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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...
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
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.
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.