http://www.gore.com/ - Gore Industries, a truly astonishing workplace in almost every write-up I've ever read.
http://www.semco.com.br/en/ - The book "Maverick" by CEO Ricardo Semler shows how he set the culture. It's grown a lot since then, but still an amazing firm
http://www.sas.com/ - employees love it
http://www.netapp.com/ - ditto, and the hardware is everywhere interesting.
http://www.qualcomm.com/ - Qualcomm is best known to sys admins of a certain age for producing qpopper and for some of their staff being killed in Iraq. The company is apparently great to work for
http://www.dreamworksanimation.com/ - more code than you might think
http://www.amazon.com/ - I know a guy who works in operations who loves it. For developers it has downside (you own your code in deployment), but he really rates it highly. YMMV.
http://www.salesforce.com/ - Rated highly by staff
https://www2.wwt.com/ - I'd never heard of them, but they appear on about half a dozen lists
http://www.rackspace.com/ - Biggest cloud provider outside Amazon, I think
http://www.autodesk.com/ - Personally I'd rather eat my own head than work there, but well regarded by employees
http://www.hds.com/ - Everybody forgets about HDS, but they do some really amazing work and do staff love it
EDIT: added more companies
Actually, I'd put that as a plus.
Also, what's wrong with Autodesk?
At least that's how it was explained when if interviewed there.
But yeah, I sort of hate it. If it had modern syntax and data structures and UI it might not be bad.
Here is interesting list of companies:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2013/07/12/the-bes...
[1] https://blog.wealthfront.com/hot-mid-size-silicon-valley-com...
That said I don't work there I just know people who have and who have interviewed with them as well.
All around good things to say about them as a company
Let me tell you why.
1.) 100% work from home (minus ~2 one week trips per year) 2.) Get paid to write cool open source software. 3.) Work with smart people from all over the globe.
#1 can't be overstated. This isn't just "flex time" or "work from home when you want to". There is literally no office to go to for most people at Canonical. Working at home is the default. The difference is huge. My last company let us work from home as much as we wanted, but most of the company worked from San Fransisco... which means when there were meetings, 90% of the people were in the room, and the rest of us were on a crappy speakerphone straining to hear and having our questions ignored. At Canonical, everyone is remote, so everyone works to make meetings and interactions work well online... and these days it's easy with stuff like Google Hangouts and irc and email and online bug tracking etc.
Working on open source is like entering a whole different world. I'd only worked on closed source before, and the difference is awesome. There's purposeful openness and inclusion of the community in our development. Bug lists are public, and anyone can file one. Mailing lists are public (for the most part) and anyone can get on them. irc channels are public, and anyone can get on them. It's a really great feeling, and puts us so much closer to the community - the people that have perhaps an even bigger stake in the products we make than we do. Not only that, but we write software for people like us. Developers. You are the target market, in most cases. And that makes it easy to get excited about the work and easy to be proud of and show off what you do.
Finally, the people. I have people on my team from Germany, the UK, Malta, the UAE, Australia, and New Zealand. It's amazing working with people of such different backgrounds. And when you don't have to tie yourself down to hiring people within a 30 mile radius, you can afford to be more picky. Canonical doesn't skimp on the people, either. I was surprised that nearly everyone on my team was 30+ (possibly all of them, I don't actually know how old everyone is ;) That's a lot of experience to have on one team.
Canonical's benefits don't match Google or Facebook (you get the standard stuff, health insurance, 401k etc, just not the crazy stuff). However, I'm pretty sure the salaries are pretty comparable... and Google and Facebook don't let you work 100% from home. I'm pretty sure they barely let you work from home at all. And that is a huge quality of life issue for me. I don't have to slog through traffic and public transportation to get to work. I just roll out of bed, make some coffee, and sit down at my desk.
One question: how long does hiring process take?
Although you're dismissive of the strip, and I can understand why from the typical visitors' perspective, there are literally tons of things to do there and many of them are significantly discounted or free to Las Vegas residents. I did the math and over the course of 3 years I went to tens of thousands of dollars of things for free.
There are concerts, some of the best restaurants in the world, conventions, boxing, shopping, and more. Traffic is manageable. Cost of living is low. Flights to most places are cheap. You can be in Southern California or doing outdoorsy stuff in Utah for the weekend with a few hours drive, or easy 1 hour flights.
ch2m