January 22nd, 2009

Fortune Announces Best Places to Work: How does it compare?

Posted by • January 22nd, 2009 • 1,516 Comments

As some of you may know in late December 2008, Glassdoor announced the Employee’s Choice Best Places to Work award. Today, Fortune has announced their annual 100 Best Places to Work For. See below the top 50 companies that made their list and the top 50 companies that made the Glassdoor list.

Here are some of the highlights when comparing the top 50 Best Places to Work:

Only 30% of companies recognized by Fortune made it into Glassdoor’s employee-selected top 10 companies
11 companies make both Glassdoor and Fortunes Top 50 Best Places to Work (see those highlighted in yellow)
Glassdoor’s #1 Best Place to Work, General Mills, falls to 99th place on Fortune’s list
Fortune’s #1 Best Place to Work, NetApp, makes the 10th spot on Glassdoor’s list

It’s surprising to see that eBay pops up on Fortune’s Top 100 list as a Best Place to Work. Based on the company ratings available at Glassdoor, eBay was actually one of the lowest rated companies according to employees. Currently eBay receives a modest 2.8 company rating and CEO John Donahoe garners a low 20% approval rating. (eBay ranked 83rd on the Fortune list)

Glassdoor 50 Best Places to Work
Fortune Best Places to Work

Rank
Company
Company

1
General Mills
NetApp

2
Bain & Company
Edward ...

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Recent Posts

Life within Circuit City is Full of Surprises, just not the good kind…

Posted by • January 21st, 2009 • 27 Comments

CNET reporter Brooke Crothers wrote an interesting article this past Saturday about the changes within Circuit City not only felt by the consumer. Sure consumers may benefit from the drastic price reductions in the stores, but what is it like for the employees when a company is going through a massive liquidation and layoffs?

In a brief interview the CNET reporter had with a store manager, the employee had this to say “as of Saturday, her new immediate boss was the person from the liquidation company. That person, in effect, was now running the show.” Based on the reporter’s own experience, combined with additional comments from employees, there was a sense of ‘sheer pandemonium’ within the store in Southern California.

Apparently, many employees were taken by surprise because they felt their store would somehow make it through what management coined as ‘reorganization’.  In addition, a female employee at the Circuit City was interviewed regarding the liquidation and was quoted saying, “no one knew it would happen–until it happened.”

It appears that the unexpected events are something that may have been carried down from the higher echelons of the company. This past week a Circuit City Senior Manager in Richmond, VA commented in a ...

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AMD Cuts 1100: Did employees see it coming?

Posted by • January 19th, 2009 • 303 Comments

AMD announced today that it will be cutting 1,100 jobs. On Glassdoor.com, AMD currently receives a 3.0 (neutral) employer rating in terms of job satisfaction, and CEO Dirk Meyer has a 44% approval rating. Stay tuned for how ratings will be affected as the impact of layoffs begins to take effect.  

Note just a handful of the interesting reviews that talk about the good and the bad at AMD that have been posted over the past few months: 

In a review just published yesterday from a MTS Systems Design Engineer at AMD it makes you wonder if the writing was on the wall: 

Pros: Interesting technologies, decent company, flexible time off, fairly engineering focused. lone competitor to intel on the cpu front and the lone competitor to intel and nvidia on the graphics front does mean that it is still doing compelling cutting edge research and development. 

Cons: poor bonus and stock compensation, too spread out in terms of location. no espp, 401k match is now gone. apparently salary cuts. questionable merger in terms of payouts to on boarding ATI menbers. hiring freezes make it difficult to know whether an approved rec will actually go through, which makes planning difficult. too many contractors in ...

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20/20 Debates Whether Salaries Should Be Kept Secret

Posted by • January 19th, 2009 • 1 Comment

Suze Orman sees potential to remove the glass ceiling with open and transparent discussions about salary. If employers and employees have equal access to salary information, negotiations can be more effective and satisfying. She comments that we already practice ‘safe sex’, why can’t we practice ‘safe money?’

Check out her interview in the 20/20 segment regarding salary transparency:  http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=6668520.

Also check out the interview in the 20/20 segment with Penelope Trunk, co-founder of Brazen Careerist. Interestingly, Trunk talked about the open salary discussions that occur within her company.

We’d love your feedback on the segment and opinions about whether salary should be more or less transparent.  Of course, we come down on the side of more transparency and it seems most employees share this sentiment.  In our recent survey of employed adults:

the majority (56%) of employees said they wish they had a better understanding of fair market compensation for their position; and
more than one in three (38%) of employees say they’d like to see more transparency related to compensation at their employer and within the local job market than has previously been available.

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Straightforward Commentary on Jobs

Posted by • January 16th, 2009 • Leave a comment

Check out some great commentary from Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg about Apple’s Steve Jobs‘ decision to step back to focus on improving his health. Mossberg provides some interesting perspective on COO Tim Cook, who will be taking over the reigns on several of Job’s current responsibilities.

http://gigaom.com/2009/01/16/on-steve-jobs-a-voice-of-reason/

Feel better soon Steve!

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Yahoo’s New CEO Get Tips from Past and Future Employees

Posted by • January 13th, 2009 • 83 Comments

The saying ‘where there is smoke there is fire’ came true today after continuous gossip over who the next CEO of Yahoo would be. Earlier today, it was officially announced that Yahoo has hired former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz, who left the post in 2006. A couple months ago when it was announced that Jerry Yang would be stepping down, we offered up some tips from Yahoo employees about what it may take to improve the company.  Below, we’ve added some recent insights from Yahoo employees about things that still need fixing that should be of interest to Carol.  In addition, we’ve included additional insights for Carol from the employees of Autodesk about the things that work well that she can hopefully take with her into her new seat.

As you’ll see below from the snapshot of company and CEO approval ratings, both companies receive a satisfied company rating in terms of job satisfaction, but where we see the greatest difference is with CEO ratings…hopefully Yahoo!’s new CEO will garner the respect of the company’s employees and in turn receive a higher CEO approval rating.

Glassdoor.com:
Company Rating
CEO Rating

Autodesk
3.5
56%

(CEO Carl Bass)

Yahoo
3.4
34%

(CEO Jerry Yang)

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Microsoft Layoffs Do Not Compute?

Posted by • January 13th, 2009 • 18 Comments

The rumor mill is alive and well with Microsoft layoffs expected to be as high as 15% of their workforce which is approximately 15,000 employees. As you’ll see in some of the employee comments below, some believe this is a necessary change that was only a matter of time whereas other employees view the company’s reputation for not laying off its staff as one the company’s greatest assets.

The Microsoft layoff announcement only worsens the fact that Wall Street’s optimistic Q1 projections were off the mark. According to an AP article, “The week’s economic news, including the Federal Reserve’s region-by-region assessment of business conditions, will be more worrisome after word Friday that the unemployment rate soared to a 16-year high of 7.2 percent during December.”

What’s ironic about this speculation over mass layoffs at Microsoft is their aggressive investment in new technologies. As TechCrunch just reported, Microsoft led a $24 million investment round for Israeli startup Intrig. Is this aggressive spending part of their strategy to stay ahead in hopes of carrying it out till the market improves?

And are Microsoft executives coming to the realization that the previous attitude of “we don’t do layoffs” is not good for business?  As you’ll read ...

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Employers: Do you use the “Standing In The Shower Talking To Yourself” Test?

Posted by • January 9th, 2009 • 46 Comments

The ADP numbers released Wednesday that showed nearly 700,000 people came off of payrolls in the month of December was even startling to those of us who expected to see a large number. I wrote recently here asking why companies still had to lay-off during the holidays. At least 700,000 people had that same question last month. And now here we sit in January with what I expect to be as many, if not more, job losses this month from the companies that did wait until after the holidays to enact changes. We won’t know those numbers until early next month, but I do expect that we are going to see another staggering number of people lose their positions. We should view the revisions to earnings estimates from companies this week as the precursor to more job cut announcements.

I am also hearing from more and more companies that they are now trying to reduce hours and salaries vs. reducing actual people from the business. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said that in November of 2008 vs. November 2007 that those full-time employees who were formally working fulltime (40 hours or more) but who were ...

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Reality Bites: Are Employees Disconnected from Market Realities?

Posted by • January 7th, 2009 • 1 Comment

It’s the first full week of 2009 and what’s on employees’ minds?  We were curious so we conducted a year-end survey with our friends at Harris Interactive to find out what employees are thinking about a variety of topics that affect our lives — layoffs, compensation, the future.  You can read our advisory with a summary of findings here, but we’ve added a bit more perspective below.  Overall, we were struck that there is an undercurrent of high employee confidence that runs counter to headlines and market realities of late. We’d love your opinions and thoughts on the findings.  Have people been living on an island? Or is it just a basic case of denial?

Little Concern about Layoffs

It’s hard to turn anywhere these days without hearing something about layoffs. Maybe you know someone who’s been laid off or maybe you know 10, but it feels like the effects are everywhere. In fact, we continue to see increases in the frequency reviews are coming in with the word “layoff.”   We did this original analysis in November.  Today the percentage of reviews with the word “lay off” is hovering around six percent.

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CNBC Reports on CEO ratings, the Future of Glassdoor and Who’s Getting A Bonus

Posted by • January 5th, 2009 • 44 Comments

Jane Wells, CNBC Reporter and Funny Business Blogger has been reporting all day today on Glassdoor.com. Jane stopped by our offices to do the taping right before Christmas (which also happened to be the day after our Glasssdoor.com holiday party – if people seem a little sluggish that’s because they were!) in the multi-segment series on her blog, check out further details from our CEO ratings report, discussion about the future of Glassdoor and information about bonuses. In addition, she’s gone a little deeper into companies like Dell and Chrysler.

Part 1:  Do You Love or Hate Your CEO?

Part 2: Can This Web Start Up Make Money?

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