This company desperately needs to get back to its roots. The focus in 2008 was almost exclusively on the stock price. Whatever happened to the employee and the customer? This season's TurboTax and QuickBooks debacles could have easily been avoided if the company had paid attention to its customers. For the employees whatever happened to a culture that was tailor-made for great software engineers? Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any creative solutions coming from senior management about what to do next. The company leaders are obsessed with growth yet rather than investing in additional product development they continue to allocate money to stock buybacks (or worse, laying off high performing engineers). Instead of encouraging software engineers to be creative and solve cool problems we see the shared software group (formerly known as SD&S), which was turning out the highest quality software in the company, blown up and its remains stuffed inside small business. Shared, reusable software continues to be an incredibly challenging, yet rewarding, software engineering problem - the engineers loved it and it was showing great results. Were I still an engineer I would have given my left arm (I need my right arm to work my mouse) to work in an organization that develops shared software. Instead of investing in great talent in MTV or SD (or the other U.S. engineering sites) the senior leaders invest in India in a proportion far greater than deserved. Any great idea an engineer has must go through an army of product managers before it might see the light of day. eBay, Amazon, Yahoo!, Google, Priceline (and 1000s of other great products) were the brainchild of great, creative engineers and succeeded without product managers. Instead of encouraging and facilitating engineer collaboration the much-loved Tech Forum has been replaced by CTOF, which is dominated by Product Managers and Marketers. The engineers have no organized forum where they can just geek out and talk software. Amazingly, in a software company, there is virtually no software quality community. You can count the number of quality leaders at the level of Director and above on one hand with some fingers left over. Anyone want to guess how many Directors and VPs there are in the Finance or Legal or HR organizations?
