After working for various start-ups and freelancing most my, I took a full-time contract at Inuit (TurboTax/Quicken) about a year a go. I was very surprised how much I enjoyed the work there. The start-ups I worked at were never huge successes so getting the chance to work on a Rails app that gets hundreds of thousands of requests per minute (it's embedded in TurboTax) was something new for me and provided a different set of challenges.
I've also found that large companies (or at least Intuit) are very open to progression and innovation. When I started our team was on Ruby 1.8.7, Rails 2.3.5, in a physical data center, used Perforce, and a bunch of other "enteprise" software suites. Now we are cranking on latest versions of Ruby and Rails, Github, AWS, and Campfire.
It has been a much more rewarding experience than I would have thought. Oh and you have no idea how good it feels to get real, publicly traded stock :)
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After working for various start-ups and freelancing most my, I took a full-time contract at Inuit (TurboTax/Quicken) about a year a go. I was very surprised how much I enjoyed the work there. The start-ups I worked at were never huge successes so getting the chance to work on a Rails app that gets hundreds of thousands of requests per minute (it's embedded in TurboTax) was something new for me and provided a different set of challenges.
I've also found that large companies (or at least Intuit) are very open to progression and innovation. When I started our team was on Ruby 1.8.7, Rails 2.3.5, in a physical data center, used Perforce, and a bunch of other "enteprise" software suites. Now we are cranking on latest versions of Ruby and Rails, Github, AWS, and Campfire.
It has been a much more rewarding experience than I would have thought. Oh and you have no idea how good it feels to get real, publicly traded stock :)
I absolutely agree that typically the impact you can have at a big company can be huge. But it may come with a cost - adjustment to that structure.
As I mentioned in the post, it is a great environment for many people, and I'm glad to hear about your case.