Intuit Sr. Software Engineer reviews

Intuit touts itself as a great place for engineers, and you may indeed get lucky and actually have a great experience there. In reality, it's a mixed bag, as one would expect in any large corporation. There are some groups within Intuit that are working on truly cutting edge technology in a start-up-like culture, whereas other departments are corporate America straight out of a Dilbert strip. Unfortunately, the latter seem to be the more common case. However, if you stay long enough, you might get a taste of both worlds, because reorganizations happen pretty frequently at Intuit. If something doesn't work out, a reorg is Intuit's preferred answer. To give you an idea: in less than 4 years at Intuit, I reported to five different managers, and each change happened pretty much entirely without my input. With one notable exception, my managers had very little to absolutely no clue about software development. Whereas it is common in large corporations, that technical skills fade out as you go up the corporate hierarchy, this phenomenon is taken to the extreme at Intuit. Already the very first level of management, those who directly manage engineers, are very non-technical. In other words, if you get stuck with a technical problem, your manager will most likely not be able to help you. In fact, she or he might not even understand what you're talking about. You might be lucky, and there is a more senior engineer on the team whom you could ask for help (but that doesn't work if the most senior engineer on the team happens to be you). I hate to say it, but the Peter Principle is in full effect at Intuit, and, quite often, engineering managers are failed engineers, promoted to their level of incompetence. As a corollary, the interview process for technical positions becomes somewhat compromised. Personally, my interview at Intuit was among the easiest job interviews I had in my entire career. Only two of my interviewers asked technical questions, one of them at a level that every fresh graduate could have answered without difficulties. I've seen software engineers hired onto my team whose interview panel did not include a single person capable of asking technical questions. You get the idea with what kind of engineers you will end up... you may get lucky and get some real talent, but unfortunately a lot of people slip through who probably should not have become software engineers in the first place. Intuit uses behavioral interviewing as the main technique for evaluating candidates. When, at some point, I ended up on some interview panels myself, I realized that I had hardly any time to ask technical questions, because I needed to fill out all the behavioral questions that I had to report back to HR. All these things said, Intuit is definitely one of the higher paying companies in the area. Based on my own interviews and job offers that I got, I can say that it's not impossible to beat Intuit's salaries, but it's pretty hard. And it gets even harder when you include non-salary benefits. Intuit provides generous bonuses and RSUs, 3 weeks of vacation in your second year, 3 flexible holidays, and even 4 paid days off for working on charitable projects. Healthcare plan options are pretty much top of the industry. Unless you get promoted, annual raises are rather measly, though. Personally, my annual pay increases barely reached the inflation rate, despite the company doing very well at the same time. Upper management complains a lot about not meeting goals, even if the company is making money hand over fist while the general economy is struggling. Getting promoted is rather difficult, and requires more political than technical skills. In other words, you are not going to get promoted for being an outstanding software engineer. Certain vertical moves, for example, from Senior to Staff Software Engineer, are especially hard to achieve. Unless you are highly skilled in corporate politics, you need to set at least 5 or 6 years aside for that to happen. Interestingly, it seems to be a lot easier to get hired into a Staff Software Engineer role than being promoted into it. Intuit is also one of the few companies that apparently tolerate stagnation in their employees. I've met many employees, who had 15, 20, or more years of "experience", which turned out to mean that they actually hadn't learned anything new for 15 or 20 years and pretty much still had the exact same skill set that they had when they were hired. If you are pursuing a career with Intuit, I recommend to be extra vigilant during the interviews. If the questions are ridiculously easy it gives you an idea what to expect of the other team members. Make sure you get a good picture of the environment of the project and of your future manager. Even though Intuit bought most of its more famous products (TurboTax, Mint, etc.) there are some pockets inside the company where real innovation is happening. You just have to find them...