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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
you insensitive clod!
I may not be a smart man, but I know what an inode is.
if I had to guess, I'd say no one cares about you.
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...
You can get your own Computer World site ;)
Though it is odd that they consider themselves "the leading source of technology news and information for IT influencers worldwide" but only mention in a few places that this was "a random sample of their U.S.-based full- and part-time IT staffs."
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Pro: IT Staff is 75% Female
Con: 66% of IT Staff also claimed to be Night Elves
What about for those of us that don't like the US and definitely don't want to work there?
Then please don't read American publications and give us a favor to stay were you are!
(There doesn't appear to be a right answer here, so I'll go for vaguely funny.) Those of us in the US wonder why you're such a grouch?
The government can't save you.
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.
It's been my experience that any fortune 500 company will have a diversified IT department. The staff ranges from network engineers, sysadmins, support, and development.
Life is not for the lazy.
You're out of luck. According to this list ALL top 100 best places to work happen to be in the US! Or maybe this is a survey of US companies only.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
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.
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.
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.
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).
You don't have to be a real professional engineer with qualifications recognised by an association of professional engineers, a four year degree or equivalent etc etc to work effectively in IT. Instead you can do a multiple choice test and call yourself an "engineer" (MSCE in the bad old days) or the even harder to attain title outside of IT - "architect". The title is not really relevant to the skill set or job description, most IT bears very little resemblence to any form of engineering.
So the answer is probably no "real engineers" at all unless they have wandered in from another profession or are the comparitative rare "computer systems engineers" of which there is probably one to every hundred in IT that call themselves "engineers".
But then again historically guys that drove trains were called engineers so call yourself anything you like. If you are going to do that just be prepared for the data entry people that write occasional macros to use the same title.
Anyway, back when I was studying to be a professional engineer I noticed that over in computer science more than half the students were female. Out in the workforce I eventually wandered into IT and most places had zero to two percent female programmers. Where did all those girls go?
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.
Anyway, back when I was studying to be a professional engineer I noticed that over in computer science more than half the students were female. Out in the workforce I eventually wandered into IT and most places had zero to two percent female programmers. Where did all those girls go?
1950's answer: Didn't you know college is for finding someone to marry?
Today's answer: Every place I've been has had a 50% male-female split for programmers, and 75%male/25%female split for sysadmins. Maybe your businesses had poor benefits and/or inflexible hours?
As a customer of theirs, and having seen the level of superb customer service they offer, it comes as no surprise that they'd be a great place to work as well.
It'd be nice if I actually lived close enough to one of their locations to apply. I'm stuck in the morass that is the Charlotte-Mecklenburg area, where it seems all IT is either not hiring, or wants 80hr work weeks as the norm.
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
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 keep hearing this (about consultants) but I find it hard to believe that anyone but the most successful consultants make four times what a systems engineer makes at a run-of-the-mill software company. With that logic, your consultancy would have to be clearing about $500,000 a year (to cover the benefits as well).
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
guess they're not from the east coast either ... they put fairfax county down near fredericksburg and DC is out by annapolis (both about 40 miles off target).
i could live a little longer in this prison
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.
Move to Maryland, DC, VA?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
We happily moved *away* from Maryland 3 years ago (my company folded and closed its NC office 2 years after we moved). I don't think going back is in the cards.
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
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.
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.