Life Online: The Biology Is Different

[Editor's note: In a world where tags like 'visionary' and 'big thinker' get tossed around too frequently, J.P. Rangaswami is the real deal. He's a fantastic storyteller and has lived an incredibly adventurous life. Trained as an economist, J.P. has been CIO of an investment bank in London and has won acclaim as one of the most forward-thinking and influential people in tech. He lives in London and is now the chief scientist at Salesforce.com. His blog, Confused of Calcutta, should be on every techie's reading list, along with his feed on Twitter, where he is @jobsworth. I'm thrilled that J.P. has agreed to write articles for ReadWrite. This piece, his first for us, leaps from a description of buying tickets online to a meditation about the billions of previously disenfranchised people who soon will come online. J.P. promises to explore these ideas in future articles. I cannot wait. - Dan Lyons]

I woke up early this morning; I tend to wake up early most mornings, but today was special. I knew I had to get ready to do something important, something very important. Something many people would find hard to understand.

Cricket. I planned to go and queue for tickets for the Saturday and Sunday of the fifth and final 'Ashes' Test between England and Australia, to be played at the Oval on August 24th and 25th 2013. Because that's the kind of person I am.

Not just the kind of person who looks forward to spending a couple of days watching 22 men in white (or 'flannelled fools,' as George Bernard Shaw called them) amble around, the occasional sound of willow on leather rudely disturbing the reverie of moustachioed majors as they snored gently into their tea and crumpets. But the kind of person who enjoys actually going to see stuff 'live': plays, concerts, musicals, opera, and sport. In all shapes and sizes.

So I woke up, got ready, made sure I had my membership details and credit card with me, and went along to buy my ticket. Queued patiently as they started serving bang on time. Waited my turn. Bought the tickets I wanted.

It was altogether a thoroughly satisfying experience. I was warm and dry throughout; there was plenty of decent food and drink on offer; the environment was peaceful and comfortable, the company friendly and worthwhile, no noise, no crowds. They even had a notice telling me how the queue was progressing.

I was at home.

While I queued, I was greeted with a notice that the website was experiencing high demand, and that I'd been placed in a queue where "the flow of members accessing the site is monitored and adjusted accordingly depending on the number looking to purchase at any one time." There was an estimate of how long I would have to wait before entering the site.

Speeding Up Evolution

Even though I've bought tickets online many times, I felt a real sense of wonder at how technology had improved the whole process. I was particularly taken with how the size of the 'waiting room' could be adjusted to reflect the number of people 'queueing' in the room. Kevin Kelly, in What Technology Wants, suggests that we should look at technology as a means of speeding up evolution. In similar fashion, whenever I look at a digital process, I am particularly interested in how it improves on the analog. (And that is why I detest 'region coding' on DVDs and games, where technology was used to pave cowpaths rather than build roads.)

The 'physics' of the digital world is different from that of the physical world. I remember Richard Bartle making this point very elegantly in October 2005, in a comment on Terra Nova:

'Virtual space is not like real space, and the users of both have different criteria by which they judge it a success. People want to feel they're in the world, and that means the architecture has to be faithful to genre. Exciting new architecture is possible, but if it intrudes then it must do so for a reason. I expect it will be a long while before the architecture award goes to a building in a contextualised (ie. game-like) world, rather than a less themeful one such as SL.

'Also, because each virtual world is physically different, architecture that is successful in one may not be successful in another. Does the virtual world need staircases? Does it require structures to self-support under gravity? Are there materials that you can see through from one side but not the other? How about materials that change what they look like depending on who's looking at them? What's possible in one virtual world may not be possible in another - unlike the real world, they don't all use the same physics.'

When The Constraints Of The Physical World Are Removed

What Bartle spoke about is what excited me about digital infrastructure in general and virtual worlds in particular. The idea that people who were otherwise constrained from movement or speech or action could have those constraints removed made my heart sing. The possibility that ubiquitous affordable access to connectivity, computing power and storage could soon become a reality fascinated me. The implication that billions of disenfranchised people could have their lives transformed, particularly when it came to health, education, welfare, filled me with glee.

So I was very taken with this 'physics is different' idea ever since I came across it. This, despite the fact that digital landscapes and virtual worlds tended to attract a lot of criticism, particularly of the 'people who are in Second Life don't have a First Life' class.

That was over seven years ago. Since then, I've spent considerable time observing, and participating in, social networks of one form or another, in business as well as in society in general. Over time, some themes became more important to me than others. One particular theme, that of how trust could scale, not just scale but scale at speed, has intrigued me deeply.

When it comes to the physical world, biology plays a key role in how we trust, both in nature as well as speed. The 'biology' of the digital world is different; over the next few posts, I plan to look at how this affects us, in our personal lives as well as in our professional ones. I am particularly interested in identifying, understanding and sharing with you the class of person who was disenfranchised in the physical world, and who is now empowered to trust and to be trusted, reliably and at speed, in the digital world.

And I'm looking forward to learning from the dialogues that ensue.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Let's All Shed Tears For The Crappy Startups That Can't Raise Any More Money

Here's some stunning, Earth-shattering news: You know all those hundreds of incredibly stupid startups that have been raising seed money in Silicon Valley despite the fact that the people running those startups have no experience doing anything, ever, and have no idea at all how to generate revenue (let alone profit) with their lousy ideas, because, in fact, there is no way to make money with their lousy ideas, because in fact their ideas are lousy?

Well, nobody wants to give those dopes any more money. So now they're going to go out of business.

I know. Shocking.

And the dopey angel investors who wrote the checks for those startups are going to lose their money. Because they can't foist their bad investments onto the venture capitalists who occupy the next rung up on the food chain.

But who didn't see this coming? For the past few years we've had people calling themselves 'investors,' who have no experience investing, swanning around the Valley, slinging money at people calling themselves 'entrepreneurs' who have never held an actual job, let alone run a company.

How else could this have ended in anything but a train wreck?

We're Shocked -- Shocked! -- By All Of This

The sweet irony is watching the buffoons, who have been cheering on this clown show and raving about traction and disruption and "pivots," now reporting on the mess.

PandoDaily is reporting on the 'Series A crunch' in which companies that have raised seed funding now discovering (presumably to their utter amazement) that actual venture capitalists aren't as stupid as the angels who gave them their first bag of cash, and, given the opportunity to invest in their pointless companies, the VCs have decided to politely decline. Thus, now we are facing a 'nuclear winter" (!) where thousands of companies will go out of business.

TechCrunch editors says they knew all about this a year ago and, by the way, it's good for all these companies to die because this is the natural ebb and flow. To be sure, when everybody could raise money, even with stupid ideas, well, that was a good thing too, and we were all supposed to cheer for those idiots because that's our job as bloggers, to cheer on and support those heroic entrepreneurs, but now that all those heroic entrepreneurs are going broke, well, that is a good thing too, because, well, right.

And remember when there supposedly was no bubble? How many times did the tech blogs go out of their way to insist that all of this over-investing and overpaying made perfect sense?

Then Facebook went splat and Zynga went splat and Groupon went splat and now VCs are pulling back and nobody can raise money and all those people who claimed there was no bubble are reporting that guess what, something like 2,000 lame-ass companies are going to flame out, but this just means that things are coming back to normal and isn't it great that the frothy times are over? But if that's the case, then apparently we were in a bubble back when all those blogs were saying there was no bubble.

I'm sorry but the whole thing is hilarious. Or sad. I can't decide which.

A Confederacy of Dunces

This is what the Valley has become these past few years:

It's wannabe journalists writing about wannabe investors giving money to wannabe entrepreneurs and everyone in the circle jerk believing that the whole thing makes perfect sense because, trust us. This. Will. Be. Huge. Oh, and by the way, bloggers aren't just bloggers anymore -- they're now entrepreneurs too.

It's Robert Scoble riding on the StartupBus to SXSW, gushing about some kids who take three whole days to build an awesome company called Gourmair that solves a huge world-changing problem: how to find takeout food. Why? Because 'there isn't a centralized place to discover, discuss, rate or buy these kinds of gourmet meals.' Wow.

It's John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins ' John Doerr! ' trying to be hip by wearing a hoodie and T-shirt and sneakers, and announcing a fund for social apps. So cool!

It's Ben Parr of Mashable, whose background includes blogging and ' blogging, announcing that he too is now a venture capitalist and is creating a 'celebrity fund' that has a super cool name ' #DominateFund. What kind of guy is Ben Parr? The kind of guy who makes up a name like #DominateFund. And who announces a fund before he's actually raised the money. And who launches a fund focused on consumer Internet just when all the smart money is moving away from the consumer Internet and rushing toward the enterprise. Oh, and when VCs are closing the door to the stuff that angels bring them. Enough said.

Well, now maybe the madness is coming to an end. VCs are shying away from bullshit consumer ideas, and the enterprise is cool again.

Maybe the Valley will get back to what it once was all about ' making actual technology products.

The great lie of these last few years is that anyone can be a tech entrepreneur. You don't need to know electrical engineering or computer science. You don't need to know anything about business. You just need a positive outlook and an ability to speak confidently while saying things that make little or no sense.

Maybe the people who have been playing 'entrepreneur' will get actual jobs making actual products and gain some actual experience.

In my dreams I imagine them leaving the Valley and going off to accomplish something meaningful. Using those brains to do medical research or eradicate poverty. Teaching in a public school. Getting a medical degree to take care of people.

They might not be ecstatically happy, but at least they'd be doing something good for the world -- something beyond pushing the value of a site that finds gourmet takeout.

Maybe if all the angels go broke on these lousy deals there won't be enough of them around to create another seed-round bubbles, or whatever you want to call what's happened.

Yeah. I know. Not gonna happen. Oh well. But as Papa Hemingway once wrote: Isn't it pretty to think so?

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Ubislate 7Ci: Can This $20 Tablet Really Change The World?

In all the competitive battles that have defined the history of the technology revolution, one essential truth almost always determines the outcome: cheap and good enough beats awesome but expensive every time.

It happened when PCs beat out minicomputers (not to mention Macintosh's). It happened when VHS killed Betamax. It happened when Linux pushed aside proprietary server operating systems. It's happening now as Google's Android overtakes Apple's iOS.

Good Enough?

And it could be about to happen again with the Ubislate 7Ci tablet. This Android device is far from special in just about every respect. The specs are ordinary at best:

• 7-inch, 800 x 432 capacitive touchscreen
• Android 4.04 Ice Cream Sandwich
• 1GHz Cortex A8 ARMv7 CPU
• 512MB RAM, 4GB storage
• Wi-Fi (a version with GPRS cellular capability is also available)
• VGA front-facing camera
• Micro SD slot
• Power, micro-USB, and headphone connectors

The speaker is tinny. The pictures are grainy and low-res, and the colors are off, too. The screen has to be held just so to be seen properly. Battery life is listed as a measly 3 hours, and in my tests the device couldn't hold a charge more than a day or two no matter how little it was used. Performance is painfully slow for anyone spoiled by the latest tablets from Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and others. Things that should happen instantly take several seconds or more, and I experienced frequent hangups and glitches. 

But build quality seems solid, and the thing is perfectly portable. Most important, though, it works - and it's being sold for just $20 in India.

Like An iPhone 3GS?

Sample Ubislate photo Professor and entrepreneur Vivek Wadwha, who lent a test unit to ReadWrite for evaluation, compared the Ubislate Ci7 to an Apple iPhone 3GS, and in my tests that feels about right. If you can remember back a few years, you'll recall that when 3GS first came out it felt plenty fast and revolutionary. And I think that's exactly how the Ubislate Ci7would feel to someone getting ahold of their first tablet right now.

But the iPhone 3GS was a hard-to-get, top-of-the-line machine when it debuted in 2009. For the Ubislate, Wadhwa says the Indian government has put in a bulk order for 100,000 devices at $40 each, which it then plans to sell to students in the countryside for $20 each. Wadhwa says they will also be available direct for $60.

It's unclear how or when manufacturer Datawind will be able to deliver on this order, and when or if the tablet will make it to the U.S. and other markets. And it will no doubt cost a lot more on these shores due to testing, taxes and other issues.

Changing The Hardware Market

But even if the Ubislate never achieves mass distribution, in the U.S. or even in India, it's still a game changer - for both hardware makers and Internet companies.

For the hardware market, iIt proves that a workable tablet can be created - if not yet delivered - at a price that makes it attainable to a lot more people than can afford even the cheapest mainstream tablets from Apple or Samsung and their direct competitors.

While people with means will always want the latest and best, the Ubislate is a step toward a world where almost everyone - Wadwha estimates that a billion people could end up with devices like this - has a tablet.

Maybe that tablet is not as good as the one on which you may be reading this article right now, but it's more than good enough to give anyone access to this article - and to the rest of the Internet. And as history has shown over and over again, good enough and dirt cheap will swamp excellent and expensive every time.

Apple has made a lot of money selling tablets for $500 and up, and Microsoft is charging a whopping $900 or more for its upcoming Surface Pro. And I'm not saying those excellent products aren't worth it.

But increasingly, those high-end machines could be competing against "good-enough" competitors that aren't just 10% or 20% cheaper, but an order of magnitude cheaper. That puts a whole new kind of pressure of device makers to justify their high prices.

A Vast New Online Market - And New Competitors

Just as important, though, truly ubiquitous tablets will bring millions - perhaps billions - of new users to the Internet. These new Internet citizens won't be as rich as the first billion people now online, but they will inevitably shift the center of Net away from developed nations.

That will open up vast new markets for Internet companies, if they're clever and fast enough to come up with products and services that meet their needs.

But when the next billion people come online, they're not just going to be consumers. We've already seen that as soon as people get access to the Net, they start figuring out how to leverage it to make life easier for themselves, and creating businesses to do the same for everyone else.

If truly cheap tablets really do double the worldwide Internet population, we're sure to see a huge increase in online entrepreneurs. If you think there's a lot of competition in the online app stores now, what do you think is going to happen when all those smart/ambitious/hungry new developers join the game?

If you don't believe that changes everything, you're just not paying attention.

For more, check out this video of Vivek Wadhwa presenting the $20 tablet at the inaugural ReadWrite Mix event in San Francisco:

What Verisign's New Contract With ICANN Means For Domain Name Rates

Verisign, the operator for .com domain registry, has renewed its six-year contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names (ICANN) with the U.S. Commerce Department's blessing.  Under the terms of the new contract, Verisign is not allowed to raise its current price of $7.85 per domain name for the length of the agreement. Unless, of course, it can convince the Commerce Department it's OK.

Wiggle, Wiggle, Wiggle, Wiggle, Wiggle 

Under its previous deal past, Verisign was allowed to raise its rates four times by as much as 7% over the six year term - and did just that, according to CNN Money. Now, any proposed rate hikes will need to be approved by the Commerce Department, and then only in the case of "extraordinary expenses related to security or stability threats." 

Verisign has operated top level domain .com and .net domain names since 2000 and has been maintaining the .com domain name for ICANN for more than 15 years. The licenses held for .net, .gov and .edu domains are separate. This provides Verisign some wiggle room. Even if the company can't raise rates on .com domains, it can hike prices for .net domains by 10% annually until 2017, when that contract expires.

Perhaps much more more important, the new contract gives Verisign the option to request that price hike restrictions be removed if it can demonstrate to the Commerce department that market conditions no longer require them. And that could happen thanks to ICANN's approval of the expansion of generic top-level domains (gTLDs), Verisign has yet another way to bypass these restrictions. If gTLDs get more popular and the intense competition for .com domains appears to wane, Verisign could be able to persuade Commerce that market conditions have changed enough to release the pricing restrictions. 

Website Owners Not Happy

That's one reason the Internet Commerce Association (ICA), an advocate for website owners, has been fighting Verisign throughout this entire process. The ICA claims that Verisign's rate hikes were arbitrary and unnecessary.

It even penned a letter requesting that the U.S. Commerce Department make Verisign charge the same amount for .com domains as it does for .net domains (currently $5.86). After all, the costs involved in .net domains are exactly the same as for .com domains. In a posting on its website, the ICA also claimed that the if the old  agreement with ICANN was extended, the company would rake in more than $1.2 billion in profits over the next six years: "Nice monopoly work if you can get it." 

While the Commerce Department didn't give ICA everything it asked for, the new contract's restrictions are expected to hold down Verisign's profits. After news of the agreement broke, Verisign's stock fell by 13% before the bell. 

Facebook Loosens Zynga's Leash - Can Changing The Rules Save Zynga?

If this were a certain social network, Zynga and Facebook could probably agree that their relationship status is: It's complicated. Two new SEC filings on Thursday revealed that the social game-maker and the social network are putting a little distance between themselves, amending some rules of their multi-year agreement to give both companies a bit more autonomy.

What's Changing In The SEC Amendments?

According to the filings, Zynga's exclusive relationship with Facebook is dissolving. Loosening Zynga's collar means that the social gaming company can ramp up efforts on Zynga.com, and redouble its push into mobile, as CEO Mark Pincus suggested in a gloomy earnings call earlier this month. The company's own browser-based gaming HQ, code-named Project Z, launched this March. Project Z lays the groundwork for a more independent Zynga that could expand beyond the confines of Facebook's walled garden, and maybe even stop its slide. Zynga will also look to invigorate its flagging performance by trying its hand at real-money gambling titles.

Zynga games will continue to clog facebook News Feeds of course (isn't it time you fed those pigs?), but the game-maker will no longer be required to employ Facebook credits for micro-transactions or display Facebook ads on its games. These amendments also open the door for Facebook to nurture other gaming partnerships, or even develop its own games, though the company claims to have no immediate intentions to do so.

Zynga's Stock Takes A Hit... Again

Zynga's symbiotic relationship with Facebook is a troubled one. Now that the honeymoon is over, the social media giant seems happy to throw Zynga to the wolves. In its third quarter earnings call, Facebook noted that casual gaming was booming, but drew a distinction between the underperforming Zyngaverse, with its revenue down 20% in the third quarter of 2012, and the rest of Facebook's gaming ecosystem, which is seeing healthy growth. On the heels of Thursday's SEC filings, Zynga's stock took a roughly 5% dip down to $2.50 a share. The latest fall is just a drop in the bucket compared to Zynga's ongoing woes - the company has lost more 70% of its value over the course of 2012. 

Breathing Room - And Room To Innovate?

Facebook might be the big dog here, but Zynga is still the biggest social game maker around. As we learned with Facebook's IPO, Zynga accounted for a whopping 12% of the social network's revenue in 2011. But if casual gaming rose sharply between 2010 and 2011, its fate is looking a little less certain at the end of 2012. Social gamers, many new to gaming, appear to be burning out on Zynga's cadre of candy-colored, cookie-cutter titles - which even Zynga itself admits don't innovate enough to keep gamers engaged.

But as social gaming slows, arguably into maturity, mobile gaming continues to explode. Projections from eMarketer estimate that mobile gaming will boom 19% in 2013, while social gaming will level off with around 6% growth in the coming two years. With a little more slack on its leash, Zynga needs to think fast - and think different - to break out of its social gaming rut.

But is mobile the answer? There's certainly growth there, but revenues are less certain.

Want to dig into the SEC filing yourself? Read the full text of the respective filings from Zynga and Facebook.

Lead image from Zynga.

Top 5 Spotify Apps For Music Discovery

Spotify wasn't built for discovery. The Swedish music streaming company realizes this and instead of trying to natively bake a zillion features into its service, it launched a platform for third party developers about a year ago. 

Spotify's app directory now features almost 60 HTML5-based add-ons for the service's desktop client. These apps perform a lot of different functions - some are social, while others sonically augment album reviews from big name publishers. The thing for which they're probably most useful is discovering music you might like but may never have heard otherwise.

1. Moodagent

Since launching on Spotify last year, Moodagent has been one of the most interesting apps on the platform. That's because it takes standard algorithmic music recommendations and beefs them up with emotional intelligence. 

There are at least a dozen apps that let you build a playlist based on related artists, but Moodagent factors in the mood of each song to build out something that feels more consistent. The options look broad, but are surprisingly powerful. A playlist can be sensual, angry, happy, tender or some combination of all four. You can even base them on tempo, playing back a series of similarly paced songs. Tie these characteristics to the same kind of artist-to-artist matching algorithm that fuels so many other music-discovery apps, and you have a uniquely intelligent system for finding new music. 

2. Last.fm

Last.fm has been around for a decade now, but the Internet radio and music recommendation service is still a reliable tool for discovering new artists. It works by keeping track of everything you listen to and using a Pandora-style algorithm to recommend related artists and albums. It's a simple concept, but one that apparently holds up quite well over time. 

Existing users of Last.fm will feel right at home in its Spotify app, which more or less frames a slightly modified version of the service's usual interface into Spotify's desktop client. The results occasionally need to be tweaked, but on the whole the recommendations are pretty solid. A few albums in my own physical record collection landed there thanks to Last.fm's ability to turn up hidden gems.  

3. Swarm.fm

Oh great, another social music-discovery app. Ho-hum.

Actually, Swarm.fm is pretty useful. It uses data from Facebook to show you what music your friends are listening to, even if they're not signed up for Swarm.fm. If they are, that data becomes much more detailed and easily explored. Swarm.fm will also let you know if any artists in your own collection have new releases, which is far more relevant than the new releases coughed up by Spotify itself. 

That tag cloud on the home tab might look like just another collection of metadata, but it's actually informed by your social music data. I listen to a number of artists who don the tag "space rock" - and when I click that tag, it shows me dozens of similar bands. I can then sort those artists by popularity and what's trending on Swarm.fm, which is a good way to pinpoint worthwhile listens.

4. ShareMyPlaylists

When I first opened ShareMyPlaylists, I thought "Oh, this is looks fairly generic." Alternative, Classical, Blues, Dance. One-size-fits-all playlists.

I was wrong. 

When you scroll down, you see a wide variety of very specific playlists: Beatles covers, the songs sampled by Nas and music from Quentin Tarantino films, songs featuring Moog synthesizers. It's a random conglomeration of curated listening experiences, but one that is well worth browsing. 

ShareMyPlaylists has something for absolutely everyone. Devotees of popular music from the charts can browse the "Top 50" tab while those with more under-the-radar tastes will find plenty of new stuff under the "Recommended" tab, which finds playlists based on the artists you listen to the most. If nothing in either section suits your mood, you can always run a search or use the app's built-in playlist generator. 

5. The Hype Machine

It's been a wildly popular MP3 aggregator on the Web for years, so it only makes sense that The Hype Machine would find its way into Spotify's app store. It's right at home on top of the streaming service's massive library of music. 

The Hype Machine eschews the complex algorithm in favor of human-curated playlists. Specifically, it aggregates tracks from popular music blogs across a wide range of genres, each of them very heavily populated. Dream Pop, for example, isn't exactly a top 40 genre of music, but the Hype Machine pulls together no fewer than 100 different blogs classified as such. It's loaded with music, all hand-selected by Internet tastemakers and guaranteed to introduce you to something you haven't heard before. 

A Growing Universe Of Music Discovery Apps

Narrowing this list to just five selections wasn't easy. There are plenty of discovery apps on Spotify worth checking out - top charts from We Are Hunted and Billboard and social music from TweetVine, Soundrop and Sifter. Depending on your tastes, the critic-curated recommendations from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, NME or KCRW can be invaluable. 

It's also worth mentioning that the new, supposedly Pandora-killing Spotify Radio feature is worth playing with. Its Echo Nest-powered recommendations are not quite as granular and effective as Pandora's, but they're quite good. Not only can you create a station based on any album or artist, but you can build one off of an entire playlist. This is pretty powerful. For instance, if you've starred a lot of music on Spotify, you can build a radio station based solely on those favorites. 

Here's another Spotify Radio trick: The Last.fm app will let you generate a Spotify a playlist based on your dozen or so most-played  albums of all time. You can then start a Spotify radio station based on that playlist, which is sure to contain a few tracks you'll love, but have never heard before. And isn't that the point of music discovery?

Why Do Tech Companies Dominate "Best Places To Work" Lists?

When the Great Place to Work Institute released its 2012 World's Best Multinational Workplaces list this month, ranking the world's 25 best employers - tech companies ruled. High-tech companies grabbed 9 of the 25 slots including 4 of the top 5.

It's a nice feather in the caps of Google, SAS, NetApp, Microsoft and the other winners, but beyond bragging rights, is there a point to this or any similar lists? Don't these awards always go to rich companies that can afford to pay and coddle their workers. Isn't that why fast-growing tech companies always seem to dominate them?

To find out, I asked a Director of Human Resources for a federal agency - who asked that ReadWrite not publish his name. He told me I was looking at the lists all wrong.

"I think they're great!" he said. Just not for employees. I was looking at the wrong consumers.

Impractical For Job Seekers

"They aren't very practical job-hunting tools," he explained, "unless you're young and mobile, and willing to go where the work takes you. But for employers ' particularly 'boring' employers like us ' they can put numbers on qualities we usually can't quantify, and that helps us compete."

His reasoning makes sense. Hip, well-funded companies offer catering, gyms, cocktail hours and a ton of perks that look great on a website. More traditional companies, particularly those (like the government) with budget constraints have to carve out less-sexy intangibles. "We have teams that have been working together for 30 years, and we really do operate as a family. We have solid benefits, a great retirement plan, and if something goes wrong and we have to lay off employees, we do everything in our power to find them work without disrupting their lives or incomes. But that's a horrible pitch, because it's fuzzy and it's tough to prove, without talking to our employees."

The Feds Do It Right!

It turns out the best, most complete report is the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, which provides unparalleled transparency and detail. The Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey was a great start, he says, because it provided actionable data he and other managers could use to make things better, and it gave his agency "a bit of an edge with recruiting transfers" from other agencies.

But the Great Places surveys' focus on employee trust was most exciting to him. "It's a measure of employee contentment, and I honestly think we can go toe-to-toe with the private sector on this. We may not be able to match salaries dollar-for-dollar, but if our employees are happier, applicants might take a closer look at why. And then we have a discussion."

Why Do Tech Companies Dominate?

So, why do so many tech companies dominate the list? Was it simply because they have the money to spend, or because their brand recognition makes them desirable?

He didn't think so. "Part of it might be their lack of legacy, sure. But mostly, I think it's because they're used to competing for the best, and they know what that takes. The good ones, like Google, know it takes an actual culture of support, and they've built that, as much as that makes my life hard when I have to recruit tech people in California. They're just ahead of the curve, and most of us have to catch up."

So there you have it, the tech companies that make the top of these lists really are likely to be good places to work - no matter what your salary.

Dos And Don'ts

Finally, if you really must use the Best Places To Work lists as job hunting tools, be sure to follow these Dos and Don'ts:

Don't use Best Places To Work lists as a primary job-hunting tool. Don't worry if your future employer isn't on a list - it might still be the perfect spot for you. Do use these lists to find new leads. Do consider high-ranked employers that you might have otherwise dismissed.

 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.