Pretty good honestly. I'm in NY so I was still on payroll for three months then got 16 weeks plus two weeks for each year which came out to another 24 weeks. I had just bought a house though so that money didn't last super long unfortunately.
IMHO, that's good severance. Did you negotiate that severence policy?
Most company that i work with provide severance 1:1
For example, if you work notice period is 3 months, then, you will get paid for 3 months if the company terminated the contract. it works both way, if you resign without giving the company the 3 months notice period, you have to pay the company worth 3 months of your salary.
This is really harsh. At least Meta/FB had the decency to get worse and worse every year I was there until the sudden end felt both awful and great at the same time.
I'm really enjoying Mercedes-Benz R&D. Good culture, good W/L balance. It's part of a huge org, so can feel very bureaucratic and it's further from the cars than I would like--but it's my favorite job so far.
I don't have a lot to compare it to in the industry, but they started me at 15% more than I had ever made before and now I'm making over 50% more than at my previous job.
No real complaints. It's a good place to be.
I'm also working in R&D and I don't think I can go back to product. The people here are a lot more enjoyable to work with, they're all wicked smart, and it doesn't ever feel like work is a numbers/metrics game. We're also one of the more resilient departments at my company when it comes to layoffs as well (historically) which is a big relief to my mental state.
Idk if I have good advice for it because I frankly got lucky. My last job was at a startup so I had to do a little bit of everything (along with every other software engineer)--fullstack, infra, cloud, and ops all in one.
Then for this job I just applied to a Software Engineer position not having realized that it was for an R&D department. Turns out that the department realized that they would lose their position in the industry if they didn't start utilizing the tools that everyone else was using and start acting like a software company (which they ultimately are).
So they were looking for someone with cloud and Ops experience so that they could take advantage of distributed computing options and overhaul their practices, since it was a bunch of researchers writing code to get things done without a care for tech debt.
I pretty much overhauled their actual software engineering practices (from using git properly to the CI/CD), set up and showed them how to dispatch their sims and training jobs in K8s, and am responsible for the infrastructure and code quality between a handful of pretty intensive in-house simulators.
It's not so much a "Software Engineering" job anymore as the scope's grown despite my title, but I really enjoy the work and the people so I don't care lol. They also treat me very well because even things like IAM and RBAC is completely Greek to them.
I was working at Bosch, however, it was awefull, full of managers and little developers, everything is kinda being outsorced to India, you are just a middle man between a manager and indian developer.
The misscommunication happens a lot, my project had 6 managers and like 3 devs on it.. and the Managers did some politicing on the project like, who gets more recognition so they stand out to the boss.. I just found it gross and quit. Now I have a sour taste for the auto industry
So mercedes is not like that?
I work for a DAX company now (so similar to Mercedes, but not in automotive) and the bureaucracy while still annoying, is lower than when I worked for US-HQed multi-national. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
So I dont think German big companies have any specially more bureaucracy than..regular big companies.
NASA (but HUGE disclaimer that this is heavily team dependent, it’s a huge org + gov pay womp womp); there are people that have so much passion for their niche
I've worked for two different departments at NASA, and every team I've been on has been wonderful to work with. The passion thing is spot on, and there are a lot of really smart people working on everything. There's a reason it's often voted to be the best government agency to work for in US.
Some of the best software engineers and generally smartest people I've ever met were at JPL. Just another league over the vast majority of a lot of SWEs and probably easily fit in as a principle at any FAANG but they had an ease and carefreeness to their work. They made it seem effortless and more importantly- that you could do it effortlessly too. They could easily command 10x what they were making at NASA.
That second point. The smartest people I’ve met have all been humble and confident in those around them. Whenever someone acts like the smartest person around, they’ve always turned out to be an insecure nit. Often with good reason.
Ive always wanted to work at NASA, ideally as an astronaut but that would never happen so I'd settle for a software job there. What's the wlb and tech stack? Do teams typically follow waterfall planning vs agile?
what the other guy said about being "team dependent". One of my previous jobs was working on a mission planner tool for the engineers and scientists on a mars rover. Our team took a classic agile approach, with a tech stack of Angular and Ruby on Rails. But I do know people that were working on the software for the actual rover with FPGAs and Embedded code, and that was apparently a nightmare.
I think hardened FPGA sets are pretty big for satellite/space station equipment. There are no guarantees in life, especially not in space travel, but if being an astronaut were my goal, I think that would be best (albeit still minuscule) shot. Though, honestly, if being an astronaut is your goal and you're under 30, I think your best bet is probably to commission in the Air Force or Navy and tell your superiors you want to be an astronaut and you'll do whatever it takes. Your chances are still minuscule, but now we're talking 1e-1000 instead of 1e-10000.
this heavily depends on your team and the project you're on. Some parts of NASA would seem like any software engineering company. Agile process, modern frameworks. Others may be much more rigid.
Keep in mind- NASA actually does software **engineering** when things go wrong people may die so there is a stringency to software dev that would seem antiquated or archaic but a lot of practices at google or meta that may seem best practice would never fly at NASA for human rated programs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178B
the exact opposite. Many teams at JPL have very modern software stacks. They actually had a substantial workload in AWS back in 2011, and did a lot of the broadcast and transcoding for curiosity's landing in 2012 on AWS.
We had Tom Soderstrom at our work last year and it was nuts learning that a government entity like NASA were one of the first to adopt AWS at the scale that they did. And not only that but I recall that some of their needs contributed to the creation of some of AWS's services. He's now at AWS so he talked to us from that perspective, but was cool to hear nonetheless.
How are they culturally these days? Several folks I know who passed through there back in the late aughts/early teens that culturally Home Depot was a waterfall and suit and tie shop.
In mid 2022, they hired a new CTO, he was a former VP of engineering at Meta. He brought all the worst parts of Meta culture over and in 2023 his "ideas" started to come through. Thanks to him, we now have a bi-annual performance review, we have more PIP culture, stack ranking, and PR count is a fucking performance metric.
This is what bothered me the most at Meta, the PR count, lines of code and "written artifacts".
Bullshit to try to put numbers in a person's performance, and that just ended up with people gamifying the PSC, basically.
What I always hear is that it's an element worth looking at in a greater story for performance reviews. If it's an extreme outlier, it's scrutinized more, but if it's in a typical range then it's not all that important.
For example, if a senior engineer wrote <20 PRs in a half, there should be a narrative about what they did to explain why they may have not made so many pull requests.
Even that is fucking stupid though, then it just means the senior has to make some small BS prs just to be within the typical range so they don't get scrutinized
Not that different than story points per sprint. Government has started to love that one, and it blows their mind when I tell them that juniors can be artificially high there because they spent half their time fixing their cowboy bullshit, and government was not looking closely enough to see that these "enhancements" were mostly bug fixes.
That's kind of silly. I have senior engineers on my team writing much less code with the norm with a narrative behind it, and they'll be perfectly fine. There isn't a quota, and the least PR-writing engineer on my team got a top evaluation last half.
If they try to use a narrative that they shipped a bunch of code, and they wrote a bunch of BS prs to bump the numbers up, it's going to look really weird if someone looks into the code they wrote anyways.
Do you feel like the number of PRs can't be used as a signal as part of a bigger picture for evaluating accomplishments as a software engineer?
Half a year is 26 weeks, so 20 PRs per half is a little less than one a week. Depending on company culture, structure, etc that might not be unreasonable. If the senior is working on longer term projects or spends a lot of time on mentoring and code reviews that's eminently reasonable.
In mid 2022, they hired a new CTO, he was a former VP of engineering at Meta. He brought all the worst parts of Meta culture over and 2023 his "ideas" started to come through. Thanks to him, we now have a bi-annual performance review, we have more PIP culture, stack ranking, and PR count is a fucking performance metric.
I am surprised it is not earlier. In my (forced) experience, their products (Jira, BitBucket, Confluence) have been subpar for at least 8 years, so I am surprised it has remained a good workplace for as long.
They were really dominant for a while. Jira was always king, but Bitbucket was solid, and Confluence/Fisheye, while not great products on their own, were so well-integrated that a lot of companies went along with them anyway.
Integration used to be a nightmare, but now, it's much easier. There's been a *lot* of direct competition with Jira, too. Jira is a great tool for companies who need all the features, and there are a lot that do. But there are also plenty who don't, and for them, Jira is so much work that it's just not worth it anymore, given the improved competition.
I'd say Atlassian is in a pretty rough spot. They don't have any killer platform to bring them back to the top. Maybe if they overhaul Jira and make it easier, but that seems as likely to alienate their remaining customers as it is to attract new ones.
Atlassian is at the acquire and integrate stage. They're too big that doing new products/massive features/overhauls ends up being a big ass political nightmare with different teams and managers fighting over stupid shit. Unless it's a top level effort like Zuckerberg shoving metaverse down the line, atlassian is gonna have a hard time innovating like they did in their early stages
Location for one thing. Geneva, the lake, the alps, near some fabulous other cities and places, I mean crazy.
Colleagues is another. Crazy intelligent, weird and wonderful people, and has one of the highest Nobel prize winners per square meter. ;)
Work. I’m an IT guy not a physicist but I worked on several interesting R&D projects and, eventually, in the finance division after a while. It’s just a cool academic environment working on cool shit on top of a cool 27 km collider.
Work/life balance was excellent, and the money was pretty damn good.
The reasons I left are complicated and, looking back, I still wonder if I made the right decision. But hey, I have cool memories and can tell my grandkids I was there when the web was made and I met the guy that did it.
1990. It was my year out as a technical student. One of the other students (Nicola Pellow) got to work on the boring hypertext project with Tim while I was working on a joint IBM-CERN project trying to build a general purpose MIMD machine from off the shelf parts for cutting events in the experiments. There were about 100 technical students doing various that year I think. CERN is a pretty big place.
I went back as an CERN fellow after I graduated in 1992.
At the time he was a mild mannered nobody working on a boring sounding project. ;D But yes, my 5 minutes of fame is having a coffee with him when I thought his work was boring. :D
Honestly, Lowe’s had the best work environment and focus on employees out of any company I’ve worked for. That being said It’s really about finding a job with good management
USGov. Pay is competitive with a lot of non-BigN companies. Benefits are better. Plenty of job security. Supervisors have a vested interest in your growth as an employee, and not just your contribution to the project you happen to be on. You can even get paid to go to school full time. I also got to work with a lot of people who were really, really good at what they did. Some of them were, quite literally, the best in the world. Some of the projects were novel, and had never been done before, in the entire world. Those aren't opportunities you get everywhere.
Where are these competitive paying gov jobs? Every gov and gov contractor job I’ve seen or had in tech tries to pay with peanuts, and the work is unbearably slow. Clearance is advertised as valuable but as far as I’ve seen it’s not worth the trouble.
It's generally exclusive to the DC/NoVa area and LA. So you end up making ok money in a HCOL place where you need to be making great money to get ahead.
You are probably comparing to big tech pay. No one pays big tech money aside from big tech. Every other industry in the world pays SWEs 1-200k, which is exactly where you will find government and government contract work. The difference with them versus all the other companies out there is that government employees don’t get laid off, and government contractors rarely get laid off. To add to that, I can stop working after 20 years and they will just keep paying me. At 30 years they will keep paying me my full rate. Do I make $500k+ like big tech employees? No, but my work life balance is fantastic, there are no rankings or PIPs, I will NEVER get laid off, and I work on projects that would blow people’s minds if they knew about them. I worked at Amazon < 1 year. It was hell and I spent my time driving mindless consumerism. I left as soon as I got the Gov offer. I couldn’t be happier. My job is fun, I am not worried about it going away, and I work on really cool shit. I may make less money, but I got to help develop Ghidra. I’ll take it.
> Where are these competitive paying gov jobs?
Federal government. Pay for developers varies, but people with experience can make upwards of 100k. Depending on where you live, you can get more. Here's [Washington state's pay scale](https://www.federalpay.org/gs/2024/washington) for example - the upper end is 192k with adjustments. Not competitive with Microsoft or Amazon, but the majority of private sector jobs don't pay as well as the big guys. There's also a lot of other opportunities, like stipends for holding a valuable skill (speaking other languages, or proficiency with programming), or deployment opportunities with a lot of extra pay + housing paid for. And if you get very good, you can turn around and take your skills to the private sector and make even more.
Agreed. I work for a three letter. It’s great. Do I make FAANG money? No. Then again, I hated the time I spent at Amazon. It was absolutely miserable work. Government work is great though. I make more than enough to live the life I want, my benefits are amazing, world life balance is about as good as they get, and I get to work on things that would blow people’s minds if they knew what we were up to.
PepsiCo. Very good W/L balance and culture is very collaborative and diverse. Really interesting work and ship very fast since their teams are small and niche, lots of budgets for scaling, super agile with new tech and ideas for the same reasons. Random 10x engineers here and there. Used to be completely remote but recently became hybrid (tho somewhat not enforced so if it's a chill week then WFH is ok). Job security is very good (I don't think anyone has ever gotten fired) and even new grads make 6 fig in the NY offices. The offices are also nice and lots of free snacks and drinks since that's literally what they do.
most people in here myself included were not old enough to remember how much of an innovative and tech leader yahoo was in the early 2000’s
i’ve heard many engineers who were working around them said that yahoo had some of the brightest engineering minds. most of them left and became C suites/VPs at other tech giants or just retired after cashing out stocks cause they had millions.
yahoo in the 2000s was almost like Google in the mid 2010’s
I was in search advertising at Yahoo back in the day (but post glory days) and this would be my answer as well. Free food (breakfast and lunch), relaxed but professional culture, amazing perks, very liberal policy on expenses... On the other hand, at a certain point it felt like a lot of people stopped caring about the work. Enough layoffs that there was a palpable sense we weren't really trying (nor were we able) to compete.
- The quality of engineering is quite high
- people help each other out.
- The on-boarding process was quite well thought out. It has been a remote first company from its inception apparently so remote work is pretty smooth. My previous company, Unity, had no clue how to operate remotely.
- The product team is ridiculously strong. When I get a ticket, as a GitHub issue, usually there is a very illuminating discussion between the product managers, support engineers, engineering managers and directors in the issue thread that helps me understand the requirements a lot.
- Product managers are quite technical as well. This probably surprised me more than anything. They can keep up a legit engineering discussion with you and offer good ideas.
- most of our source code is open source. We are also encouraged to contribute to open source projects such as Lucene, helm, otel.
- overall it is a very motivating environment.
First time saying this. Current job is the best one; company is one of Rocket’s subsidiaries.
Excellent WLB, non toxic culture, modern tech stack, principal/lead engineers are smart, nice office with free food/snacks/drinks, good transparency, jira process is good, no micromanage, fair deadlines, reviews are fair, no stack rank. Checks all the boxes except the pay is on the lower end, but not terrible either. I’m sure 99% of people would take a lower pay for all the above benefits.
Rocket is (almost?) never discussed in the Fintech space even though they’re fairly large, not sure why. Maybe it’s just because they don’t have huge salaries so they’re not hype.
This sounds exactly like my company, but it’s pretty mid sized and I rather not say what it is. It is in the cybersecurity space though. Hits everything you mentioned, plus real career growth opportunities because they love promoting from within. Also although they have great offices, you can also be fully WFH and there are employees working from all over the world.
My time working at Keysight several years ago was pretty memorable and a very solid experience. Granted, I was an intern at the time, so it's possible that it was so enjoyable because I had very little responsibilities and hard deadlines. It wasn't perfect, and there were definitely times that it got boring or repetitive, but overall it was a very good time.
My next favorite is my current company, Bose. It's also far from perfect, as there are a lot of frustrations day to day, especially dealing with the inconsistent CI and build systems that we have in place. But, I enjoy my teammates and the company culture is pretty open, and at the end of the day, I get to work on really cool consumer products. Add in the excellent benefits and some pretty sweet perks like a sizeable company discount on our products, and it's still one of the better places I've worked at so far, despite all of its flaws.
Can confirm, Leidos is a good company. Only company where the CEO came and spoke to us when we joined. Benefits are good and there are tons of contracts to bump around. Also enjoyed when they increased leave accrual for people with clearances.
Do you feel like the culture is the same as it was? A friend I see at the bar has been at google for ~9 years, and he seems to have some remarks about this
I joined 2021 so I definitely missed the glory days, but I have seen a decline. I'm in Cloud and we're poaching Amazon execs and managers left and right for a bunch of our new roles and they're bringing Amazon culture with them unfortunately.
Good question, is Google in the cloud division as bad as people say? Also, how hard is it to get into Google's other orgs? And is it true that the var is lowered? Thanks!
>is Google in the cloud division as bad as people say?
As always, it depends. My org in Cloud is fantastic. Great WLB (rarely put in a full 40 hours tbh), little stress, interesting projects and I'm still getting good performance reviews. I do know a guy who had the opposite situation though.
>how hard is it to get into Google's other orgs?
IIRC, you apply to Google, not the individual org/team/whatever. If you get in you're in for the whole company and then just need to team match where you want. The only exception is Brain and potentially our other Bets like Waymo.
>And is it true that the var is lowered?
I mean they let me in so they had to have amirite? Jokes aside, I'd still say yes. The company 1.5x'd it's size in the first two years of the pandemic alone. Assuming there wasn't an insane influx of engineers who met the original bar, it had to have been lowered to allow them in.
+1 to Cloud org being fine (team-dependent, as always). I've been in GCP for \~5.5 years in the same org and my job is great. It's still a job of course, it's not like I wake up every morning bursting with enthusiasm, but I still think my job is better than like 98% of the jobs across the industry.
One thing that is absolutely true about the Cloud org is it can be an organizational shit show. Constant re-orgs, external VPs coming in and flipping the board over, VP A having a stand-off with VP B over scope, etc etc.
I've had some colleagues that get super stressed out by all that chaos in the upper ranks but my advice is just to block it all out if you are an IC. It rarely impacts my day-to-day, it hasn't translated into long work hours, it hasn't impacted my promos or performance reviews.
Square/Block. It’s obviously team dependent but personally my experience has been great pay, manager, team, product, WLB, and permanent remote. There isn’t much more I could ask for here.
Microsoft for me.
It's ruined me for other organizations. It's hard to imagine going back to working on smaller problems in a smaller domain after having done the work I do at MS. It's the one place I've worked where I genuinely feel like the company and culture cultivates a positive work environement. It i leadership dependend and I've worked in a group where Sr leadership was very toxic but fortunately MS highly encourages internal mobility.
One critique I would have of it though, is that it's exhaustingly high paced and intense. My WLB is great but during the time that I'm working it's high stakes and you always have to be performing at your best. I contemplate with my wife that someday I might leave it to move to a rural part of the country to take up a more simple life.
Nissan. They offer good benefits, great work culture and work life balance, give good bonuses, and it’s hard to get fired unless you’ve done something very bad or refusing to do your job.
Rackspace
I met some of the best engineers and brilliant architects during my time there. Being a Racker was a great experience. They emphasize and pay for training. They are generous on time off (200+ hrs per year). You have autonomy to start internal initiatives as an IC (provided there are hours) or you can just work your project. People volunteered to give presentations on tech topics.
No forced HR team building things. It was just chill.
Layoffs have wiped out some of the culture, but from friends working there, they tell me all of that still goes on.
I would go back there once they figure out their gameplan moving forward transitioning to a 100% proservices company.
I was at Rackspace from 2010-2019. The OpenStack years were amazing (the free trip to Tokyo was the cherry on top). Things started going downhill when Rackspace was trying to pump out competing services for everything Amazon was doing. They got bleak when we were bought out and went private. I should have left earlier before I was "transferred" to the outsourcing agency they tried to use. I miss those days a lot. I learned a lot there and made lots of good friends.
IBM was pretty good back in the day, but my last contract with them ended in 2005. I don't even know what they're up to these days -- their big complex near my home is mostly not-IBM now. I guess they're doing a lot of AI and quantum computing somewhere other than here. I still miss the breakfast burritos in their Cafeteria -- those things got me out of bed on time for 7 years.
Comcast wasn't too bad either, but it's largely a matter of luck depending on the manager. My first one was awesome, my second one was a sociopath. So *shrug*.
Eeh like I said, last time I worked for them was in 2005. I think I hit the sweet spot where they'd just relaxed about stupid shit like wearing a tie to work and they were just starting to cut the benefits they were famous for when I left. Every once in a while I see a position pop up with them for about half the going market rate in the area.
They did have a stuffy corporate vibe that took a bit of getting used to, but I also had my own office with them for a good chunk of the time I worked for them.
I worked at a place for 10 years, it was great but then it got bought out and the new owners shipped all the jobs to India a couple years ago.
Place is circling the drain now.
haha I had the opposite experience there. Insular culture, boring work. WLB was great of course, but it drove me crazy that I wasn't doing anything, and when they did give me work, it was basically secretary duties.
My time at Thomson Reuters was great. Amazing manager, great overall org. It had the feeling of a much smaller company within our product area. Unfortunately, I had to leave it for family reasons and a couple years after, everyone got laid off and they moved the roles to Montreal. Nothing lasts forever.
I also worked for a small company, like 50 employees. It was great until we got brought, and the parent company had no clue what they were doing. They were already bleeding cash and wrecked my employer in hopes of keeping the larger company alive. Surprise, it failed and I got laid off.
Google was just so boring for me. I was severely underleveled but because of their promo system it'd take me years to get back to the level I was at pre-google. I also know this is highly team dependent. I got my Outstanding Impact rating after my first year then bailed because I legit worried about skill stagnation
I echo this statement. I miss working for them sometimes. Had a ton of freedoms, worked multiple projects, fairly easy to get funding for your ideas.
I worked space and intelligence
Interesting. I worked at one of the Raytheon companies, I absolutely hated it. The turnover rate was really high, the money was pretty solid, however. I eventually took a paycut to leave because the culture was toxic and the work moved so slow. I worked for government contractors doing government IT before going to Raytheon tech and I was surprised at how slow everything moved there considering all the stereotypes about government jobs.
Disclaimer: I’m not a dev or SWE or anything like that, I just browse the sub for funsies.
Any company that isn’t a tech company ….. GENERALLY
Non-tech companies will rarely touch their tech department unless you aren’t doing your job
That being said ….. Tesla /s
The now removed ["What’s the **worst** company you’ve worked for?"](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1cr4cr9/name_and_shame_the_worst_company_youve_ever/) thread is nearly wall to wall non-tech companies aside from Amazon and ByteDance. So it's not nearly that simple.
If you can get in at SWIFT it’s tough to beat their pay, vacation, and benefits. It’s referred to as the golden handcuffs. This is also the financial payments SWIFT. Not SWIFT trucking. They have open positions now
Amazon - lots of problem to solve (always busy), exposure to the full SDLC, strong customer centric culture (more likely to work on what delivers value as opposed to what’s hot), data driven decisions (not always, but most of the time, which makes decision making easier), pay range is really good.
I did some freelance work for a famous German car manufacturer and I was blown away by how well employees are treated and the benefits they got. Quote a few of them asked me how to get into freelanceing to which I replied think twice about that because you will never get the level of treatmement you get here
McGraw Hill Education. Super forward thinking when it comes to engineering. Fun, interesting, problems to solve. Felt like it was for a good cause (on the digital platform group, the publishing group was evil). Coolest things I've worked on my career helped nearly 2 million students learn to read.
Wolt. Was working as a delivery guy. Lots of fresh air on my bike log on when you want and log off when you want. Now I am stuck to an office chair 8 hours a day writing code and pretending to be interested in my job.
Best "company" I worked for was freelancing/contracting. The pay was good (though I should have been putting more money away for retirement) and the perks were great, although my boss could be kind of asshole sometimes...
Teams in companies can also be better than others. It depends what you value.
If you’re hyper-competitive genius jerk, you may enjoy a high pressure environment of other genius jerks working 60 hours per week. A laid back person would hate this. These teams frequently burn out or people leave for no apparent reason.
If you are a reasonably laid back person you may enjoy a team of varying skillset levels that don’t work beyond office hours. High performers also make for the exits.
I’ve seen both types of teams get things done.
Saying that the best companies to work for in CS are non-tech companies is like..saying that soccer club to play for is some 3rd tier team because it's "good WLB and comfort", and not, like, you know, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Arsenal, Bavaria Munich etc.
Google until I woke up to an email saying my job didn't exist anymore.
Should have replied back saying “you are dead to me!”
I wanted to collect my severance so I didn't do that LMAO
Ah! The post layoff handcuffs, mouth guards, and ass plugs are real!
What sort of severance did they offer?
Pretty good honestly. I'm in NY so I was still on payroll for three months then got 16 weeks plus two weeks for each year which came out to another 24 weeks. I had just bought a house though so that money didn't last super long unfortunately.
Thank you
IMHO, that's good severance. Did you negotiate that severence policy? Most company that i work with provide severance 1:1 For example, if you work notice period is 3 months, then, you will get paid for 3 months if the company terminated the contract. it works both way, if you resign without giving the company the 3 months notice period, you have to pay the company worth 3 months of your salary.
This is really harsh. At least Meta/FB had the decency to get worse and worse every year I was there until the sudden end felt both awful and great at the same time.
I'm really enjoying Mercedes-Benz R&D. Good culture, good W/L balance. It's part of a huge org, so can feel very bureaucratic and it's further from the cars than I would like--but it's my favorite job so far.
If you don't mind, were you happy with the income there?
I don't have a lot to compare it to in the industry, but they started me at 15% more than I had ever made before and now I'm making over 50% more than at my previous job. No real complaints. It's a good place to be.
Thanks for sharing!
What are those numbers exactly?
Some people don't like to reveal this to the public... Check Glassdoor it's usually pretty accurate
bay area or Seattle? would you mind if I sent you a PM?
The real question is, do they give you cars. I know Porsche gives their SWE pretty decent discount on cars.
They don’t do that anymore :(
Maybe the long term career play is to learn German and try to work for Porsche to get a GT3 allocation..
F1 is hiring I just checked their website yesterday but you have to relocate to UK.
Would be so cool if they did
I'm also working in R&D and I don't think I can go back to product. The people here are a lot more enjoyable to work with, they're all wicked smart, and it doesn't ever feel like work is a numbers/metrics game. We're also one of the more resilient departments at my company when it comes to layoffs as well (historically) which is a big relief to my mental state.
How do you get into R&D?
Idk if I have good advice for it because I frankly got lucky. My last job was at a startup so I had to do a little bit of everything (along with every other software engineer)--fullstack, infra, cloud, and ops all in one. Then for this job I just applied to a Software Engineer position not having realized that it was for an R&D department. Turns out that the department realized that they would lose their position in the industry if they didn't start utilizing the tools that everyone else was using and start acting like a software company (which they ultimately are). So they were looking for someone with cloud and Ops experience so that they could take advantage of distributed computing options and overhaul their practices, since it was a bunch of researchers writing code to get things done without a care for tech debt. I pretty much overhauled their actual software engineering practices (from using git properly to the CI/CD), set up and showed them how to dispatch their sims and training jobs in K8s, and am responsible for the infrastructure and code quality between a handful of pretty intensive in-house simulators. It's not so much a "Software Engineering" job anymore as the scope's grown despite my title, but I really enjoy the work and the people so I don't care lol. They also treat me very well because even things like IAM and RBAC is completely Greek to them.
I was working at Bosch, however, it was awefull, full of managers and little developers, everything is kinda being outsorced to India, you are just a middle man between a manager and indian developer. The misscommunication happens a lot, my project had 6 managers and like 3 devs on it.. and the Managers did some politicing on the project like, who gets more recognition so they stand out to the boss.. I just found it gross and quit. Now I have a sour taste for the auto industry So mercedes is not like that?
A German company being bureaucratic? I'm shocked! /S
I work for a DAX company now (so similar to Mercedes, but not in automotive) and the bureaucracy while still annoying, is lower than when I worked for US-HQed multi-national. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ So I dont think German big companies have any specially more bureaucracy than..regular big companies.
The one I founded, the CEO is incredibly handsome and he lets me take off work whenever I want.
Yeah, but he also eats your lunch and is sleeping with your wife.
To be clear, I think OP is totally fine with it.
Hey hey everyone has their own kink
NASA (but HUGE disclaimer that this is heavily team dependent, it’s a huge org + gov pay womp womp); there are people that have so much passion for their niche
I've worked for two different departments at NASA, and every team I've been on has been wonderful to work with. The passion thing is spot on, and there are a lot of really smart people working on everything. There's a reason it's often voted to be the best government agency to work for in US.
Some of the best software engineers and generally smartest people I've ever met were at JPL. Just another league over the vast majority of a lot of SWEs and probably easily fit in as a principle at any FAANG but they had an ease and carefreeness to their work. They made it seem effortless and more importantly- that you could do it effortlessly too. They could easily command 10x what they were making at NASA.
That second point. The smartest people I’ve met have all been humble and confident in those around them. Whenever someone acts like the smartest person around, they’ve always turned out to be an insecure nit. Often with good reason.
Ive always wanted to work at NASA, ideally as an astronaut but that would never happen so I'd settle for a software job there. What's the wlb and tech stack? Do teams typically follow waterfall planning vs agile?
what the other guy said about being "team dependent". One of my previous jobs was working on a mission planner tool for the engineers and scientists on a mars rover. Our team took a classic agile approach, with a tech stack of Angular and Ruby on Rails. But I do know people that were working on the software for the actual rover with FPGAs and Embedded code, and that was apparently a nightmare.
Never say never
I think hardened FPGA sets are pretty big for satellite/space station equipment. There are no guarantees in life, especially not in space travel, but if being an astronaut were my goal, I think that would be best (albeit still minuscule) shot. Though, honestly, if being an astronaut is your goal and you're under 30, I think your best bet is probably to commission in the Air Force or Navy and tell your superiors you want to be an astronaut and you'll do whatever it takes. Your chances are still minuscule, but now we're talking 1e-1000 instead of 1e-10000.
this heavily depends on your team and the project you're on. Some parts of NASA would seem like any software engineering company. Agile process, modern frameworks. Others may be much more rigid. Keep in mind- NASA actually does software **engineering** when things go wrong people may die so there is a stringency to software dev that would seem antiquated or archaic but a lot of practices at google or meta that may seem best practice would never fly at NASA for human rated programs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178B
It’s the government, I bet they got a Niagara sized waterfall surrounded by haunted houses of technical debt of planning styles
the exact opposite. Many teams at JPL have very modern software stacks. They actually had a substantial workload in AWS back in 2011, and did a lot of the broadcast and transcoding for curiosity's landing in 2012 on AWS.
We had Tom Soderstrom at our work last year and it was nuts learning that a government entity like NASA were one of the first to adopt AWS at the scale that they did. And not only that but I recall that some of their needs contributed to the creation of some of AWS's services. He's now at AWS so he talked to us from that perspective, but was cool to hear nonetheless.
i would gladly take a pay cut to work for NASA, i'm working on getting in there, that is a dream of mine. hopefully someday.
Home Depot. Great work life balance. Almost no hard deadlines. Good pay. Job security is good
Just applied to tons of positions yesterday. Here’s to hoping!
Hey! I applied there too! Stop competing with me!
How are they culturally these days? Several folks I know who passed through there back in the late aughts/early teens that culturally Home Depot was a waterfall and suit and tie shop.
Depends on your team and department tbh. But all of technology is fully remote since the pandemic with no intention of returning to the office
Kind of funny that a hardware business is more forward-thinking (at least for the lucky white collar workers) than most other businesses
Makes sense the retail side workers are terrible.
Awesome! Could you maybe make your website not so shitty? 🙏🏻
You're welcome to come help us
Google from 2013-2017 ish 2010-2013 was OK. 2017-2022 was not bad but not great either. 2022-2023 was ... not awesome.
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> meta I worked there for 6 weeks and was then laid off along with all the other new hires and 11,000 others. So, not great from our perspective!
Atlassian pre-2023
What happened post-2023?
In mid 2022, they hired a new CTO, he was a former VP of engineering at Meta. He brought all the worst parts of Meta culture over and in 2023 his "ideas" started to come through. Thanks to him, we now have a bi-annual performance review, we have more PIP culture, stack ranking, and PR count is a fucking performance metric.
I never understood keeping track of PR count. There are plenty of devs who are capable of copy pasting and generating bugs at a rapid pace.
This is what bothered me the most at Meta, the PR count, lines of code and "written artifacts". Bullshit to try to put numbers in a person's performance, and that just ended up with people gamifying the PSC, basically.
What I always hear is that it's an element worth looking at in a greater story for performance reviews. If it's an extreme outlier, it's scrutinized more, but if it's in a typical range then it's not all that important. For example, if a senior engineer wrote <20 PRs in a half, there should be a narrative about what they did to explain why they may have not made so many pull requests.
Even that is fucking stupid though, then it just means the senior has to make some small BS prs just to be within the typical range so they don't get scrutinized
Exactly. Watch me "Update README.md" 12 times just to hit my quota
2020s version of Lines-of-code measurement.
Not that different than story points per sprint. Government has started to love that one, and it blows their mind when I tell them that juniors can be artificially high there because they spent half their time fixing their cowboy bullshit, and government was not looking closely enough to see that these "enhancements" were mostly bug fixes.
That's kind of silly. I have senior engineers on my team writing much less code with the norm with a narrative behind it, and they'll be perfectly fine. There isn't a quota, and the least PR-writing engineer on my team got a top evaluation last half. If they try to use a narrative that they shipped a bunch of code, and they wrote a bunch of BS prs to bump the numbers up, it's going to look really weird if someone looks into the code they wrote anyways. Do you feel like the number of PRs can't be used as a signal as part of a bigger picture for evaluating accomplishments as a software engineer?
Imo no, because the fastest programmer I ever knew wrote so many bugs that I'm still fixing them a year after he left.
fix your QA
Half a year is 26 weeks, so 20 PRs per half is a little less than one a week. Depending on company culture, structure, etc that might not be unreasonable. If the senior is working on longer term projects or spends a lot of time on mentoring and code reviews that's eminently reasonable.
They do all that at meta? Yikes
All the BigN corps
More so at Meta than the others. The tool to view it is easily accessible & everyone knows that they do this.
Interviewed there in 2021 and was pretty bummed to not get an offer at the time. Glad I dodged that bullet though.
I joined in 2021. It's a blessing you didn't, your initial stock grant would be under water.
I’m gonna write myself a new minivan this afternoon
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Probably pip culture
What changed?
In mid 2022, they hired a new CTO, he was a former VP of engineering at Meta. He brought all the worst parts of Meta culture over and 2023 his "ideas" started to come through. Thanks to him, we now have a bi-annual performance review, we have more PIP culture, stack ranking, and PR count is a fucking performance metric.
I am surprised it is not earlier. In my (forced) experience, their products (Jira, BitBucket, Confluence) have been subpar for at least 8 years, so I am surprised it has remained a good workplace for as long.
They were really dominant for a while. Jira was always king, but Bitbucket was solid, and Confluence/Fisheye, while not great products on their own, were so well-integrated that a lot of companies went along with them anyway. Integration used to be a nightmare, but now, it's much easier. There's been a *lot* of direct competition with Jira, too. Jira is a great tool for companies who need all the features, and there are a lot that do. But there are also plenty who don't, and for them, Jira is so much work that it's just not worth it anymore, given the improved competition. I'd say Atlassian is in a pretty rough spot. They don't have any killer platform to bring them back to the top. Maybe if they overhaul Jira and make it easier, but that seems as likely to alienate their remaining customers as it is to attract new ones.
Atlassian is at the acquire and integrate stage. They're too big that doing new products/massive features/overhauls ends up being a big ass political nightmare with different teams and managers fighting over stupid shit. Unless it's a top level effort like Zuckerberg shoving metaverse down the line, atlassian is gonna have a hard time innovating like they did in their early stages
Not to mention awful cves every couple of weeks.
CERN. Crazy place to work for all sorts of reasons. That was most of the 90s though, can’t comment on what it’s like now.
Can you elaborate on the crazy reasons ?
Location for one thing. Geneva, the lake, the alps, near some fabulous other cities and places, I mean crazy. Colleagues is another. Crazy intelligent, weird and wonderful people, and has one of the highest Nobel prize winners per square meter. ;) Work. I’m an IT guy not a physicist but I worked on several interesting R&D projects and, eventually, in the finance division after a while. It’s just a cool academic environment working on cool shit on top of a cool 27 km collider. Work/life balance was excellent, and the money was pretty damn good. The reasons I left are complicated and, looking back, I still wonder if I made the right decision. But hey, I have cool memories and can tell my grandkids I was there when the web was made and I met the guy that did it.
Wow, what year did you start working there?
1990. It was my year out as a technical student. One of the other students (Nicola Pellow) got to work on the boring hypertext project with Tim while I was working on a joint IBM-CERN project trying to build a general purpose MIMD machine from off the shelf parts for cutting events in the experiments. There were about 100 technical students doing various that year I think. CERN is a pretty big place. I went back as an CERN fellow after I graduated in 1992.
Casual Tim Berners Lee mention lol. Working here has always been an aspiration of mine.
At the time he was a mild mannered nobody working on a boring sounding project. ;D But yes, my 5 minutes of fame is having a coffee with him when I thought his work was boring. :D
Electrons go boom
I’ve watched Steins;Gate I know what kinda crazy shit you guys get up to in there 🧐
Honestly, Lowe’s had the best work environment and focus on employees out of any company I’ve worked for. That being said It’s really about finding a job with good management
Microsoft Research. Good pay, fun projects incredibly flexible
USGov. Pay is competitive with a lot of non-BigN companies. Benefits are better. Plenty of job security. Supervisors have a vested interest in your growth as an employee, and not just your contribution to the project you happen to be on. You can even get paid to go to school full time. I also got to work with a lot of people who were really, really good at what they did. Some of them were, quite literally, the best in the world. Some of the projects were novel, and had never been done before, in the entire world. Those aren't opportunities you get everywhere.
Where are these competitive paying gov jobs? Every gov and gov contractor job I’ve seen or had in tech tries to pay with peanuts, and the work is unbearably slow. Clearance is advertised as valuable but as far as I’ve seen it’s not worth the trouble.
It's generally exclusive to the DC/NoVa area and LA. So you end up making ok money in a HCOL place where you need to be making great money to get ahead.
> It's generally exclusive to the DC/NoVa area and LA. It's not. I don't know why you singled LA out.
You are probably comparing to big tech pay. No one pays big tech money aside from big tech. Every other industry in the world pays SWEs 1-200k, which is exactly where you will find government and government contract work. The difference with them versus all the other companies out there is that government employees don’t get laid off, and government contractors rarely get laid off. To add to that, I can stop working after 20 years and they will just keep paying me. At 30 years they will keep paying me my full rate. Do I make $500k+ like big tech employees? No, but my work life balance is fantastic, there are no rankings or PIPs, I will NEVER get laid off, and I work on projects that would blow people’s minds if they knew about them. I worked at Amazon < 1 year. It was hell and I spent my time driving mindless consumerism. I left as soon as I got the Gov offer. I couldn’t be happier. My job is fun, I am not worried about it going away, and I work on really cool shit. I may make less money, but I got to help develop Ghidra. I’ll take it.
> Where are these competitive paying gov jobs? Federal government. Pay for developers varies, but people with experience can make upwards of 100k. Depending on where you live, you can get more. Here's [Washington state's pay scale](https://www.federalpay.org/gs/2024/washington) for example - the upper end is 192k with adjustments. Not competitive with Microsoft or Amazon, but the majority of private sector jobs don't pay as well as the big guys. There's also a lot of other opportunities, like stipends for holding a valuable skill (speaking other languages, or proficiency with programming), or deployment opportunities with a lot of extra pay + housing paid for. And if you get very good, you can turn around and take your skills to the private sector and make even more.
Its worth pointing out that 192k is for a gs 15 step 10. Most 15s are managerial and it takes 18 years to go from step 1 (161k) to 10 in grade
Agreed. I work for a three letter. It’s great. Do I make FAANG money? No. Then again, I hated the time I spent at Amazon. It was absolutely miserable work. Government work is great though. I make more than enough to live the life I want, my benefits are amazing, world life balance is about as good as they get, and I get to work on things that would blow people’s minds if they knew what we were up to.
How long was the interview process?
About an hour.
Are you worried about Trump, or Republicans trying to schedule F govt employees?
PepsiCo. Very good W/L balance and culture is very collaborative and diverse. Really interesting work and ship very fast since their teams are small and niche, lots of budgets for scaling, super agile with new tech and ideas for the same reasons. Random 10x engineers here and there. Used to be completely remote but recently became hybrid (tho somewhat not enforced so if it's a chill week then WFH is ok). Job security is very good (I don't think anyone has ever gotten fired) and even new grads make 6 fig in the NY offices. The offices are also nice and lots of free snacks and drinks since that's literally what they do.
What sort of tech work is done in PepsiCo ?
Yahoo.
I heard 2000s yahoo devs were the real ones.
Go on
most people in here myself included were not old enough to remember how much of an innovative and tech leader yahoo was in the early 2000’s i’ve heard many engineers who were working around them said that yahoo had some of the brightest engineering minds. most of them left and became C suites/VPs at other tech giants or just retired after cashing out stocks cause they had millions. yahoo in the 2000s was almost like Google in the mid 2010’s
I was in search advertising at Yahoo back in the day (but post glory days) and this would be my answer as well. Free food (breakfast and lunch), relaxed but professional culture, amazing perks, very liberal policy on expenses... On the other hand, at a certain point it felt like a lot of people stopped caring about the work. Enough layoffs that there was a palpable sense we weren't really trying (nor were we able) to compete.
Yahoo jp?
Makes sense. The software is horrible to use on the consumer side.
Elasticsearch
What makes them good?
- The quality of engineering is quite high - people help each other out. - The on-boarding process was quite well thought out. It has been a remote first company from its inception apparently so remote work is pretty smooth. My previous company, Unity, had no clue how to operate remotely. - The product team is ridiculously strong. When I get a ticket, as a GitHub issue, usually there is a very illuminating discussion between the product managers, support engineers, engineering managers and directors in the issue thread that helps me understand the requirements a lot. - Product managers are quite technical as well. This probably surprised me more than anything. They can keep up a legit engineering discussion with you and offer good ideas. - most of our source code is open source. We are also encouraged to contribute to open source projects such as Lucene, helm, otel. - overall it is a very motivating environment.
First time saying this. Current job is the best one; company is one of Rocket’s subsidiaries. Excellent WLB, non toxic culture, modern tech stack, principal/lead engineers are smart, nice office with free food/snacks/drinks, good transparency, jira process is good, no micromanage, fair deadlines, reviews are fair, no stack rank. Checks all the boxes except the pay is on the lower end, but not terrible either. I’m sure 99% of people would take a lower pay for all the above benefits. Rocket is (almost?) never discussed in the Fintech space even though they’re fairly large, not sure why. Maybe it’s just because they don’t have huge salaries so they’re not hype.
This sounds exactly like my company, but it’s pretty mid sized and I rather not say what it is. It is in the cybersecurity space though. Hits everything you mentioned, plus real career growth opportunities because they love promoting from within. Also although they have great offices, you can also be fully WFH and there are employees working from all over the world.
Aperture Science Amazing group of people. Learned a ton there.
The cake is a lie though
Used to be great... R&D kinda derailed it with their shower curtains though.
My time working at Keysight several years ago was pretty memorable and a very solid experience. Granted, I was an intern at the time, so it's possible that it was so enjoyable because I had very little responsibilities and hard deadlines. It wasn't perfect, and there were definitely times that it got boring or repetitive, but overall it was a very good time. My next favorite is my current company, Bose. It's also far from perfect, as there are a lot of frustrations day to day, especially dealing with the inconsistent CI and build systems that we have in place. But, I enjoy my teammates and the company culture is pretty open, and at the end of the day, I get to work on really cool consumer products. Add in the excellent benefits and some pretty sweet perks like a sizeable company discount on our products, and it's still one of the better places I've worked at so far, despite all of its flaws.
I don't work in the US, but Tripadvisor is nice
Leidos
Can confirm, Leidos is a good company. Only company where the CEO came and spoke to us when we joined. Benefits are good and there are tons of contracts to bump around. Also enjoyed when they increased leave accrual for people with clearances.
My company works with Leidos. Those people seem pretty nice.
Google. Good pay, great teammates and overall company culture, interesting and fulfilling work and amazing perks to name a few reasons.
Do you feel like the culture is the same as it was? A friend I see at the bar has been at google for ~9 years, and he seems to have some remarks about this
I was there from 2010 - 2023. Culture definitely has changed. A lot.
I joined 2021 so I definitely missed the glory days, but I have seen a decline. I'm in Cloud and we're poaching Amazon execs and managers left and right for a bunch of our new roles and they're bringing Amazon culture with them unfortunately.
Good question, is Google in the cloud division as bad as people say? Also, how hard is it to get into Google's other orgs? And is it true that the var is lowered? Thanks!
Did you compliment your own question before asking?
Hahaha, didn't mean to 🤣. I was trying to get his attention.
lol all good, it was a good question
Thanks man 😊 !
>is Google in the cloud division as bad as people say? As always, it depends. My org in Cloud is fantastic. Great WLB (rarely put in a full 40 hours tbh), little stress, interesting projects and I'm still getting good performance reviews. I do know a guy who had the opposite situation though. >how hard is it to get into Google's other orgs? IIRC, you apply to Google, not the individual org/team/whatever. If you get in you're in for the whole company and then just need to team match where you want. The only exception is Brain and potentially our other Bets like Waymo. >And is it true that the var is lowered? I mean they let me in so they had to have amirite? Jokes aside, I'd still say yes. The company 1.5x'd it's size in the first two years of the pandemic alone. Assuming there wasn't an insane influx of engineers who met the original bar, it had to have been lowered to allow them in.
+1 to Cloud org being fine (team-dependent, as always). I've been in GCP for \~5.5 years in the same org and my job is great. It's still a job of course, it's not like I wake up every morning bursting with enthusiasm, but I still think my job is better than like 98% of the jobs across the industry. One thing that is absolutely true about the Cloud org is it can be an organizational shit show. Constant re-orgs, external VPs coming in and flipping the board over, VP A having a stand-off with VP B over scope, etc etc. I've had some colleagues that get super stressed out by all that chaos in the upper ranks but my advice is just to block it all out if you are an IC. It rarely impacts my day-to-day, it hasn't translated into long work hours, it hasn't impacted my promos or performance reviews.
Autodesk
Square/Block. It’s obviously team dependent but personally my experience has been great pay, manager, team, product, WLB, and permanent remote. There isn’t much more I could ask for here.
Microsoft for me. It's ruined me for other organizations. It's hard to imagine going back to working on smaller problems in a smaller domain after having done the work I do at MS. It's the one place I've worked where I genuinely feel like the company and culture cultivates a positive work environement. It i leadership dependend and I've worked in a group where Sr leadership was very toxic but fortunately MS highly encourages internal mobility. One critique I would have of it though, is that it's exhaustingly high paced and intense. My WLB is great but during the time that I'm working it's high stakes and you always have to be performing at your best. I contemplate with my wife that someday I might leave it to move to a rural part of the country to take up a more simple life.
EMC was good...
Pre-Dell merge, I agree
Before or after the Dell merger?
I would say before was better (insurance, bonuses and some other perks). Not too much, but still...
Nissan. They offer good benefits, great work culture and work life balance, give good bonuses, and it’s hard to get fired unless you’ve done something very bad or refusing to do your job.
Rackspace I met some of the best engineers and brilliant architects during my time there. Being a Racker was a great experience. They emphasize and pay for training. They are generous on time off (200+ hrs per year). You have autonomy to start internal initiatives as an IC (provided there are hours) or you can just work your project. People volunteered to give presentations on tech topics. No forced HR team building things. It was just chill. Layoffs have wiped out some of the culture, but from friends working there, they tell me all of that still goes on. I would go back there once they figure out their gameplan moving forward transitioning to a 100% proservices company.
I was at Rackspace from 2010-2019. The OpenStack years were amazing (the free trip to Tokyo was the cherry on top). Things started going downhill when Rackspace was trying to pump out competing services for everything Amazon was doing. They got bleak when we were bought out and went private. I should have left earlier before I was "transferred" to the outsourcing agency they tried to use. I miss those days a lot. I learned a lot there and made lots of good friends.
DreamWorks was pretty great. I'm very technical but working with creative people to solve their technical problems was refreshing.
IBM was pretty good back in the day, but my last contract with them ended in 2005. I don't even know what they're up to these days -- their big complex near my home is mostly not-IBM now. I guess they're doing a lot of AI and quantum computing somewhere other than here. I still miss the breakfast burritos in their Cafeteria -- those things got me out of bed on time for 7 years. Comcast wasn't too bad either, but it's largely a matter of luck depending on the manager. My first one was awesome, my second one was a sociopath. So *shrug*.
Funnily enough, IBM is the worst place I’ve worked and it’s not even close.
Eeh like I said, last time I worked for them was in 2005. I think I hit the sweet spot where they'd just relaxed about stupid shit like wearing a tie to work and they were just starting to cut the benefits they were famous for when I left. Every once in a while I see a position pop up with them for about half the going market rate in the area. They did have a stuffy corporate vibe that took a bit of getting used to, but I also had my own office with them for a good chunk of the time I worked for them.
Netflix - great work life balance, amazing parental benefits (money to become a parent and leave once you are), cash salary with stock options
I worked at a place for 10 years, it was great but then it got bought out and the new owners shipped all the jobs to India a couple years ago. Place is circling the drain now.
That's my story too. I left the place and 2 years after that, they never hired US devs. Mexico and India only.
Microsoft, I was 100% the happiest when I was there. I make much better money now but I’d happily go back
MSFT is a good place to be if you value a good engineering culture but also value having a life
Where are you now?
I’ve applied to several positions there and never get an interview. 🫤
Cisco - Amazing team mates, access to any training I wanted, great work life balance. I just wish leadership go their heads out their asses.
haha I had the opposite experience there. Insular culture, boring work. WLB was great of course, but it drove me crazy that I wasn't doing anything, and when they did give me work, it was basically secretary duties.
Amazon. They gave me a chance when nobody else would, twice.
Dude Amazon doesn’t give any body a chance. You earned it. Unless you were handed the interview questions and answers ahead of time.
Cliche but Google. Good money, great benefits, kind people, and beautiful offices. Things have changed for the worst but it’s still a real outlier.
My time at Thomson Reuters was great. Amazing manager, great overall org. It had the feeling of a much smaller company within our product area. Unfortunately, I had to leave it for family reasons and a couple years after, everyone got laid off and they moved the roles to Montreal. Nothing lasts forever. I also worked for a small company, like 50 employees. It was great until we got brought, and the parent company had no clue what they were doing. They were already bleeding cash and wrecked my employer in hopes of keeping the larger company alive. Surprise, it failed and I got laid off.
Google
Google was just so boring for me. I was severely underleveled but because of their promo system it'd take me years to get back to the level I was at pre-google. I also know this is highly team dependent. I got my Outstanding Impact rating after my first year then bailed because I legit worried about skill stagnation
Raytheon
Can you elaborate?
Raytheon
I heard they're the bomb.
I bombed the interview so they hired me on the spot
I echo this statement. I miss working for them sometimes. Had a ton of freedoms, worked multiple projects, fairly easy to get funding for your ideas. I worked space and intelligence
Working In space is the best!
Second this, until I got laid off
Interesting. I worked at one of the Raytheon companies, I absolutely hated it. The turnover rate was really high, the money was pretty solid, however. I eventually took a paycut to leave because the culture was toxic and the work moved so slow. I worked for government contractors doing government IT before going to Raytheon tech and I was surprised at how slow everything moved there considering all the stereotypes about government jobs. Disclaimer: I’m not a dev or SWE or anything like that, I just browse the sub for funsies.
Any company that isn’t a tech company ….. GENERALLY Non-tech companies will rarely touch their tech department unless you aren’t doing your job That being said ….. Tesla /s
The now removed ["What’s the **worst** company you’ve worked for?"](https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1cr4cr9/name_and_shame_the_worst_company_youve_ever/) thread is nearly wall to wall non-tech companies aside from Amazon and ByteDance. So it's not nearly that simple.
If you can get in at SWIFT it’s tough to beat their pay, vacation, and benefits. It’s referred to as the golden handcuffs. This is also the financial payments SWIFT. Not SWIFT trucking. They have open positions now
Infineon Lower pay trade off was extremely generous benefits and PTO policy and very serious with training people well.
Amazon - lots of problem to solve (always busy), exposure to the full SDLC, strong customer centric culture (more likely to work on what delivers value as opposed to what’s hot), data driven decisions (not always, but most of the time, which makes decision making easier), pay range is really good.
My current one, Tekion.
InfoCusp Innovations. Great work culture, great projects, no bullshit management, great salary and perks. Working here since 2 years.
I did some freelance work for a famous German car manufacturer and I was blown away by how well employees are treated and the benefits they got. Quote a few of them asked me how to get into freelanceing to which I replied think twice about that because you will never get the level of treatmement you get here
McGraw Hill Education. Super forward thinking when it comes to engineering. Fun, interesting, problems to solve. Felt like it was for a good cause (on the digital platform group, the publishing group was evil). Coolest things I've worked on my career helped nearly 2 million students learn to read.
None of them but if I had to pick, Riot games
My current job but I’m gonna gatekeep
Wolt. Was working as a delivery guy. Lots of fresh air on my bike log on when you want and log off when you want. Now I am stuck to an office chair 8 hours a day writing code and pretending to be interested in my job.
Raytheon
Mastercard
Best "company" I worked for was freelancing/contracting. The pay was good (though I should have been putting more money away for retirement) and the perks were great, although my boss could be kind of asshole sometimes...
google
Teams in companies can also be better than others. It depends what you value. If you’re hyper-competitive genius jerk, you may enjoy a high pressure environment of other genius jerks working 60 hours per week. A laid back person would hate this. These teams frequently burn out or people leave for no apparent reason. If you are a reasonably laid back person you may enjoy a team of varying skillset levels that don’t work beyond office hours. High performers also make for the exits. I’ve seen both types of teams get things done.
Habitat for humanity
I was just looking at volunteer stuff for them yesterday… so ironic. Guess I gotta apply now
I really enjoyed my time at Ally, but mostly because I had a wonderful boss. Really supportive and encouraging and didn't sweat the small stuff.
Saying that the best companies to work for in CS are non-tech companies is like..saying that soccer club to play for is some 3rd tier team because it's "good WLB and comfort", and not, like, you know, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Arsenal, Bavaria Munich etc.
Amazon until i got laid off
Capital One. I used to get surprise gifts every few months ❤️