The best airline is the one that hires you, unless you have multiple airlines to choose from..

As a guy on the outside looking in (and trying not to lick the window) I don't really see any of the "Majors" (Which to me includes, UPS, FedEx, SWA plus the legacies) as being a bad place. Other than HAL, first year pay is liveable at all of them, and you can at least hold reserve somewhere not across the country within a year or two at most.

Of course, as I'm currently living in a room the size of a prison cell that I share with three other dudes in Afghanistan, even bad hotels are an improvement.

I'd have come to SWA if they gave me a job offer after my interview. And in all likelyhood, as I got hit with an involuntary mobilization that would have started about four months in, for 16 months, odds of me ever jumping ship would have been low.