Salary: $116,000

Posted by Software Engineer, in San Diego, CA, USA on November 21, 2014
SAIC is mostly a IT technology company these days. It seems like over ½ the employees are ex Navy or Marines. This is good because in-general, these people are trustworthy and hard-working. All types of platforms are used including MS and Oracle. There is a current push to update all software and hardware to the latest versions. Most products center-on business needs, i.e. finance, accounting and communication. Margins are tight so no place to become a millionaire, but a great place to work at fair-pay and keep your quality of life.

Posted by Sales Ops Manager, in San Francisco, CA, USA on January 17, 2008
The company is great, it feels like I’m taken care of…typical silicon valley startup style. Awesome Perks, free food everywhere, free school bus like service to me to work. Company has an awesome product.

Workwise, you’ve seen one sales ops job, you’ve pretty much seen them all, so issues are all apparent, and mostly same with all companies. But the company is brining on people like mad, so training and ramp up speed is tough, so experience is definitely a must to join this company.

Overall, I love working here, and am gaining weight as we speak.

Posted by Intern to Financial Analyst, in San Francisco, CA, USA on January 17, 2008
I was an intern turned Analyst after I graduated school locally. I learned a lot from the company and loved the way they would rotate their employees.

Perks were a plus too, free drinks, and some snacks. Free commuter checks, and other things here and there.

Tough to get in, but once in, you have a variety of jobs to choose from after about 2 years of serving your time on the original job you were hired for. Only thing to be worried about is if you choose the route of rotating, you learn different facits of the business, but don’t move up as fast.

Pay wise, I moved around different jobs, and didn’t get much of a raise, but to their defense, it was during the .com bust, and I should have been grateful I still had a job. After leaving, I learned so much, that I got promoted just by going to another company…overall, a good experience.

Posted by Computer Programmer Intern, in San Diego, CA, USA on January 29, 2008
Generally, an internship here was a good experience. I learned a lot about production-level coding. They have a lot of talented and friendly staff that you can learn from too. While I was there, I programmed in Java and misc Unix scripting. They also do C++.

I think that interning here would be great for UCSD computer science majors as well as any pre-med majors. It’s just about across the street from campus and they even have a shuttle to and from.

The biggest problem I had was that the level of pay was sub-par. I was getting paid more being grunt web programming elsewhere! Pfizer should really consider changing their pay structure for interns.

Posted by Staffing, in Los Angeles, CA, USA on March 08, 2008
Work Culture:

Positives were: laid back culture, lots of fun,social events, great FREE breakfust/lunches/dinners (in Mtn View office), free snacks, culture of work hard/play hard, generally nice, friendly people (in HR and other departments), huge egos among the engineers were a downside. There was a lot of drinking and alot of happy hours (almost too many) in the Santa Monica office. It kind of felt like high school where everyone wanted to fit in and you felt peer pressure to show up at all of these off-site, social events. Those who “socialized” more faired better in their jobs. Those who didn’t were marginalized.

Staffing Salary Benefits:

Salary and benefits meet industry standards. Rock stars are rewarded handsomely. Stock allocations have dwindled substantially since the IPO and are not the goldmine they once were.

Job Security:

Job Security used to be much better than what it is now. Recruiting contracts have been shortened from 1 yr to 9 months and far fewer conversions to FTE are happening. For most existing Googlers terminations for cause are rare unless you’re blatantly underperforming, but future layoffs could potentially be on the horizon as Google’s stock continues to tank. Google has already been written up in Vallewag about allegedly laying off many recruiting contractors.

Career Growth:

Google has a thin layer and few levels of management so it is very difficult to have a career path of upward mobility there. This is even more magnified in remote offices. It’s better suited for an engineer who wants to be an individual contributor and team player.

Managment:
As they say, your manager can make or break your experience.
Unfortunately I had a moody, emotionally unstable and volatile manager who was unprofessional and the king of office politics.

Overall Comments:
Google is a great place if you want to be surrounded by bright minds & soak up all of the perks and great company culture. I had tons of fun shooting pool, drinking mochas, and playing Guitar Hero. If gaining 15-30 lbs from all the free food/snacks is your goal this is place to be. Of course if you work in Mtn View you can work off the calories at the company gym. Workwise, if you’re an engineer or product manager it will probably be rewarding and you’ll learn a lot. There can be significant frustrations with the bureacracy/process that exists at Google, but at least you get a sense of organization and not controlled chaos. A lot of the engineers are very high maintenance and have huge egos sometimes to the point of being arrogant and condescending. It is difficult to hire people there because the standards for prospective engineers are exceedingly high. This is why so many Googler Engineers feel excessively proud to be “in the club,” have a lot of loyalty and rarely leave (there is very low turnover). What I discovered is that the standard for recruiters who get hired as FTEs or converted from contractor to FTE is low. Many of the recruiters don’t have college degrees or have degrees from unimpressive, less prestigious, lower-tiered schools. It is almost as though Staffing Management feels threatened by recruiters with brains who actually produce and don’t engage in “rectal smooching”. The “B” players in management tend to hire “C” players. For the most part people at Google are pretty cool, but like every company there are some very rotten apples. Just hope that one of these apples doesn’t end up being your boss.

Posted by Intern, in Washington, DC, USA on January 15, 2008

Great experience for those interested in U.S. foreign affairs. Interns are not subjected to the typical intern work, such as filing, copying, etc. And many interns actually have the opportunity to attend brown bags, important meetings, and contribute to important documents.

Posted by Software Development Engineer, in Seattle, WA, USA on December 14, 2007
A cool job at a cool company. We make so many products; there is always something interesting going on. The challenge is that you need to seek out the good work. It won’t fall in your lap unless you try to get it.

The city itself sucks and the ratio is terrible. Live in Seattle, commute to Redmond. It is the only way.

Posted by Computation Technical Scholar, in San Francisco, CA, USA on November 02, 2007

I worked as a summer intern in the computation directorate. I had an awesome experience at LLNL. The people I worked with were very helpful and just great people in general. Every intern gets assigned a project to complete over the summer, and I was lucky enough to have a wonderful mentor who gave me an interesting and challenging project where I worked with generating vector graphics in real-time.

I really enjoyed the academic and research-oriented environment. I would highly recommend attending the seminars that are provided for the summer students to learn more about what new research and cutting-edge technologies are being developed at the Lab. Here are some examples of seminar topics: details about how LLNL is constructing the largest laser in the world, discussions about how to achieve controlled nuclear fusion, supercomputing (they have the fastest supercomputer in the world), the forensic science center, and more.