Guidewire

Guidewire is a great, people-centric organisation. There is a strong focus on values, self-organisation, and self-management. People are trusted and expected to do the right thing. Salary and benefits are very good and linked to your performance in a very fair and reasonable way. Growth in the Dublin office has been really strong over the last few years and will continue for the foreseeable future.

Product Development teams are set up for success as self-organising 'pods' that define and run their own Agile practices and processes. These pods are generally about 5 to 8 people with a product manager, 3 to 5 engineers, and 1 to 2 QAs. Pods are collected into tribes with specific purposes.

Product Development in Dublin covers 3 main areas:

• Digital, which encompasses the online 'Digital' aspects of the product set, delivering a set of online digital experiences targeted at different roles.
• Suite - which covers the engineering and delivery of elements of the underlying product suite.
• Content - delivers market-specific enhancements of the product for specific regional markets.

I would say that in Guidewire Product Development, there aren't many cons. It's a really great place to work.

If pushed, the only cons I would list are around the maturity of the products.

We have been developing these products for nearly two decades; there is a lot of existing software. This has been developed and enhanced over many years. Some areas of the product suite are more modern than others; some have been modernized, and some haven't. This can present a challenge for people looking to develop greenfield applications. As we grow and develop, we tackle these challenges, but it's not the same as starting with a blank sheet.

The only other con worth a mention is the use of an internal language, Gosu. It's a Java-like language that provided access to key language features before they were available in Java. It's straightforward, but if you are very sensitive to the language you use, this might be a turn-off. Most strong engineers are not bothered by this; it's just another C-like language.

Keep doing what you are doing. The company's growth and direction are great. The leadership and focus on enhancing the modularity of our product architecture is fantastic. The faster we can move through this process, the better.

Keep investing in better tooling for Business Users for the majority of configuration. Build out the engineering toolset for the minority engineer configuration.

Make it possible to run true unit tests on any piece of code anywhere in the platform. (Just to be really specific, the test must not require a server to be running to execute; it must be capable of executing independently.)