Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture? - kalarikos
======
United857
I'm biased, but I'd say out of all the "big" tech companies, FB has the best
engineering culture.

* With few exceptions, engineers aren't hired for a specific team; they go through bootcamp where they get exposure to all parts of the stack and tasks from different teams.

* Ideas usually come from engineers. Managers are there to be a sounding board/connect you with people resources as needed.

* Moving fast is valued (we used to be famously known for "move fast and break things" but now it's "move fast with stable infra". I.e., our dev infra is developed with a eye towards enabling rapid iteration.)

* Lots of internal knowledge sharing.

* Scale. Probably only Google, MS, Amazon come close.

* With only very few exceptions, every engineer has access to the near-entirety of source code at FB (Oculus, Whatsapp, Instagram...).

* Internal mobility is quite straightforward; after a year you can generally transfer to teams with available headcount without a formal set of interviews.

Of course, it's not everyone's cup of tea and like any big company it's not
always 100% perfect and we don't always live up to this in every circumstance,
but in general this is what it's like and what we're aiming for.

~~~
akerro
I think Facebook has very poor engineering culture. They built their iOS app
with 18k classes, then claim that iOS and Git can't handle their 'scale'.

Let's avoid putting here obvious companies and companies who over-engineer,
maybe?

[http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-
th...](http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-the-facebook-
ios-application-is-so)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3m5n2n/faceboo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3m5n2n/facebook_engineer_ios_cant_handle_our_scale/)

~~~
danpalmer
I've spoken to Facebook engineers who work on their internal source control
systems, and it was pretty obvious from talking to them that Git wouldn't work
for their purposes. There is plenty of writing about this topic that explains
in some detail why Git is unsuitable, and why Mercurial was a better option
for them.

As for the 18k classes in their iOS app, I don't see why this is a sign of bad
engineering? I'd expect that a large number of these are auto-generated, for
example from Thrift API definitions, and I'd also expect that what we see as
users is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the code needed. There's obviously
a lot of analytics code, and also I'd expect the resiliency and reliability
needed requires much more code than we'd expect.

~~~
mattmanser
It's nothing more complex than 100,000s of other apps out there. Yet somehow
they managed to create 18k classes?

Scale is handled at the back-end.

~~~
mercer
I can't immediately think of any apps that are just as complex as Facebook's,
but maybe I'm just not thinking hard enough. Could you give me some examples
(honest question)?

~~~
nailer
Unreal Engine.

~~~
Psilidae
Based on their documentation—which, albeit, I know has many classes
omitted—Unreal Engine has ~6900 classes. That number probably gets greatly
multiplied, though, if you count generated classes.

~~~
nailer
And it's managed in git.

~~~
bluesilver07
I can't find the link, but I remember an Epic engineer saying that they use
Perforce internally and do a 2 way sync with Github.

~~~
richardboegli
Correct, it is managed in Perforce and MIRRORED onto Github.

------
dirtyaura
Google has an unique software engineering culture that was built and designed
by the first engineers. Many of the practices show deep understanding of the
challenges that growing an engineering culture faces.

A few examples:

There are clearly defined initiation rites for new employees that make them
familiar with the engineering practices.

Focus is on a few key languages (C++, Java, Javascript, Python, Go) and code
reviews are practiced over the team boundaries. This makes the knowledge
transfer inside the company faster.

Changing your team and role regularly is encouraged.

Single, company-wide code tree and build system makes it easy to switch teams
and make it possible to build very efficient tooling.

Coding style is strictly enforced to avoid petty fights and Google's very good
coding styles guides include reasoning why certain choices were made.

~~~
pmiller2
I'm interested to know more about the "initiation rites."

~~~
exfacebook
I'm guessing he means readability. Google fetisihizes consistency, even at the
cost of ingenuity and productivity. Heroism is a virtue at some other
companies; at Google, it's a sin.

~~~
fishnchips
> Heroism is a virtue at some other companies; at Google, it's a sin.

This is not entirely true. I've seen many people being promoted for "jumping
on grenades", especially in SRE. A culture of heroism is unsustainable, but
individual acts of heroism (when required) should always be appreciated.

------
jakozaur
There is no universal scale. Some people prefer to work at big companies such
as Google, Microsoft, Facebook... some at smaller fast moving startups and
everything in between.

There are for sure better and worse companies in each category, but even
within big companies there is huge variance and it depends what you are
looking for.

Though some generic observation:

1\. Product companies tends to have better culture than software
consultancies.

2\. Companies which got strong technical leadership and software is a key
component rather than add on (e.g. some banks).

3\. Good litmus test is to ask employees, do they have hackathons/educational
budget/internal tech talks.

4\. Another litmus test is to ask how hard is to push feature to
production/release or about developer tooling. Good companies tend to have
convenient tools.

Of course even those 4 points got exceptions.

~~~
culturestate
> Good litmus test is to ask employees, do they have hackathons

I'm a designer rather than an engineer, but I've always been a bit puzzled by
the popularity of intra-company hackathons. It seems like a great way for
management to keep employees working longer hours for less pay – an overnight
hackathon that results in, say, 80 hours of additional work from a small team
only costs the company some pizzas.

~~~
jakozaur
Heh, actually that is a good question, since answer will also tell you a lot
about culture. It is an indirect question about working hours too. E.g.:

1\. We do hackathon once a quarter during work hours.

2\. We do 24h hackathons, but it's really fun!

3\. Well we work so long that we don't have time for hackathon.

4\. We care so much about work-life balance, that we don't do hackathons.

Depending on what you are looking for, you may be satisfied with different
answer.

~~~
SmellTheGlove
Serious question: Who out there isn't looking for #1 or #4? I'm failing to see
anything positive about 2-3. Who's looking for those?

~~~
NiceGuy_Ty
Have you ever wanted to collaborate with a coworker on something outside of
your job, but can't ever find good time outside of work to schedule it? Our
company did a hackathon (time limit of 24 hours, but no one stayed overnight)
and I got to work with one of the senior tech leads on a HipChat bot. I found
that extremely fun and rewarding.

------
ksk
Could someone explain to me why so many people on here fetishize scale? Scale
is a constraint on a problem, and it affects the solution you come up with. I
don't understand why solving problems around that constraint is considered
cooler than solving problems around other constraints like uptime,
performance, memory cost, etc. Does "Our API serves 234 million requests" hold
more cachet than "Our medical device firmware runs 24/7 without crashing and
takes up 12 MB of RAM"?

~~~
gervase
This is just a guess, but I suspect that "scale" also generally correlates
positively with compensation. A medical device company with 50 employees just
doesn't have the same resources as a company with 1M+ users, for example.

Following from that, compensation is one of the easiest ways to measure
professional "success", which is why large, highly-compensated companies are
commonly viewed as the pinnacle of software engineering.

Whether that's a fair or accurate assessment is a different question.

~~~
ritchiea
Scale is also scarce. There are few companies operating at Google or Facebook
or Amazon scale. You can't just create a product at scale if you want to gain
the experience of scaling a product, you have to be working somewhere that
grows tremendously.

------
FlorianRappl
I am surprised that no one mentioned Microsoft so far. These days they are
professional, innovation-driven, and do not bring in much of the unnecessary
cult that comes with companies like Google. They are more open than Apple.

Also from a personal experience I think their interviews / hiring methods are
better than all of the other big players.

~~~
nxc18
But are their engineering practices better? They used to take test seriously,
but then they fired all the testers and quality of basic things has slipped.
They don't even hire for dedicated testing roles any more.

I get that devs are supposed to test their own code, but they are surprisingly
bad at it overall and unit tests, despite being a great meme, just don't cut
it.

Some examples of quality issues: new limit to how many items can be in the
start menu. I see bugs/rendering issues in Word for the first time ever
(Windows and Mac). Edge is glitch when opening/closing tabs.

~~~
omouse
That's interesting to hear because I was reading the Software Project Survival
Guide and it said that, at the time, Microsoft knew the value of quality
because their tester to developer ratio was 1 to 1. Higher quality code had a
ratio of up to 4 testers per developer. Low quality code is usually the
opposite ratio, 1 tester for every 3-4 developers.

------
lettergram
This is a fairly hard question, and inherently ha bias. What I will say is
this, I believe every company from Google to the startup down the street will
have some fault.

However, one of the largest faults I've seen in my years working is the
arrogance. I have personally found startups to be some of the most humble in
that regard, they'll push you to make design choices other shops won't have
you make, and if you mess up, your job is much more on the line. This humbles
many engineers, and in my opinion creates a better culture.

Larger companies breed arrogance, people learn their niche, there's "in
breeding" so to speak. Engineers learn and specialize, and believe they are
the smartest or most knowledgeable. This will create arrogance. Where as
startups will train everyone to be tricks of the trade, masters of none. And
people will learn to improve generally.

~~~
nrjdhsbsid
I've had the opposite experience.

Not universal, but I find most startups I've interviewed with extremely
arrogant. The nicest workplaces for me have been the old and steady companies
with boring software.

Things I see a lot in startups: Lack of real world business experience, so
terrible management. "we're the best" attitude pervasive in everything. Hyper
focused on the technology used over the job at hand. Unrealistic expectations
in general. I'm gonna be rich because I'm awesome founders club.

~~~
BeetleB
That's my perception of startups too. Some of them pretty much _require_ you
to believe the company is the best, and if you express moderation, it is a
sign that you are not going to give your all to make the company succeed.

You know, the faulty "If you don't think you're the best, then you never will
be" advice everyone seems to believe (not just in startups).

------
g12mcgov
Etsy. I don't work there, but I've interviewed there twice and know lots of
contacts who work there, and it's a great engineering culture.

The overwhelming majority of the company are engineers, and they have a large
commitment to OSS, which was one of the initial selling points for me. Not to
mention, Rasmus Lerdorf works there, and several of their engineers contribute
to HHVM.

~~~
grardb
I'm a former Etsy employee. The engineering culture is awesome there, but I
feel the need to point out that the majority of the company are not engineers.
Even when I joined in 2013, we were about half the company. By the time I left
(June 2016), we were around 1/4 or so.

------
framebit
In regards to mega companies, it's hard/impossible to talk about culture in a
meaningful way because the organization is so large. For a personal example,
saying "I work at IBM" is not terribly informative because IBM has more
employees than most island nations have citizens, and its branches and
divisions are extremely different. Some are doing really cool, cutting edge
work, some are doing uncool, arthritic, blue-polyester-suit-style work. And
the culture may not be homogenous across those either. Considering two
"uncool" divisions, maybe one, despite being uncool, has a really innovation-
oriented exciting culture and the other has more of a who-took-my-stapler
vibe. Maybe the same holds true for divisions doing cool work.

I would venture to say that this more or less applies at any company of a
sufficiently enormous size. It's just hard to generalize.

I will definitely agree with posters here who have said different strokes for
different folks. Megacorps of all kinds, regardless of internal culture, are
just different from startups.

------
prohor
Spotify sounds very interesting to me. But I don't work there, so cannot
really tell if it really works as they describe.

[https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-
cult...](https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-
part-1/) [https://labs.spotify.com/2014/09/20/spotify-engineering-
cult...](https://labs.spotify.com/2014/09/20/spotify-engineering-culture-
part-2/)

~~~
gurkendoktor
The Spotify app for macOS has a habit of eating 100% for no reason, even when
no music is playing. I habitually quit Spotify every time I leave the room. I
hate coming back from shopping only to realise that my laptop fans have been
running for hours. Poor machine.

These kinds of problems with Spotify, SpotifyHelper, SpotifyWebHelper etc.
have been well-documented for years. It would kill me to work for a company
with such low engineering standards.

------
bluesilver07
Valve's new employee handbook looks pretty interesting -
[http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...](http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf)

~~~
zamalek
According to Newell[1], Valve aggressively fires as it hires. It's not based
on stack-ranking bullshit - more of a cultural and disciplinary fit. If you
have the right personality you could thrive there, but if you need a manager
to help you shine it's best to look elsewhere.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU)

~~~
idlewords
It's based on capricious and cliquish factors that aren't documented anywhere.
Having the "right personality" to thrive there means knowing who to ingratiate
yourself with.

Source: close friend is an ex-valver.

------
cbayram
Long time lurker. First comment at HN. Apologies if this sounds too HR.

I had a year stint at Cloudera working remotely, meeting up with our
distributed team 3-4 times/year. I was smitten with the approach they took in
implementing 18 different open source project into enterprise big data
offerings. They had proper software development lifecycle. There was/is lots
of talent and maturity. I absolutely loved my team, the maturity and the
culture at Cloudera.

------
Vinnl
Reading the Netflix engineering blog now and then, I do appreciate how many of
their engineering decisions also take into account the effect it will have on
their colleagues, i.e. "does this change affect how quickly/independently our
engineers can do stuff"?

~~~
fdsfsaa
Netflix's stack ranking is a huge turnoff though. Netflix's philosophy is that
it has no loyalty to employees and expects none in return. Regardless of
Netflix's other attributes, this policy is a huge turn-off.

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3056662/the-future-of-
work/she-c...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3056662/the-future-of-work/she-
created-netflixs-culture-and-it-ultimately-got-her-fired)

If I wanted great pay and cutthroat competition, why wouldn't I just work in
finance? The finance industry isn't stupid. They have developer efficiency
teams too.

~~~
taway_1212
How does loyalty even work? Let's you'r a valuable developer, but your
performance dropped significantly for 6-12 months because you got a baby. The
company should stick with you not because of loyalty, but because it's good
business - they know you will bounce back once you start getting enough sleep.

Another example - you were a valuable developer, but got a crippling, chronic
disease which makes it harder to concentrate. There is no hope of your
productivity ever going back to "reasonable" levels. What is loyalty in this
case? Should they still pay you for the years even though you can't
contribute?

~~~
criddell
Your first example relies on the tired employee have specialized skills.
Instead, if the tired employee were easily replaceable, then loyalty would be
sticking with that person despite the fact that they could be easily replaced.

For your second example, loyalty would be working with the employee to find a
more suitable position in the company (or outside of the company) and helping
with medical bills and any rehabilitation.

~~~
taway_1212
I've read that that's how it pretty much works in a lot of Japanese companies
(i.e. even when you're pretty much of no use because of bad luck (illness,
accident), they give you for example a janitorial job where it's understood
that little is expected of you).

That's completely at odds with Western individualistic culture though hence
it's rare here. Netflix is not really an exception - if you are the "weakest
link", they will just fire you after your yearly review instead of waiting for
a panic fire of bottom 10-20% of staff when stock price plummets (like most
other corps do).

------
meunclealf
Valve's dev culture is quite good. Teams are very small and each developer can
get a lot done. You decide which team you're on and what work you do. There's
no manager on a dev team; there's a team lead but the role is taken on as more
of a service to organize discussion rather than dictate the team's focus.

It's a very collaborative environment and requires that each person is good at
figuring out what's important to work on. For those suited to it, it's a hard
place to beat.

------
segmondy
I know some people are going to be looking at this list to find potential
places to go to. I urge some of you to be the change you desire. You might not
be at place that currently have a great engineering culture, but you can
become the origin and catalyst of that change. Read engineering blogs, papers,
get new ideas and bring it forth to wherever you want.

------
arjie
Without cross-company exposure it's hard to answer this question, but for me,
Netflix is very good at projecting good engineering culture. The fact that
they build engineering tools that work in general contexts, that they write
blog posts describing them, and that they open source these tools impresses
me. When I read their blog posts, I see a company that's effectively solved a
particular problem in a very general way that works well in specific cases
too. I love it.

The degree to which Twitter open-sources its work is another thing that I
like.

------
thomas-b
Biased as well, but for that other side of the world: Atlassian Engineering
culture is amazing, and repeatedly ranked best place to work in Australia.
Atlassian is also very actively hiring in Sydney with great relocation
experience (feel free to poke me on that).

~~~
pram
I think the perception of 'Atlasssian Engineering' has been tainted by HipChat

~~~
seattle_spring
JIRA taints their perception, for me at least.

~~~
nailer
And how unmaintained Sourcetree is.

~~~
blakeyrat
Sourcetree is a pretty crummy product regardless of how maintained it is. It
reveals a culture that seems to hold basic usability testing & concepts almost
in contempt.

~~~
nailer
It's one of the only git UIs hat has proper rebase functionality.

------
thecupisblue
I'd have to say Square:

They have amazing engineers, contribute a ton to open source, their devs
travel around the world, write blogs and generally do really cool stuff. They
put emphasis on clean code, maintainability and testing.

------
EngineerBetter
Pivotal. I've had the pleasure of working with many Pivots, and Rob Mee has
built a great XP culture.

~~~
sporkenfang
Pair programming all day, every day I thought I could handle. Turns out, I'm
in no state to interface with any other human being, including my SO, at the
end of a day of that. I think it's a good fit for a select group of folks who
are both extroverted and technical. I also prefer having a tiny corner of my
own space at work. It's comforting. At the office where I worked, everyone
shared desks (you sit wherever your partner for that project is sitting at the
moment) and nobody had their own space. It may be different at other Pivotal
offices, but I didn't enjoy the short time I was there.

~~~
jacques_chester
In fairness, pairing is not for everybody. We fret about whether we select for
extroverts. In my experience, no, but pairing certainly takes a lot out of me.

On the flipside, we absolutely _smash_ out the work here. I love being able to
_finish_ stuff every day, every week.

------
psyc
That depends on what you want. Do you want more process, or less process? Do
you prefer strong leadership, or consensus decision making? Etc.

------
exfacebook
Facebook --- far and away the best engineering culture I've ever seen, and
I've been programming for 20 years. Other companies aren't even in the same
league.

Facebook has an incredibly high hiring bar. I never once met someone who I
didn't feel was qualified to be there. I was seldom the smartest person in the
room.

The high average engineer quality allows the company to give developers almost
complete autonomy. At Facebook, you not only get to choose your team, but once
you're on that team, _you_ , not some PM or manager, decide what to work on.
You're evaluated on impact twice a year, and Facebook has an expansive and
nuanced understanding of "impact" that rewards things like developer
productivity improvements, side projects, and removal of bad code.

Facebook encourages cross-team collaboration in a way that Google only dreams
of doing. There's a single codebase unified under "fbsource", of course, but
also a lack of OWNERS files. That means that it's your job as an engineer to
decide what code to add, not some team of blessed approvers. There's no
readability process. Teams are trained to _expect_ people from all over the
company to contribute code. It's a dream job if you want to wear lots of
different hats, or if you have a maniacal obsession with following a problem
to its root cause and fixing it.

One engineer famously traced a sporadic failure to a single bad register on a
single core on a single server. He was recognized for it too: Facebook has a
"fix of the week" program that highlights heroic fixes and clever hacks.

Facebook management "gets it" in a way I haven't seen anywhere else. Developer
productivity is paramount. When something goes wrong, management doesn't
overreact. The general ethos is to apply tooling to make developers better,
not to add process to make developers slower.

Best of all, Facebook is _fun_. The code review tool, Phabricator, has built-
in meme support! The internal Facebook groups are full of interesting
discussion and trolling (of the good sort). The people there all feel like,
well, characters. They're memorable in a way I haven't seen at other
technology companies.

Best of all, at Facebook, there's none of the insufferable technical
grandstanding you see at other companies. It's hard to describe --- at other
companies, people with just enough competence to be annoying regularly create
elaborate word-salad design documents that would fit right in at
/r/iamverysmart. At Facebook? People say what needs to be said.

The most striking thing about Facebook is how it does more with fewer
developers. At Facebook, you feel incredibly productive. There's always enough
to do. Teams are much smaller than equivalent teams at other companies, but
somehow move faster. Management trusts you --- I never once heard "you can't
check that in: the technical risk is too great".

Oh, and the pay is fantastic, especially if you demonstrate extraordinary
impact.

Is Facebook perfect? Of course not. After all, I'm not there anymore. Some
people ragequit. The company is growing more corporate over time, little by
little. Traffic in MPK is nasty. Traffic in SEA is worse. The tooling has some
room for improvement --- but you're welcome to send patches! The playfulness
isn't for everyone. The open allocation policy sometimes leads to duplication
of work, forcing people to discard their hard work. There are few hard rules,
and sometimes you don't know where you stand in the power structure.

All that said, I'd go back to Facebook in a millisecond if circumstances lined
up. Despite Facebook's flaws and its inevitable slow decline, it's still the
best fucking engineering culture on earth right now.

~~~
dasmoth
As someone who generally wouldn't look at large companies, that does make FB
sound kind-of interesting.

One question: how much emphasis is placed on day-to-day visibility? Is it
legitimate to hide in a corner for a few weeks trying something out?

~~~
exfacebook
> Is it legitimate to hide in a corner for a few weeks trying something out?

Yes.

------
hugorut
I actually made a website that attempts to answer this question. My site,
Devstop, provides a resource for developer certified reviews of companies'
software engineering practices. The idea is to help software engineers
identify the best companies to go work for. Check it out here:
[http://devstop.io/](http://devstop.io/)

------
randomname2
London-specific (and from a recruiter that is listing some of their own
clients, so take with a grain of salt), from [https://www.quora.com/What-are-
the-best-software-engineering...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-
software-engineering-companies-to-work-for-in-London) (2014):

Large tech firms:

================

Google, Deepmind

Facebook

Twitter

Microsoft, Skype, Yammer

Palantir Technologies

Bloomberg

Start-ups

=========

Improbable.io

Swifkey

Hailo

VisualDNA

Editd

State

Opengamma

Duedil

…and plenty more good ones in stealth.

Gaming:

======

Mind Candy

EA Games (Playfish)

Playfire

Foundry

…and the list can go on forever.

Not software engineering firms, but have plenty to offer software engineers:

Investment banks:

================

Morgan Stanley

Goldman Sachs

JP Morgan

Barcap

....and plenty more.

Tech-driven funds:

=================

Man AHL

G-Research

KCG (Getco, Knight, Automat)

…any plenty more you've probably never heard of.

~~~
rayui
You do know that there is no Yammer or Skype in London anymore? (we did have a
fantastic culture though, so great it has been recognised. source: ex-Yammer.)

------
dmritard96
simply depends on how you measure/see 'best'. In some ways my tiny company is
'the best' simply because how the 3 of us design and define it. Want a
different process, suggest it. Want a useful tool, build it. In some ways the
'best culture' is the one in which you follow all the rules, build
foundational code, limit your hours and contribute back to open source
frequently while at a giant company whose existence seems a certainty. The
experiences are so varied situationally, compensationally, etc. I'm starting
to think on a remote island as a nomad freelancing and/or working on your own
projects. You live in a beautiful place, its often affordable, interesting
cultures, etc.

------
ganduG
From friends who work there, Asana has amazing culture.

~~~
pspeter3
As someone who has worked at Asana for 3+ years, I would agree.

------
psion
I worked at Quicken Loans before, and I would have to say the culture there
was one of the best I have seen/heard of. An allowance for time to work on
personal projects, a healthy work/life balance, and the usual job benefits
were incredible.

------
mcguire
Be aware that the culture of an organization has little to do with the
software it produces.

Actually, I haven't seen many poor organizations produce good software, lots
of good organizations produce bad software.

For example, when I worked for IBM in the 90s, the organization (in Austin
anyway) was great, but they couldn't get anything to market that wasn't
garbage.

------
chmaynard
Why not broaden the definition of "company" to include open source software
projects? If we do that, I would suggest that the Linux kernel project
probably has a very successful engineering culture. I'm basing that opinion on
the quality of their work, their longevity, and the incredible success of
Linux as a server OS.

------
asafira
Doesn't this story just beg for companies to advertise their "culture"? This
may be just exactly the targeted advertising they need, right?

------
Old_Thrashbarg
Interesting (but perhaps not surprising) that no one has mentioned Apple,
while the other large tech companies have been mentioned multiple times.

------
santaclaus
I knew some peeps at Fog Creek who seemed to love the culture. I haven't
worked there myself but Joel Spolsky seems like a thoughtful fellow.

------
sidcool
ThoughtWorks has a great Engineering culture. It's run by most engineers. The
amount of freedom is amazing. Pretty transparent culture.

~~~
faitswulff
It's also extremely progressive. Last I heard, they had managed to hire 40%
woman engineers in recent cohorts. Compare this to a ~10% industry average.

~~~
sidcool
It recently won the award for the best tech company for women, leaving FB and
Google behind.

------
BerislavLopac
ThoughtWorks?

~~~
awareBrah
I heard they pay way below market, otherwise I heard mostly good things

~~~
tyingq
You could look at their positions in lower cost areas, like Dallas.

------
tfang17
Quip.

------
zump
yawn

~~~
dang
You've posted plenty of unsubstantive comments to HN. We eventually ban
accounts that do that, so please only post civilly and substantively from now
on.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13316569](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13316569)
and marked it off-topic.

------
swagv1
Wow. This is a wankfest we all needed.

------
nrjdhsbsid
Accenture and Infosys

~~~
projectileboy
I'm assuming you're kidding, but if not, would you be willing to elaborate?

~~~
pmiller2
I don't have direct experience, but, judging by what I've heard, they're
probably "best" by _some_ measure. ;)

~~~
bshimmin
Ah, Infosys! My only experience of dealing with them stands out as one of the
more amusing of my career. I was contracted to lead a team for a digital
agency to rebuild the front-end of one of the UK's largest supermarkets;
Infosys already had an existing contract to handle the back-end and
integration; the supermarket had just a couple of (not very) technical leads
(glorified project managers, really) to steer everything from their end.

About monthly, the supermarket's tech leads, myself, a project manager working
with me, and anywhere up to about ten Infosys employees would meet up
physically in the supermarket's offices. Only one of the Infosys employees
would ever address the table, and rarely at that. The others all had identical
laptops (perhaps even identical clothes?), and all took notes during the
meeting, but never spoke, apart from just occasionally to mutter quietly to
each other.

It was absolutely surreal. Needless to say, the integration did not go
especially smoothly.

