Prelude to Massive Disloyalty: Employers I believe I'd like to work for

This was in my Draft folder...from 2008. Let's review:

EveryBlock - no longer exists, got swallowed up by another company.

Amazon - well known to be a phenomenally shitty workplace.

Metaweb - acquired by Google 2010

SAS - I don't really think about them much anymore

Lego - nice and all but I'm not obsessed with Lego. You gotta be obsessed with that shit to get a job there.

Things are suboptimal in the career arena right now. I'd rather not indulge in livejournal-esque expansion on that topic now. Instead, in a true power-of-positive thinking inspirational move, here are some places I think would actually be great places to work. Maybe I'm naive or deluded. Maybe I'm over-reaching. Regardless, here we go....

EveryBlock

A Chicago-based startup that makes raw, often unstructured data meaningful via mapping. Find out where all the crimes are going down. Find out which restaurants have good inspection scores. Cool things about EveryBlock:

Chicago
Python
Django (plus the guy that created Django)
Lots and lots of data manipulation, scraping, processing, munging, mangling, and so on

Amazon

Google gets all the 'changing the world' press, but Amazon put EC2, S3, and SimpleDB out there before Google App Engine came along. At a recent data warehousing conference, a big-shot in the industry sang the praises of the incredible Oracle DBAs that work at Amazon. They'd have to be incredible. It'd be a place where I could tolerate being the (relatively) dumb new guy in exchange for the incredible learning opportunities. Or so the theory goes.

The SAS Institue

Because of my math background, my whole life (it seems) people have told me: 'You know what you should do? You should work for the SAS Institute.' Actually it makes sense for other reasons as well. SAS always shows up in the 'best employers to work for' articles in the business magazines. It's located in North Carolina, and I love North Carolina - even more now that Jesse Helms left the building.

Metaweb (the creators of Freebase)

Wikipedia is cool, but Metaweb takes the idea a step further, giving the data more structure and creating the cool MQL (Metaweb Query Language). Here's an idea that's in the rich early stages - the possibilities are endless. That and the tweet from the MetaWeb dude saying 'look for me at the conference, I'll be in purple hair and a Freebase t-shirt'. It'd be great to have co-workers like that.

Lego

It's Lego! It's located in the alleged happiest place on Earth (although this article cooled my jets on that idea in a big way).