There are many tech (and non-tech) companies in the Phoenix area. Your choice, as always, is to work at a place where the importance of the technology and the talent of your engineers and designers is recognized, or work in PetSmart's IT/Web department (where you're constantly fighting budget and recognition battles).
So should you opt to go into tech, GoDaddy is the largest and best-paying, and has fairly decent benefits. Unless you were a Senior level professional elsewhere, it would likely be in your best interest to work at GD.
That said, it's also a company run by bean counters and marketing. Most (read: all) important decisions regarding what choices the company makes goes through a ringer that includes assessing how much direct money comes from an innovation or change. If test a yields or saves $1 and test b yields or saves $2, test b wins, no matter how poor a choice it is in terms of user experience, customer care or any other metrics that relate to long-term customer retention.
It's got tons of middle management, which in itself isn't a bad thing, except that everyone's fighting to own the creation a product, but no one wants to be accountable for it, should it not go well.
Essentially this creates an environment of fear against innovation, accountability and iteration.
I've only been here less than a year so I haven't been exposed to that. What I've observed is that the culture is very compartmentalized in the sense that there are lots of small teams that each have a specific product they work on. Each team basically has it's own culture and way of doing things.
That isn't good for standards/best practices, but it does mean that teams have a lot of leeway to do things pretty much however they want. My team has a ton of flexibility on how we code, test, and deploy, though we have to work within some red tape imposed by other teams that have their own way of doing their things.
In my day to day work I'm actually pretty free to work how I want without being pushed by people up the food chain. That could be because the product I work on is a supplementary product and not a 'core' product, though.
So should you opt to go into tech, GoDaddy is the largest and best-paying, and has fairly decent benefits. Unless you were a Senior level professional elsewhere, it would likely be in your best interest to work at GD.
That said, it's also a company run by bean counters and marketing. Most (read: all) important decisions regarding what choices the company makes goes through a ringer that includes assessing how much direct money comes from an innovation or change. If test a yields or saves $1 and test b yields or saves $2, test b wins, no matter how poor a choice it is in terms of user experience, customer care or any other metrics that relate to long-term customer retention.
It's got tons of middle management, which in itself isn't a bad thing, except that everyone's fighting to own the creation a product, but no one wants to be accountable for it, should it not go well.
Essentially this creates an environment of fear against innovation, accountability and iteration.