Are there any companies that stand out to be a solid place to work besides

1) SAS
2) Cisco
3) NetApp

Profession does not matter. I was just curious!

8/23/2008 2:13:13 PM

pfizer

8/23/2008 3:06:51 PM

kimley horn (like SAS, they're headquartered in cary)

8/23/2008 3:15:58 PM

Microsoft and Qualcomm are good as well. Microsoft has a small presence in RTP, but they are good nonetheless..

8/23/2008 3:21:44 PM

i've heard Angus Barn treats their employees very very well


that (plus the $$$) is the reason some servers have been there for 20 years

8/23/2008 3:51:59 PM

kimley horn is one of the top 100 in the nation

they're doing the hillsborough street renovations

8/23/2008 6:08:02 PM

SAS

8/23/2008 6:12:57 PM

i tried to get a job at kimley horn

8/23/2008 8:39:16 PM

NCSU!

8/23/2008 9:34:01 PM

>_>

8/23/2008 9:52:30 PM

My husband works at the Environmental Protection Agency...(EPA)...They have the FBI and Lockheed Martin in there... He likes it

8/23/2008 11:24:34 PM

i applied there too, the HR woman was a cunt

8/23/2008 11:30:41 PM

Bandwidth.com in Cary

8/23/2008 11:31:44 PM

$10 says Bandwidth wont be here in 10 years

8/23/2008 11:58:34 PM

redhat

8/24/2008 12:06:22 AM

Progress Energy

8/24/2008 12:13:00 AM

netapps would be the WORST place to work for.

SAS and Glaxco seem to consistently get this highest ratings from employees to work for.

8/24/2008 1:22:05 AM

in my experience, downtown has been the best place...i didnt really like cary...blue ridge was ok...

DEFINITELY not crabtree valley mall

8/24/2008 1:37:34 AM

Glaxco

who?

8/24/2008 2:19:25 AM

Maybe they meant GSK?

8/24/2008 2:34:48 AM

Quote :

"netapps would be the WORST place to work for."

really? Tell me about your experience. We've had a few of our guys bolt from cisco for netapp for significant raises. They claim to be happy over there.

Now that Cisco no longer gives out stock options to non-management, i'm looking at other opportunities.

8/24/2008 9:24:20 AM

Quote :

"SAS and Glaxco seem to consistently get this highest ratings from employees to work for."

Having a parent that has worked for Glaxo for over 20 years now, I can fully assure that Glaxo is not the place that it use to be, and it shouldn't be in the top 100,000 places to work.

8/24/2008 10:46:32 AM

Quote :

"redhat"

8/24/2008 11:16:36 AM

^^ yeah, my step-father-in-law is an exec at GSK, and he has the same perception.

8/24/2008 11:23:26 AM

WCPSS. Can't beat 10 weeks of summer break.

8/24/2008 11:36:01 AM

Quote :

"DEFINITELY not crabtree valley mall"

dude taco bell is WAY worse

8/24/2008 1:24:52 PM

Fineline Prototyping

8/24/2008 3:31:58 PM

Lenovo

8/24/2008 3:45:17 PM

Quote :

"Now that Cisco no longer gives out stock options to non-management, i'm looking at other opportunities."

that sucks.

8/24/2008 3:59:24 PM

Glaxo has been pretty good to one of my clients. They allow her VERY flexible hours and her job is almost entirely telecommuting. Good for parents.

If you are in a same sex relationship, Best Buy is a wonderful place to work because your life partner qualifies for the same benefits as a spouse.

[Edited on August 24, 2008 at 6:55 PM. Reason : .]

8/24/2008 6:54:11 PM

Quote :

"DEFINITELY not crabtree valley mall"

I worked there for awhile and it wasn't bad for a part time job. I always felt sorry for the lifers though.

8/24/2008 8:32:17 PM

I'd say many of the smaller to medium sized engineering firms in the area are great places to work. Of the ones I've seen they have a family-friendly atmosphere, hold a variety of office-wide events that don't suck, they tend to have decent pay and aren't super strict in regard to some things you usually associate mega-corporations as having problems with (i.e. reasonably professional clothing is acceptable, showing up slightly late isn't a huge deal if you get all your hours in, your bosses are cool and easy to speak with, your job remains interesting and doesn't stagnate, etc).

I will also go ahead and say that any large-sized corporation that's been around for a good long while is probably not quite as good a place to work for as it was about 10-20 years ago. An example would be hewlett packard. Used to have wonderful benefits and a nice family friendly work environment, then they nuked the local office and have held firings over the head of all their employees constantly and have randomly fired employees to replace them with younger new-hires that cost the company less in wages and benefits.

A friend of mine's dad works at Nortel and I ended up job shadowing him in high school to learn about his job (more electrical or network engineering type stuff I guess, not what I am interested in now), and it was the most horrid work environment I'd seen. Everybody in the office made an attempt at being cheery but you could tell that the overall atmosphere was depressed. Firings were held over the head of everybody working there as well. In fact, there was a sort of mothballed pool table sitting in the break room there that had not been used since the dot com bubble had burst a few years before I was job shadowing there. It was like some sort of eerie monument to the company's past excesses that landed them in their current situation (2/3 of their RTP campus was empty at the time and the building we were in was a sort of ghost town as well, it was very weird).

There's still lots of big places here that are awesome to work at, I just thought I'd mention those two since those are examples I had a little first-hand exposure to.

8/24/2008 11:12:38 PM

royal parking valet services

8/25/2008 12:26:56 AM

Quote :

"If you are in a same sex relationship, Best Buy is a wonderful place to work because your life partner qualifies for the same benefits as a spouse."

same at SAS

8/25/2008 1:42:48 AM

Quintiles

8/25/2008 2:15:45 PM

the weed store

8/25/2008 2:22:32 PM

In semi-related news, google is no longer the golden calf that it once was

http://www.webguild.org/2008/08/apple-employees-300-richer-than-google.php


Free Food Not Cutting It Anymore
The stagnant to declining stock price is making it harder to recruit seasoned employees. These employees are usually making decent money at their present jobs and their stock options have probably done better than 5%. The free food is not cutting it anymore. A recent interviewee said “I could care less about the free food. Pay me what I am worth”. The interviewee with 15 years experience as a product manager was offered $65,000 a year, free food and no stock because it was a one year contract. He is presently making $115,000 at a Google competitor.



BTW, in other latest developments, a good chunk of the free food is also going away. More below:

http://valleywag.com/5040986/googles-food-perks-on-the-chopping-block

8/26/2008 8:27:51 AM

I heard the same about GSK

8/26/2008 8:26:19 PM

I Co-oped at GSK and although I did enjoy working there I don't think I would want to be there full time. Half the people in my department were always worried that they would be the next to be let go. I found out later that almost half of them did get let go. Terrible employee morale due to this.

8/27/2008 8:22:20 AM

Cisco is still awesome to work for, depending on the department/manager you end up with (and I have been quite lucky in this regard). The change in stock options don't really bother me much personally. After so many years with any big company though, there are probably more lucrative options with startups or other companies. I was also surprised to hear the negative NetApp comment on here.

8/27/2008 12:39:22 PM

I also co-oped at GSK. My entire department was outsourced to India a few months after my rotation ended. I'm glad I wasn't there to deal with it all. I do enjoy working for a smaller company now though. I get a lot more job satisfaction compared to being another cog in the machine.

8/27/2008 12:53:18 PM

The government

and

Novozymes (in franklinton though)

8/28/2008 8:46:20 AM

Quote :

"If you are in a same sex relationship, Best Buy is a wonderful place to work because your life partner qualifies for the same benefits as a spouse."

Quote :

"same at SAS"

same at NCSU

8/28/2008 8:51:03 AM

Quote :

"Cisco is still awesome to work for, depending on the department/manager you end up with (and I have been quite lucky in this regard). The change in stock options don't really bother me much personally."

yeah, don't get me wrong, the work and environment is still awesome. I'm just unhappy about the reduced compensation from loss of stock, which has been very significant at least for me over the last 6 years.

Now that the golden handcuffs are off, I know that there are other companies who pay network engineers far better than Cisco, and if i find something interesting, i'll probably bolt. In the past, the options kept me here.

8/28/2008 9:02:42 AM

man that sucks when companies take away perks you're used to getting. a friend of mine had his annual review and although they agreed that he outperformed himself from last year, there was no money put aside for bonuses so he effectively made less this year for working harder

8/28/2008 11:57:03 AM

^thats why you do as little as you can because you will still earn the same amount.

8/28/2008 1:18:18 PM

NetApp is supposedly a great place to work. I've turned down a few soft offers, because I prefer the job I am doing to what I would be doing at netapp, but that time could change.

8/28/2008 3:05:56 PM