A sinister business model in every possible way.
Do they even employ any sizable number of IC SWEs in the US, or are they all Leads/M2s that manage outsourced contracts?
I don't know why you think people don't think that. I imagine that most people who have been informed will think along similar lines. Those who don't think it are likely not yet informed.
Not surprisingly, most people think the complete opposite about the government.
So where Intuit is diabolically good, it’s at arbitraging those colloquial narratives and embedding itself in the middle as the savior. The good guy who is here to help.
They screw you, so they can later come and help you. As I said before, a sinister business model.
That’s still not true of most large companies like say Walmart or McDonalds which still invest a great deal in technology.
Is Google a tech company? Probably, but technically they sell advertisements, not software. You could say that they make money by operating ad-selling software. Walmart is a company that makes money by operating purchasing, distribution, and retailing software. An old west General Store owner could, if his records were lost, make a good guess as to what he should by from which big city distributors, when and how much of it to stock, and how much to sell it for, conversely, zero people have a comprehensive understanding of Walmart's product lines, they're just cogs in the software-powered machine that makes the corporation work.
Every large company today is dependent on software. I agree that it's a bit absurd to suggest that this means they're all tech companies.
Are they primarily dependant on off-the-shelf software? Possibly not a tech company. Is their software development team bigger than the whole of the rest of the company put together? Probably a tech company. Have the developers convinced everyone else to form squads and hold all the usual agile ceremonies? Don't @ me.
Nice.
Other "big tech" companies would not even exist.
Intuit most certainly is a tech company. They make web and desktop software. This semantic argument is a distraction.
https://jobs.intuit.com/search-jobs/
> If computers and internet were not a thing
Cool counterfactual. Not relevant in this discussion.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
Isn't it literally a constitutional right? It's not a side-effect of anything - it's a right by itself.
I can't understand anyone suggesting that we should not be allowed to present our opinions to the government. What are you in favour of? Just voting once every four years or so and never saying anything else the rest of the time? Bizarre.
It's not the "saying anything else", it's the listening: Sure, anyone has the right to say anything they want. The difference is that the government doesn't listen to most people -- how could they? Where would they take the time to listen to everyone; when would they get anything else done? It's not as if there's any constitutional right to be heard -- but some people and organisations, they do somehow magically find the time to listen to.
Pretending that this is just "a super-basic part of democracy everywhere" in stead of highly correlated with how much money the ones who get heard have contributed to the campaigns of the ones doing the sympathetic listening is disingenuous in the extreme.
Intuit isn't a person, it didn't vote and it has no place telling the government what to do for the people. A company has no opinions, only a bottom line and in many lobbying cases a bunch a shareholders. A government isn't a company and doesn't need to have financial gain, it needs to support the collective people of the country it governs.
If the CEO of Intuit phones their representative and says they think some change to the tax code is bad that's lobbying and that's fine to me.
If the CEO of Intuit (or a representative of Intuit) just called the same phone line the rest of us get, sure there wouldn’t be a difference there. Even if the representatives were calling on Inuit from their side because they believed Intuit has relevant insights into the tax code, that would be fine. But that’s not what’s happening. It’s the way political donations buy access to representatives attention in ways that the non-rich don’t have access to that people take issue with.
A company is essentially a sociopath that does not have to follow a social contract, has no limited lifespan, doesn't need to eat, sleep, have shelter, and doesn't feel pain or joy. All it does is extract as much value as possible, at any cost, including joy, safely and general lives of others.
A government that panders to sociopathic wealth hoarders isn't a government, but just another company and the people in general are worse off for it.
And even then, does it matter? The point is that voters, which is what the government exists for, should be the ones to assess what they want, not the sociopathic wealth hoarder with the most wealth. If you want to define an ultra specific scope around that, you can do that.
Obviously a company as an abstract entity does not lobby. An individual human being lobbies. A voter.
Even an absolute monarch is going to have have various people/groups petitioning. For reasons both good and selfish.
That would be one way of looking at it yes.
Because it isn't that big of a deal.
> Their business is literally the idea of creating friction in federal and local tax systems so they can extort people in exchange of removing some of those synthetic frictions (emphasis on "some").
That's a hyperbolic characterization. It's not that big of deal.
Lobbying is a fact of life in a democracy. There are always interest groups on every side of any issue that lobby for their selfish benefit, frequently to the detriment of the public (e.g. public sector union contracts). That tends to make most government programs less efficient and more expensive then they could be because politicians will balance needs of all kinds of interest groups. That will never change. Intuit has a right to lobby for their interests. Characterizing this as somehow nefarious, or even as an outlier is hyperbolic. Welcome to Democracy.
They aren't. Those programs don't require Intuit to claim.
Your argument makes it sound like you do not know what the issue in question actually is.
Why? My father is an immigrant, speaks with broken English and has no higher education ... and did his taxes for years with forms.
Which target group are you referring to?
the question starts to sound more interesting when you add the fact that the members of that union have "death or life" power over the public.
>This is what democracy looks like.
it is more like a "contract you can't refuse".