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Good place to work - just be "nice" and grovel

Senior Software QA Analyst
Former Employee
Worked at Intuit for less than 1 year
July 20, 2009
San Diego, California
4.0
RecommendsApproves of CEO
Pros

Flexible work-life balance with self-managed time creates a less stressful work schedule.

Telecommute when needed with all remote access capabilities.

Exceptional employee benefits, including ESPP, Medical, Dental, and Vision – the "Cadillac" of benefits.

Cons

Immature processes, coupled with too much team decision-making, create a weak infrastructure that fails to exchange and interchange information and software between teams and departments. Teams continually reinvent the wheel within their own enclaves, ultimately developing and using tools and software that cannot even play together, let alone play nice with one another.

Old-boy leadership and politics, down to the small teams, create a difficult environment in which to enact any meaningful change for the better and stifle career advancement for newcomers joining long-standing teams. Individuals who are "nice" about their own incompetencies are often "rewarded" when the shortcomings for the role are delivered in a certain manner. In other words, some people are not in certain positions because of their skills.

SCRUM (agile development) is not executed efficiently. It's more like "mini" waterfalls and could be called "Fragile" since the software could break at any moment. The new incrementally delivered application functionality masquerades as working when, in actuality, its new functionality is a facade. The big money spent bringing Ken Schwaber in to mystify leaders did just that, and only that. There does seem to be chaos; none of it, however, appears controlled.

Advice to Management

Institute industry best practices throughout the organization when it comes to standardizing life-cycles through common, interconnected applications from third-party vendors. This is instead of creating and developing home-grown tools that pale in comparison to even some open-source solutions.

Stay true to your bread-and-butter applications and solutions. Intuit might be "trendy" with its latest business practices and customer solutions, but it should remain committed to its core software to avoid becoming a fad.

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