Netflix Is No. 1 Company Techies Want to Work For, Survey Finds

By Todd Spangler

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Netflix beat out Silicon Valley’s biggest heavy-hitters on a new survey of the most-coveted places to work among technology pros.

took the No. 1 spot on Hired’s 2018 survey of tech workers ranking the companies they’d most like to work for, moving up from fifth place on the job site’s 2017 survey. That put the streamer ahead of Google (#2), Elon Musk’s Tesla (#3) and SpaceX (#4), Airbnb (#5) and Apple (#6).

Other notable players on Hired’s survey were Amazon (#9), Hulu (#10), Disney (#11) and Facebook (#13).

For the survey, Hired provided respondents with a list of companies to choose from and they ranked their interest in working at each company on a five-point scale, which was the basis for an overall “Brand Positivity Index” score on a 100-point scale. The survey polled 2,200 tech workers in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

Netflix is far smaller than most of the companies it beat out on the survey. But the Los Gatos, Calif.-based company has been dramatically upping its spending on R&D, which is one key indicator of investment in technology.

For the second quarter of 2018, Netflix reported $317 million in technology and development costs, or 8.1% of topline revenue. That’s up more than 50% in just two years, from $207 million in Q2 2016 (9.8% of revenue).

Hired’s survey also asked technology workers to pick the top three factors that matter most when they’re looking for a job or evaluating an offer. The top criteria were: compensation and benefits (55%); company culture (45%), opportunity to learn new skills (40%); challenging technical problems to solve (29%); and the members of the team in the job under consideration (27%).

Here is the ranking of the 25 top companies on Hired’s “2018 Global Brand Health Report” survey of tech workers: