Intuit Again is an initiative that provides an opportunity for technologists to return to work after taking a break in their career for caregiving purposes. This platform not only gives candidates a chance to work at one of the \u201cBest Companies to Work For\u201d (#1 in India, #13 in the U.S.), but it also provides technical and other training to sharpen their professional skills.<\/p>\n
We talked to Rada Despotovic (pictured above, far right), a software engineer who went through the program in Spring 2018, to learn about the highlights and challenges of going back to work.<\/p>\n
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Intuit: Where did you work before you paused your career?<\/strong><\/p>\n RD: <\/em>My last corporate job was with Apple as a senior back-end engineer for their online store. I worked on two highly visible components \u2013 customer account management and order workflow.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Intuit: What were the primary skills you used in that job?<\/strong><\/p>\n RD: <\/em>Enterprise Java, Oracle relational database, REST web services based on Spring MVC, and NoSQL data stores such as Oracle Coherence.<\/p>\n Intuit: Why did you pause your career?<\/strong><\/p>\n RD: <\/em>I took a break from work to spend more time with my family and recharge my batteries after working a very demanding job for almost six years. I also wanted to try something different, like pursuing small business ownership and taking interesting technical classes that I previously had no time for.<\/p>\n Intuit: <\/strong>What were the biggest challenges you faced when you returned to work?<\/strong><\/p>\n RD: <\/em>One of my challenges was around usage of tools that were not widely accepted before I took a break, such as GitHub or Docker. But honestly, just like any other new employee, it did not take me more than two to three weeks to get completely familiar with them.<\/p>\n Intuit: How did you feel about your primary skills when you returned to work?<\/strong><\/p>\n RD: <\/em>I felt great. I have always believed in myself and I did not feel disadvantaged. During my break, I became a certified solutions architect for Amazon Web Services and a big data architect for a distributed database called Cassandra. I also became a certified developer for Hadoop ecosystem, another big data platform, so all those accomplishments helped me feel more competent.<\/p>\n Intuit: What new skills did you develop after joining Intuit Again?<\/strong><\/p>\n RD: <\/em>I learned Kafka messaging platform and DynamoDB development and administration while working on a data-loss prevention project. I\u2019m polishing my presentation and listening skills as there are a lot of demos and team meetings on a daily basis.<\/p>\n Intuit: How did people help you overcome challenges?<\/strong><\/p>\n RD: <\/em>We have hundreds of Slack channels to talk about anything, including channels for specific projects and technologies. I had a great mentor through Intuit Again and we continued our friendship later on.<\/p>\n Intuit: What are you working on now?<\/strong><\/p>\n RD: <\/em>I work on back-end systems for QuickBooks Online universal search. I integrate our microservices with other parts of the Small Business group and I help bring performance and stability to our production deployments.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Intuit: What would you tell someone who\u2019s thinking about applying for Intuit Again?<\/strong><\/p>\n RD: <\/em>Go for it! You\u2019re going to receive a lot of support. We have such a great team, starting with Tracy Stone [head of the Tech Women @ Intuit initiative]. We met many Intuit executives at our bi-weekly meetings, starting with the CTO who had a special budget just for us. They were all personally invested in our success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Intuit Again is an initiative that provides an opportunity for technologists to return to work after taking a break in their career for caregiving purposes. This platform not only gives candidates a chance to work at one of the \u201cBest Companies to Work For\u201d (#1 in India, #13 in the U.S.), but it also provides<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128776340,"featured_media":7970,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rkv_browse_by_id":0,"rkv_cta_id":0,"rkv_optimize_for_pagespeed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"useModifiedDate":false,"customPublishDate":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1383],"tags":[1405],"intuit_collection":[],"intuit_series":[],"coauthors":[237496056],"class_list":["post-2620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life-at-intuit","tag-women-in-tech"],"yoast_head":"\n