Ask HN: What's It Like at Intuit/TurboTax on Tax Day?

35 points by dc_rog 1 year ago | 14 comments
(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?
  • envoked 1 year ago
    I worked on Turbotax as a co-op back in 2009/10 so things have definitely changed but two things stood out to me. First, there were two “peaks” one around January 19th (when the first wave of W2s goes out) and one around April 15th.

    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.

    • etrautmann 1 year ago
      And nimble in lobbying to continue fleecing the American public
      • JohnBooty 1 year ago
        Oh.

        My.

        God.

      • spicyusername 1 year ago
        Unrelated, but I used Free Tax USA this year, and it was great.

        Glad to be rid of Intuit.

        • hrunt 1 year ago
          Related to your unrelated, I also used Free Tax USA this year. I ended up having to use TurboTax to complete my taxes because FTUSA didn't handle calculations for a Schedule K-1 correctly and did not support all information provided by said K-1 (as confirmed by their support staff).

          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.

          • cosmotic 1 year ago
            FTUSA guarantees all the calculations are accurate and a maximum refund. Seems like they'd be on the hook for any K-1 issues.
          • pstuart 1 year ago
            Just discovered it today -- simple and cheap, as painless as one could hope for (save for the taxes themselves). Never again will I give Intuit a dime.
          • irrational 1 year ago
            I wonder what percentage of people wait till the last day? I would imagine there would be a ramp up beginning in early February, once people start getting their documents, but, is it logarithmic or linear or something else? It is probably not a smooth curve, with spikes on the weekends.
            • behringer 1 year ago
              People are incredibly lazy and they also do their taxes at work. I'd expect a smooth curve right up to April 15.
            • gamepsys 1 year ago
              Two interesting tidbits about Intuit and taxes.

              * 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.

              • markiannucci 1 year ago
                https://excel1040.com is humming along quite nicely.
                • 5555624 1 year ago
                  Although he calls it "Excel1040.com," the URL I use is:

                       https://sites.google.com/view/incometaxspreadsheet/home
                  I use it every year.
                  • jaktet 1 year ago
                    What is it? Site isn’t loading for me
                    • 77pt77 1 year ago
                      Can't even load!
                    • webwielder2 1 year ago
                      [flagged]