Companies in STL

[Matt Taylor]

Has anyone worked in the java community in St. Louis? I'm interviewing
at several places there at the end of the month. I'm especially
interested in Object Computing Inc. (www.ociweb.com) -- they run the
STL JUG -- and KellyMitchell.

Also meeting with Talisen Technologies, Adaptive Solutions Group,
Stockwell Consulting, River City Internet Group, Envision, and TEK
Systems.

Anyone have any experience with these companies? Any advice or
guidance would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[Gregg Bolinger]

You might contact Scott Delap (http://www.clientjava.com).  He works in STL.

Gregg

[Dave Ferguson]

I checked with a co-worker of mine from St. Louis and his feedback is below.
-Dave

---
KellyMitchell has a bit of a bad rep with local developers. I have
worked for Stockwell and found them to be a very good company to work
for. They treated me (as a consultant) like a normal employee, 401K,
health etc. One of our salesmen worked for Teksystems, he hasn't
complained about the experience. I worked for AeroTech (the company
that spun off Teksystems) and they were also good at the time(~10
years ago).

On 7/13/06, Matt Taylor <rhyo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>

[Matt Taylor]

Thank you for the information. I'll pay attention to Stockell.

Anyone worked with Envision LLC (www.envision.com)? They seem pretty
legit. Hired someone to do a tech interview over the phone pretty
quickly.

Thanks again.

[Ken Totten]

Hi Matt,

I know one of the owners at Envision very well and I have almost 20 years of experience in the St. Louis IT consulting market.  If there is any insight I can offer you or anyone in the group I would most happy to talk with you.

For the past 9 years I have been with Object Computing, Inc. (OCI), an OO Software Engineering company based in St. Louis.  We have a development center in St. Louis and in Phoenix and serve over 500 customers across the country.  At any given time we have between 12-15 concurrent projects on average going on in our development centers.  Our implrmentation technologies include Java web apps, J2EE,  C# , and C++.  We are looking ahead and are now teaching Ruby and Ruby on Rails.  We are a Sun Authorized Java Center and a Voting Member of the Object Management Group.  Our core competencies are architecture, design and development of agile systems and we possess strong middleware/frameworks expertise.  We provide consulting, training and open source products.  More info is available at www.ociweb.com.  In addition we started Advantage Consulting Inc. www.stladvantage.com as an IT staffing solution company.  OCI is not a staffing company but a SE firm.  Advantage provides project based employment opportunities, an aggressive compensation and benefits package, has a one sentence non-compete (extremely fair/focused), and allows its consultants to accept perm career offers with our clients.  In addition, everything that OCI teaches at Wash U, over 50 courses in OOAD, Java, design patterns & frameworks, etc. are free and available to you.  The training is a pretty unique benefit.

I started the Java News Brief  8 years ago.  Our readership is now in all 50 states and throughout 60 countries.   A strong part of our company culture is our technical training forums, e.g. Java and C++ luncheons and the sense of community by our development staff.  Besides our development and training centers we serve over 15 major corporations in the St. Louis area with on site consulting.  There is alot going on in the St. Louis market right now.  My bigger concern for software engineers today is the trend in corporate IT towards becoming system integrators and technical leads on off-shore development projects.  If your joy comes from designing and building OO solutions - software engineering, it may pay to consider working for a software engineering company. 

Best regards,

Ken Totten
GM, Object Computing, Inc. & Advantage Consulting, Inc.
314-590-0204
www.ociweb.com
www.stladvantage.com