Comment by noname123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noname123 | Hacker News Reader

I find these rankings to be really arbitrary. They should really have them split into categories like they have them for types of schools people like to go to (engineering schools, big city schools, hipster schools, ivies, facing-saving schools for ivy rejects etc.),

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!

I'd like to hear more about Lucrative BigCo. Are they hiring?

We here at Lucrative BigCo are always looking for paradigm changing talent to accelerate our dynamic synergy efforts. Please submit your resume to our jobs portal. This will require manually typing all of the info on your resume by hand into individual fields. Resume itself may only by in .txt format. We look forward to not responding for 6 to 12 months!

Don't forget the portal has no back button, and a 30 second page timeout!

And then they ask you to apply for a different, "more suitable" position and you have to re-submit your same CV through the process from scratch.

This a funny and a sad reality - come join our innovative company and solve interesting problems yet please submit your cv via jobvite/taleo or some other completely horrid job tracking system. Seems like that would be a place one could "disrupt."

Uggh was just going through this process a few hours ago .. dealing with those horrible enter your cover letter and resume systems for X big company. I even just encountered this when applying for a job thru StackOverflow.

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.

If you encountered a problem like this when applying via Stack Overflow, can you let us know which job it was?

You can either reply here or email careers@stackoverflow.com. Thanks!

No issues and now I realize after writing the above your system was only two windows. Create cover letter and upload resume ... easy stuff compared to the annoying/frustrating Big corp CV/resume data entry systems.

StackOverflow careers should have a filter for "Doesn't make you go through a stupid process to submit resume/cover letter".

My god I remember doing exactly this for a semiconductor capex company back in 2010.

Essential skills: Familiarity with Microsoft Office, IBM Rational tools, and SAP.

I am willing to give up being an agile ninja to become a RUP Cataphract.

I was applying for a job via one of these portals earlier in the year. I got so frustrated at the process that I started including bug reports for the portal as part of my job application.

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.

IBM does this, or at least my department does. And they're hiring. And firing. But in different areas!

In tech, "places for grown-ups" would be a good start.

http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/index.html

Well, not exactly what the parent describe but you have "laid-back" lucrative companies. In France it's banks, insurances, etc. You can't necessarily WFH easily but with more than 7 weeks of PTO it's more like "no work from home" when you feel like it.

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!")

Feels like you are talking about EuroInformation Dév...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia8OKMlqxLs

>"Places for people who like to Chillax and Still Get Paid (Lucrative BigCo with flex-time, summer hours, no morning standups, WFH)"

Does these still exist?

Sounds like every company I've ever worked at in in Sweden.

Welcome to Oracle.

Sounds like Morgan Stanley

Intuit.

Yes but they aren't hiring.

Banks.

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.

I work at at a big co: I'm given about 2 months off per year, flexible hours and a work from home option.

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.

Yes. I have 30 days off a year, free lunch, opportunity to travel abroad on business, morale type party events in office, I get to "ship things", and I solve challenging technical problems in a true full stack role. This is the first job I've had where I actually had to be up on algorithms as we use a ton of graph theory.

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.

This article looks like the functional equivalent of writers at a travel magazine perusing Yelp for highest-rated restaurants, then writing a full article based on those rating but never actually dining at those establishments.

I'd love to see an artists rendering of this idea as a map similar to xkcd's map of online communities.

That should also have overlaps for people who want several categories.(and will be increasingly ridiculous with higher number of categories..)

I'm curious if you'd mind giving a list of those universities, too :P Particularly that last one piqued my interest!

Sure, np. But don't want to say them out aloud because it's not nice to stereotype in public.

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.

Oh interesting. That's a totally different and much better approach that what I proposed in sibling post!

Just look at the top 20 colleges in US News and World Reports and remove all the ivies (and the top engineering schools if you're an engineering student).

Could you explain what you mean by "summer hours"? The term is not familiar to me, and Googling was unfruitful.

In my experience, "summer hours" mean half-day Fridays over the summer. I'd never heard the term until I moved to NYC.

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.

Summer hours could also mean that the expectation that employees have the option of taking the entire Friday off during the summer, provided that you schedule into your work Mon-Thurs. to make for the lost "eight hours unit" across those four days of work (e.g., WFH, come in an hour earlier).

37 signals has a 4 day work week during the summer months.

Summer hour to me always meant it wasn't uncouth to leave an hour early during the week or take a full day or half day on Friday. Really it's just more relaxed hours.

this could disrupt the recruiting industry. its a matchmaking service and it matches your personality to the company. someone make this please.

I know that HN User kokev wanted to do this (since he himself had a particular set of preferences for employer characteristics) but idk what became of it.

... this is the recruiting industry, is it not? Are they not taking into account the kinds of cultures people want to work in?

Recruiters care that much? Haven't seen it.

From what I could tell, various branches of google fit all the "places" you listed in your post.

Wait, hey, that last category of companies sounded really nice. Especially the closed offices. Can you list of some companies like that, so I know where to look?

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