Does this job actually suck?
A new database finally helps you find out
How far we get in our careers depends on more than intelligence, temperament, and hustle. Where we work—and the support we receive there—matters immensely. Does the company promote from within or hire senior talent from outside? Does it invest real money in training and mentoring? Is it a place you’d want to stay for the long haul?
The age-old problem for job seekers is that these things are hard to judge from the outside. Even a company with a strong overall reputation can turn out to have dead-end roles in a particular department.
Two nonprofits—the Burning Glass Institute and the Schultz Family Foundation—set out to answer the question systematically. They analyzed the career histories of 12 million workers across 1,750 of the largest U.S. employers from 2019 to 2024, drawing on data from sites such as LinkedIn and Glassdoor. Each occupation at each company was scored on three factors:
- **Promotions**: the likelihood of rising to a higher internal position within five years of starting the job
- **Retention**: the share of workers who stay at least three years
- **Salary**
The result is one of the most useful databases available for anyone considering a job in corporate America: a role-by-role guide to the best, average, and worst places to build a career. Variation within companies is enormous. At the average firm, there is an 81-percentile-point gap between its strongest and weakest roles on promotions and retention. At Chanel, for example, fashion designers rank in the 97th percentile for retention among peer roles nationwide, while project management specialists rank in the 16th.
To make the data more manageable, Burning Glass narrowed the focus to six prominent tech occupations a typical computer-science major might pursue: software engineers, data scientists, software quality assurance analysts and testers, computer systems and security engineers, IT project managers (a category that includes product managers), and IT systems analysts. The groupings follow the government’s occupational categories.
Across these roles, a handful of familiar tech companies emerge as clear winners. Because software is core to their businesses, they tend to treat the people who build it especially well. Amazon and Salesforce stand out most: both deliver top-of-market pay, strong advancement opportunities, and high retention. Salesforce software engineers, for instance, rank in the 97th percentile for promotions, 98th for retention, and 96th for salary—a rare win-win-win. Adobe, Google, and Microsoft are not far behind.
Other tech giants pay extremely well, but the picture beyond compensation is mixed. Apple offers relatively few promotions, yet people tend to stay. Uber is the reverse: workers advance at a decent rate, but the company struggles to retain them. Meta’s promotion record is mediocre, and retention varies sharply by role.
Outside Silicon Valley, Liberty Mutual is one of the strongest performers for tech roles, often outperforming much of Big Tech on advancement and longevity even though its salaries do not reach Valley levels. Software engineers there are promoted 3.7 times as often as those at Meta. USAA also stands out for how well its tech workers fare.
Once the highest-paying employers are set aside, additional hidden gems appear. John Deere and Northwestern Mutual offer unusually strong advancement and career longevity with middle-of-the-road pay. In healthcare, Mayo Clinic IT project managers and systems analysts both rank in the 99th percentile for retention—even though both roles pay less than two-thirds of comparable positions elsewhere.
There are also clearly less appealing options. At Goldman Sachs, software engineers are paid very well but see limited internal mobility and tend to leave relatively quickly; its data scientists fare poorly on advancement and retention without the same salary premium. At Deloitte, many technical roles look similarly unattractive: limited upward movement and low retention.
These distinctions matter more today than they did a few years ago. When demand for tech talent was red-hot, workers could easily jump ship for a bigger title and higher pay if their careers stalled. Job-hopping was the norm, and a weak internal path was less of a concern. The environment has changed. With hiring slower and layoffs more common, many tech workers now prioritize stability—a steady employer that keeps them engaged and helps them grow over many years. A growing number of younger professionals say they would trade a higher salary or a flashy brand name for that kind of long-term home.
That desire can sound nostalgic for an era of corporate loyalty that no longer exists. Burning Glass’s analysis suggests otherwise. Great employers—or at least great employers for particular jobs—still exist. The database simply makes them easier to find.