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

by dc_rog on 4/15/24, 10:30 PM with 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?

  • by envoked on 4/16/24, 2:06 AM

    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.

  • by spicyusername on 4/16/24, 2:46 AM

    Unrelated, but I used Free Tax USA this year, and it was great.

    Glad to be rid of Intuit.

  • by irrational on 4/16/24, 1:53 AM

    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.

  • by gamepsys on 4/16/24, 1:53 AM

    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.

  • by markiannucci on 4/16/24, 2:02 AM

    https://excel1040.com is humming along quite nicely.