- OKR culture has pervaded the entire organization. This is basically just an excuse for management to obsess over their bonus incentives constantly. They spend weeks every quarter re-negotiating OKRs instead of accomplishing anything useful. It used to be the case that people at least pretended to care about the business and thinking like the CEO. Instead, this time around, my manager told me "that's not in our OKRs" when I suggested a project that would directly improve the company's profitability. Since another team owned those OKRs he didn't care.
- Middle management is mostly people from failed consulting careers, Amazon, or other generally-middling backgrounds that do not lend themselves to much opportunity. They typically have no subject matter expertise in banking. Before I joined management blew up their P&L leaning into a product that was clearly experiencing temporary tailwinds from the events of 2020.
- As a boomerang hire, I felt a pit of despair immediately upon entering the office. Everyone there looks unhappy and is fighting for the survival of their careers. I saw a woman cry once at her desk in the middle of the workday, then get back to work. Our executive accidentally revealed the percentage breakdowns of specific questions in the quarterly associate survey, revealing that 40% of people were either burnt out or concerned about being burnt out, and 1/3 were considering leaving within the next 12 months. Management's solution was to adopt a "green/yellow/red light" strategy in 1 on 1 check-ins. That's how out of touch they are.
- Stack ranking alone is sufficient reason to avoid this company. It is like dousing the flame of horrible, toxic culture with lighter fluid. If you are a professional hire new to an org, you must start scrambling immediately to make alliances. "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" is the name of the game. This also occupies several weeks of management's time twice a year.
- When I originally joined Capital One one of the core company principles was "unassailability" -- doing the right thing. I worked on several projects that actually had this as a primary mission and made the world a better, less-scammy place. They literally got rid of this principle. In contrast, in my most recent role there were executive debates about refunding customers with whom we had clearly made an error. Just to save a few dollars. At the expense of risking Capital One's global brand.
- An example of how strong the Kool-Aid is here: employees are grateful for the opportunity to buy cafeteria food at "subsidized" rates. Mind you, the campus is in the middle of nowhere.
- Professional hires mainly exist to backfill horrible roles that no one internally wants. This was the case with my role. The former employees' name was mentioned just once or twice, almost as if he never existed.
- Extremely top-heavy management structure. 10 people barking orders for every person actually doing work. This is a major reason why management is so out of touch. None of them are ever actually working -- just having meetings and posturing for OKR re-negotiations -- so they don't understand how long it takes to do most things.
- Directors used to have to actually understand what was going on. Now, they've brought in a Project Manager role as a buffer between directors and the lower ranks. The entire point of this role is to host meetings all day and it's depressing just to interact with them.
- Middle-upper management constantly refers to themselves as "leadership" / "your leaders" without even realizing how cringe this is.
