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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
by KingMachiavelli 7y ago
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.
- Wohlf 7y agoI can't speak for In-N-Out, but I know Chick-Fil-A treats their employees quite well.
- chrisseaton 7y agoIs 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.
- the_cat_kittles 7y agoi would
- Ill_ban_myself 7y agoIf pay weren’t a consideration I would have been working at a coffee shop years ago. I love working with a complicated temperamental machine and cranky demanding sometimes charming people. Which is why I went with my 2nd choice: programming
- nilkn 7y agoMy 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.
- saagarjha 7y agoAs an engineer?
- TylerE 7y agoI bet lots would if the pay was the same.
- shantly 7y agoGod, if pay for all jobs were equal I'm not sure software development would even make my top 100 list of jobs I'd like to do.
- itake 7y agoChick-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. [0] - https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2019/10/19/chick-fil-a-moving-250-jobs-into-new-tower.html https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2019/10/19/chick-fi...
- saagarjha 7y agoMost Chick-Fil-A employees are probably not engineers.
- cloudwalking 7y agoWhich is why the comparison is pointless.
- CamperBob2 7y agoAccording to this article[0], they have trouble retaining employees, because their office location is so bad. Well, that, and the whole Christian Taliban thing.
- trenning 7y agoBasically you're saying people shouldn't work there because they'd have to live around poor blacks instead of high rise condos with rich whites. South ATL isn't all bad but your implied racism is.
- echelon 7y ago> Basically you're saying people shouldn't work there because they'd have to live around poor blacks instead of high rise condos with rich whites. > 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 https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ga/college-park/crime
- creddit 7y agoIn-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.
- Ill_ban_myself 7y agoTrue conservatism can be appealing when every new thing is a means to strip away rights, money, and privacy.
- kerng 7y agoGoogle hasn't become a terrible place to work, it's just not as great as it was 5 years ago. I think most people would agree with that. Also, why can a burger company not be as good or better then an ad company to work for?
- filoleg 7y agoIt 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.
- downerending 7y agoOne 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.
- ggggtez 7y agoExactly. 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.
- shadowgovt 7y agoHappiness 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.
- saagarjha 7y agoI'd think that the work hours of an In-N-Out employee are generally a lot less flexible than that of most engineers.
- ronyeh 7y agoObviously 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? ️
- akhilcacharya 7y agoThey aren’t. Disclaimer: I turned down higher paying/more prestigious companies for Amazon so YMMV
- KingMachiavelli 7y agoPossibly, 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.
- gdulli 7y ago> 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.
- elicash 7y agoIt'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.
- NeoBasilisk 7y agoDon't employee surveys factor heavily into these evaluations?
- wuliwong 7y agoIt was posted by glassdoor so I'm assuming it is from glassdoor reviews.
- president 7y agoNot 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. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/facebook-employee-death-was-suicide.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/facebook-employee-death-was-...
- baroffoos 7y agoWhen 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.
- compiler-guy 7y agoRight. 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.
- parkovski 7y agoYeah let's aim for less suicides than average. Jesus.
- mffnbs 7y agoHow 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!
- DevKoala 7y agoIf 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.
- dmitrygr 7y agoUnless 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
- ronilan 7y ago> How can one compare In-N-Out Burger to Google? You can’t. But on the other hand, in most tech companies, the on-site interview process is like Five Guys.
- awinder 7y agoYou’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.
- mc32 7y agoThe 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.
- djtriptych 7y agoAs someone who interned in 2005 and worked full time in 2013, I have to say the changes were obvious.
- tenpies 7y agoI 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.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> How can one compare In-N-Out Burger to Google? 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.
- MrZongle2 7y agoHow can one compare In-N-Out Burger to Google? One facilitates a surveillance state, and the other makes burgers?