So, this company functions by asking it’s more senior engineers to scope out projects months in advance — this is your commitment. Various department heads will then “mandate” certain metrics (quality metrics, perf metrics, deployment metrics, etc) — this all the other work you have to get done for your calibration to work out, and this is how they squeeze just that little bit extra out of you. I wouldn’t not work here for this reason alone, but it’s a nice to know.
Now, the management is straight up incompetent for the most part. I had a few different managers in my tenure there, and one was pretty good, but for the most part they are not technical and they aren’t good at managing, whatever that might mean. The standard manager has 9 hours of meetings a day, and if they all disappeared, I’m not sure anyone would notice.
The architects are where this company goes from a 7.5 to a 4. This elite group of engineers (typically from principle up) probably knows the right thing to do, but they all get caught up with their egos and force their pet projects into the rest of the company with tremendous impact.
If you want to get ahead, buddy up with an architect, do his (it’s always a guy) pet project, and you’ll be promoted, period. Don’t buddy up, and you’ll retain your current title until you die — it’s just the way the Intuit promotion game works.
Ultimately it’s the architects’ egos that find Intuit, time and again, feeling the need to (re)invent new and horrific frameworks. This issue is most apparent on the front-end where you will be asked to implement a handful of in-house technologies which if the real world knew were running their tax and business software, they’d all lose faith in the Intuit brand and probably humanity as a whole. Forget contributing to the open source community — we’re practically forbidden from using what’s out there.
The ideas underlying the frameworks aren’t necessary bad, but the implementation is. But again, it’s not the top engineers doing the work — it’s the engineers that want to get promoted. It would seem then, that architects are rewarded by what’s delivered on the surface. Hey, I got x number of teams to use my framework. It doesn’t matter that the framework is garbage, it just matters that we’re all using it.
Make no mistake. Intuit is not an technology company. It is a product company. There is serious technological shortcoming at the highest ranks and built into the culture.
