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Best Places To Work In IT
jcatcw writes "Computerworld's annual summary of the best places to work in IT lists companies that excel in five areas of employment: career development, retention, benefits, diversity, and training. According to the scorecard, the top five retention methods are: competitive benefits; competitive salaries; work/life balance; flexible work hours; and tuition reimbursement. Of the top 100 companies, 64 expect the number of U.S.-based IT staffers to increase in 2007, on average by 7%. Here is the whole list. The top three are Quicken Loans, University of Miami, and Sharp HealthCare."
Since you posted as "Anonymous Coward" why didn't you share your employer's name with us?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Frankly, I've always enjoyed in smaller companies, because the beauracracy is far less annoying and you can be more personable with the people in the company. They never really include those companies, because if they actually tried, they'd have thousands of companies to interview and it would take too much time. But if they really wanted a list that made sense they'd include smaller businesses. Expand the definition a little more and stop making such a big deal about being a huge corporation.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Maybe my standards are different, but the companies on that list don't seem very interesting.
It reminds me many years ago ('97) when I and a coworker decided we had had enough of the company we were working for, and decided to make a top ten list of companies we wanted to work for. Both of us landed jobs with our number one choice, but our top ten lists were very different. Mine was a list of coolest companies to work for, and mostly startups (Cygnus Solutions being at the top of my list), and his were more "nicest" companies to work for (SAS being at the top of his list, they have a 35 hour work week, pianist in the cafeteria, gyms, etc).
Perks are great and all, but if the work is not intellectually challenging, or just patience-challenging, and I'm not pushing the envelope, I'm going to be bored out of my skull and not improving my skills, which is a terrible way to spend almost one third of your life.
Exactly what groundbreaking technologies are being developed at a loan website, besides finding new ways to get past my spam filters?
I worked for a Fortune 100 company for 25 years before retiring and starting my own computer repair business. I saw this company go from the best to the worst in that quarter of a century. I was one of the lucky ones and got something from them before they imploded; a mire shadow of once an industry giant. The last several years were tough, but by then I had too much of my career invested to leave voluntarily. I am much happier now that I can dance to my own tunes.
Amusingly, there is a point to be made here. Unrelated to this survey, but at my own company we have regular employee satisfaction surveys, and the inevitable result is that whatever areas on the survey are considered to be low-scoring, the company response is to implement new policies, training, or processes that are far more annoying than any perceived complaints before.
For example, a common complaint is "feedback", some employees feel they don't get enough feedback. First, this is incredibly ambiguous as to what this really means or if it's even really true that employees don't get enough feedback, even if some think they don't. Second, it's very possible that even if "feedback" is the lowest score on the survey, it still is easily high enough to suggest that 80+% of the employees don't consider it a problem.
And yet, in that special MBA approach to things, whatever the lowest score is must be a problem to be focussed on. So the company keeps implementing increasingly onerous mandatory review and feedback processes. At this point we now have twice yearly reviews of personal goals, yearly 360 reviews, yearly "official" reviews from our manager. At least three "all-hands" quarterly meetings every quarter. It sometimes seems that you can't get any actual work done because of all mandatory "Let's make everyone happier" procedures that keep coming up. And many of these things are not even cheap! I've been told that 360 Reviews, for example, are actually fairly expensive.
This is truly another Survey of Dubious Quality (tm). If they wanted to take real measurements of retention and employee satisfaction, they would ask the top 1% of the talent at said companies. Why is Google, Microsoft, IBM, and all the other big players in the industry? Not a single one is on the list, yet they continue to attract, hire, and keep the best talent.
There is no way job at Quicken Loans is better than Google or Microsoft by any stretch of the imagination.
I got nothin'
The best place to work is your own, start a business.
I'm a top-tier UNIX support guy that supports a bunch of these IT groups in the list. We save their bacon when they have a "senior" moment and screw the pooch. Or our software breaks or fails. In that theater, everyone gets to earn their bones. You get to know "organizations" instead of individuals, because you are an outsider. You never get just one guy on the phone, crying in his mountain dew. The "system" may have from 3 to as many as 20 heads, all siloed in their perfect knowledge of "how it's supposed to work". This may be the first time some of them have met. On the field of desperation. The help you HAVE to provide a customer like this tells much about what they really know about "How it works". The list almost seems an upside-down chart of my most "clueless" customers to more and more competent. Really. It scared me. To Know that IT nirvana is inversely proportional to operational competence. And now somebody wants me to think that's good? My head exploded. Ya wanna know what scared me more? I was quizzed by the same rating company (ramdomly?) last week at MY company. I'm REALLY hoping this ain't a trend. It's too many years till retirement :(
I'm all for Minneapolis, but honestly, how the hell does General Mills get on the list for Minneapolis, but they exclude other companies like Seagate? Where the hell is Honeywell? And what does General Mills do that qualifies as IT? I would imagine the Mayo Clinic would be more IT than GM, and much of a better place at that, and that's not on the list? Who's willing to place bets that these are companies that the authors' friends and families work at?
I know many (most?) Slashdotters don't follow sports to any large degree, however this one jumped out at me. From within TFA:
[Quicken Loans] founder Dan Gilbert, who also owns the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers, invites employees to travel to Cleveland to see the team in action via the Cavs Express.
Ummm....the company is headquartered in Livonia, Michigan -- big-time Detroit Pistons territory. Might as well offer your employees tickets to see the Ohio State Buckeyes or Chicago Bulls -- equally hated rivals of Michigan sports fans...
[ObDisclaimer -- I'm a big Ohio State fan...give me the tickets!]
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
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Who moderated the parent up? Do you have any proof that:
a) that anonymous coward is the same anonymous coward from the grandparent?
b) that the anonymous coward actually works for quicken loans and not say, for Countrywide or Microsoft?
Why is the parent "5 informative" and not "5 funny?"
Your name was not required on the form, but the teachers issued specific instructions about how to hand the forms forward,
That's when you "accidently" drop the forms on the floor, scattering them.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Maybe having to work 60h/week and be active part of their "culture" is not so appreciated by people that are not socially challenged.
you may not like the things they make but how does that invalidate they may have a Great IT department that people actually ENJOY working at? That's really really bad logic.
Since Google was rated the #1 company to work for by Fortune, they only explanation for their complete absence in the Computerworld survey is Google's failure to purchase a full page ad in this months issue of the magazine.
-- Will program for bandwidth
That's because this was a survey for "IT people". This means system admins and other menial technology related fields. It doesn't mean "Engineering" or the like.
I work for a top-tier IT consulting firm, and while my company's not on the list (but all of our competitors, except our nemesis, IBM, made the list), I've actually worked on client projects in nine of the companies on the list. Save for one of the companies, I could not believe that these were the best IT companies to work for. Then I re-read the criteria -- competitive salaries, work/life balance, flexible work hours, and tuition reimbursement -- then it all made sense. A lot of these companies are where the driftwood wash ashore and hang out until they catch a bigger wave out, or just rot away being happy deadwood.
Let me explain.
My current client's IT department (in top 30 on the list) has one of the lowest morale I've seen. Projects are rarely ever delivered as promised, and even if they hobble across the finish line, the solutions are often half-baked and incur undue additions to the already ridiculously heavy production support cost. Business runs the show, but are increasingly dissatisfied with IT's delivery (why does it cost so much?) and rely more and more on consultants or "heros" to get things done. Good, standard processes erode away and management throws on more and more bureaucracy onto the eroding base, thinking that having three Project Managers on a project will get things delivered faster. The "heroes" either turn into lawless cowboys that run the show however they like, or if they're really actually competent and sharp, leave on the first train out that offer them better positions. The deadwood never drift out (company's pride is that they never let people go), so what you get over the years is accumulation of deadwood.
So let's go back to the criteria: competitive salaries, work/life balance, flexible work hours, and tuition reimbursement. This spells, "overpaid staff that leave at 5 on-the-dot, working from home on random days, minimal effort on the job, steady paycheck, perhaps get an MBA or certifications to get even better paid." Meets all the criteria, but I would NOT work here. What they didn't figure into the equation were "challenging and interesting work" and "solid mentoring and career development."
... believe they are in the top 1% of the talent at their company.
For what its worth, I'm in the other 20%. I have no illusions that I am the best hacker I've ever met, or even the 47th best. I produce code which, on a great day, has bits of brilliance, on a good day, is solid and worksmanlike, and on a bad day is junk which I'll have to replace the next day... just like almost every other programmer I have ever met.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I'm sorry, but the most important ranking criteria is missing. How about working on a product that, in itself, gives you joy? Let's face facts. Most of us spend the best part of waking hours, at least 5 of 7 days per week, pouring all available energy into this job. If you don't love it and you don't have an emotional alignment with the product then that effort is unhealthy for you.
just because they're a pain to deal with from the outside doesn't mean it isn't fun from the inside (can't you imagine how entertaining it is to be able to be an asshole to people 8 hours a day?)
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I am willing to take a cut on my pay for many other factors: location, atmosphere of the area where the office is (it really weighs you down to go to the office day in day out in the middle of an industrial dump or a neighborhood with no amenities or unsafe), kind of work.
The money does a lot of the talking, but should by no means be the only thing whispering on you ear.
I do agree about not caring about who people I work with, but I don't agree about working with unpleasant people. If there is somebody rude, loud or smelly either they change or one of us has to go. As simple as that (and since I am more senior, the few times this has happened it wasn't me doing the walking. Morale for you newbies: be polite, take a shower every day and you'll have the old farts in your side).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It's possible that they're experimenting with a new alternative fuel source; burning karma.
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Seems around 2000/2001 the term IT came about. What is it? I'm amazed Google wasn't #1, but I'm guessing it's more of a Computer Science company rather than IT. At least around here IT tends to mean networking, maintenance, basically to keep systems running without actually creating any software or hardware that does the jobs. So it IT == computer maintenance person?