The Home Depot

• The enterprise is very hands-off with tech, which is surprising (in a good way!) for a company its size. Many teams are coding on an XP paradigm, so production releases are typically small and regularly occurring. The amount of red tape needed to cut when deploying to production is slim to none.

• Software teams are welcome and encouraged to find and use newer technologies with very little restrictions (again, a pleasant surprise considering the size of the company), and the enterprise push to move away from older, legacy systems is real.

• Work/life balance on a day-to-day basis is good. In four years, I had to put in extra hours only a couple times, and never had to work weekends, other than when it was my turn in the on-call rotation.

• Work/life balance on a monthly/yearly scale is not so good. PTO is by far the worst of anywhere I have ever worked. Six holidays is the absolute bare minimum, as is two weeks of vacation.

On the corporate level, there is no system in place for tracking time off, so whether you have to stick to those ten days is up to your manager and if they track it themselves. If they do, you're stuck with it.

• Success sharing bonuses are better when the company does better, but that won't keep you from getting a lowball raise when annual reviews come around.

• High reliance on contractor work. Between associates and contractors, I had 35 direct reports, which on its own is far, far more than any one person should have. Of that, half were contractors.

• Very few "extras". Corporate and team celebration events were few and far between prior to the pandemic. Once it hit, they all dried up.

As previously mentioned, the enterprise's forward-thinking attitudes towards software engineering are refreshing. Big enterprise engineering often comes with a lot of big enterprise overhead. Instead, THD has very little, and that's great. Unfortunately, several of the company's more broad employee policies feel like they haven't changed since its founding in 1978.

You can't have employees working for 49 of the 52 weeks a year with no extrinsic rewards; they will feel underappreciated. You can't apply the same policies and benefits you do to store associates as you do to office associates; they will leave for better ones elsewhere.

There are some associates who see The Home Depot as the endgame. Most have already been there for a decade, maybe more. At present, it's hard to see anyone new to the company staying for more than a few years. It's a big name, a good name, and one where you'll get a lot of good experience as an engineer. But eventually, you'll use it as a stepping stone to something better.