Yahoo

You get to work with very smart sons and daughters of midwestern farmers. You get to work for the hottest CEO out of all companies that exist.

The whole site is about 150 people, so people know each other and are very friendly.

Hiring is ongoing.

Family oriented. Good work/life balance. Just not much to do even after you get off work.

A lot of workers have been around the area for a long time, the average age is high. There are a few who are older than Gandalf and do some magic on the computer.

Handle Yahoo's all advertising traffic; big, big, big data.

Small college town surrounded by cornfields if that's what you're looking for. (This could be a con.) But the cost of living is much lower than in CA.

• There won't be a lot of opportunities to advance. This may change since they are building a new and bigger building to cope with many new hires coming in, which means they are going to need more manager-level positions.

• The main purpose of the site is to maintain the existing data pipeline. All the exciting things happen at Sunnyvale. Once people at Sunnyvale are done playing with new technology, they dump it to Champaign if it's something Yahoo! wants to maintain. You have to fix and maintain lousy second-drafts 90% of the time. Managers are aware of this and try to bring something exciting to the site.

Your job is not to be a politician.

Your job is to lead the world's brightest software engineers.

You gotta be a geek. You got to be technically strong.

Keep it purple!