Facebook, Google Drop Out of Top ‘Best Places to Work’ List
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Also when really big, recognizable companies have their rating change so drastically, it's obviously reflects more about the PR of the company than it's work environment. If you don't consider ideology, Google didn't actually become a terrible place to work rather it's its employees, by the nature of their demographic, be more informed and apt to oppose certain policy and also feel they have the leverage to cause internal change.
I love working with a complicated temperamental machine and cranky demanding sometimes charming people.
Which is why I went with my 2nd choice: programming
According to this article[0], they have trouble retaining employees, because their office location is so bad.
[0] - https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2019/10/19/chick-fi...
No, nothing in the article says that.
The fourth paragraph.
Less directly, they quote a spokeperson:
> This new office space will allow us to grow while inspiring new and existing talent Christina Coleman, director of campus planning and operations for Chick-fil-A
Interestingly, both Chick-Fil-A and In-N-Out are highly religious organizations.
Also, why can a burger company not be as good or better then an ad company to work for?
It's like making a lawyer compare his workplace to that of a surgeon at a private practice, you are comparing apples to oranges. In part, because the chosen field in itself affects the workplace environment, and there isn't really a good way to separate the effects of the field vs. the individual workplace environment for the purpose of that chart.
And as for Google, no not terrible, but no longer good enough that I'd accept a position there.
With shift work, you have the luxury of turning your brain off work at the end of every shift.
It could very well be age related, but I was never more relaxed than when I worked a retail-eqsue job. Even when on vacation.
My highest-paying jobs generally lacked most or all of those qualities.
FWIW, I loved my years at Google, and I think of going back from time to time. Is it an ideal workplace? No. But it's the best I have worked at by quite a margin. Why do I think that? Because Google is able to offer competitive pay and the projects that don't make your eyes glaze over right from the start, with the potential for truly breathtaking pay and world-leading projects with a little bit of effort and moving around internally, if you have the chops. It's not the best paying place anymore (that'd be FB), but not far behind, and on the balance it more than compensates for that by offering more meaningful work and beyond state of the art dev infra.
Disclosure: I no longer work at Google, and hold no positions in its stock. They treated me well when I was there, so I wish them well.
In theory, a place could be so great to work at that people would pay to be there. That would be negative pot sweetening with money.
But the wage is determined by the least amount a suitable employee is willing to accept, which is affected by how interesting the work is and how "good" the environment is.
Then it's no longer a job, it's an expensive hobby / education / retirement activity.
Most people work jobs to support themselves (or others) financially, you can't do that on negative income.
And having more income than you need means you can retire sooner and do more of your desired hobby then, so it absolutely is a pot sweetener.
I've been in the $300s a couple of times, but my ability to get much useful done, joy of workmanship was completely washed out by the fairly nasty politics of the groups I was part of.
(I've never worked at Google, but after reading the internal message traffic surfaced in the Damore lawsuit, it's difficult to imagine enjoying it.)
I'm not 100% sure why Google keeps those people around, but they are fairly easy to avoid: just don't engage, no matter how insane their ramblings are on any given week.
It only wins because you're excluding some of the most important criteria. Stay at the pizza place for 12 years and see how you feel about what has happened to your life and well-being. Did you buy a house? No, you couldn't afford one. Did you get married and have a family? No, you couldn't afford one. Did you have amazing health insurance? No. Did you save anything for retirement? No, your bills are pretty close to your wages and the pizza place provides squat for benefits.
The only way the pizza place wins is if you work there for a short amount of time, otherwise entropy will particularly badly eat away at you (in every regard). Low paying jobs are brutal on people over long periods of time, living at the line of existence perpetually is very harsh. You can't fix things that break, you can't acquire values that you want.
I think it's just saying if both jobs paid the same, the pizza place would be a more rewarding, fulfilling and pleasant place to work.
"The typical In-N-Out Burger Store Manager salary is $84,315. Store Manager salaries at In-N-Out Burger can range from $55,134 - $130,157." — Glassdoor.com
That's pretty good for most of the US, particularly so outside of major cities, and especially if you've been making money — even just mediocre money — for 4 years, while skipping student debt.
It's also infuriating because you'd expect these large tech companies, with all their surplus resources, to be able to do better for their employees' happiness and well-being. Yet this would also be a money-focused way of looking at companies. I suspect employees' overall well-being has less to do with money and more with their bosses' attitude and the work environments they create. Many of these tech giants sound hellish to me, with their relationally-unenlightened, cutthroat, misanthropic corporate cultures. The maxim that "A players hire A players but B players hire C players" also applies to the human decency side, regarding the kind of managers a company's bosses hire or cultivate (as well as the policies they establish.) Some of these bosses may be A players on the technical/business side, but are B or C players on the human-decency scale (as with Steve Jobs, for example). Thus their company, though bursting at the seams with money, struggle to provide other things their employees need or want.
Employees who worship their company might be overjoyed that they're one of the chosen ones, but other employees who don't drink the Kool-Aid might not be as happy with the cult's toxic aspects, regardless of the money they're making.
At In-and-out, you don't get any of those things. Not that I don't like I&O - their burgers are great, and I'm sure work environment is better than other fast food companies. But it's just not comparable to Google.
Which is a bit of hyperbole, but higher pay is one way to get people to accept years of schooling, and soul-crushing busywork. You’re not paid for virtue or happiness.
Because I can't see how else you'd end up with that number.
https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at...
>The typical In-N-Out Burger Store Manager salary is $84,315. Store Manager salaries at In-N-Out Burger can range from $55,134 - $130,157. This estimate is based upon 11 In-N-Out Burger Store Manager salary report(s) provided by employees or estimated based upon statistical methods. When factoring in bonuses and additional compensation, a Store Manager at In-N-Out Burger can expect to make an average total pay of $114,271 .
Not sure what the "total pay" means exactly but that averages 114k. Still way below the 160k you quoted which I think was from this article: https://medium.californiasun.co/in-n-out-store-managers-earn...
The California Sun article gives no sources for the claims of an average salary for in-n-out managers of 160k. Which is amusing as the article does reference Indeed.com for the "architect" salary it compares to in-n-out. According to Indeed.com the average salary is 42.8k [1]. I also saw that the story was picked up by USA Today, so I'm sure most people will forever more think In-N-Out store managers are making 160k on average, truth be damned.
[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/In-N-Out-Burger-Store-Manag... [1] https://www.indeed.com/cmp/In--n--out-Burger/salaries/Manage...
84,315 + 82,701*5/11 + 10,345*2/11 = 123,787
It's weird to make a list flat out ranking In-n-Out as an overall better place to work.
2) Free buffet style breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The quality is not as good as it was, but still better than anything in&out would give, no?
3) Clear ladder and career growth. While in in&out you would be lucky to move up to any job higher than $22/h
4) Much more interesting job. Say what you want to say about how bad Google is, I can't imagine how working in a burger shop would be more rewarding than working at your desk in Google, with all interesting challenges, good resources, and the smart people to learn from.
Google has problems, but this list is not a good list if it puts in&out over Google. It's misleading at best.
How many of your team members are fully remote? If the answer is 0, it sounds like there are some "questions asked".
Blasphemy! I'd eat In-N-Out every day if I could.
Consider: The In-And-Out worker would need 10 sick days to equal the pay of a single sick day for the tech worker.
Maybe it's a nice place to work compared to McDonalds, or other similar places... but trying to imply that people are happier working there than FAANG is just silly.
FAANG employees get paid way more than In-N-Out employees, but some of them are also expected to carry pagers that wake them up at 4AM. That's never an expectation of an In-N-Out employee.
What IS notable to me as an engineer, is how Google is ranked #11 but Amazon isn't on the list at all. Are the horror stories about working at Amazon true? ️
Disclaimer: I turned down higher paying/more prestigious companies for Amazon so YMMV
Back around 2007 I was considering moving to Seattle and read up on working there. At the time their first round of bad press hadn't yet hit and I started with no impression about them.
It's too long ago to remember the details, but from searching around I remember being definitively turned off from considering them an option.
And then a few years later I think it was, it broke into the mainstream. It wasn't a one-time thing, there was a consistent story told about it for years. The central theme was a culture of terrible treatment of people. Nothing specific to engineering.
They've had years now to do damage control. I have a friend whose husband works there and she says that there's a culture of treating people in such a way as to never allow any further bad press. (Which is subtly different from treating people well.)
She says he's on pager duty a certain number of nights/weeks per month and gets calls regularly overnight. That's not related to the narrative of bad treatment of people, just a fact of life in engineering that she called out as being stressful for them. Since she got regularly woken up too.
And she said the benefits aren't great, he doesn't even get a free Prime account. There's a culture of non-competitive benefits because you're supposed to feel privileged to work there, to see that as its own benefit.
That said, I didn't find the work as bad as some others experienced it. My team's pager only went off once a day or so at most.
That's a fact of incompetent engineers who can't keep their code operating reliably without human intervention.
Anecdotally I've heard mixed accounts, where some ex-Amazon employees say they never had issues, but still some others have some pretty bad stories to tell.
Recently Bezos said he only wants "to hire missionaries, not mercenaries", so take that statement as you will.
Steve Yegge (former Amazon and Google employee) once had to walk back a flippant remark about "dread pirate Bezos," in which he explained that while the work was fulfilling and he was successful at it, the background message he perceived of a consistent drumbeat of "Be useful to the company or we'll fire you" weighed on him psychologically.
https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2011/10/g...
So, if one way you support what companies to give your business to is based on how well they treat their employees, then sure, maybe this list makes me 5% more likely to frequent In-N-Out Burger (if they ever set up shop in DC).
Or, maybe this data is interesting to investors, I don't know. Not because you're comparing the #1 slot to the #5, but just to say that anything in the top 10 is a sign of something positive that can be added to other factors you'd analyze.
So there could be useful ways to use it. But it wouldn't make me quit my job to work at Hubstop, either.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/facebook-employee-death-was-...
The classic example of this is that on Google's main campus there are tens of thousands of workers. That's the size of a small town. So one should expect medical emergencies at about the same rate as a small town--which is to say, several every week. You should expect ambulances and fire trucks and what not else regularly, not unusually.
You can’t.
But on the other hand, in most tech companies, the on-site interview process is like Five Guys.
What has happened is two distinct things:
1. They are now regular companies (due to ubiquity and staff size). So there is lots of boring ordinary work—but with great perks.
2. In a subset of the staff, mostly idealists realize that they’re just another company, albeit high tech., but they are not creating the paradise cities that Japanese futurists thought up back in their heyday.
At worst, you're quite helping a totalitarian regime's intelligence apparatus.
By splitting the question "which do I prefer" into "which job pays more" and "which job would I take if money weren't an object".
This survey measures the latter. Pay, with output requirements, measure the former. We each hybridize these factors differently--attempting to isolate them is valuable.
One facilitates a surveillance state, and the other makes burgers?
This list sounds ridiculous.
They all do not control for systemic bias of reviews.
At what point is it just a marketing piece?
Glassdoor is fun. Worked a different company with lots of honest raw reviews giving you a real feel for it. Couple of years later, issues not addressed, but now great reviews! Well done to the repu managers.
Methodology: https://media.glassdoor.com/staticList/pdf/2019/Glassdoor-Be...
Not sure how accurate glassdoor is since its plagued by the same issues as most review sites.
Interesting to see that JUUL is at #31
I would take Glassdoor with a grain of salt (unless you read the negative reviews and find specific constants across reviews). I would also strongly encourage devs to keep FAANG companies as a healthy benchmark for production software.
If things are not going well, you're upset about your work, or you are looking for another job, then you are more likely to be on Glassdoor and/or more likely to leave a negative review. If things are going well at work, you're thinking about your work or something else in your life, not reviewing it on Glassdoor (unless incentivized somehow).
levels.fyi is so much more accurate and informative whereas glassdoor never seems to update their numbers nor add new features like career levels that it really makes me wonder what everyone does there especially as I think www.levels.fyi was written by 1 guy.
Many of the Googlers I know dread the Gbus rides from SF, and many that have left have found remote work or city jobs.
Haha, is this the same HubSpot? https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/books/review-disrupted-da...
...I mean I guess it kind of makes sense, most people on this site probably don't read books D:
The scores are averaged which any statistician will know means that in a place like In And Out where most jobs are making $10-$20/hr. Maybe there are accountants at In-N-Out, but I doubt their opinion even moves the needle here.
You could say the same about the content flaggers or whatever. The majority opinion from FAANG companies is going to be engineers.
And side note: I think anyone who spends their time helping catch child predators is someone to be respected...
How does Google/Fb treat their grunts (developers I assume) and how does a burger restaurant treat their cashiers/cooks? It's sad if a cashier/linecook feels like they get more respect from their managers than a developer from their own managers.
Sure, but knowing the psychological fallout, not really something to want for your own kid.
The comment I was responding to was proposing a hypothetical dilemma, between guaranteeing your kid would work at Google or would work at In-N-Out. My point was twofold: one, that the idea that all jobs at FAANG companies are great is wrong (and, no, the majority of workers at FAANG companies are not engineers, who comprise a minority of employees); and two, the worst jobs at FAANG companies are worse than the worst jobs at In-N-Out. Yes, catching child predators is critical, but reviewing user-supplied content for child pornography, extreme graphic violence, etc. as part of your day job is incredibly psychologically traumatic. It's also likely that the contractors who do so receive worse compensation and benefits than the average In-N-Out worker, who does get paid relatively well and also gets health benefits.
There are more Apple retail employees than engineers. I'd guess Amazon has a similar story, but I haven't checked the numbers for that.
It's sort of like if you said "Would you rather be born in the USA or India?" Sure it depends whether you end up the child of the richest guy in India or a baby immediately human-trafficked in the USA but the probabilities line up in precisely one direction.
Not all or even a majority of contractors, to be clear, lead a bad existence. But a lot of mythmaking happens with FAANG companies, and they really want you to think of them as relying only on sexy jobs, all the while sweeping the more mundane and crappy ones under the rug.
I know of at least one company near the top of that list that has to be astroturfing their reviews. Most folks there hated their job and the turnover was insane. Like we're talking onboarding classes where 50% or more of the employees quit within a month or so.
And in fact, say, google may be great if you're in some roles and miserable in others. How can you normalize that?
But it worked: I clicked on the link.
Google atleast makes hardware now.
I've heard from friends that they pay very well, that it's very challenging, but that "they treat people like adults". Which can mean a lot of things. But to me it sounds positive overall. (But again, small data set).
Also, their burgers are very good too.
This list is about the best places to work in the world in 2020. Not best tech place to work. Or best place to work if you have a degree.
In N Out pays very well for a fast food position. Compared to comparable jobs at other fast food companies, it’s easily the best one to work at.
For a company C, define S(C) to be the set of companies where the "average" employee at C could conceivably get a job without significant extra training. Under this survey, a company C is ranked highly if it is considered great within the group S(C) of companies. Said differently, a company C is ranked highly if employees working at other companies within S(C) tend to want to work at C specifically.
While we may not be telling our kids to strive to work at a burger place when they're adults, the reality is there are millions of people out there who aren't going to be working at Google for various reasons but they still deserve good jobs that pay well and treat them with respect. It could very well be the case that In-N-Out stands out as a great place within S(In-N-Out) more than Google does within S(Google).
Perhaps the point of contention then is whether lists like this should be aspirational or empirical. You could easily make an aspirational list by reducing it down to raw absolute pay. I'm not sure how useful that really is. This list is interesting (to me, at least) because these are places where people are actually really happy, given what their realistic options are.
so the reason they are on the list is because they employ more people?
What a simplistic view of the world.
There is really no point in paying attention to nonsense like this.