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Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

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Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#11

Post by BobbyTables2 »

kstrauser wrote: post #6
mactavish88 wrote: post #3

The absolute last thing I want in the filing of my taxes is non-determinism.

Boy, do I have bad news for you. Edit: To be clear, as a sibling post said, the basic arithmetic is easy enough. It's the tax opinion stuff that is absolutely not deterministic. If your situation is even moderately complex, there's a vast number of ways to describe your deductions, each with different tax implications and multi-year requirements. I'm not talking about being Jeff Bezos, either. Is your spouse an indep…

I know my own taxes pretty well. I don’t follow the tax code changes but could fill out a 1040 form on my own. Even did for a short time.

I use tax prep software because I do NOT want to worry whether I copied the amount from line C to line K correctly. The IRS forms are a nightmare!

The postscript in PDF should allow something more sane than what we have today in IRS forms, but that’s just wishful thinking.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#12

Post by crowcroft »

kstrauser wrote: post #6
mactavish88 wrote: post #3

The absolute last thing I want in the filing of my taxes is non-determinism.

Boy, do I have bad news for you. Edit: To be clear, as a sibling post said, the basic arithmetic is easy enough. It's the tax opinion stuff that is absolutely not deterministic. If your situation is even moderately complex, there's a vast number of ways to describe your deductions, each with different tax implications and multi-year requirements. I'm not talking about being Jeff Bezos, either. Is your spouse an indep…

I think it's a very common misconception among programmers that the law is a sort of natural language 'program' where you can consistently deduce that x input generate y output.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#13

Post by 866-RON-0-FEZ »

I've been using TurboTax forever, mostly due to laziness.

This year they made you take a survey at the end, asking why you're still using boomer desktop software and haven't switched to their totally-not-worse web version. I think the writing is on the wall.

If they kill the desktop version of TurboTax, I'm gone. I despise doing taxes in a browser. I'll go back to doing taxes by hand if I have to.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#14

Post by Loudergood »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #11
kstrauser wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boy, do I have bad news for you. Edit: To be clear, as a sibling post said, the basic arithmetic is easy enough. It's the tax opinion stuff that is absolutely not deterministic. If your situation is even moderately complex, there's a vast number of ways to describe your deductions, each with different tax implications and multi-year requirements. I'm not talking about being Jeff Bezos, either. Is your spouse an indep…

I know my own taxes pretty well. I don’t follow the tax code changes but could fill out a 1040 form on my own. Even did for a short time. I use tax prep software because I do NOT want to worry whether I copied the amount from line C to line K correctly. The IRS forms are a nightmare! The postscript in PDF should allow something more sane than what we have today in IRS forms, but that’s just wishful thinking.

No, that's Intuit lobbying.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#15

Post by kstrauser »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #11
kstrauser wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boy, do I have bad news for you. Edit: To be clear, as a sibling post said, the basic arithmetic is easy enough. It's the tax opinion stuff that is absolutely not deterministic. If your situation is even moderately complex, there's a vast number of ways to describe your deductions, each with different tax implications and multi-year requirements. I'm not talking about being Jeff Bezos, either. Is your spouse an indep…

I know my own taxes pretty well. I don’t follow the tax code changes but could fill out a 1040 form on my own. Even did for a short time. I use tax prep software because I do NOT want to worry whether I copied the amount from line C to line K correctly. The IRS forms are a nightmare! The postscript in PDF should allow something more sane than what we have today in IRS forms, but that’s just wishful thinking.

I use to think that. I'm capable of putting numbers in a form correctly. A good tax preparer can point out things like "did you know that your specific commuting pattern entitles you to claim mileage?", or "the law says the way you have your working environment set up at home means you can deduct some of your utility bills", and so on ad infinitum.

Basically, unless you get someone who has a deep knowledge of the law, if your tax situation is non-trivial (see my post above this) then you might be leaving money on the table. It's a terrible, idea to evade taxes. It's a fantastic idea to realize when you're paying more than you're legally required to so that you can fix it.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#16

Post by HoldOnAMinute »

I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself.

So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway.

This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful.

If it stays at arm's length, and if it can "read only", then I am OK with it and actually somewhat pleased with it.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#17

Post by kstrauser »

crowcroft wrote: post #12
kstrauser wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boy, do I have bad news for you. Edit: To be clear, as a sibling post said, the basic arithmetic is easy enough. It's the tax opinion stuff that is absolutely not deterministic. If your situation is even moderately complex, there's a vast number of ways to describe your deductions, each with different tax implications and multi-year requirements. I'm not talking about being Jeff Bezos, either. Is your spouse an indep…

I think it's a very common misconception among programmers that the law is a sort of natural language 'program' where you can consistently deduce that x input generate y output.

It sort of is, except that the entire law isn't defined in one place. "Hey, do I have a home office?" Well, "home" is defined over in this regulation, and "home office" is defined over there in that other regulation, and "having a home office" would normally mean this except for this case law that says it can also mean that when these other circumstances apply, and...

These things are knowable, but unless you've spent some time studying it intensely, it's certain that you only know a fraction of the places where the program is written.

If it's helpful, programmers should imagine that it's written in C. At a glance you can tell what something's doing, but once you study it you can find UB all over the place and suddenly it's hard to say what the right answer is until you know the intricacies of the compiler and the target platform. You can't really determine the exact behavior without all that information that lives outside the code. Now, once you have all that, you can surely reason through it all. But how many people actually know all that, or even realize which parts they don't know?

"This is pretty straightforward" is a sure sign of someone who doesn't actually understand it well.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#20

Post by user3939382 »

Intuit lobbies to keep our complex tax code for the benefit of their revenue. Intuit is a parasite. If they could go ahead and lay off the rest of their workforce and fold it up that would be great.

My favorite Intuit experience was hiring one of their ex engineers to convert my QuickBooks file back to the last version that didn’t require a subscription which they intentionally tried to make impossible.

Double entry bookkeeping doesn’t need a subscription and their connectors are constantly broken. Fuck Intuit very much.

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