The 50 Best U.S. Cities for Employment Satisfaction

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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The best company to work, the worst, and the new “50 Best U.S. Cities for Employment Satisfaction” study from industry leading employee opinion group Glassdoor. The actual list would be better called a review of the “50 largest cities,” and which ones have the most favorable work environments. Or, as researchers call it sometimes, the Glassdoor Employment Satisfaction Report Card by City.” Pick the best title, as if it were a contest.

No one should be surprised that these cities are mostly very affluent have highly educated residents, good climate and likely bicycle paths and public education as well. Texas and California get more than their fair share of cities, but they have more than their fair share of the national population.

The cities near the bottom of the list, are probably ones that most people who have the luxury to pick and choose will ignore. Detroit is near the bottom. So are Las Vegas, Buffalo and Milwaukee. Not has much to recommend these other than bad real estate prices and residents who want to leave.

Glassdoor reports:

The Bay Area takes the lead as San Jose, CA  and San Francisco, CA  take the top two spots. Interestingly, both cities are home to five companies that made Glassdoor’s Top 50 Best Places to Work for 2013 report – San Jose (Google #6, LinkedIn #14, Agilent Technologies #30, Intel #31, Apple #34) & San Francisco (Facebook #1, Riverbed Technology #3, Chevron #13, Workday #19, Salesforce.com #22).

Rounding out the top five cities for overall employment satisfaction are Seattle, WA, Salt Lake City, UT , and Washington, DC.

How did they do it:

This report is based on U.S. metro population and at least 500 reviews per metro shared on Glassdoor by local employees over the past year.

And, the entire list:

Glassdoor-Employment-Satisfaction-Report-Card-by-City

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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