Capital One reviews

Forced Downtime: There were weeks I struggled to find 20-30 hours of work to do. Leadership from the Director+ level either had no vision for the product or failed to communicate it. Product always seemed lost. We never had a refined backlog. Enterprise teams were major blockers. Developers spend a lot of time just spinning their wheels. Forced downtime is nice occasionally but I was bored out of my mind far too often - I probably could have worked a second job. Enterprise Teams: Enterprise teams are absolutely atrocious. They were the number one blocker to getting anything done. Our CI/CD pipelines were continuously going down. You'd get nonsense errors and build failures for no reason at all. Builds took 30 minutes+ and would fail because some behind the scenes enterprise service was overburdened. It would often take days if not weeks to get a response from enterprise teams to fix critical issues with deployment. Development Process: Again, just like with enterprise teams this one was a headache. Architecture teams are required to sign off on major design decisions and API contracts and would take weeks to respond. On one instance an architect mandated a design pattern that wasn't supported by our enterprise tools and it caused weeks of issues. CI/CD was a constant pain. Getting new applications onboarded was a headache, enterprise portals rarely worked. Salary: If you're a talented engineer, you can do much much better. Leadership attempted to counter as I was on my way out the door until they heard my new offer. C1 has taken insufficient measures to stop the bleeding in the form of tech attrition. The CEO, Rich Fairbank, went on record saying Software Engineers were too expensive. Sorry Rich, I'll go somewhere that pays me what I'm worth - enjoy your contractors. Stacked Ranking: Stacked ranking is horrible. Managers went up to meetings to defend your rating and to get anything above Strong (Average) you basically had to have a ton of extracurriculars. Doing your job and doing it very well isn't good enough at Capital One. They expect you to be earning certifications, volunteering, conducting interviews, joining resource groups, etc. to "differentiate yourself" from your peers. It's all crap and probably a cost saving measure so they don't have to give too many people decent raises every year. Hybrid Work: People want fully remote work. There are antiquated managers who feel like things are "just better" in person but many many engineers want fully remote work or have left to get it. Nobody wants to go from the comfort of their home to having a commute, spending money on gas & vehicle, prep time before and after work, just to sit in a noisy open office environment where things are less productive. Products: A lot of C1 products I dealt with weren't engineered to a very high standard. Our pages are slow to load, don't look great, and are dwarfed by more established competition. I didn't feel proud to work on a product that felt was vastly inferior to the competition. Constant reorgs and lack of vision from leadership was a consistent hurdle.

First of all, I'm not sure how Capital One has so many positive reviews on Glassdoor. There has to be many fake reviews here. In my six years working there I didn't know anyone (at least in Retail Bank IT) who was really happy about working there. Most were absolutely miserable. On one hand, Capital One gave me a lot of experience and exposure to things I wouldn't have encountered otherwise. On the other hand, Capital One caused incredible stress to my life because of their morally bankrupt performance management, politics, dishonest and cowardly management, and constant turnover. If you are considering working there, understand one thing....you are a number on paper. That is it. If management feels that you are not helping their agenda (if anyone even knows what it is), they will push you out by ignoring you and your work, lying about your performance, and finally firing you (they call this "redeployment" to make it sound less serious). In my last year there, I worked extremely hard to go above and beyond every objective assigned to me, only to have my current manager do a pathetic job at presenting me to the performance management calibrations, which by the way, are based on the opinions of other managers who don't necessarily know anything about what you are working on. It was then I knew it was time for me to go. The whole system is not just ridiculous and absurd, it's immoral. It is a system designed for upper management to empower "yes men" managers to control hiring/firing. Capital One is extremely political. I even had a co-worker tell me that to be successful there I should focus more on being visible than my actual work. Believe it or not he was right. Thankfully I found a much smaller company where I don't have to put up with all the nonsense and be rewarded for my actual work. It's absolutely wonderful. If that's what you are looking for, stay far away from Capital One. However, if you are an outgoing person with above average job skills who is good at politics, you'll probably excel. Make no mistake, Capital One is one of the best companies I've ever seen at marketing a spotless image to the outside public, but on the inside, it is toxic, although it will take new hires a while to pick up on this.