GEICO

• Job stability
• They will train you if you don't have the right experience.
• A lot of women in middle management.

The culture is strict and controlling. There's a dress code that you have to pay to get out of. You have to work exactly 8.5 hours a day (no working through lunch so you can leave 45 minutes early), and they audit your entry and exit to enforce it. They have the desks set up so that your coworkers can watch you and report on you to management, and they will tell you all of this to scare you into compliance.

On my project, the code reviewers/architects had absolute power. They nitpicked at our code but gave us limited guidance on how to do things correctly. Senior developers complained that they were only given rote work and were told that that was just the way it was.

They advertise themselves as essentially being a tech company and as a recipient of an award for women in IT, but it does not feel like a tech company at all. I would estimate that less than 10% of the developers that I encountered were women. None of the architects or code reviewers were women.

The headquarters building is gross. I have seen a mouse and a large cockroach. It seems like the work areas never get cleaned. There was dust and coffee stains everywhere.

If you want to be a tech company and attract talent, you need to have the right culture: competitive pay, flexibility in work times and telecommuting, and teams where developers don't feel like they're working on an assembly line.