Ask HN: What's It Like at Intuit/TurboTax on Tax Day? (Very US centric question around tax day / April 15).
I've always wondered what it's like to work on these products at Intuit/TurboTax (or competitors) that get such high demand seasonally and on one day specifically. Is it an all-hands 24-hour event? Any crazy stories of things breaking? What's something that the normal user or tech person wouldn't realize? |
Second, was around the migration from desktop to online. At the time, TurboTax was one of the earliest tax prep products that had a cloud offering. It had done so in a somewhat interesting way. In order to maintain parity between the tax calculations and segregate tax data, they were running an instance of the desktop software for each web user server side. It would then use a Java process to convert the desktop UI to HTML (somewhat IE specific) and output it back to the user. It was very inefficient from the resource side but it made me appreciate how nimble this large company was in adapting to new mediums.
My.
God.
Glad to be rid of Intuit.
I thought it was a great product, but alas, I need it to handle those things properly if I want to dump TurboTax. I would actually be happy to pay for FTUSA if the features worked.
* Intuit is one of the original users of AWS. Amazon has peak server requirements in Nov/Dec, and Intuit has peak server requirements in March/April. A server sharing system was a natural move for Intuit.
* Intuit's fiscal year ends in Q2, because of how important tax season is for their revenue. It's really a make or break season for them, and all of their customers are stressed out too.