Honestly, this sounds like a project I would enjoy working on: designing and building a brand new system, learning about a new kind of business, encoding some c

Honestly, this sounds like a project I would enjoy working on: designing and building a brand new system, learning about a new kind of business, encoding some complex business rules into code, being able to work closely with the people who would be using my software (ie other folks at the company). However, I would be worried that software development at a non-software company would be a second-class citizen. Lots of pressure, and unhealthy culture, upper management that didn't understand the nature of software development... How would I know that I would have the space and the support to do good work in a good environment? I actually had a good time doing this at Target of all places, where I got to work on building a new supply chain optimization system from scratch. It was a lot of fun and had a lot of impact, but largely because our team was insulated from the "normal" way of working at Target for several years. But, eventually, the Target way of doing things caught up to us and most of the best people on the team left within a couple of years. (Side note: we were transitioning from a third-party system that ran on a literal mainframe, but I was never involved too directly with the legacy system.) So, my advice? You can definitely hire legitimately strong programmers even in a non-tech company, but you need to solve two problems: how can you show-not-tell that the software team won't just be a cost center without the space and scope to do good work, and, once you can do that, how do you get the word out to strong programmers? I've seen companies do this well but always in pretty context-specific ways; there's no universal solution. Just saying something "we're like a startup inside a bigger company" won't do because a) everybody says that and b) it's too fuzzy. And how to get the word out, well, I really don't know much about that. Side note: happy to talk more about this if you're interested.