Glassdoor is good for negative signaling, not so much positive signaling. It probably makes sense that larger, older companies will inevitably get bumped down in Glassdoor’s eyes, since it’s much harder to climb back up than to drop down, and the likelihood of dropping down increases over time.
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.
Precisely. I would argue that people are much less motivated to leave good reviews for employers than negative.
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).
The data on Glassdoor is abysmal. I was looking up several engineering job titles in the local area (NYC) to compare them to the sorts of salaries we had needed to offer to land good candidates. The quoted numbers were consistently 60-70% of the actual salaries we had to offer four years ago.
Totally. The business model seems similar to Yelp's: "You got yourself some negative reviews there. A lot of them seem totally bogus; we'd love to help you curate you presence here."
My secret theory is that glassdoor purposefully doesn't improve their website because they don't want everyone to know how poorly they pay compared to GAFAM.
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.
He/she said they pay well for a fast food place, which isn't the same statement.
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.
> 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).
so the reason they are on the list is because they employ more people?
I don't think that's fair. The marginal utility between $200k/yr and millions isn't that high, but it's ridiculously high between $30k/yr and $200k/yr. Put another way, you can comfortably afford to raise a family in CA on one of those salaries, and even put some money away to retire eventually, it's much, much harder to do that with the other.
They do an estimated half billion in revenue every year, I'd wager there are more than 100 'good' positions within the privately owned company known to promote exclusively from within.
Not a surprise since both companies require in-person work and don’t place remote work as one of their cultural values. Both have become extremely corporate places to work.
Many of the Googlers I know dread the Gbus rides from SF, and many that have left have found remote work or city jobs.
Not an apples to apples comparison, apologies to the computer company. Software companies are increasingly offering remote work to workers.
As far as fast food is concerned, you are right, I don’t believe there are any remote workers, aside from Postmates/Caviar and cloud kitchens (IaaS providers) etc. But that’s more an industry-specific thing. Designers and software engineers are blessed to have that as an option for work.
I really can't convince myself to put any stock in this. How can one compare In-N-Out Burger to Google? Aside from a small fraction, most of the positions don't overlap.
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.
Is there anyone in the universe voluntarily quitting their job at Google to go to work at In and Out Burger? No? So in what sense is it a better place to work? Clearly not empirically.
My understanding is that it's just based on employee satisfaction with their workplace. The implication is that In-N-Out Burger might be a better place to work relative to other options for its employees than Google is relative to other options for its employees.
Chick-Fil-A's engineering office is in middle of nowhere south Atlanta. You either have a long commute from midtown and above or you're living in some sketchy neighborhoods.
According to this article[0], they have trouble retaining employees, because their office location is so bad.
> The decisions are based on the battle to recruit and retain top talent. More of those companies are moving to the Beltline.
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
In-N-Out does as well. In-N-Out location managers make serious money and the company is known for promoting from within, good benefits and positive employee experiences.
Interestingly, both Chick-Fil-A and In-N-Out are highly religious organizations.
It can, if you are comparing between similar positions. Comparing the environment of an In-N-Out engineer to a Google engineer is valid, and so is that of an In-N-Out cook to a Google cook. But I don't think that knowing whether life of an average Google employee is "better" or "worse" than that In-N-Out is gonna be useful or illustrative of anything at all to an average In-N-Out employee.
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.
One of my measures for whether a tech job is "good" is how it compares to the pizza place that I worked for in college. Ignoring the lower pay, the pizza place wins more often than you'd think.
And as for Google, no not terrible, but no longer good enough that I'd accept a position there.
Simple part-time job, clear expectations, no pressure to innovate, working with a crew of like-minded individuals. Yeah, I can see how it’d be more fun than a high level professional job.
It'd differ by the job I'm comparing to, but in general, at the pizza place, the role and goals were pretty clear, my boss was outstanding, we were rarely idle and never given busywork, occasionally I got to save the day, and we made customers happy (in person!) many times every single day.
My highest-paying jobs generally lacked most or all of those qualities.
How about if Google sweetens the pot with $350K/yr in sweet, sweet cash? Would you still prefer the "pizza place"? I mean, higher pay is pretty hard to "ignore" to folks without a trust fund. This is _five times_ what an European software engineer typically makes, and it's by no means the upper bound.
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.
'Best place to work' is different from 'place I chose to work'. Indeed, money sweetening the pot signals that a job isn't at a place that people want to work.
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.
Doesn't work like that if you have a family to support and a mortgage. In fact, it doesn't work like that at all. The probability that you will find interesting work as an engineer at least is directly proportional to how much the employer (or client) is willing to pay. If you're paid half a million dollars a year, chances are you won't be doing something mind numbing that a $100K/yr fresh grad can do. You will be doing gnarly, interesting shit where there's disproportionate ROI. In fact in my current consulting gig, some of my clients insist that I offload bullshit work to their FTEs. I like that. I wish I could do that when I was an FTE. :-)
ROI is only half of the equation, though. It will tell you the maximum the employer is willing to pay.
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.
Do you really think Google is "compensating" for its shortcomings as a workplace? I mean, if you do that's great, less competition drives up the wages, but from personal experience that's just not true. They're a great employer (both technically and in terms of quality of employee experience) who also happens to pay really well. That's how they're able to attract the kinds of people they're able to attract: by not sucking and paying well. In fact, if they did suck as an employer, they'd not be able to compensate for it with pay - that only works on poor people. When your brokerage account begins to look like a phone number, you're too far up on the Maslow's pyramid to tolerate such shenanigans.
The scientific world may disagree. I work in bioinformatics and take a pay cut to do interesting work. It's not negative, but I'm not making a lot of money. Supply and demand- people are willing to work in a low pay field because the pot is sweet. Academia is pretty sweet gig and pays crap to work on hairy problems. UPDATE- teachers spend money out of pocket on their classes, is that negative income?
When teachers spend money out of pocket on their classes, I would estimate they are doing so out of negative feelings, such as the feeling that it's such a shame for kids to fall due to lack of money; but I don't see that as a spiritually sweet place for a teacher to be. That is a response to pain.
I think people are different, I work for money and it is such a motivator for me that if it is good enough I don't notice the downsides of a place. I agree in theory, but I think that theory is less likely to apply in my case than others. Maybe though I just don't care about most of the things that other people care about a workplace.
Yeah, as an adult with responsibilities, that pizza place is unfortunately no longer a possibility. And I'm sure it seems better in memory than it actually was.
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.)
Damore is the extreme case. There's a small clique of people there that do "social justice" activism on internal forums and little else. Damore pissed right into their punchbowl.
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.
When it comes to things like threats of physical violence, threats to get someone fired, or even blacklisted at other companies, I expect to see offenders immediately dismissed. That's a basic workplace hygiene issue, and none of the companies I've ever worked for would tolerate it.
I agree with you on that one. But as much as this sucks, it doesn't have to suck _for you_. Just come in, do your work, leave, collect $12-20K (pretax) every 2 weeks depending on the level. Google is fine with that. You don't have to engage with this bullshit.
> Ignoring the lower pay, the pizza place wins more often than you'd think.
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.
Going back to In-n-Out instead of unknown-pizza-place which I can't look up and may not be on the list of good places 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.
What's sad is that if you are right, then some tech companies are only better than a restaurant because they give you more money. It's very, very sad when one's life and career are reduced to just making money.
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 Google you get amazing benefits, giant salary, world-class talent as peers, luxurious offices around the globe, first-hand knowledge of unparalleled technical systems, flexible schedule, ability to work on innovative products from healthcare to drone delivery, and the most prestigious alumni network in the world should you leave it.
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.
Maybe google has to pay more to make up for the being a bad place to work.
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.
Well, I'm pretty sure that's the median job at each. But even if you wanted to compare software engineering at the two, I'm guessing that the comp differential still holds.
Related, there was a really interesting article going around a few days back, on how Chick-fil-A provisions bare-metal K8s clusters to every single remote branch. Not all the innovation is happening in the FAANGs
According to glassdoor the avg salary for In N Out managers is ~84k [0].
>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 .
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.
According to that Glassdoor link, the average base salary is $84k and the average extra pay (bonuses?) just about doubles that. I'm not sure if I'm reading it right since like you said they describe the average total pay as $114k
Glassdoor says the salary average is based on 11 reports. 5 reports included a bonus averaging $82,701 (and 2 reports included profit sharing averaging $10,345). The question is why only 5 of the 11 reported a bonus; or more specifically, did the others receive bonuses that they didn't report? If Glassdoor assumes that the other six didn't receive bonuses, then the average total pay of $114K makes sense.
84,315 + 82,701*5/11 + 10,345*2/11 = 123,787
The simple way I see to count these doesn't match the $114K, but it's close enough that I can buy that that's a big part of it. But the question is still whether the assumption (that nobody else received bonuses) is correct. It's plausible that many people fill out only the base salary figure, even if they have other compensation. If everybody gets a bonus, then the $160K figure reported in the other articles could be justified.
Sure, and that's a great salary, but the median Google engineer makes more than the median CA software engineer, and a much larger percentage of Google workers make the types of salaries we're talking about than In-n-Out workers.
It's weird to make a list flat out ranking In-n-Out as an overall better place to work.
All of these people are responding talking about how it doesn't pay the same at Google yet this site is filled with miserable people making hundreds of thousands of dollars and constant threads about it. Perhaps greed isn't as fulfilling in life as actually enjoying one's self and performing a job that has perceived value.
...or maybe these people don't remember (or have never had the experience of) working a low-paid job. Or maybe people like to complain. Or maybe there's just a lot of selection bias in the commenter pool. Maybe all the people happily working at Google are just busy working and don't care about HN drama.
I don't think it's "greed" to want to work as a software developer instead of flipping burgers (I've done both). However it should probably raise some eyebrows in Google management (among others) that a company in an industry known for slim margins and low pay nonetheless manages to have happier employees overall.
1) Flexible working hours. I can WFH any time I like. No questions asked.
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.
Exactly. It's really pointless to compare a $20k/yr position to a $200k/yr position, especially based on things like "having flexible schedules". The worker pool and expectations are leagues apart.
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.
Happiness is only partially correlated with money; depending on how the people who answer the survey evaluate their personal happiness, it's completely possible for the job to offer fulfillment through avenues other than income.
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.
Obviously it's difficult to compare companies in completely different industries, so I wouldn't worry much about minor differences between #1 and #11.
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? ️
Possibly, but it's far more likely that it's the non-tech/engineering employees who have well publicized subpar to inhumane working conditions that are skewing Amazon's rating. There are some reports of that culture permeating into it's cloud/tech business areas but it's difficult to know the relative ratio (both # of user reports and rating effect size) between the two.
> Are the horror stories about working at Amazon true? ️
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.
I remember from my stint at Amazon many years ago that everyone at Amazon, including me, felt that surely our total compensation was higher than our peers at other companies to make up for the lack of benefits. Otherwise everyone else would have left, right? Long story short, we were wrong. There was nothing better about being at Amazon than the other top tech companies.
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.
"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."
That's a fact of incompetent engineers who can't keep their code operating reliably without human intervention.
>Are the horror stories about working at Amazon true? ️
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.
Depends on the horror story and what employees factor into their happiness.
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.
It's based on employee ratings, so I do think there's still value if you use this the right way.
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.
Not sure about Google but regarding Facebook, there is something to be said about your work culture when one of your engineers commits suicide [1] by jumping off a building at your HQ. I would imagine things like this would lead to a lower score on that top list.
When you have a huge number of people working there its not unlikely that at least one person will do this and there is probably nothing you can do to stop it. What would be interesting data is if per person there is a higher rate than the general population.
Right. When you have 10,000 employees, then you are quite likely to experience something only one out of 10,000 people would do. Multiply that over several years, and low probability events happen with surprising (at first glance) regularity.
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.
How dare you assume that this is something we can change! These men are discussing numbers and figures and you’re out here with ideas that defy statistics!
If you are a talented and accomplished engineer, do you really want to work for Google or Facebook? It seems that the answer is not clear anymore. That is all.
The surveys are collected from employees, a lot of them with different work environment experiences.
Unless you are already in possession of fuck-you money, your choice of employment may be easily predicted and is likely highly correlated with comp. C'est la vie
You’re not reading the metric right. You’re trying to make it a statistic about what the best place _for you_ to work is, or for _a given position_. This is a metric that would describe overall happiness in different workplaces. There’s no problem measuring this across company types or position types, it’s speaking more to culture anyways, and if you want a different metric, you can totally find it elsewhere.
The big tech companies have not become lousy places to work for from one year to the next.
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.
I don't think number 2 is precise enough. For some of us it's not just that you're not building something good, it's that you're actually helping a company who is quite likely destroying society.
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.
Both a burger chain and an airline are among the top ten companies. And VIPKid, which I had to look up, which is apparently a "teach kids in China English via the web on your own schedule" service.
Ask yourself this, if you have a 5 year old kid then in which company would you want him/her to work when he/she grows up ? Google or In and Out Burger ?
Depends on the position. Would you prefer them to be an accountant at In-N-Out, or a Google contractor paid to scroll through and flag thousands of images of child pornography?
Why would you compare such drastically different (and frankly extreme) positions in the first place? That's not making any sort of point in good faith.
This is highly inaccurate for a number of reasons:
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...
Actually, I think you brought up something interesting. The stats are mostly about the "bulk" of the workforce. How are the general workers (grunts) treated? Kind of like, you can tell how clean a restaurant kitchen is by visiting the bathroom.
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.
You're doing a bit of sleight of hand by treating averages.
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.
I know one thing: if you didn't tell me what the positions were going to be, and you said "Would you rather Google or In n Out?" I'd go for Google. The probabilities favour that direction.
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.
A probability to think about: what proportion of Google's employees do you believe are contractors versus FTE? Come up with a figure first before you look it up. If you get it roughly right, kudos to you, but if you're pretty far off, you should consider revising your image of what a "Google employee" actually is.
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.
Why not both? When that 5 year old is 15 I would be thrilled if they worked at a place like In and Out. It's a good company, it pays well, and working in that type of job is an invaluable experience.
I worked in companies that looked great on Glassdoor had 4/5 stars ... but the reality was very different.
Companies nowadays "encourage" employees to leave reviews on Glassdoor because they think that will
attract "talents", help with hiring, and make them look good in front of the next VC.
The reality is that I started not to trust companies who have all great reviews on Glassdoor.
I tend to focus instead on the negative ones, that like on Amazon, very often highlight
the weak spots.
So I don't really buy into this `Best Places to Work` list.
Another day, another "best place to work" list that has no real quality controls on the reviews or methodology to ensure reviews are not fake or coerced.
They all do not control for systemic bias of reviews.
Reminds me of a company years ago that had particularly low morale for various reasons. They then entered one of these good place to work competitions and told us that "yeah it's ironic, but help us by giving us a good review because it's good for marketing". And dutifully everyone agreed.
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.
the "best" in 'best places to work' is pretty vague. it's based on employee reviews and a lot goes in there. what is best for those who have left reviews? social atmosphere, pay, career path, etc.? it most likely differs from company to company, sector to sector. with this in mind, comparing In'n'Out to fb is comparing apples to oranges. however, the fact that fb and google have experienced such a noticeable drop in favourability over time is news.
Ditto -- I'm curious what's people's opinion of working at Netflix. You don't hear it very often.
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).
These lists barely make sense. They compare apples to oranges. On top of that, they're heavily gamed.
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.
If you work at those companies you are just supporting tracking and advertising (generally ineffective ads). It's nothing to be proud of. If I see those companies on a resume that's an automatic no. You spied on people and still didn't make better marketing than the 70s. Nothing to phone home about. There is no prestige in that
I don't think constructive discussions by any mean can be done with comparing tech companies to fast food franchises, but it's still interesting to see 3~4 tech companies in the top 10 list. Is there anyone who can provide anecdotes for those companies in terms of working environment, career growth compensation, perks, etc...?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadMethodology: 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.
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.
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:
Many of the Googlers I know dread the Gbus rides from SF, and many that have left have found remote work or city jobs.
As far as fast food is concerned, you are right, I don’t believe there are any remote workers, aside from Postmates/Caviar and cloud kitchens (IaaS providers) etc. But that’s more an industry-specific thing. Designers and software engineers are blessed to have that as an option for work.
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...
Well, that, and the whole Christian Taliban thing.
South ATL isn't all bad but your implied racism is.
> South ATL isn't all bad but your implied racism is.
He didn't say anything racist! This is a baseless attack.
I wouldn't want to live or work in college park either. It has one of the highest violent crime rates in the entire state [1].
The parent poster even mentioned working around midtown, which is incredibly diverse.
Don't be like this. It's harmful to our community. Even if you did think he was racist, there are better ways to approach the issue than with venom.
You don't even know this person's race anyway. Way to assume.
[1] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ga/college-park/crime
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...
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.
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.
The reality is that I started not to trust companies who have all great reviews on Glassdoor. I tend to focus instead on the negative ones, that like on Amazon, very often highlight the weak spots.
So I don't really buy into this `Best Places to Work` list.
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.
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).
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.
Google atleast makes hardware now.
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.