Silicon Valley firms no more best-workplaces?

Tuesday, 30 March 2010, 02:59 Hrs   |    1 Comments
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Silicon Valley firms no more best-workplaces?
Bangalore: Within weeks of being named the best place to work last year, in February 2009, NetApp announced plans to cut about six percent of its workforce. Customers had slashed their spending budgets, leaving the company with no choice but to eliminate jobs, NetApp said at the time. NetApp's woes may have signaled the end of Silicon Valley's dominance of the best-workplace rankings, reports Bloomberg. When the list came out this year, the Sunnyvale, California-based company dropped to No. 7. And for the first time since 2006, all three of the top companies were outside the region. Silicon Valley was hit hard by the recession. Unemployment remains above the national average, and about 90,000 jobs were lost between the second quarters of 2008 and 2009. "I've been doing this for 22 years, and this is the worst I've seen in Silicon Valley", said John Rosica, Head of the San Jose, California, office of Management Recruiters International. The average compensation for technology workers in the region was $103,850 in 2008, down from $120,064 in 2000, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Overall US pay rose 3.1 percent during that period, while compensation for technology jobs outside Silicon Valley climbed 1.3 percent. The Great Place to Work Institute, based in San Francisco, creates its list of top workplaces by compiling surveys from employees and a culture assessment generated from a survey of managers. It measures such criteria as fairness, pride and camaraderie.