Capital One reviews

1) Uses stacked ranking for performance management. How will you be evaluated as a developer you ask? This will determine not only your bonus, but also when you will likely be promoted next and salary increases, so it's pretty important. At Capital One, this is process is known as calibration sessions. All the managers under a senior director get in a room and they are given a certain percentage of who can be rated as exceptional, very strong, strong, and needs improvement. . There is little regard for the reality of how the employees are actually performing objectively. Astonishingly, the managers work backwards from the same distribution no matter where you are in the company (no I'm not joking) and try to fit all the employees into that, leading to some cases of exceptional employees being under rated, or struggling employees being rated as strong. Your rating will be determined by other managers who you have little opportunity to interact with on a daily basis, and will heavily depend on how much political clout your manager has. Astoundingly, there is little to no consideration put on the opinion of your teammates who would know the most about your contributions. What this results in is a sort of hunger games culture where you can only do better by having those who work closely with you to do poorly. As you can imagine pitting teams and employees against each other in this manner is a huge drain on productivity. 2) Work is not interesting and doesn't build your developer skill set The data breach has created a very shortsighted culture. There is a cyber initiative that in theory would be important work to safeguard customer data, but as an initiative it's not very well managed. Don't get me wrong, securing platforms and customer data is and always should be the number one priority. But the kinds of things they have developers doing aren't making the platforms any more secure, and are largely dictated by non-technical types. There's teams of developers (a significant portion of devs) that are spending months doing nothing but continually upgrading versions of libraries of internal systems and filling out endless google sheets. This work is the height of tedium and you can expect your developer skills to slowly degrade if you find yourselves in one of these nightmare positions. 3) Lots of late night releases More so than other places that I've worked, you likely expect to be up on late night releases 2 to 3 nights per week. This is a drain on your work life balance and one of parts of the job that are actually not conducive to work life balance, otherwise the work load is pretty fair. 4) High turnover (and loads of technical debt) This may vary with team, but almost every platform I've encountered is understaffed and filled with technical debt. It's a vicious cycle where developers are leaving because the platforms are unmaintainable, which leads to new developers going through the same burnout and leaving. You can't under-staff a platform and continually put off refactoring and listening to developers without paying a price. 5) The hiring process leaves a lot to be desired. Applicants for software developer positions are given questions out of a pool that interviewers are mandated to pick form and are frankly... awful. They're solving a small coding challenge that has no resemblance to the kind of work that we do on a day to day basis. It's no surprise that with this hiring process we get a fair amount of developers that can't contribute to the team in any meaningful way and are rarely fired, but merely moved from team to team forever. 6) Company politics are rampant I've personally seen managers straight up lie to another to get ahead. On one occasion one manager said he would give a developer to the other if they could transition a platform, and then went back on his word and pretended he never said this. I was shocked. Some of these managers directors are so without moral compass and scheming they make Machiavelli's characters look like Fred Rogers.