intuit

ɪnˈtjuːɪt/

verb

• understand or work out by instinct.

With a mission of powering prosperity around the world, Intuit was conceived in 1983 by Scott Cook who realized that personal computers could lend themselves as replacements for paper-and-pencil based personal accounting.

“We believe in the people who do things – the hat jugglers, the to-do list junkies, the masters of getting it done faster, better and more efficiently than ever before. Whether that’s balancing the household budget, running a business or paying taxes.”

- an excerpt from Corporate Profile, Intuit

In this constantly evolving world, Intuit believes in not just meeting, but leading the changes, which has made them survive for more than three decades and emerge as an industry leader.

Today, Intuit stands as a leading provider of business and financial management solutions, that develops and sells financial, accounting and tax preparation software and related services for businesses, accountants and individuals, headquartered in Mountain View, California, generating a revenue north of $4.7 billion.

How does one get into-it?

My story reads a little fairy-tale like, you’ll see.

Step 1: Have a low enough CGPA, so you get rejected by GS. But not so low that you can’t recover. So I kept it at 6.95 (by choice).

Step 2: Screw up MS’ written test.

Step 3: Get Intuit to come to your campus (luckily they did, for the first time in 2016).

Step 4: Get through the primary test, which comprises of a set of multiple choice questions focusing on several computer science concepts, especially, Data Structures, Algorithms, Operating Systems, Networks and Databases; followed by 3 programming questions with varying levels of difficulty. Luckily, you get the freedom of language and editor (Python and Vim, yay!).

Step 5: Ace the interviews. They mainly focus on your personality, aptitude, knowledge of computer science fundamentals and experience with code. Also, they silently judge whether you comply with their ethics and make sure they don’t just bring in a workhorse.

Step 6: Get selected in the team of your choice. Yes, they listen to you if you know how and when to subtly drop the necessary hints, during the interviews that is. I, hence, landed an intern with the Innovation and Advanced Technology team.

Work, place?

I always thought a good satisfying corporate job was a myth I had to believe. Well, my internship proved me wrong. Being called a 35-year-old startup, Intuit believes in reinventing itself time and again, making it one of the most innovative companies in tech right now.

Intuit’s approach to innovation has two core competencies that differentiate the company and allows it to deliver solutions that truly change people’s lives.

• Customer-driven innovation, which is a mindset and methodology to uncover important, unsolved problems.

• Design for Delight, a process that helps create better ways to deliver what’s most important to customers. This approach to innovation creates an entrepreneurial environment where small teams collaborate to delight customers and deliver awesome product experiences.

“By giving our employees the freedom to experiment, we are able to bring groundbreaking innovations that solve important customer problems to market faster than ever.” said Brad Smith, Intuit president and chief executive officer. “Our strong performance is boosted by the secular tailwind that we’re riding toward a connected services economy, backed by continuous innovation and strong execution.”

After spending ten weeks, I can safely say that all of this is true and brilliantly achieved.

The interns are regarded on the same level as the employees and granted all the privileges, which I’ll get into, soon. On your day of arrival, you are issued the highest end Macintosh laptop money can buy (cheap thrills, sorry) and an identification card which earns you the perks an employee enjoys.

After a tedious orientation day, you get to meet your team and mentor, the ones you’ll be working with for the coming months. The people there, way too friendly (thanks to the silent judgement of ethics during the hiring process), help you around and get you acquainted in no time. You are allotted a spacious desk among other employees, mostly of your team, equipped with a desk phone and any number of accessories which you ask for; monitors, keyboards, mice, headsets and the like.

The workload depends on how much you take upon yourself and there are no restricted working hours. I personally took up two main projects and usually worked from 11 to 6, but stayed back a little longer (for the food, fun and games).

Being in the IAT team, I broadly worked on Data Science and Machine Learning projects, thanks to which I learnt a lot and gained claimable proficiency in the same. Being a large organisation, there are teams digging deep into each field of information technology and the work one intern gets is almost guaranteed to be good, meaningful and deliverable, which actually goes into production, like mine did in the last week of my term.

Dotted throughout the months were meticulously planned and well executed events, some exclusively for the interns and some otherwise, ranging from hackathons to leadership-connects, from We Care and Give Back sessions to product-mashups. This helped us learn the ins and outs of the company and attain a sense of belonging.

Good work is always appreciated at Intuit, in the form of Spotlight rewards, mementos or dine-outs. This keeps one motivated and feel like someone cares, which is something you don’t come by in giant corporates.

At the end of the day (or whenever you feel like it), you can drop down to one of the recreations areas lined with numerous games and avocations, or grab a delicious bite to eat at one of the cafeterias (free food, early morning to late evening), or enjoy the luxury of the gymnasium, sleeping cells et cetera.

In the last week, you present and demonstrate your work before the Architects whose judgement, in conjunction with your team, manager and HR’s feedback, determines whether you’ll be called back to work with them a year later.

Location, location, location

Intuit has three buildings in the RMZ Ecospace tech-park in Bellandur, Bangalore. You already know about Bangalore, right?

Summing up

Intuit is one of the most employee friendly companies out there doing amazing work, for which it was recently awarded the Economic Times’ award for being India’s best company to work for, 2017. One can describe the internship experience as a training period for a full time role where you can pick up right where you left off. Intuit boasts a lot, but for a reason; difficult to describe in words, but marvelous to experience.