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Best Places To Work In IT 2010
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.
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.
Independent contractor
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I'm stunned. You'd think given this earlier story they wouldn't be anywhere near the top.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
What about for those of us that don't like the US and definitely don't want to work there?
you insensitive clod!
I may not be a smart man, but I know what an inode is.
In 2010, the best place is the place that will hire you.
In 2010, the best place chooses you!
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?
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
No Google? Seriously?
Clearly, this is a list generated from companies who had to submit their own scorecard... I don't see any of the top tech companies on the list...
Pro: IT Staff is 75% Female
Con: 66% of IT Staff also claimed to be Night Elves
Does this include real engineers, or just "IT workers"?
1. This list looks like it only covers the United States. That's too bad.
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.
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....
Next we need a list of Most Slack Places to Work in IT 2010.
For a while I thought it meant United States Air Force Academy. Interesting I never heard of United Services Automobile Association, and I never guess there main product is insurance.
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.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
For example. Take Adobe. In the USA its an okay company to work for.
In India, its like a dictatorship.
Employees have to sign in when they enter, and every time they exit they sign out. The system computes their time in office, and employees who do not spend 40 hours in office every week are required to compensate by putting in long hours on other days.
Shortfall means bad hikes and low ranking. How much work you do does not matter.
I just can't take the article seriously. You would think the top 100 'best places to work in IT' would include Google somewhere near the top, but it didn't even make the list. The United States Postal Service is a better place to work IT than Google? Ya right. This from a survey that claims 93% of respondents say the most important factor is the work environment. It's missing all the top tech companies - Google, Amazon, Microsoft, any of the gaming companies, Sun, etc. etc. None of the top tech companies make the list at all? Complete and utter bullshit.
It puts Oakland and Mountain View north of Golden Gate Bridge.
I guess Computer World is not in the Silicon Valley and definitely not cartographers.
I worked as a contractor at one of the top 50 companies listed in the survey. I will say that I respected my boss, but she was way over-worked and over-stressed and so far as I know her boss wasn't doing anything to alleviate that. No one was keeping an eye on the quality of coding being done. Program and system documentation was non-existant. The fairly new (at that time) Oracle database group was essentially non-responsive to the needs and requirements of the group I worked in, and they were not taking responsibility for their actions or lack thereof. There was an incredible amount of data redundancy between groups in IT, and an incredible lack of integration of different IT functions. Employees were working a lot of OT. The production support group bordered on incompetent. Very often, people working different projects were changing the same program, and keeping those changes straight bordered on the impossible. There were multiple testing environments and it is was often difficult to impossible to get copies of production data to test against. The same was true for QA environments, but the QA testers did their damndest to do a good job. Oh, and because the DOD was a major customer, it dictated how almost everything could be done - including the fact that you could not test program changes against copies of live data. But this is one of the top fifty best companies to work for? I wouldn't go back there for what I was making at the time. The stress, amound of overhead, lack of training, lack of documentation, lack of managerial support, lack of managerial foresight, highly rigid (unchangeable) environment make it a non-enjoyable place to work. If this company is rank between 40th and 50th on the list, I can't imagine how bad it must be lower down on the list.
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.
is the Chicago suburbs or New Jersey.... At least according to that little map showing all the places on their list. Yea... somebodies on crack.
Never trust these sorts of surveys... I used to work for a company that used to be always ranked very highly. When other people came to audit or investigate they would make sure that everyone who was even remotely negative about the organisation had leave those days.. A great way to skew the results of the people coming into assess what is going on. Of course by skewing it and making sure that only the people who they wanted spoke to the people it made the company very successful.
Actually I would like a list of the BOTTOM 10 or so! I want a job that leaves me doing NOTHING while I collect a paycheck until I get fired for no reason. That way i can take 7 or 8 such jobs and make LOTS of $$$ ROTFL LMAO!
Is that they are really lists of: "The 100 companies that are best at convincing their staff to fill in the questionnaire favourably for some vague promise of reward".
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).
Of course Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. are not in the list. Those are software and computer engineering companies. This list is for places to work in IT, which is not the same as engineering. IT is about system administration, tech support, and having your life sucked out of you. Engineering is about designing features, implementing products, and having your life sucked out of you.
Means not being white; in other words, another form of racism. So instead of a post-racial world dictated not by the color of one's skin but rather the content of their character, we have garbage like this reinforcing the notion of a racial pecking order.
BAH is one of those places that is nice to have on a resume, but while you are there, they work you to death. Wearing suits to the office, drowning in "officialese" and 60 hour (salaried) workweek are the staples of the place. Great if you are straight out of college and looking for resume fodder.
At least in the DC area, BAH is referred to as a "nice place to have been from."
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).
Why don't you tell us where?
There's two answers given as to why people get fired for such trivial reasons. There's the real trivial reason that the person with the power to fire doesn't like the person they fired because of x,y or z - then there's the official lie of incompetance, insuborbination or whatever comes down to one person's word against another.
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 of good management is to only fire people for good reasons because it's a pain to replace them.
I couldn't agree more with this post. As a developer, working for a small consultancy early on in your career can do wonders for your upward mobility later as it will give you a good breadth of experience and help you lay a solid foundation of technical and client management skills.
As a rule of thumb it is a good idea to stay away from the big consultancies, but some mid sized ones (SunGard Consulting Services comes to mind) combine the comfort, relative safety, and availability of dollars for thing like training and conferences of a big consulting firm with the nimbleness and acceptance of new tech of a smaller shop. Also, be sure to do your research on the culture of different regional offices inside any consulting firm as they are very dependent on the management style of the managing partner in charge of the office and can vary wildly from one city to the next.
I thought the place was bat shit insane after the first round of phone interviews.
"Hello, I'm the primary transport for the kids in my household. Due to custody reasons they stay where they are now. I'm not relocating any time soon." The concepts seemed foreign to them.
If you are very bright with OCD, or other mental defects, and don't mind management using your mental defects to take advantage of you, google might be a good place to work.
But I'll work for another commercial/retail bank before I'd work for google.
There is 100% problem free and there is "Let's try not to screw up the same way twice."
I've been woken up multiple nights in a row due to queue problems for a label printer. Management never saw the benefit of buying an extra label printer and loaning it to the company that did the printer software to fix the drivers. And management never saw the benefit of offloading typical queue maintenance to the 24x7 operations group. The problem was a failure to innovate.
I've been woken up multiple nights in a row due to an overflow of oracle transaction log archives. Noone would listen to "Maybe there needs to be a gigabit link into the backup server and there probably needs to be a gigabit link on the sap BW servers." Again, a failure to innovate.
I've lost the most sleep to problems that had existed well before I got there, and due to an unwillingness to innovate persist long after I've left.
Good company. The list shows the benefits you get as an employee... and the people are overall fun to be with. As someone stated, probably one of the only things that USAA can't do better is be small and flexible. When you service 7 million people for bank and insurance, you can't always try "cool" new things that would serve a business purpose, but a) aren't 10 years old or b) cost less than a LOT.
For example, I want to get Nagios or similar in, and put Python on some prod machines for scripting instead of (or alongside) Perl.
AHAHAHHAHA
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 center for decades. Now that software makes money for them, it's already working like it should.
If a big company is run with any competence whatsoever, the same rules apply whether it costs or whether the clients pay for it. In fact, I'm expecting apathy about coding to grow just because clients are now paying instead of the company. Less incentive to control costs rather than more now. But that won't happen because the company wants to remain competitive.
Of course, they just fired everyone who wasn't absolutely necessary over the past 3 years. So we don't have dead weight, and the same stuff gets done with fewer people. They need to find other ways to trim costs, so they are forced to look at the hard parts of consolidation and migration and shutting things down - stuff they should have started with in the first place. So naturally development is part of the "everything" they want to make cost-efficient.
The best place I've worked for had less than 50.
I'm satisfied with my current employer, which has several thousand. The bureacracy isn't horrific, and I have decent abitility to innovate. But its not at all the same experience.
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.
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 where are the people going to college? The closest acredited school is 30 miles away and doesn't do much at night. All we have locally is community colleges and a couple of non-accredited "universities".
according to their interactive map.
i could live a little longer in this prison
I have worked for USAA since mid-2006, it is truly an incredible company. They are very smart with their finances, they take VERY good care of their membership and their employees, and there is a solid culture of openness between multiple departments and management levels, all the way up to the CEO himself.
"Hey Gary, why are we wearing bras on our heads?"
working From Home
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
Well, my company made it in to the top 25, and I can honestly say that I would not rather work for any of the companies ahead of mine. It is the best IT company to work for in our state.
Nevermore.
Put the "Best places" in quotes. The "Best Places to Work" are generally the worst places to work that have hired a PR firm to get them on one of these best of lists so someone, anyone will want to work for them.
If I was in the market for a new job, I'd be looking for companies who operate as a Results Only Work Environment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE
I am SO done with this hourly nonsense.
The second-worst place I've worked had about 50 employees. The worst place I've worked is my current employer, which has about 1800 employees worldwide, and about 200 in its primary US location where I work. The bureaucracy here is ridiculous; getting development Linux machines was like pulling teeth, took months, and we're still having a lot of trouble in that area. By contrast, when I worked at Intel (a giant company), getting development machines there was easy. I basically got a blank check to order what I wanted from a different division of the company, and we set them up the way we wanted. At Freescale (another giant company), it wasn't as good, but it still wasn't nearly as bad as my current company.
The big companies were easily my favorite jobs. Sure, they had bureaucracy, but not nearly as bad as this medium-size public company I'm at now. The corporate processes were a lot better too; the big companies have been around long enough to evolve processes that work better, whereas the company I'm with now basically tries to act like a small company, but has no clue how to manage large teams across continents. For instance, there are no status meetings. Ever. I have absolutely no idea what other people in my team are doing, what other teams elsewhere are doing, or really what the heck is going on besides my little piece of the puzzle. I don't even have much of an idea about any timetables, roadmaps, when anything is due, etc. The only time I ever learn anything is when my manager directly tells me, through gossip, or I overhear something. Big companies have meetings that might seem like a waste of time to some, but the better-managed groups have managers that keep you abreast of what's going on, and your place in the puzzle and how your work relates to everything, without letting you get bogged down in all the politics and stuff going on above. Generally, I spent little time in meetings in my large companies, mainly just a weekly status meeting, and a monthly department meeting.
There's also no ability to innovate here, as everything is micromanaged to an extreme degree. I haven't actually counted, but it seems like there's as many managers (including tons of project managers) as there are engineers. I didn't have that problem in the big companies. Managers there (esp. at Intel where training is a big deal) knew how to not micromanage and let their people work efficiently.
I worked for one of the top 50 until they did a 20% layoff in 2008, Benefits were OK but for the industry they are in you would expect them to be a whole lot better. Still tryng to figure out how you make the top 50 after such a large IT layoff.
For a magazine, this is a fine survey. If you want real information, I wouldn't put a lot of faith in it. According to the Computerworld description, they went through a contact at each company to obtain the data. For companies and contacts that are honest, you may get a somewhat accurate result (although possibly for a small section of the company rather than the company at large). E.g. USAA, has always seemed like a decent company when I've personally interacted with them.
On the other hand, for dishonest companies/contact, the information could be completely bogus and have no connection to reality. E.g., I'm looking at you Booz-Allen!
In any case, I would suggest looking at the results as entertainment, not as data.
As a long-time USAA customer, no surprise it's a good place to work...
As for working in IT... yup, did it for 15 yrs, hated it. Not so much the work (I really liked the work) but the "techies with titles" that are your managers who don't know how to lead and have no people skills - they only know how to manage upward to keep kissing the hand the feeds them while treating their employees like shit. Fuck them.
Did the IT management thing... hated it. Long hours, pay really wasn't that great... lots of vacation time I was too busy to use only to lose it at the end of the year. Your employees hate you and at the same time they'll do whatever it takes to fuck you so they can get promoted into your job. Fuck them - let them have the shitty job.
These days I'm doing field service for Nortel PBX's (81C's, CS1000's, etc...) and leveraging my IT background as we move into unified communications (MS OCS 2007, etc...). LOVE IT. Work from home, have a company car, wear jeans, haven't seen my boss in over a month - and lucky if I talk to him for more than 5 minutes every few weeks. No office politics or bullshit, no backstabbers to watch out for - I just head out every morning and do my job. Company is well established - 50 yrs or so with a large geographical footprint up and down the eastern seaboard and about 300 employees spread across the footprint. Pay is about what I was making as an IT manager, but with 10% of the workload and headaches. Plus I'm hourly, so there's OT and prevailing wage premium when working at a public sector site. Nice thing is my work is a specialty - not many people know how to do it - so I'm no longer competing with 1,000's of unemployed people with MCSE's for a job that pays 30% less than it did 10 yrs ago.
And where I am - the benefits aren't great, but the work is satisfying, many days I'm home by 2:00 and done for the day (but I'm still on call til 5 and paid for the full day) and there's lots of freedom and autonomy.
I worked at a company that made this list. We learned that we should rate the company highly - otherwise we had to waste time in meetings discussing how we could improve employee satisfaction.