Pros: Great people and an exciting time for the company. The benefits are good, and you are given a lot of flexibility with your time, with a real focus on work-life balance. Everyone has a strong understanding of our customers, and innovation is encouraged and rewarded.

Cons: Preparing for growth means that some people are left behind. The quality of the food at the Mountain View campus is low, especially compared to other software and Internet companies like Yahoo, Google, Oracle, etc. A major SaaS player, but we were not known for that, with most people seeing us as a desktop, shrink-wrapped software company.

Pros: With ~9000 employees globally, Intuit is the perfect mid-size company for engineers who want to really understand how to create and run a successful business. Unlike most companies in Bangalore, we do not get "requirements" - instead, the emphasis is to partner with your colleagues to really understand what the customer is struggling with and come up with a good solution. At Intuit, it is never about technology for technology's sake. We are always encouraged to first figure out what the customer's problem is, and only then start looking at technology solutions to address this. Our architects are trained to strike the right balance between "short and long" - having the big vision for the future and a good plan to get there. We call it "moving from current state to target state in bite-size chunks". Leadership has an absolutely razor-sharp focus on the business outcome. Intuit has been relentlessly transforming itself from the "desktop software" company of the nineties to the "cloud-based SaaS company" of today. The company's leadership puts in immense effort to ensure that each one of us understands where we are going, where we are, and what each one of us needs to do in order to get there. Employees are taught and encouraged to think about technology and business in a holistic manner, how to develop a well-thought-out point of view, influence leaders, take end-to-end ownership, and grow into leaders. People are respectful of each other. It is a very woman-friendly place to work for. Almost 25% of the engineering workforce is women. Finally, the salary and benefits are absolutely top-notch!

Cons: Intuit is constantly transforming itself. This means that there is a decent chance that you might get assigned to work on a more mature product. Some engineers may see this as a problem; others (including me) look at this as an opportunity to make the product better, to refresh it with new technology, to transform the product beyond imagination. It depends which bucket you fall into. To paraphrase Al Pacino from "Any Given Sunday" – the inches are always around you. You just need to seize them.

Pros: Great set of people (smart, funny, caring), a solid business and millions of customers (which means bonuses and profit sharing every year), great culture (non-political, nurturing, integrity values), a fantastic CEO, perks and benefits (gym, conference, reimbursement for classes, etc.).

Cons: Intense workload during business season. Most work is to enhance the legacy applications, so it takes a while to learn the existing code and make sure you don't break anything.