Intuit Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Intuit full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – It is a company that actually lives by the core values that leadership talks about. It is a company that gives back to the community and it rewards innovative thinking. Compensation if the best I have had in my 30 year career. Benefits too are outstanding. I can't say enough great things about my company and where I work!

Cons – Honestly none come to mind.

Advice to Senior Management – Get better at change management.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Intuit full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – People are expected to do right by the customer and each other.

Cons – Once in a while, you find an arrogant, smarty-pants MBA who doesn't know much due to lack of experience. They are annoying and they can create havoc due to lack of maturity and their outsized ambitions. Fortunately, they have been let go for various reasons and I think (but not sure) that their inability to build positive relationships with colleagues had something to do with their layoffs.

There are waaay too many meetings at Intuit. It's hard to get one's job done from 9-5 when you have to start your real work at 5 pm after meetings are over. No joke--meetings took up most of the day.

Some managers are knuckle-heads because they don't understand the work that their staff are performing AND they get in the way of progress. Not understanding the detail of staff is common, and completely typical and understandable. But getting in the way of progress because the manager doesn't understand the nitty-gritty steps it takes to get to the outcome is silly. For example, the publisher of a magazine doesn't need to know how much ink to order this month and what pressure setting the ink is applied to achieve a desired look. The publisher just needs to know that the staff knows what to do, and that it's getting done right. Don't stop the printing specialist from printing the magazines on time! This is obviously an analogy but this happened to me many times at Intuit. Continuing the analogy, I had explain how much ink was bought last month vs. this month, explain how the ink is poured into the printing machine, how long it took to print each page, etc. So tedious. I wanted to pull my hair out many, many nights.

Advice to Senior Management – Cut down on the number of standing meetings, let people take steps without going through so many consensus-building meetings.

Give people opportunities to move around the company, encourage new growth opportunities so that employees will stay motivated and stay at Intuit rather leave to find something different to do.

Support working moms to keep this important part of the workforce. Working moms perform double duty by working outside and inside the home. Provide flexibility to keep the talent inside the company. Additionally, women think and act differently; we don't display bravado that men do, which is taken as a sign of confidence and competence. Women are extremely competent but many of us don't think of work as a sport where you have to wrestle others to the ground to win points and promotions. Many of us operate efficiently and quietly. Please appreciate our work styles and reward us for our accomplishments. There is no chest beating but the accomplishments are real.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Intuit full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – This is a great company that cares about growing talent. There is a lot of great training in leadership skills, communication, along with technical training to insure you stay relevant and find the path you want to take. The best part is getting to make a real different in people's lives - we really do make services that help people make better financial decisions and keep more of what they make.

Cons – It's a company that is 30 years old- so there are still legacy issues. There are hopeful activities to deal with them. But it's not as fast as a startup or a company built on cloud computing.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Intuit

Pros – Focus
Respect
Integrity
Culture
Leadership

Cons – Growth opportunities
Slow when compared to startups

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Intuit full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Work/life balance, competitive compensation, great perks, awesome health

Cons – Inside network needed to advance career

Advice to Senior Management – Be more objective

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Intuit as an intern for less than a year

Pros – Freedom to work on project as you want

Cons – Slow to get data from other departments

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Intuit full-time

Pros – Good work life balance, great culture

Cons – No more stock option offerings

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Intuit full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – > Lots of cash around to spend, if you are on the right team or project
> Huge potential market to existing customers for new ideas with huge market shares in several financial management categories (Personal Finance, Taxes, Business Finance, etc.)
> Pays very well (especially non-bay area locations)
> Existing Customers Come First and this is NEVER forgotten... ever
> First Rate Recruiting, the employees are very smart (although stale skills are acceptable)
> Respectful handling of employees by HR
> Opulent Campuses in the Major City locations

Cons – > A couple of high-volume, high-margin products fund a large amount of "messing around" with trying to grow (without much result). Makes things seem inefficient... with one set of organizations constantly being pushed to produce more with less and others that seem to spend everything those "cash cow" organizations make. Can be fun, if you are in the right organization... but has obvious pitfalls if you aren't.
> Senior Management is very concerned about the employees, but are even more concerned about themselves. Can make you dizzy if you are into "management watching" as they are constantly trying to jockey for position in upwards management... and they are very disorganized with their direction changing constantly. Fortunately, senior management is really NOT required to find solid and rewarding work. With solid, long-term, customer-oriented middle management, there is always some outstanding opportunities in helping existing customers get more for their money.
> Don't try to change things. Intuit pays so well and the markets are so solid, there is no incentive to put things at risk by making changes. Current skills are not required, only the willingness to participate with a team that focuses on a customer opportunity, bringing whatever capabilities you have to the table. Don't let any doom-and-gloom messages from the people mostly paid with stock (i.e. senior management) fool you. Growth is not that important, creating outstanding solutions for existing customer is all that's important.

Advice to Senior Management – It is hard to give advice to these people as things are working out really, really well for them. But... in the class of "don't take any wooden nickels" advice (i.e. hugely obvious and maybe not so important) there is only:

Don't let your ego get TOO out of hand. Intuit is a nice warm bubble of outstanding compensation and sycophantic underlings that obviously does not require you to have solid business skills to move up, only the ability to "manage upward" well. If you are not independently wealthy when (or if) you decide to find another job, people are going to find you lacking in solid delivery techniques. Don't let this trip you up.

Having said that, it's doubtful that you will get tripped-up... as you will be so good at selling yourself, no one will notice the holes in your swing. I'm honestly jealous as I've spent my career on business skills and have no native talent for self-promotion. I really do wish I had spend more time learning what you seem to be able to do effortlessly and then found a place that pays like this. Nice work.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Intuit full-time for more than a year

Pros – I've never in my life worked with such "nice" people. And when I say nice, I mean really nice. Almost to a fault, whereby people aren't willing to criticize anything anyone else is doing because they don't want to hurt someone else's feelings. And management at Intuit genuinely cares about the personal well-being of its employees -- you can always leave work early or take time off needed to attend to personal matters. There's also very little "catty-ness", backstabbing, etc. that you often see in large companies where people are just trying to climb the corporate ladder at all costs -- you don't get any of that at Intuit.

Unbelievable work/life balance for those that want that. If you're at the Intuit offices before 9:30am or after 5:30pm, it's a total ghost town. It seems like everyone there has families, and getting home in time for dinner is just as important as putting the finishing polish on a product. And there's complete flexibility to work from home whenever you want, as long as you're not missing any in-person meetings that you're scheduled to be a part of. Being a single entrepreneur that's used to working 70-80 hours a week, I couldn't care less about the work/life balance that Intuit had, BUT it did afford me the ability to start another start-up on nights and weekends and not have to worry about falling behind with my Intuit work :)

The compensation package is very strong. Base salaries and bonuses are great, especially given the mere 35-45 hour work weeks that are expected of you. You'll be hard-pressed to find a large company not named Google or Facebook that offers the compensation that Intuit offers.

For a big company, they really try and put together a lot of company and department socials, extra activities, fun things to do, etc. I've worked at other big companies before that only do a holiday Christmas party. Intuit seems to have a party or activity of some sorts going on at least a couple of times a month.

Cons – While Intuit claims to be an innovative company, it's anything but. The typical things that drag any large company down from being able to innovate, such as endless meetings, countless PowerPoint decks, way too many layers of management, etc., are all unfortunately extremely pervasive at Intuit. It's very difficult to actually find time to build innovative products when you're stuck in 6 hour-long meetings most days (i.e. there's little time left for actually "doing" the innovative work instead of just talking about it).

As mentioned above, there are way too many layers of management that really don't "do" much in terms of actual core product building, executing, etc. In addition, you can tell that several management leaders are simply in the position that they're in because of time spent with the company, NOT because they know more than the people below them that they're managing. What this leads to is a mis-alignment of who are the right people that should be calling the shots. You have very smart people that should be Sr. Directors and VP's but are stuck as Sr. and Group Managers, and you have lots of VP's who don't do a whole lot and should be lower on the totem pole. This setup also greatly contributes to the stifling of innovation that I mentioned in point #1 above.

Unfortunately, Intuit is not a meritocracy and working hard and delivering top results don't necessarily give you opportunities to move up within the company. In fact, HR and management are extremely vague when it comes to laying out what objectives people can meet in order to achieve a higher role with the company. Promotions are almost non-existent, and as a result, top talent often leaves to pursue better opportunities elsewhere once they realize this. I also think this is why people there tend to just work 35-45 hour work weeks -- why bother putting in the extra effort if you're going to get paid the same regardless, with little opportunity for advancement.

Some other minor issues that I found annoying were that they stop serving food in the cafeteria at 2:30, which means if you get hungry during the day or want to work late, you have to bring your own food, grab a candy bar out of a vending machine (what is this, 1988?), or get in your car and drive into Mountain View to get some food. None of which are convenient options. Snacks and things to drink are never free (see the aforementioned vending machine), and given that Google is right next door with the allurement of free food, I think that Intuit should seriously consider offering at least one free meal per day, if not ongoing free food.

Advice to Senior Management – Learn how to foster entrepreneurship and take advantage of the smart minds that you have working there, otherwise they're going to leave like I did and start their own startups.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Intuit full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Great benefits, cutting edge technology, training opportunities

Cons – Like most big companies, you tend to feel just like a cog in a great box of other cogs. No real ops for career advancement and usually it's who you know rather than the work accomplishments itself that gets you noticed.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend