Intuit

I had the most pleasant experience while interviewing with Intuit for an internship. The university recruiter, Courtney, made everything accommodating and helpful.

The process went like this:

- passed resume to recruiters at a job fair
- they e-mailed to schedule for a phone interview
- the phone interview lasted about an hour. They asked about general computer science questions: data structures, object oriented design and previous projects and work.
- the on-site interview was an event thing. all of the possible candidates got together for a 3/4 hour event. We would be rotated through a series of interviewers. This was more detailed than the phone interview. They did ask how to code particular examples and write it down on paper. Going through a series of interviewers was a great way to see what the company culture was about.

- they provided everything for us: plane ticket, hotel and even great indian food!

- even the exit intern review was pleasant :)

I have worked for Intuit for over 5 years now. Every year we participate in the Great Place to Work survey. Those numbers are going down year after year and I believe the results will be the same this year if not worse. The company no longer cares about it's customers like they say they do. Look at the way their technical support area. They want the customer to have to find their own answers or they want other customers to help each other. This is free to Intuit and the customer is paying the price. They distribute sub-standard product early and have the customers be the unpaid unbeknownst beta testers.

Intuit has a dismal patent incentive plan. The company asks us to submit patent ideas, which some ideas could save/make the company millions and the offering to the patent maker is a token payment of $250.00 up to $1500.00.

Outsourcing will be the standard now and will be a mainstay in the future. Some agents will be here in the US but most will be in India and Phillipines.

Intuit has a great well organized internship program, which gives you face time with the senior leaders of the company.

Interns are given work at the same level of responsibility as a regular employee, giving a great environment to learn what it feels like to the job. My team accepted me as an equal and valued my opinions just as well as any other engineer.

There are plenty of new projects the company is working on aside from the major mainline products and code bases. Either is an interesting experience, but if you have a preference be sure to make that clear. The company is very flexible when it comes to employee satisfaction.

I was a coder at Intuit in Mountain View. The actual job tasks itself is not as interesting as I would have liked it to be. You will get tasked with similar programming jobs as you would with any other big computer company. You will be making features in their programs and you will be expected to help do bug fixes when crunch time comes.

To their credit however, they do have a good development system going on. They have a large array of testers, UI evaluators, etc. You can always ask for help from someone without feeling stupid.

The co-workers, bosses at Intuit are great. There are a lot of younger people at the company. The bosses seem to care about your well being.
Every Friday, Intuit has a "happy hour" where they offer free food and drinks(as in beer) to the whole company. Not too many companies do this!