Ryan Bickerstaff

In a way, I have two full-time jobs. By morning and/or evening I’m focused on triathlons, and by day, I work as a software engineer. When I graduated from Stanford for the second time in 2005, I really thought about giving triathlons a full-time commitment right away. However, I had just returned to the sport six months earlier and wasn’t at the highest level yet. Furthermore, I was a little concerned about how things would turn out if, after spending so much time and effort getting a good degree, I didn’t put it to use for several years while pursuing triathlons. With student loans added on to those concerns, I felt like I should work for a while to at least get something on my resume for the future.

So, after three months of living and training at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs after graduation, I started work at Intuit. Not many people have heard of the company, but it does have a few popular products - QuickBooks, Quicken, and TurboTax. Most of their products are related to finance in some form. I started out in something called the Rotational Development Program. The idea was to spend a couple months learning about the product, customers, and business, and then go into 4 six month rotations in sort of product management, marketing, and product development roles all on different teams. Since I didn’t really know what I wanted to do as a career (haha actually, I still don’t have a clue), it seemed like a good idea to get a little bit of experience in everything.

After a year or so of that, though, it became clear that having a more permanent job would fit in better with my triathlon pursuits, so I switched to being a full-time software engineer and went back to the team I had done my first rotation with. The product I was working on at the time was QuickBooks Time Tracker, which is a web-based solution for professional service firms to have their employees/contractors enter their hours online and then have an administrator download those hours and bill clients/customers through their QuickBooks accounting software.

I moved to a new division in February of this year - Innovative Merchant Solutions (allows businesses and products to accept and process payments - i.e. credit/debit cards, e-checks, etc.) where I’m a developer support engineer for the QuickBooks Merchant Services SDK team. The position is kind of a mixture of software engineering and product management and has been a nice change of pace. It’s one of the fastest growing divisions in the company, and it’s always nice to be on a winning team!

When I first started at Intuit, I thought I might only stick around for a few months if I had to sacrifice too much training time. Luckily, Intuit has been pretty good to me in terms of enabling me to have a reasonable work/life balance with triathlon. They use the phrase “pay for performance” versus “pay for attendance,” and that is accurate representation from my experiences thus far. There are no set hours you absolutely have to be in the office, and a lot of people will work from home once a week or so. This flexibility lets me train at slightly more ideal times of day, and I can login to my computer at work in the evenings or on the weekends when needed.

I feel like I can get to a pretty high level in swimming and running with my current situation, but finding blocks of time to get longer bike rides in (and still swim/bike) is a challenge. I really want to see how far I can go with triathlons, and I believe I have the potential to achieve some great things given enough time to train and recover appropriately. So, I’m always thinking about when to make a break from work (at least temporarily) and just focus on triathlons. I don’t think I’ll ever see what I’m capable of otherwise, but it is definitely a bit scary to think about going from a world that has a comfortable and reliable paycheck every other week to a world where there will be very, very little certainty. One of the reasons I started working in the first place was to be able to take that risk without having to worry as much about money, so now it’s just a matter of figuring out the best time to take the leap.

Filed under: Work