If you ask anyone what’s the place where the next big thing in software innovation is going to come from, most would say Silicon Valley. The rich history of computers and IT success stories coming out of the south bay of San Francisco has meant that it’s an area synonymous with interesting and exciting work as a developer.
You know the big names coming out of the Bay Area and the famous tech companies in San Francisco, but what are some other companies that are worth a look?
These tech companies in San Francisco have been making the news lately as interesting places to work. Put your bootcamp training to use and apply to them today.
Adobe
You’re no doubt familiar with Adobe products like Photoshop and Acrobat, but Adobe as a company has also won a number of awards recently for being an excellent place to work. Fortune called them one of the “Best Workplaces for Millennials” in 2018 and Forbes called them the “Best Employer for New Graduates”. If that wasn’t enough, Indeed.com said their one of the best places to work in tech.
In addition to flexible time off (itself something of a standard with most of these companies), Adobe has a Learning Fund for professional development (for conferences and workshops) and education reimbursement (up to $10,000 a year). The larger offices of the company have paid sabbaticals as well.
Algolia
Algolia provides search functionality for mobile apps and websites. Algolia works with clients like Under Armour, Coursera, Slack, and Twitch. Inc magazine ranked it highly as a “Best Workplace” and a “Best Place to Work in San Francisco”.
Among their stated company values is humility, defined with an employee focus: “We want our teammates to succeed as much as we do ourselves. We believe each team member is as important as the other and we approach each new challenge knowing that we may not have all the answers.”
Atlassian
Atlassian makes a number of software products used in software development and business management, including Jira, Confluence, and Trello. If you work in programming, odds are good that your company uses an Atlassian product at some point in development. Offices around the world mean plenty of opportunity for travel if you want to relocate.
Based out of Australia, they have offices in San Francisco and Mountain View. In addition to the competitive flexible hours and tuition reimbursement that most of these companies offer, Atlassian has what it calls “Foundation Leave”. This is five paid days a year for volunteer work.
Carta
Carta was originally formed as a company called eShares. Then as now, they provide capitalization table management and valuation software. They were ranked at sixteen in Inc magazine’s “Top San Francisco Companies” list. Carta is at the forefront of making the stock market more accessible to more people; making them a cutting edge company to get involved with. This makes for some attractive stock options for their employees, with every employee receiving equity and offering employee liquidity every 12-18 months.
Copper
Pitched as a more user-friendly alternative to Salesforce, Copper—as described on their website—“Adds leads, updates deals, looks up past interactions, creates Google Calendar events, and follows up on tasks—right from your Gmail inbox.” Their youth means the opportunity is there to get in on the ground floor as they grow with a company that has superb benefits, a downtown San Francisco location, and catered lunches.
Domino Data Lab
Data science is the hot field in tech these days and the Domino Data Lab is on the cutting edge of it. It’s an interesting business model: they host an open data science platform for businesses to run whatever large-scale data models they need. Among their clients are Tesla and Dell. They want to attract the best and the brightest, so of course they offer a flexible work schedule, flexible vacations, and an annual education reimbursement.
Eventbrite
Eventibrite is a big name in event management and ticketing and they are causing a big disruption in that market. Their headquarters are located right in downtown San Francisco at the South Market.
In addition to the expected flexible time off policy, they offer a free catered lunch every day. If that wasn’t enough to make it homey, dogs (called “barklings”) are welcome in the office.
Groove.co
Groove.co was founded by former Google employees. Their software works with business mail and calendar systems (like Salesforce and the Google suite of office products) to automate data entry and mass emails. Current clients include Slack, Uber, and former employer Google. Inc. magazine ranked them number 19 in “Top San Francisco Companies” as well as one of the fastest growing private companies. Although they don’t publicize their company benefits, the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a tech company headquartered in San Francisco makes this an attractive place to work.
Kenna Security
Kenna Security addresses cyber threats with cutting-edge data science for a range of clients large and small. They were ranked #20 in Inc. magazine’s “Top San Francisco Companies” list. In addition to the expected flexible work hours and casual, “start-up culture” work environment, Kenna also has a learning and development budget for its employees, a monthly gym membership, and catered lunches.
NVIDIA
Although they got their start making processing units for the gaming industry (especially graphics chips for video games), NVIDIA is currently exploring newer fields such as artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles.
Based out of Santa Clara, NVIDIA was ranked number one in MIT Tech Review’s “50 Smartest Companies” list praised for creating “….new opportunities by combining disruptive technologies and business savvy.”
NVIDIA’s stock options are very generous and employees have access to the Stanford Health Navigator Program: a comprehensive health consulting service.
Onfleet
Onfleet provides logistics software for every step of a supply chain, from end-to-end route planning, dispatch, communication and analytics. Emerging from the work of Stanford University students, they were ranked eighth in Inc magazine’s “Top San Francisco Companies” list. They have a list of perks that rivals any well-funded startup: stock options, flexible vacation schedule, the ability to work from home on Wednesdays… even a kombucha keg.
Salesforce
Salesforce is a cloud-based product company whose main focus is customer relationship management (CRM) software. As one sign of their dominance in the Bay Area, their headquarters is in the former Transbay Tower (now renamed Salesforce Tower), the tallest building in the city.
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They have a number of employee incentives. Some of these are community outreach focused, such as up to a week of paid time off for volunteer work and matching nonprofit donation of up to $5,000 a year.
To find qualified employees, Salesforce created the Futureforce University Recruiting Program to actively find undergrads, graduates, and graduate students to work for them.
Zoom Video Communications
Zoom would have to win on employee satisfaction awards alone. Ranked number one in a Glassdoor poll for Bay Area tech companies, and with numerous awards from Comparably in employee satisfaction, as well as
a CEO ranked number one by Glassdoor across all industries, Zoom Video Communications must be doing something right. They provide cloud-based remote conferencing tools and software that are quickly becoming the teleconferencing standard in the business world.
Get Started
While you shouldn’t forget about the big names in Silicon Valley, it’s good to remember that even Apple and Google started as modest start-ups. A number of the companies listed here are on the ascent, meaning that any one of them could become the next multi-trillion dollar company that’s going to change technology forever. Would you like to become part of that?
It’s every coder’s dream to work in a place that treats them well, has interesting work, and challenges them to grow in ways they couldn’t imagine. And why not work for a high tech company in San Francisco? This list is a good start to look for that position. If you’re currently a coder looking for work like that, reach out to them. And if the idea of doing work like this appeals to you but you don’t know where to start, consider a programming bootcamp and begin your journey.
FAQ
Not necessarily! The difficulty of programming depends on the language you want to learn and the kind of software you’re making.
Html, Python, JavaScript, PHP, and Java are some of the easiest, high-level languages for beginning coders to learn.
Assembly, C, C++, C#, and Object C are some of the tougher programming languages to learn.
There is no “right” way to learn to code! You can learn programming through self study, a traditional four-year degree, or through a coding bootcamp.
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