Pros
Atmosphere is great for kids straight out of college. Focus on healthy living (onsite gym, ride bikes between buildings), lots of restaurants on campuses, great health benefits, onsite pharmacy, visually pleasing campuses, relaxed dress, flex start time. Genuinely great coworkers. Capital One University Training courses available for workers to further themselves online. Always learning bleeding edge new technologies and developing market first technologies. Small consistent raises and yearly bonuses paid for employees that manage to avoid the layoffs that occur each year. Flexible work locations. After hours employee gatherings / parties (when you travel to an alternate location), and semi annual team outings.
Cons
Using agile project methodologies, you are constantly having to document what was completed yesterday, what you plan to complete today, and what you plan to complete tomorrow in daily standup . Tell the employees what you want done, when you want it done by, and empower them to make the right decisions to get it done by the deadline you specified. Quit focusing on delivering the next shiny new bell, demoing a new application at the next south by southwest convention, and focus instead on delivering applications that change banking for good like credit cards for customers that have an lcd with a dynamiclly generated secure account number, and the ability to dynamically do everything i can do in a physical bank on my mobile phone. The performance management cycle is the absolute worst thing about this company, hands down. They hire 10 to 15 new employees in each area monthly and then turn around at the end of year and eliminate 10 to 15% of their workforce in each department based on a performance based measurement system that puts everyone on a bell curve. It creates an environment where folks are constantly playing dodge the whack a mole by moving between departments. Employees are often working 11 hours a day every day (55 hours a week) to deliver on projects related to a race to be on the bleeding edge of tech (migrating all applications to the cloud, consolidating banking applications related to ing bank purchas and purchase of hsbc credit card company. Because the high volume of work never ends, employees are beginning to feel like they work in a sweat shop and that they are in a lottery where its just a matter of time before they become part of the 10 to 15% workforce cuts that occur yearly.