Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
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)
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Couple of interesting points here. First of all Quicken Loans seems to make the list every year, while others come and go. Sounds like the real deal to me. However... Second, I can recall 8 years or so back that Walmart was up there. At the time, they had a strong anti-outsourcing policy. NOW, they outsource all they can. And they are missing from the list. Remember when Walmart also had a strong "Buy American!" policy? :-P
I guess the moral is it may be great to work somewhere now, but brace yourself...
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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).
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?