Today we will be communicating to approximately 1,800 employees, which is 10% of our workforce, that they will be leaving Intuit.

Intuit letting 1,800 people go.

we will hire approximately 1,800 new people primarily in engineering, product, and customer facing roles such as sales, customer success, and marketing.

Intuit firing 1,800 people. 

We’ve significantly raised the bar on our expectations of employee performance, resulting in approximately 1,050 employees leaving the company who are not meeting expectations

I’m incredibly torn on this news. On the one hand, mass layoffs suck for all those involved, and cause so much chaos within the organization. Also, the metrics used for letting that many people go are (in my experience) are iffy at best. The way information and ability of individuals gets communicated at such a large organization is challenging and so much gets missed. 

This reminds me of the time Steve Jobs returned to Apple and realized they had incredible talent in various areas of the company, but the folks were limited in their ability to do anything because of poor leadership.

How does a company know that hundreds of people are a poor fit? The ability for politics and posturing to get in the way is far too easy. 

On the other hand Intuit is offering (for US Employees at least) 16 weeks of paid leave and 6 months of health insurance. That’s better than I would have expected. 

I’ll be really curious to see where Intuit takes things, where they grow, and what they build as a result of this change. 

(Via Intuit)