Intuit reviews

Wide variance in how managers work/support teams. Many managers interpret the operating values in ways that don't support a good work/life balance. Intuit also doesn't know how to provide growth opportunities or career advancement opportunities after Sr. Manager roles, as proven by the appointment of a VP, Career growth and advancement. Managers don't want to "give up" good people, so they make it practically impossible for people to move cross funtionally or to different business areas.

On the other hand, if you’re yearning for meaningful employment, if you’re weary of busywork and corporate BS, then move along, there’s nothing to see. Cynicism and burnout runs rampant at Intuit, and the longer you work here, the worse it gets. I’ve noticed that the happiest Intuit employees are the ones who either turn a blind eye to all the hypocrisy and BS, or generate heaping piles of it themselves. If you can convince yourself that your buck-naked Emperor wears clothes despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you’ll do well. And if you can convince others, you’ll thrive. Over the last 10 years, I’ve watched Intuit morph from a fun, rather quirky company to a bland, top-heavy, boring corporation. It started in 2000 when another company overran Intuit like a column of army ants engulfing a sloth that had chosen the wrong day to fall out of a tree. In the name of “building a high-performing organization”, dead-weight workers were quickly replaced by dead-weight directors, managers, analysts, and similar muckety-mucks from the other company. Intuit provided a vast new expanse of virgin Lebensraum to this other company’s castoffs. The invaders brought with them strange new terminology like “process excellence”, “six sigma”, “black belt”, and “DMAIC”, reinforcing the widespread notion that Intuit was under occupation by unwelcome foreign troops. During the occupation, Intuit’s once-legendary customer service took a distant back seat to the all-mighty dollar, as evidenced by the wildly unpopular TurboTax product activation scheme and poorly-trained, barely coherent support reps. The Praetorian Guard regime installed a seemingly inexhaustible string of unstable, psychotic directors and managers, many with connections to the other company. These human tornadoes barged in, laid waste to their departments, and bumped off many valuable employees before ultimately getting fired themselves. The survivors got stuck with the cleanup. In all fairness, Intuit has righted many of these wrongs. In my business unit at least, there is a concerted effort to implement suggestions from both customers and agents. Customer satisfaction with our product, support and service is at an all-time high. The tools we use for our everyday work have improved drastically. The wild and wacky directors, managers, analysts, and other "crazies" that once infested Intuit have mostly retired or moved on to greener pastures. But Intuit is still inhabited by a small but powerful cadre of hacks with deep ties to the other company, who earn rewards for cost-cutting measures that look good on paper. The ratio of managers to employees who actually do work is still way too high. Despite this, micromanagement is rare because managers are too busy attending online meetings while they tweak the PowerPoint presentations required to justify the next block of online meetings. It’s common for workers to report to multiple managers, and it’s equally common for managers to be completely clueless when it comes to knowing what their workers actually do all day long. Intuit wallows in BS. Brace yourself for mixed metaphors like “it’s in our DNA” instead of “it’s in our genes” and “solving for the Big Y” when every 6th grade algebra student knows that you solve for X, not Y. The corporate drones who parrot the oft-repeated phrase “True North” can barely handle a dollar-store compass, let alone explain the differences between geographic versus magnetic North. This constant misuse of scientific terminology exposes these town criers for what they really are – imitators, not innovators. It speaks volumes that lower-level, frontline employees rarely emit this blather unless they’re trying to impress (or mock) management. Layoffs occur regularly, but Intuit is hardly unique in that respect. Layoffs are merely symptomatic of a much more sinister problem – Intuit’s summertime reorganization (“reorg” for short). In addition to providing a convenient excuse get rid of long-time employees who, ah, make a little too much money, the reorg satisfies upper management’s annual urge to Do Something. Departments and teams are reshuffled and renamed, people disappear, and of course more managers are hired. The joke around here is if you don’t like your manager, wait 5 minutes. The reorg also has a significant but underappreciated negative effect on employee productivity. Before and during “reorg season”, employees are reluctant to continue working on existing projects, let alone start new ones, because the reorg may very well render the whole thing moot. You might spend months seeking and finally gaining support for your sexy new project or idea, only to watch it go out the door along with your newly-unemployed sponsor. Employees have been conditioned to give up after experiencing the inevitable annual letdown year after year after year. Is it any wonder formerly productive, engaged employees turn into frustrated, bitter, burnt-out hulks who resign themselves to doing the minimum amount of work required to keep their jobs? Even after the reorg, employees continue to mill about unproductively because they’re applying for new positions, waiting to hear if they got that new position, training and adapting to their new co-workers, reshuffling workloads and responsibilities, attending dozens of “shared vision” meetings with their new departments, trying to figure out who is now in charge of what, and/or waiting for their new managers to get up-to-speed. Not to mention the annual ritual of filling out your pointless Goal-Setting Form, where you want so badly to write "My goal is to get a nice severance package". Enormous amounts of time are spent engaged in nonproductive, secondary work while waiting for the dust from the reorg to settle. To sum it up, the successful employees at Intuit are the ones who eagerly agree that their naked Emperor is fully clothed, or at least pretend not to notice his conspicuously dangling you-know-what. Employees unwilling to do that can either speak the truth and risk being labeled as negative non-team players, or keep their mouths shut and risk being labeled as unengaged non-team players.