Get vacation time and sick time upon being hired (40 hours each) along with floating holidays (another 20 hours or so) along with national holidays and the such. Comparable health benefits (we just switched to a better model – Bit more expensive but it covers a lot more).

Our work schedules are very relaxed outside of tax season. Need to leave? Get on outta here. Sick kid? Stay home for the day. Etc etc.

During tax season though, we are only alloted 3 vacation days scheduled a month in advance. Outside of that you can only call in sick for yourself. They are humane about things though, so if your wife is sick or family is sick, they’ll let you go.

We have quite a few parties and social gatherings here. Tax season kick off party, end of tax season party, thanksgiving, halloween, christmas and then random things throughout the year as well. This Halloween we had all the families and such go around to everyone’s desk and collect candy. Then we had a magic show afterwards with free snacks for everyone attending. The neat part about the candy… is that we have like 250 employees here. Our building is fairly easy to walk around so it took maybe an hour to bank some serious candy

I would say this is one of the more friendly companies to work for in Utah.

Meaningless to you. For the most part, meaningless to me as well, at this point in my life, but hopefully that will change one day. Certainly family friendly is extremely important to a large number of employees.

To address your point of the “unappreciated hero” yes, that happens. My experience, however, is that people who are really heroes for the company, who are really pulling two or three times their load, are well known to their management. Sure, some managers are short sighted and try to take credit for all that work, but managers who have been around the block even a little bit know that it’s always better to share the credit.

My experience has been: most of the people who feel that they’re under appreciated at work are either: suffering from a terrible direct supervisor (which happens, and is why middle management is actually a critically important job), or think they have a much greater value to the company than they actually do. I’ve seen a lot more of the second case than the first, though I suspect that is in large part because terrible supervisors rarely have heroes working for them for long, one way or another.

That said, you also have to stand up for yourself, at least a little bit. A great supervisor will sit down with you, at least occasionally, and ask you about what you want to do, and where you want to go. A great supervisor will do what she can to get you there, but, at the end of the day, you have to get there yourself.

Anecdote time: back in January my company started negotiations for our second project. It was clear that the lead designer for Pirates was not going to have the time to be the lead designer for this project as well. I made it known that I was interested in this project, that I wanted to be a lead designer, and that I wanted to be lead designer for this project. I went out of my way to find out about the project, and involve myself (in a limited way) in the earliest stages of the project. I ended up getting the lead designer position on the project. Would I have gotten that position without being proactive and getting involved early? Maybe, hell I’d say even probably, but because I went out and got involved early, I was the obvious, immediate choice.

It’s about accomplishments. It’s about worth. A good programmer is worth 40 bad ones. See John Carmack.

The problem is certain fields, such as sales, have easily determined deliverables and a simple way to compare who is golden and who is the goose. Others do not. They have a lot of people working as a team dependent on organization and knowledge.

I’ve worked as a programmer and DBA for the past 16 years. When I was young I put in a metric ton of hours simply because there was so much I didn’t know. Older, more experienced people completed the same amount as I in 2/3 the time. This is as it should be. As the 22 year old you should be working your guts out. As a 32 year old, provided you are in the same field, you should be streamlined, wise, and understand how to budget your time. You should also have enough of a knowledge gap to do even more in your limited time.

The problem from my vantage point is when a group or person tries to look at things from an apples to apples comparison. For example in most of my shops there was the ‘guru’. He was a guy who knew more, and tended to get the difficult assignments. Unfortunately, this person was often not significantly better paid, and often was used and abused. He didn’t necessarily work more hours, he just knew his stuff.

This is the guy who makes the IT world go round, and is the hidden MVP. Since his success is wholly dependent on how he is represented by management, therein lies the crux of the problem.

People complain about family friendly and other things that are utterly meaningless, but most could careless that the true superstars tend to go ignored, unpromoted, and by the nature of their own talents mired in the same position while lesser talented, better marketed people take more pay and responsibility.

That to me is the real travesty.

Having been both the 22 year old with no life and the 32 year old with obligations (but still no life, mind you), I can’t say as I necessarily accomplished that much more, despite being a wholly owned subsidiary of The Company.

I think what you want is better accountability from top to bottom, perhaps? It’d be nice if that was the case, but it goes against human nature.

Furthermore, everyone claims to be family friendly because they know that’s the right thing to do. That means the companies that punish people for having lives know they are doing something ethically wrong, and they feel like they need to hide it under a thin layer of token gestures.

Companies are first and foremost about their own success. Consider yourself your own company, and do what’s best.

If your field demands more than you want to give, then it’s time for a literal paradigm shift for you.

The happy side of it is that the place will probably fold in due time.

The more I listen Sanya, the more I rule out the possability of ever working in the games field. You folks seriously need a union.