A new tech career database covering the career histories of 12 million workers across 1,750 of America’s largest employers has gone public, offering job seekers something they have never had before: a role-by-role guide to where people actually get promoted, stay, and earn well, rather than just which companies carry the best brand names.
The Where You Work Matters list, produced by the Burning Glass Institute and the Schultz Family Foundation in partnership with the Harvard Business School Project on Managing the Future of Work, rates more than 55,000 occupations across those 1,750 employers. It scores each role at each company on three factors: the likelihood of an internal promotion within five years, the share of workers who stay at least three years, and salary.
What the Tech Career Database Measures
The methodology matters. Unlike most employer rankings, the project does not rely on data provided by companies themselves. Instead, it draws on external sources including CVs uploaded to career sites, career updates posted to social media platforms, pay data, and job postings, according to the Schultz Family Foundation. The underlying research report, titled Good Company, Wrong Job and published by the Burning Glass Institute, covers the period 2019 to 2024.
One of the headline findings is how wildly a single employer’s record can vary by role. On average, an 81-percentile-point gap separates the best- and worst-performing occupations inside the same firm. At Chanel, for instance, fashion designers rank in the 97th percentile for retention among similar roles nationally, while project management specialists sit at the 16th percentile.
The project is also the successor to the American Opportunity Index, which the Schultz Family Foundation launched in 2022 with the same institutional partners as a tool to raise awareness about the role businesses play in upward mobility for American workers. The 2024 edition of that index found that only 80 of the 395 firms it assessed had increased promotion opportunities, while 240 had seen some level of decrease; 174 firms also reduced their hiring of people without college degrees or meaningful previous work experience, according to a Harvard Kennedy School summary of the findings.
Salesforce and Amazon Lead; Goldman and Deloitte Lag
For six tech occupations that a typical computer science graduate might pursue, covering software engineers, data scientists, QA analysts, systems and security engineers, IT project managers, and IT systems analysts, two companies stand apart: Amazon and Salesforce.
Salesforce’s software engineers rank in the 97th percentile for promotions, the 98th for retention, and the 96th for salary. Adobe, Google, and Microsoft are not far behind. The Schultz Family Foundation’s broader data across the index shows that top-100 companies on the pay metric pay workers on average 130% more for the same job than those near the bottom, and top-100 companies on the promotions metric promote workers 2.5 times more often than companies at the lower end.
The picture is more complicated elsewhere in Big Tech. Apple pays well and retains people, but offers relatively few promotions. Uber moves workers up at a reasonable pace but struggles to keep them. Meta has a mediocre promotions record, and its retention varies sharply by role.
Outside Silicon Valley, Liberty Mutual outperforms much of Big Tech on career advancement and longevity. Its software engineers are promoted 3.7 times as often as those at Meta. USAA also stands out for how its tech workers fare. John Deere and Northwestern Mutual offer strong advancement and career longevity at mid-market salaries. At the Mayo Clinic, both IT project managers and systems analysts rank in the 99th percentile for retention, though both roles pay less than two-thirds of comparable positions nationally.
At the other end, Goldman Sachs pays software engineers well but offers limited advancement and sees them leave quickly. Its data scientists fare poorly on both advancement and retention, without the same salary premium. At Deloitte, many technical roles show a similar pattern: limited progression and low retention.
The timing of the database’s release reflects how much the tech labour market has shifted. In the early 2020s, strong demand made it easy for engineers and data scientists to job-hop for bigger titles and higher pay, so weak internal career paths were easier to overlook. With hiring slower and layoffs recurring across the sector, stability has become a priority. The tech career database exists to help workers find it, role by role, before they sign an offer letter.