First Year as a Software Developer
Tags: career, webdev, beginners, codenewbie
Published: 2020-08-15 15:52:39

3,15,36,000 seconds spent as a Software Dev in the Silicon City of India, Bengaluru. The 22nd of July, 2019 was when I joined Intuit as a full-time employee and now it has been one complete year already! It has been a pleasant and perhaps purposeful journey, where I learnt and unlearnt many things. I have always been wanting to write about so many things, but could never decide what to write about. And here we are. What better to write about than completing my first year as a software developer, something that I have been dreaming about since I was in 10th grade. 

Intuit was technically my first corporate experience. I first interned with Intuit as a summer intern, June 2018 - July - 2018. This exposure was absolutely mind boggling. For the first time in my life I was completely surrounded by code. What an overwhelming feeling that was! Everybody around me was indulged into application development, driven by purpose and mission. It was truly an exhilarating experience to interact with the highly seasoned brains of the industry. Post the internship, I was totally thrilled to hear that I had an offer to join as a full-time employee at Intuit, starting from July/August 2019. 

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## 1. What goes up must come down 
I was given the opportunity to do a 6-month internship during my final semester in college. So, by the time I joined as a full-time engineer, I had already spent 6 months at Intuit. This enabled me to have a smooth transition into my full-time job. The fun fact about my 6-month internship was that I was involved in efforts to decommission a legacy service. What I jokingly tell people is that, when my friends were learning to build something new, I was learning to decommission a service. This is basically my first learning, code must be constructed with complete consciousness and being mindful of the eternal fact that it may have to be brought down someday.  
## 2. The years teach much, which the days never know 
After spending 6 months as an intern, it was fairly easy for me to transition into a Full Time Employee. As a full time employee, I was exposed to more team members and a broader spectrum of tasks. Every individual around me had so much more experience than I did. The dynamic aspects to problem solving that they placed on the table just meant one thing to me -  

>Some lessons are learnt only through experience and cannot be taught by anyone. 

These kinds of experiences also made me understand that there is not one right way to solve an existing problem, but multiple ways, and probably they are all right. 

## 3. Integrity Without Compromise 

In the words of Brad Smith, former CEO at Intuit, Integrity is what you do when nobody is looking at you. Integrity Without Compromise is one of the values enlisted at Intuit, which we at Intuit consider to be amongst our core beliefs. This value is the one that I associate myself with the most. Every single deliverable assigned to any engineer is approached by completely owning the problem. Like they say here at Intuit, Fall in love with the problem and not the solution. This is such a fantastic way to encroach a problem and solve it in the best possible way. I have also seen Integrity at the highest level when it comes to Customer Obsession. Intuit is a highly customer obsessed organization, which probably is our secret to product innovation. 

## 4. Sprouting innovation at grassroots level 

Innovation is to be driven in a bottom up way. The engineers driving the product development are equally responsible for innovation as much as the leaders driving it. The WhiteSpace hours at Intuit have enabled us to spend time on any field that we like and make progress in that field. The WhiteSpace projects can be totally off track from your deliverables and complete support is provided to you in terms of dev resources, guidance from SMEs in the organization, visibility across the organization and the right recognition. Apart from this, the Global Engineering Days, which span across a week, are held once every quarter. The GEDs are for completely working on innovation while parking aside the other tasks at hand. The end of the week, the innovations are exhibited by the participating teams. Absolutely amazing feeling to see innovators all throughout the hall, who are connecting with other fellow innovators, learning from them, sharing their own new findings. All of these events instill enthusiasm and the desire to innovate at work and better the applications that we are working on. 

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## 5. The Team 

The team is the most important asset for us. A well balanced team helps each one to propel towards excellence in our desired fields. In accordance with what John Nash said, the best result comes when everyone in the group is doing what is best for themselves and the group. Driving par excellence in our chosen fields and directing the outcomes to be aligned with the organization’s goals reaps the best results for any team and individual. Grow Together is another value embraced at Intuit, where the whole team comes together to transform ideas into reality, harness excellence from talents spread across diverse backgrounds and deliver great products. The team is not constricted to just the set of people we work with, but a wide spectrum of groups, like the entire batch of new college graduates who joined together, group of like minded people working on various initiatives for Open Source, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and many more. 
![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/xq07vhgbv9jb22fxdx1f.jpg)