Silicon Valley tech companies are well represented in the top rankings of the 2014 Glassdoor Compensation and Benefits Survey. Glassdoor, a recruiting website, this month released its ranking of companies based on anonymous employee ratings.
Google came in at number one; that’s no surprise, the competitive perk-fest kicked off by Google’s free meals and on-site massages has been well covered in the press. But one surprise for the tech community—Washington-based Costco slipped in at number two, ahead of Facebook.
Google employees praise the food, the food, and the food, as well as the gym, laundry, bowling alley, volleyball pit, parties, and pay. Facebook employees love the speed and openness of the culture, and the food, but some did express concern that all the free food made it too hard to leave the office. (That, of course, is the point.)
In fourth place came veteran Adobe, with Intuit in sixth, and Salesforce.com in ninth—these companies haven’t jumped onto the free-food bandwagon, but still manage to make their employees happy. So it’s not all about the food. And in another Glassdoor survey, ranking best overall places to work, San Francisco-based Twitter came in ahead of both Google and Facebook, with employees praising the startup environment and the fact that Twitter’s youth means more effort is put into interesting new products and less on maintaining old ones.
The top ten companies for compensation and benefits in the U.S., according to Glassdoor:
- Costco
- Adobe
- Epic Systems
- Intuit
- USAA
- Chevron
- Salesforce.com
- Monsanto
Tekla S. Perry is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., she's been covering the people, companies, and technology that make Silicon Valley a special place for more than 40 years. An IEEE member, she holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Michigan State University.
