Glassdoor: Airbnb dethrones Google as the best tech company to work for in U.S
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
Perfect Places for A Personality People also Like Cults (Amazon, Bridgewater Associates)
Places for people who like to Chillax and Still Get Paid (Lucrative BigCo with flex-time, summer hours, no morning standups, WFH)
Places for parents (BigCo with generous maternal leaves, daycare or benefits for families)
Places for brogrammers (Genius formerly known as RapGenius)
Places for 'Silicon Valley' Show Lovers (Company mission statement that includes the phrase "change the world," Nerf Guns part of office deco, uncompromising nature to adopt the latest cool tech like Node.js)
Places for introverts (Places with offices for employees, not open office plans, WFH options; in fields that are less sales-oriented and more academic, niche research companies)
Curious if anyone else has any ideas on the 'ecology' of tech companies and what 'animals' are best fit for which one!
Overall those systems frustrate me to the point of finding the hiring managers name and their email address (just google for example @xcompany.com to see how their work email address is formatted) and sending them a personal message with my resume attached. This works at times, while other times it doesnt. But, either way I dont have to deal with those horrible CV/resume data entry systems. Also, since not many are using this hack Im sure the recruiting manager saw my resume vs. it going into a black hole.
You can either reply here or email careers@stackoverflow.com. Thanks!
Needless to say, I didn't even get an interview. But I'm in a fortunate position where I can choose the company I want to work for and that business, with their buggy application process, failed to impress me.
They're lucrative because they have money to throw around, you don't have to work very hard because they don't like risk anyway so everything moves slowly.
The downside is that work is boring, slow-paced with old tech. Think J2EE stuck on Java 6, on the front you have to use jQuery 1.7 and they need a committee to decide to validate usage of jQuery 1.8. Sometimes you might get to write a cool prototype with recent tech but they'll just say "yeah it's cool but we can't integrate it with our legacy code", etc. Once in a while they pick a shiny new tech for their "new platform" (like Angular) but by the time their whole codebase is migrated the "new platform" is obsolete ("Angular 1 sucks I want to use Angular 2/React!")
Does these still exist?
Where do I work? A big wall street bank most people in this thread would never bother replying to if recruited. This situation may be unique...I don't know, but you can't find out without exploring the opportunity.
I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday who went into detail about the exceedingly generous PTO packages offered by her employers when she worked in the banking industry. I was very impressed.
Of course, I'm selling this year's PTO back to the company because I was under pressure not to use it, and since every week is crunch time, required working hours are 8:30-6 Mon-Sat in the office.
Point being, offerings are meaningless unless corporate culture allows you to use them.
Instead look up the list of the most expensive undergraduate tuition in US, filter for schools that has the (largest price tag * (1 - percentage of demonstrated financial aid met)) / academic rigor ratio.
To elaborate: Apparently the idea is that people could use it as travel time for weekend trips. Drive up to the Hamptons on Friday after lunch, have a full Saturday/Sunday to relax at the beach. Though I use it primarily for afternoon naps.
Google on the other hand has like 60,000 employees and IPO'd over a decade ago. It almost goes without saying that, as a large, more mature company it's a lot harder to keep employees happy.
So... not really a fair comparison IMO.
I get that pre IPO companies have that advantage, but a company like Google which makes absurd amounts of money also has its advantages, like being able to afford giving their employees high salaries and also better work life balance. I am not sure that Google gives its employees that though, at least not the latter. Plus, a more mature company should have its processes already ironed out and no more growing pains.
I've been at Google for over a year, and I'd say that you get as much "work-life balance" as you can be bothered to make for yourself. As far as I can tell there's no penalty for choosing to do that, but not everybody does.
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What you have said here is simply not true. I know MANY people who maintain an extremely solid work life balance and are doing just fine, career wise. I would include myself on this list. I work a 9-5, I take all of my vacation, and avoid opening my laptop outside of the office. I don't keep my corporate account on my phone. I'm well compensated, I've been promoted without incident, and never once received feedback that I wasn't showing enough leadership or working hard enough. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Please stop assuming that what you think you know about Google is true (or universal to the Google experience).
There are anecdotes about amazing contractors who can work 8 hours a week showing up pointing out problems and offering smart solutions but almost all of them can do that because at some point they were putting in 100 hours a week.
If you care about moving upward yes you will need to do more than show up for 8 hours.
Upward, yes. The top, no
>If you care about moving upward yes you will need to do more than show up for 8 hours.
This is not true. If you need to show up for more than 8 hours at the bottom to move up, then you are working at a place where it is expected you will show up for more than 8 hours once you move upward. In my experience, there are companies where almost everyone does 8 hours or less, and there are companies where the work never stops. It's an office culture and it doesn't change with titles, from my experience.
Most people who stay longer at offices do so of their own volition, yet mentally count those hours as work even if they aren't exactly working on a task delegated to them.
A company like Airbnb hasn't gone through like 1/100000 of the pains that Google has gone through. Think of all the products Google has built (some successful and some not), think of all the economic environments Google has had to go through (2000 meltdown, 2008 meltdown), think of all the employees who have worked there (there's 60k now, but google has probable cycled through 5x that amount).
Airbnb has made like, one product? Through a relatively small stretch of time, while probably still using most of their original employees. It's an electric time to be at Airbnb no doubt, but I wouldn't trumpeted them as the best place to work just yet.
"We're going to have a baby!" "I just got engaged." "We just hired this great engineer." "We're going to Hawaii for Christmas."
I could go on, but you get the point. Once you've had Google's free food and other perks for a while, they become baseline. They're just part of what's normal.
Seriously, this happens?
It's comical.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/designer-sues-airbnb...
I don't know how copyright works for interior design, but if it were a book she wrote, and then someone else rewrote without permission, there'd clearly be room for claiming a violation.
What does that mean? The "algorithm" could be anything, possibly not even an algorithm.
It's so silly, it's sad.
The fact venturebeat only shows Tech company makes it a bit better than the original ranking since it's at least comparing Apples to Apples: On the original ranking the fast food chain In-N-Out, or grocery store HEB is a better place to work at than Apple, or Microsoft (not even in the top 50 in that list)
But even, a startup and a tech giant shouldn't be on the same list.
The ranking can be found here: https://www.glassdoor.com/Best-Places-to-Work-LST_KQ0,19.htm
EDIT: Also presenting best companies to work on 1 dimension is somewhat useless. Glassdoor probably weighted Salary, Flexibility of hours, career opportunities, etc. their own way. A better ranking would let you weight the different options yourself, or at least give you the option of a few presets weights: Best place for 'workaholics', best place for family people, best place for career growth, etc.
Unless you think they're lying?
E.g., Uber is a 4.4 on glassdoor right now, where are they?
(full disclosure: I did work there previously, along with Google, but now work for neither)
curious why apple would be higher but microsoft doesn't seem to be a surprise.
Although I suppose in raw numbers most of their staff are not engineers, so maybe it wouldn't be a fair comparison.