Dan Morrill pointed over to ComputerWorld’s annual best places to work survey. I clicked the list of 100 companies expecting to see ComputerWorld advertisers, the same old big guns like Google and Microsoft and Yahoo!, and others large companies that can have lots of day-to-day IT grunts write in praises on the surveys (seriously, there are tons of little surveys on Best Company for ____ that are simply getting 80 of your own employees to write in and overwhelm the voting…), but, I was pleasantly surprised to continuously say, “who? who are they? huh?” to many entries. This intrigues me a lot, and makes me kinda wonder what some of these smaller, unexpected entrants do with their IT operations and workforce to be such good places to work. Almost anyone should be able to take the top 20 in this list and get good material from them for case studies… Any by “smaller” I mean smaller than the biggest companies that I expected.

I really think there are many, many smaller and start-up type companies that are amazing places to work for, especially if they have predictable income (which sometimes is tough because so many want to be Yahoo rather than a long-term small company that maintains a solid existence without trying to eat the whole cake…). Hrm, yes, I still have a bug to find something better…