Pros
It’s a fintech job so the minimum salary is still better than other industries and jobs in the grand scheme of things. There are some great people you can find at the company. I’ve been fortunate enough to be around these people but I know a ton of people who are less fortunate in this sense. If you find a good group, it can be great to work alongside and learn from them. Work life balance can be good if you get the right team and depending on the time of year. The holidays after performance management has died down are usually pretty chill and you don’t have to go in the last couple weeks of the year. 401k matching is very good. PTO is usually fairly relaxed - if you’re not abusing it, some teams don’t really track it. Although some teams make it difficult to take PTO so also team-dependent.
Cons
Locations have clear priorities compared to others. Some get free lunch, others have a full gym, restaurants, tons of fun events, while others have awful snacks that people don’t even touch and struggle to refill basic things like coffee. Stack ranking is aggressive and people will get pipped left and right for legitimately false and bias reasons. It’s started to make the company feel hostile because you need to do better than your coworkers rather than make the company succeed together. People are always trying to drive their own agenda and selfish choices are generally rewarded more than team- or company-driven choices. If you get pipped or a coaching plan and then pass, your record is tarnished and you’re likely to be pipped again. Contrarily, looking at benchmarks, you can be performing amazingly but there’s essentially a queue of people who are awaiting promotion so you’re stuck behind them. On a few of the benchmarks, I was hitting 2 levels above before I got promoted. Even if your manager wants to promote you, they have to put an incredible amount of effort in doing so and then there’s still a huge chance it won’t go through due to a large variety of factors that are out of their hands. RTO (return to office) is a joke. You have to swipe in a minimum number of times during a rolling period whether you work with others in your office or not. If you get marked as not going in, it “affects” your ability to get promoted for 6-12 months regardless of how well you’re performing. I’ve heard it actively prohibits no matter what but I can’t confirm. People describe the direction of the company as the “Amazonification” of Capital One but without the compensation. To get stock, you have to allocate a portion of your salary. Once you hit Manager+ level, you can start earning stock separately in some capacity. Every time an announcement is made about this place being an award winning place to work, people are genuinely confused who’s voting for those awards/lists. The pay is significantly lower than other similar jobs, whether that’s other fintech, full on tech, startups, etc. Big company politics cause things to move incredibly slow sometimes and then have very unreasonable deadlines with intense crunch. There’s a bunch of enforced old tech that you’re required to use (One Pipeline). The company is making baffling decisions like no longer having a support channel for it and instead having the longest and busiest office hours that you can never get help in. Depending on the team and part of the company, you may be able to build more or just be in maintenance mode. Each has tradeoffs. However, due to senior leadership trying to push certain agendas or being not plugged into the day-to-day work, a lot of the issues that are attempting to be solved are to reach some arbitrary goal rather than addressing real concerns in smarter and more appropriate ways. There’s an All Associates Survey to see how the company is doing and I’ve never heard of anyone giving it a good score in the past couple years. People always complain about RTO, OPL, and other things in this review. And then senior leadership says “we’re doing great” then make decisions directly against the grievances of the employees. Almost everyone I know is passively or actively looking for a new job. The only thing that’s keeping them here is fear mongering from the job market being awful at the time of writing this review. However, every person that is able to leave inspires more people that there’s hope to leave themselves. It was just announced that Invest in Yourself Day will no longer be supported anymore. This was a pretty big benefit of working at Capital One as it was a day to learn new things. Some people would take this as free PTO but others wouldn’t get to use it because things could get so crunchy. Formally removing it is the icing on the cake of how it feels like the company doesn’t care about its employees and how they feel. I understand not wanting to give out more PTO but there are other solutions. Pretty much the only reason this isn’t getting 1 star is because there are obviously worse jobs out there. This place used to be great to work at and I think they’re trying to push that image as much as possible wherever they can both internally and externally. But it’s clear that’s starting to fade considering the Glassdoor score has dropped significantly given the size of the company. The poor changes in the company alongside the aggressive push of “we’re amazing” makes it worse. If they weren’t making some of these baffling changes, this place would be great because clearly it used to be.