I've worked at Intuit for many years (more than 15). I love the people I work with. Over the past 1.5 years, we've had a strategy and mindset change focusing on connected services. While I understand where we're going (I was already working in this space prior to the increased focus on it) - I don't think we really went into this fully prepared.
Most of the managers in my PD area previously managed desktop development projects - they have no experience in managing online projects at all. This has resulted in poor planning, poor estimates of work, poor execution of the work and tremendous schedule compression which is killing the employees. We've tried outsourcing some of the work to other PD units in India, but it hasn't helped. Our skill sets are not where they need to be right now, in both the management and even in some of the engineering areas. There are lots of bright people here, it's just taking a while to get everyone to understand the connected services mindset.
Idea generation seems to be a problem in my business unit. I understand a company can get many of its innovative ideas for new products, prototypes, etc. from the employees, however it seems in my business unit that it is over emphasized. While I understand and agree with the concept of whitespace time and ideation, the reality is that many engineers simply don't have a lot of time to work in this space. We have people that we pay to think about and generate these types of ideas - they're called product managers. I guess if your product managers lack the experience and technical knowledge in their space then it stands to reason that the business would use others to help bridge the gap.
The work life balance here has disappeared. It didn't have to - with the economy in the state it's in I think many are fearful they may lose their job so they won't stand up for themselves or speak up at all when unreasonable demands are placed on their time by others (which is almost always due to poor planning). If we could see the fruit of our labor (i.e. what we end up with actually making money for the business) then maybe I could be satisfied with working a little more to gain more. What I see now is more people working on these connected services than actually use them. Low customer acceptance rates make it seem like the work is throw away at times.
Couple this with migrating our applications to new data centers with new technology that hasn't been fully proven yet and you've got one big, time consuming, chaotic set of things happening, and that is what's happening, almost every day. You can shrug it off as strategy/growing pains, etc., but this is the worst year on the job that I've ever experienced out of all the years I've worked here - and trust me, there were some bad years in there.
