Asking for a friend: Hey all, I’m considering joining Intuit or Snap as a UX/ product designer since I have some friends working there. I’m curious what design hiring managers think about either of these companies. Which one would be better to join? And why? Some additional info: Intuit - I’d be working in a large team on an existing product Snap - I’d be working as the sole lead on a new product TC- no offers yet, 4.5 yoe #design #ui/ux #intuit #snap #snapchat
Snap design has a lot of toxic people. Don’t join unless you love playing politics more than designing
Is it like that on most teams?
Just design
Snap. Designers rule the company and hold a lot of power
Snap. It's one of the only companies around that take design very seriously.
Don’t join Intuit.
Care to elaborate? What’s the design culture/org like?
You’ll be working in a culture where design is at the mercy of product managers and engineering, only focused on quantity shipped vs quality, and a culture of v1 and done. Also, given how dated the tech stack is, your designs will be heavily constrained by it. There are many reorgs and shifts every 4-6 months that don’t make much sense either but they can completely dismantle the work you’re invested time and effort towards. I’m no longer there but I spent a good several years trying to do my part to evolve the culture. I realized that many teams are not encouraged to do proper qual and quant research but really just act on guesses and whims of product managers. Which is depressing because Intuit previously had a fantastic culture of trying to incorporate design thinking. Now, more often than not, designers are expected to march to PM orders and bypass the research part to rely on assumptions and intuition to fast track their design deliverables . Some teams are easier and more receptive than others but overall it’s extremely frustrating because senior leadership doesn’t recognize nor reward quality experiences…only the quantity of things shipped and the OKRs. So it’s a really difficult environment if you want to do high quality work. On the other hand, the good and bad part is that many things do ship. Data is a mess. Data analysts themselves have told me that the data dashboards vary greatly in quality and accuracy which means they’re guesstimating, too. If they’re basing their data dashboards off of someone else’s, then it’s not too different from throwing darts. Pretty gnarly to hear that for a company that’s been around as long as Intuit has and with all the opportunities available to clean its data up, right? Now, to this, add the numerous wet and dry experiments each team is constantly shipping without coordinating with each other that further muddles the data and makes for an increasingly choppy user experience. WLB steadily declined over the years. Compensation is so-so. Refreshers dwindled over the years. It’s a highly political environment so good work doesn’t get recognized, rewarded, nor translates to career growth. Benefits were great and the only thing that remained consistent. I stayed there because I enjoyed the mission and problem space. People were generally good to work with but managers and senior leadership were infuriatingly incompetent and insecure. They create false sense of urgency for their own benefit even to the detriment of the customer experience and team well-being. At this day and age, the QuickBooks mobile app is still second rate, poorly supported, and has many discrepancies. Ask about how big that mobile app design team is…That alone should indicate how archaic the leaders’ mindset is. It’s all about milking the money from the existing dated products and adding premium live expert services trained to navigate said dated products because Intuit will never have their act together long enough to make it intuitive for the average small business owner to confidently navigate on their own. So yeah, my advice would be to find a better option.
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TC ?
Just updated, no offers yet, but later interview stages so no TC but 4.5 yoe