Intuit

I was here before the acquisition and got to see the company change from a little Eagle ID startup to part of an 8,000+ employee corporation. Here are some thoughts from a software dev's perspective:

• The benefits got a lot better. You probably won't find any other jobs in the Boise area that beat the benefits at Intuit (insurance, stock, bonus, etc.).
• People you work with day-to-day are very smart.
• Intuit has some cool tech they're promoting internally for use across products.
• You get personal dev days at the end of each sprint and engineering days twice a year, which you can use to work on basically whatever you want, as long as you're improving yourself or the company in some way. Personal dev days I usually spend learning new technologies I'm interested in by working on fun side projects. If it weren't for personal dev, I would have left the company years ago. It gives devs the ability to hone new skills instead of staying in their bubble.

TSheets lacks someone in the architect role, so different development projects don't always come together nicely. Other Intuit orgs have architect(s) who take on the job of forming a broader vision of how the codebase/architecture should work.

It seems like devs are always writing a lot of hacky stuff to make things work because of a lack of someone who has a bigger vision.

The codebase will leave you wanting. I guess with a 12+ year old PHP monolith, what are you going to do? I will say it's getting better though.

Management could prioritize code improvements more. Our feature teams don't have as high velocity as they could because of handicaps in our codebase.

Put someone in the architect role. Make that someone's full-time job. It's seriously needed.

A while back, there was talk about "development sprints" – or whatever we were calling it – a special sprint several times a year where devs could focus on cleaning up unused code, useful refactors, etc., rather than feature work. That was talked about by the top dog, JD, at sprint retro and sounded official, then sort of never got spoken of again. From talking to devs around the org, those would seriously be useful even if it's just some teams here and there, so please think about doing that.