Seattle Tech Companies

November 14, 2007 9:56 AM

Seattle tech companies worth working for?

I'm looking for recommendations -- or any information / opinions, good or bad -- regarding tech companies in the Seattle area.

I'm an open source web developer, and I'm interested in moving to Seattle within the next six months or so. I've spent some time on various job sites and individual company sites, and I have a list of companies, but they're mostly just names to me. There's only so much you can learn from a company web site, and it's going to be pretty biased.

I'm primarily interested in technology-focused companies, large enough to be stable, and I'd feel a lot more fulfilled working somewhere that produces something users find directly useful, rather than something like advertising.

Google's on the list. Microsoft isn't really open source friendly. Other than that... what should I look into?

posted by coined to Work & Money (4 answers total)

Microsoft has several open source projects.

Amazon is here.
RealNetworks is here (though I don't like them).

I worked with people who started or went to the following companies that I would recommend looking at:
pluggd
pelago
talentspring
posted by jeffamaphone at 10:31 AM on November 14, 2007

I've had several acquaintances that worked at Amazon over the years and they've all raved about how great a place it is to work. My understanding is that they're very OSS friendly, but that might just be the rose-colored glasses of the people I've talked to.
posted by togdon at 10:39 AM on November 14, 2007

Look at Zillow, the real estate valuation company, looks good. They're right downtown and probably still in the entrepreneurial stage.
posted by lhauser at 8:57 PM on November 14, 2007

Google has a campus here and they are hiring. I'm not sure if it houses one of their open source projects (mentioned here in this artical from Slashdot. But they are definitely a presence in the area.
posted by ptm at 4:57 AM on November 15, 2007