Two of the Bay Area's big tech companies that have long been evangelized by their employees and praised as places to work are steadily slipping in their popularity rankings on Glassdoor.
The Mill Valley-based employer evaluation hub just published its 100 Best Places to Work list for 2019, and the most notable fall was for Facebook, which was the #1 company last year and this year fell out of the top 20 to drop to #23. Google/Alphabet, which was at #5 last year, dropped to #11 — going from a 4.6-star rating to a 4.4-star rating with comments from employees like "[it's] starting to have big company problems."
In driving down Facebook's rating in 2019, employees don't necessarily make note of the company's very public scandals and questionable moral position when it comes to user data and political advertising. But they do say things like there's "disconnect to overall strategy" for some, and "[it's] hard to know what's going on within the company or different teams."
Meanwhile Apple remains way down the list at #84, which is where it was last year — though the Business Times notes it has fallen 13 spots, perhaps since 2017?
Glassdoor President and COO Christian Sutherland-Wong said in a statement to the Mercury News that the new rankings show the shift to a "culture-first decade in the workplace."
“(The) winners are employers that are prioritizing culture, mission and employees at the heart of everything they do,” he says. “In turn, their employees have spoken and are recognizing them.”
Other Bay Area companies that are ranked higher than Facebook and Google this year are DocuSign (#3), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (#6), Intuitive Surgical (#7), and VipKid (#9). The #1 company in the country to work for is Boston-based computer and software company Hubspot.
Also ranked higher than Google and Facebook are In-N-Out Burger and Southwest Airlines. LinkedIn comes in at #12. Juul Labs is at #31.
The Bay Area remains well represent on the top 100, with Nvidia Corp., VMware, Adobe, Intuit, Cisco Systems, and Intel Corp. all making the cut as well.
Bay Area companies regularly complain about the competition for talent in the region, and rankings like this can have a major affect on whether employees choose to move to one company or another.