361–370 of 447 posts
If you live in Wisconsin, I highly recommend northwestern mutual which is a life insurance/financial company.
Positives: + Great product that kids of all ages (1-99) all around the world like and will want to talk to you when you say you work for LEGO + Healthy work life balance + Company really cares about it's employees (not just on paper) + Family owned + Huge emphasis on doing this in legal, ethical ways + Profit gets reinvested in renewable energy and similar projects and in significant percentage given to good causes + Plenty of work for IT people in different parts of organization (take your pick...) + Relocation is handled/helped by the company + Most of the areas are quite international
Negatives: - If you do not get hired for CPH office, your workplace will be Billund on Jutland which is boooooooring (good if you are a parent) - Weather sucks in Denmark, so if you come from somewhere more south you will complain - Like in any big company, promotions, implementation of ideas ect can be based both on rational reasons like contribution, ROI and office politics (depends on departments) - Some areas might be more amateurish than you are used to in IT solution oriented companies (SAAS and similar)...but you can view it as places for improvement
Disclosure: I have worked and am working at LEGO as an IT-ish engineer for 5+ years.
Feel free to ask questions.
I've been working for Xero since three years. It's a great place to work. Free barista coffee, fruits and social gathering every Friday. Everyone is very helpful and nice. Waiting to move into a brand new office here in Melbourne, AU. It's great to work for a company that cares about ethics and governance. We've to jump through several hoops before we can do anything with customer data. I have a lot of freedom in ter…
Cisco. Great teamwork and culture, tons of smart and friendly people, interesting technical problems (I think computer networking is interesting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), opportunities for growth, and good work-life balance. One thing to note is that much of this might be because I got lucky and joined the team that was part of the OpenDNS acquisition.
Just be prepared for your RSUs to basically remain stagnant for your entire tenure because the hardware business is a boat anchor for the stock price.
(Zoom was started with 40 Webex (Cisco) engineers. lol.)
Also Cisco salaries are really low for SV, like 30% less - totally non-FAANG. I've pointed that out to Cisco recruiters, and they almost cried on the phone begging me to go to the next interview step anyway.
I loved every minute of my time working at Netflix. Great, talented coworkers who I could constantly learn from, management chain from bottom to top of former engineers, so they understood when you would say, "I worked on this for a week but have no results because it didn't work". Plenty of resources to do what you needed to do, and lots of autonomy to do what you thought was right. Very little process and upper man…
I've had a pretty excellent time at Netflix myself. The business model is refreshingly simple: people pay to watch shows they'll enjoy. As a result, our work is pretty aligned with our customers. No annoying ads, no selling data, no focusing on whales, no anti-consumer dark patterns (or at least not many). And Reed is an excellent CEO, imo. He's tried his best to build a culture that treats everyone as human and inte…
There's plenty of those. They removed the star ratings, they don't show IMDB or other external ratings, nonsensical categories, things that still autoplay even with all autoplay options off (e.g. when selecting an episode in a series).
They keep producing average to bad content and keep pushing it in front of you without any option to filter it out. And the things they produce that are worth watching are hidden in a stream of junk and cancelled after season 3, usually without a satisfying ending, because Netflix structures their contracts in such a way that they would have to pay a lot more after season 3.
And they keep removing non-netflix content. They said themselves, they want to become HBO before HBO can become them. Well, I don't want HBO. I want a Spotify for video content where I can watch everything in one place. Old netflix was just that. I refuse to pay for multiple streaming services at the same time. Yo-ho and raise the flag.
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SBIR shops often pay abysmally (with bad benefits) even if the work is interesting.
Depends on the shop. SBIR farms that have never commercialized a single product are terrible. Ones that have a revenue stream are fine.
For my skillset, there's tons of jobs in industries like entertainment, finance, insurance, tech B2B, advertising, private sector contracting, chemical manufacturing, gambling, etc. I'm really sick of my labor going towards turning people into consumer zombies, making the rich richer, or otherwise exploiting people or nature. How do you find a tech job where you know your labor is actually having a positive impact on…
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Applying through company websites is usually a black hole. For whatever team you’re applying for, try to find the team lead/manager/etc and hit them up on social media. Obviously be prepared to sell yourself but getting hold of a human usually fares much better than applying through whatever portal.
Unfortunately I've had the same experience as the OP with regards to Netflix. How effective do you actually find reaching out to random people related to job postings? In my experience for the companies I've worked at, even if I'm referring a close friend/former colleague the only difference (visible to me at least) is that it they get put in a similar queue.
I have have enjoyed working at the EPA (US Government) as an IT Specialist. The good parts are working with people passionate about their jobs, on things that truly matter. Work life balance and management trust is very high. The bad parts are there as well: outdated technology, lots of committees, long processes to do certain things. Pay is less then I could get in industry. Mixed bag: Not a "fast to fire" environme…