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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.
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
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.
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.
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).