Ask HN: Best companies to work for in the US which don't have media coverage?

Companies that always appear on "best places to work" lists include:

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

Forbes' 2013 list of the best financial services companies to work for: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/07/31/the-be...

Anybody supplying contractors to the NSA. From the central banking database you know how much money they have in what bank account. From Facebook you know if they could be dead by now. The sum of all monetary holdings of any of these targets forms collectively a bounty on their heads. Do you really need to see Edward Snowden's stash of documents to understand this? I don't.

I met a few people who work at Zappos in Vegas. They couldn't stop talking about how much they enjoy working there.

arbor networks

ch2m

If you're ok with being in LA then Cornerstone on Demand is a great choice, they're public, great benefits, 40 hour workweeks etc.

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

I'm a bit late to the party, but I'll nominate the company I work for - Canonical (although the part about no media coverage has been somewhat untrue the last few days ;).

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.

I came across this article[1] that has a list of "hot" tech companies. It's from 2012, but I think it's still relevant.

[1] https://blog.wealthfront.com/hot-mid-size-silicon-valley-com...

Do not overestimate Google's benefits. There is nothing magical in what they offer. The only reason why you should consider working at Google is people and your CV (if you will manage to get job in Google).

Here is interesting list of companies:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2013/07/12/the-bes...