I believe a little background information on Intuit would be helpful. The company was founded in 1983 by Scott Cook and Tom Proulx in Palo Alto, California. Their first product was Quicken, a personal money management system that allows a person to put all of his/her financial information on a single sheet program and display it on a single page.

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From there they went on the develop or buy many other financial programs, the other big one was TurbTax. Intuit is made up of many small companies that have been purchased over the years. When I started with Intuit each of these companies operated as it had before even though it now had the Intuit name. What I mean is that if you were a customer of one product you had an account with all your user information in it and if you used multiple products, which many people did, you had a separate account with user information for each product.

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Now back to my place at Intuit. I answered an ad and was interviewed by a product manager who had persuaded management that SDS, the department he worked for, needed a technical writer. His name was Steve Adams and we got along great and he hired me. I worked for him for the first 90 days, which was my trial period, and then I was transferred to a line manager when I was hired as a permanent employee. Steve and I continued to be friends and I would often just go into his office to chat or let off steam.

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My first major project at Intuit was to work with Bev Weeks, a department manager, and one of her analysts to write a document that defined the process Intuit would take to combine all the many user accounts and create a single user account for each customer. There were many customers who had six or seven different accounts with Intuit. In our research while implementing the program we found one customer who had nine accounts. The name of the new program was called the Party Reference System.

The Party Reference System was my one on-going job, but I worked with many other programmers helping them writer their design documents during my three years at Intuit.

Along with writing programming documents I did other tasks.

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I was the editor of the Fagan Newsletter. Michael Fagan is the inventor of Formal Software Inspections. It is a structured process that attempts to find defects in development documents, program specifications and designs and other documents written during the software development life cycle. Fagan's wife worked for our department and she persuaded the VP to allow her to publish this newsletter monthly. I was the one who took the articles written by various programmers and edited them and acted as the Art Director for the document. That means I created newsletter.

I also created and updated an internal website for Intuit programmers explained the products that SDS created and where to find them and how to use them. Not only was SDS creating a single user account for our customers and vendors we created all of the ancillary programs that each page on each Intuit website has. These include those links at the bottom of the page such as Privacy, Security, Legal, et al.

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In 2003 I was selected to be part of a five-person team who created and put on the 2003 Intuit Technology Forum. This was a 3-day session where 60 Intuit programmers presented papers to the 450 others than attended.  I built and managed the two databases for the forum. The first was one where people submitted papers that they wanted to read. I reviewed each paper to make sure it conformed to the specifications required for a paper and then followed the paper as it went through the steps of being accepted or rejected. The other database was one for people to sign up for the forum. To go to the forum you had to be nominated by your manager and approved by his/her manager. I had to be sure that all names in the database had the proper authorization because this was the people we booked rooms for at the Hotel del Coronado where the forum was being held.

Another role that I played was to act as a sounding board for the developers when they were creating their first design document. I was 63 when I went to work at Intuit and had been involved in program development for more than 40 years, in many roles.

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One session is significant in my mind. I became friends with one of the highest-level programmers. There were just two programmers at his level. Their job was to define the overall programs that were required for all major project our department worked on. I was now working with this programmer on the system that was going to begin all of the multi-account customers to one customer.

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I had worked with the System Architect who had taken the concept document that Bev Weeks had created and he had created the "blueprints" for the system. That is he had defined every part of the program and its resources and how it would perform. There was a major problem in one of his definitions that rippled throughout the entire program and made the program as define unworkable. The architect had been promoted to a position in another Intuit division and was not available to help with the redesign.

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Now you must understand that the signoff of the architecture set in motion a timeline for the system to be completed and working. So this senior programmer was under a great deal of pressure to find a solution. He would come into my office and explain the problem. This was more a way for him to think out loud and fill my white boards. At the end of the process he was so grateful for my help that he wanted to give me a gift. He gave me his cigarette lighter from his days in the 101st Airborne, one of his most prized possesses. He gave it to me with blurry eyes. I still have and cherish that gift. He did solve the problem in my office, talking to himself.

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Another interesting project that I had was with the TurboTax division which I worked for from time to time even though it had its own group of technical writers. I had gained a reputation of doing good work and being easy to work with and was asked for to work on a number of projects. This project was the only product documentation work that I did while I was at Intuit. It was documenting an internal program. TurboTax had a technical support program where you, as a user, could call and talk with a live person about the problem you were having with the system. My job was to write a tutorial that taught the Intuit "expert" how to use the program from Intuit's side. It was an interesting project.

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Russell Dean a senior programmer was the head of the Party Reference System project and he and I had worked on other project in the past and we got along very well. So I set out with the eight people on the project to create the final document defining the project down to the small nuts and bolts that held it together. They were all a great group and I enjoyed creating the document and watching them create the program within the deadline.

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In July of 2005 I was called into the office of the director that I reported to and he told me he needed two additional programmers and that my salary would cover the cost for them. He said I was being laid off. I was 66 at the time so I didn't really have any legal recourse and I was very mad – for about thirty minutes. Then I realized that I was retired and would not have to work any longer.  I had spent the last ten years working the stock market through my 401K  and an investment account I established and had built up a good fund. Intuit gave me a very good severance package that allowed us to pay off our car loan and all of the other debts that we had. We would be fine living on Social Security with the 401K money to fall back on from time to time.

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