Intuit

As an intern in Mountain View (2016), we had some of the best intern perks in the Bay Area:

• Rental car for carpooling to work with other interns
• Corporate housing in San Jose with other Intuit interns
• Frequent opportunities for lunch and learns and internal hackathons
• Awesome intern summit during the summer to learn about the company and volunteer

As a full-time employee, we have some of the best benefits across top tech companies:

• RSUs as a new grad
• Intuit matches your 401k contributions
• Two weeks of vacation (not that good, but maybe you can negotiate)
• Software Engineer 1s start off as hourly employees and are later converted to salaried employees
• Lots of learning opportunities to level up your skills (e.g., React, AWS, Git). Most of these classes are in person in Mountain View, but some are offered online.
• Generous yearly fitness stipend to spend on gym memberships, outdoor activities such as skiing. This could also be spent on bicycles and smartwatches (e.g., Fitbit, Apple Watch, etc.).

I mainly have experience working in the payroll world.

Intuit acquired PayCycle in 2009 and unfortunately inherited an awful codebase with no automated testing. Here's a snapshot of my experience:

• Releases are done monthly, usually take a couple of hours, and rolling back is not that uncommon.
• Right before I left, the regression and rollback testing was still manual for some teams (e.g., manually create accounts, verify information, manually run payroll, verify information in the database, etc.).
• It was not uncommon for testing environments (QA, E2E) to be down for hours, thus blocking testing.
• Tons of incoherent and repetitive documentation in Confluence.
• It was really hard to get work done when engineers aren't located in the same office.
• As an engineer, sometimes you're at the mercy of the DevOps team since they have to approve a whole bunch of things before you can actually test your changes.
• Some teams don't have monitoring/alerts set up, so this can go unnoticed for hours when their services break or have an outage.

Conclusion: I would recommend interning for Intuit to get experience and to take advantage of being in the Bay Area and meeting some awesome people.

Although I worked with some wonderful people during my time here, I would not recommend working full-time for Intuit. Ask yourself: do you really want to work for a company that still makes desktop products? There are more modern tech companies out there, so don't waste your time here. If you really are considering Intuit, stay away from the payroll products and try to work in the business groups that support Mint, TurboTax, etc.

Be more intentional about SMART goals with your employees.

As an employee, not all of my goals have to be work-related.