Capital One reviews

3.6

59% would recommend to a friend

(18,965 total reviews)
avatar

Richard D. Fairbank

75% approve of CEO

63% positive business outlook

Capital One has an employee rating of 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 18,965 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Capital One employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Finanzas industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

19K reviews
1.0
Apr 11, 2023

Unfair Performance Management Practices

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Love the culture and people

Cons

My experience at Capital One was not what I expected, and I would hesitate to recommend it as a workplace for new hires. The performance management process felt unfair, with success often seeming dependent on the relationship between an employee and their manager. In my case, I felt as though my manager's personal opinion of me negatively affected my performance evaluation. The stress of trying to meet what I perceived as arbitrary benchmarks took a toll on me, and I struggled to maintain my values and beliefs. I often felt like I was being taken advantage of, with my manager assigning tasks that seemed designed to make me fail. Unfortunately, my concerns were not addressed, leaving me to navigate a difficult work environment. In my experience, being placed on a development or coaching plan by your manager can overshadow any progress you make. The power dynamics between managers and employees can be intense, and in my case, I felt like my manager was not leading by example. Moreover, it seemed that higher-ups enabled this behavior. It appears that job security at Capital One can be challenging if you haven't been with the company for a long time. Many new hires have joined in the last few years, only for the company to later realize they may not need all of these employees. While it's possible to have a positive experience if you have a fair and unbiased manager, my personal experience was quite the opposite. During my two years at Capital One, I encountered management issues that I found deeply troubling. In conclusion, I would advise prospective employees to carefully consider their options before joining Capital One. In my experience, the company's performance management practices were problematic, fostering a toxic culture that can set employees up for failure.

3.0
Mar 31, 2023

Good and Bad

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Decent code base - Some good people at the company who will help you learn and improve - Good extras (retirement matching, annual bonus etc) - Nice vacation time

Cons

- Mandating return to office 2-3 days a week despite every indication from past company meetings that employees are not interested - A lot of toxic practices and micromanaging disguised behind things such as 'culture'. 'collaboration', 'team building' etc - A huge amount of 'for lifer' employees who lack external perspective and who parrot whatever the company stance is - Tone deaf all hands meetings to hear about the senior leadership teams trips and vacations

1.0
Mar 9, 2023

Bait and Switch

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Pay is decent, 401k match is good, they'll pay for an AWS cert if that means anything to you. Ability to transfer internally. Maybe the card side of the business is ok?

Cons

tldr; It all boils down to poor management Self-interested managers that pull rank to make terrible decisions. You might get hired for one team and then a more senior manager you had no interaction with might snag you to their dumpster fire of a team/product doing work you never intended to do when you accepted the offer. If giving 6 months for an entirely new team of people (80% of which are new to the company) to make significant progress on a legacy product and firing the new people when that plan somehow doesn't work out, and redoing that cycle multiple times sounds like a great place to work, then you might like it here. Plus you'll have no support from the teammates or management. If you have the experience, you can figure things out pretty quickly. The portion of the team that can't will be hung out to dry, no matter how much you try to help bring them up to speed. Opinions are set pretty quickly which means you'll have a team of 4-6 where 2-3 people are doing most of the work. They killed the Agile delivery job family, which I can understand why, but from my perspective was a terrible decision and will likely continue allowing bad managers to impose poor decisions onto their engineering teams which only cause more headaches and fires. You can push back and explain why continuing to make the same short-sighted decisions is bad long term, but if your manager can't take the heat from their manager it will just be constant pain for you and your team. Highly regulated industry which leads to release freezes, audits, and essentially no trust between coworkers/managers/teams. Waterfall veiled as agility because they "do devops" and "have CICD". Sure the release cycles can be pretty short, but call it what it is. Off-hours release windows with lots of manual intervention isn't utilizing the tools well. Tons of on call. Do you enjoy staying up until 6am after working a full day, then getting on the next day and doing it all again? How about not being able to handle personal affairs, not knowing day-to-day when you're working until? Do you like being a remote control for someone else to do work through? Do you want to get fired because that remote control culture means you're the one clicking the buttons because the HIPPO told you to? They're insulated by you being the one doing their bidding. Do you want to work with people that like to be busy for the sake of being busy? Do you like your manager kicking cans down the road until you're up against a tight deadline every day? The one senior person on your team that is familiar with Capital One or the project(s) you're working on is unlikely to have the skills to properly train, knowledge share, and onboard team members effectively. If you've led sustainable high-performing teams before, you'll have a lot to overcome to create that here. The manager won't make that any better. I haven't been fired, I'm still employed at Capital One when writing this review. All of this is based on what I've been told of past teams, what I saw when I came in, and what I've seen in the area I work. The whole experience has been a nightmare, I'd avoid at all costs. I'm sure it's better in some slivers of the company. Needless to say, I've been applying externally and waiting until I can do an internal transfer.

Viewing 514 - 516 of 18,965 Reviews

Glassdoor has 21,351 Capital One reviews submitted anonymously by Capital One employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Capital One is right for you.