The New York Times

The Brand. Smart people do actually come to work there to pay their dues and move on. They have the best journalists and written articles, without a doubt.

Whew! Where do I begin....

• Everything is political. It's all about if you are in the "IN" group.

• People who failed spectacularly get promoted. It's the one place where you can fail up pretty consistently.

• They still run on old, dated technologies like SVN, Prototype, etc. They do boring things and use boring tech, with the notable exception of the newsroom who can build code that works for a day, and then you have to fix whatever they broke in the process after that day.

• They use a ton of good people to build terrible products.

• Be careful if you build and design a pay model that is highly successful. The paper pushers in upper management will get nervous about their jobs and pigeonhole you so you can't take their job away from them because they don't actually do anything.

• Make sure you aren't too successful. That's grounds for getting fired at NYT or at the very least for a glass ceiling to be put over your head.

• They have about 25 layers of middle management too many, and the CIO and CTO aren't even credible or knowledgeable in the world of tech.

• I don't have a positive view of management.

• The pay is minuscule compared to what the market is yielding. The NYT calls it "Leveraging the Brand." I call it insulting.

Lose some management.