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Best Places To Work In IT 2010

Posted by kdawson on from the wish-you-were-here dept.

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.

33 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. missing from the list by mentil · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Independent contractor

    --
    Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
    1. Re:missing from the list by bbbaldie · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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...

  2. I work in my mom's basement by NoBozo99 · · Score: 2, Funny

    you insensitive clod!

    --
    I may not be a smart man, but I know what an inode is.
  3. Re:Verizon? by nschubach · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm guessing it's an IT staff vs. Sales staff discrepancy.

    --
    Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
  4. The best place by michaelmalak · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In 2010, the best place is the place that will hire you.

    In 2010, the best place chooses you!

  5. Re:Outside the US? by nschubach · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.
  6. Norton Healthcare by ArbitraryDescriptor · · Score: 5, Funny

    Pro: IT Staff is 75% Female

    Con: 66% of IT Staff also claimed to be Night Elves

    1. Re:Norton Healthcare by pjt33 · · Score: 2, Funny

      Racist!

  7. Re:Outside the US? by bendodge · · Score: 4, Funny

    (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.
  8. Observations and Questions by BBCWatcher · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Observations and Questions by jmcbain · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Of course it's for the US only. ComputerWorld is a US publication. Slashdot is a US website. If you want something for your own country, why are you even reading the articles posted here? Go to one appropriate for your own country. Use some common sense. That's like me reading a Japanese publication about best IT companies and expecting it to cover US companies.

  9. Best? Why just best? by Lord_of_the_nerf · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Next we need a list of Most Slack Places to Work in IT 2010.

  10. Bullshit criteria by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Bullshit criteria by doctrbl · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's funny (to me) that you say this because I recently watched a video that told me money isn't a motivator. I'm sure it's someone trying to pitch their ideology on me. I don't know about you, but I'll gladly take a raise. I have a house to buy and I don't want to go "cheap."

      You should watch that video again because you missed the interesting part:

      If you don't pay people enough money, they won't be motivated. The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough so that they're not thinking about the money, they're thinking about the work

      (mostly quoted from the linked video)

  11. Bad places to work by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
    1. Re:Bad places to work by Aceticon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I've been working as a freelancer in IT for large banks in London for a couple of years now and all of them have Charity programs.

      The common thing to all those programs is that employees are expected to donate their own personal time and/or money to make the company look good. I have yet to see one in which the company donated worker-hours to charity.

      It's all PR on the cheap: that's the way they work.

      Thus I'm not at all surprised when their "Diversity" programs tend to really be about projecting an image of "forward thinking and hip" to attract young (and easilly impressed) employees and pre-emptivelly avoid anti-discrimination laws and lawsuits, not about being inclusive.

    2. Re:Bad places to work by leomekenkamp · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You sure it was not because you were hitting on co workers?

      Assuming most workplaces have workers of both sexes: would you have asked the same question if gp would have stated to be straight instead of gay?

      --
      Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
    3. Re:Bad places to work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes, companies fire people for being gay so they can get sued. I'm also really really sure that your statement with zero context is 100% factually correct.

      Sexual orientation is not a protected class in most states, and there is no federal statute, so you can't sue for being fired for being gay.

    4. Re:Bad places to work by HogGeek · · Score: 2, Funny

      Well, then stop being so damn happy!

      Obviously you're too young to realize that organizations want sad and dreary workers. Thats why google is wrong

  12. Bullshit by dlgeek · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Bullshit by Eskarel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Bullshit by Antony+T+Curtis · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.
    3. Re:Bullshit by pasamio · · Score: 2, Insightful

      To be honest that sounds like any 24 hour systems support role to me, pretty standard fare. Not a great job but someone has to do it and for that line it is a fact of life. Given a sufficiently large organisation someone is in a position where they're going to be paged at weird hours and depending on how your on call works (different people for different days, different people per week, etc) four nights in a row doesn't sound that hard.

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      I always wondered where this setting was...
    4. Re:Bullshit by Trepidity · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

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      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    5. Re:Bullshit by Eskarel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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?

    6. Re:Bullshit by sjames · · Score: 2, Insightful

      One might think that in a place the size of Google, they would have some people working nights to take care of issues at night. It's not like they're a Mom'N'Pop where there wouldn't be enough stuff for them to do when there isn't a critical issue.

  13. One of the top 50 ?? by mikein08 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  14. Re:This is clearly a bogus list... by Antony+T+Curtis · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.
  15. The thing with these types of survey... by ewrong · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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".

  16. Opinion from 15 years on the field, 10 companies by Aceticon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

  17. What are those "best benefits"? by LordKronos · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

  18. Re:Verizon? by OneAhead · · Score: 2, Insightful

    UserFriendly's law: a company can be a good workplace for IT staff or a good workplace for salespeople. You cannot have both at once.

  19. Re:Verizon? by jnaujok · · Score: 2, Informative

    Sorry, I know people in Verizon IT, and they refer to their job as "the Death March" and their building as the "Tower of Doom". According to their (admittedly anecdotal) observations, they see 3-5% turnover in their groups every week.

    I think Verizon must have offered a $500 bonus for filling in the survey as "happy world".

    --
    Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.