Intuit

Great culture. Smart engineers. Average Bay Area pay. Regular corp benefits.

It's a Silicon Valley misfit. They try to create an environment like Google, hire a lot of highly paid, smart people to innovate around just two major products: QuickBooks and TurboTax. These products have their own challenges, like tough global expansion and government compliance.

The management realizes very late that they are spending a lot of money, equivalent to Google or Salesforce, but not generating as much net profit.

Result: Constant layoffs, every year.

Yes, the company is listed on the Fortune Best Places to Work, but notice that the rank is dropping. Also, the folks who are probably the happiest with the company are interns and early-career engineers, as they don't understand business so well.

One more big con: A lot, lot, lot of middle management, and on top of that, very few managers are technical. There are situations where a senior manager (barely technical) manages a small set of entry-level engineers. That job can be done by a tech lead at a lower cost and higher efficiency.

The funny thing is that these managers are called leaders, and the company spends a lot of money on developing leadership skills for these managers. In a day-to-day life, these are just supervisors who have no idea what they are doing, other than getting a fancy title, fat paychecks, and not-so-needed recognition.

They speak a lot of values, but when you display the values, you get beaten by stupid middle management.

You don't have to be in Silicon Valley, hire expensive engineers and later realize that you are overspending and do layoffs.

Take the classic example of "Ultimate Software," based in Florida (a tax-free state). They spend less, are nimble and focused, and still have great talent. On top of all that, they are also on the Fortune best companies to work for list.

Get rid of middle management. Create a flat structure and let senior or above engineers lead projects.

My two cents, but I hope management takes my point of view.