003, including jobs that have access to your sensitive personal information.
Thanks, George.
I'll just point out that publically-chartered corporations are collectivist systems, whereby a large number of owners appoint a small number of board members to oversee their interests. It seems that you are engaged in more than a little hypocricy to blast one collectivist system without blasting the other. As Enron shows, the fact that it's called a "corporation" rather than a "labor contractor" or "union" does not render it immune to corruption -- any organization where a few people are selected to defend the interests of the many tends to turn into a system where those few people defend their own interests, and to [bleep] with the many.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Protectionism is a refuge of the selfish. Why should you deny Indians (or whoever else they decide to outsource programming to) jobs? Are they somehow inferior to the citizens of your own country?
If Microsoft decided to outsource half their workforce to India, what would happen? A few thousand programmers would go on the job market-- highly qualified programmers, whatever you say about Microsoft. The average programmer's wage would probably go down some, and, after a while, the numbers of new coders coming out of college would decrease to compensate. The programmers that lost their jobs would hardly be starving in the streets-- IT workers are generally adaptable people-- they could go back to school, become teachers, or something else that's needed.
However, for the 3rd world worker, an IT job seems far more important than to a (relatively) wealthy American. For them, a job programming could mean the difference between food on the table, and the gutter.
There are other, more tangible, disadvantages to protectionism. If the US is taxing Indian Software, India will probably return fire. Trade wars like these could be devastating to all sides.
Well, I am a manager at Adobe Systems, and I won't accept resumes in anything except PDF. If you want to get in the door, show me that you can figure out how to use our tools to reach me. And for those that don't have a full copy of Acrobat, we have an online service (free for sample use) that allows you to create a PDF. And I have been know to give copies of Acrobat to high-quality candidates to see what they would do with it. Think of it as an aptitude test.
Lots of electrical engineering and non-technical companies. No pure software engineering once again. In fact I've never seen a software engineering firm listed in this study. Of the hardware/software companies, the reason they get on this list is probably their hardware side. I wonder why software is so hard to manage effectively. Is it because you don't have a reliable measurement of employee productivity? Is is because software is hard to modularize?
I know quite a few people in the medical field, either doctors or management...
Yes, actually it is true. The AMA artificially restricts the number of doctors in the market to insure wages are kept high. Doctors also have the power to keep clinics from hiring additional doctors because it means sharing another piece of the pie. Doctors would rather see 3 month waiting lists than having another doctor on staff.
It's not that doctors don't care about their patients, but keeping their pockets lined with green is pretty high up on the priority lists. Now obviously there are groups such as Doctors without Borders that are exceptions.
Feed this, muther fucker