Capital One reviews

Forced Downtime: There were weeks I struggled to find 20-30 hours of work to do. Leadership from the Director+ level either had no vision for the product or failed to communicate it. Product always seemed lost. We never had a refined backlog. Enterprise teams were major blockers. Developers spend a lot of time just spinning their wheels. Forced downtime is nice occasionally but I was bored out of my mind far too often - I probably could have worked a second job. Enterprise Teams: Enterprise teams are absolutely atrocious. They were the number one blocker to getting anything done. Our CI/CD pipelines were continuously going down. You'd get nonsense errors and build failures for no reason at all. Builds took 30 minutes+ and would fail because some behind the scenes enterprise service was overburdened. It would often take days if not weeks to get a response from enterprise teams to fix critical issues with deployment. Development Process: Again, just like with enterprise teams this one was a headache. Architecture teams are required to sign off on major design decisions and API contracts and would take weeks to respond. On one instance an architect mandated a design pattern that wasn't supported by our enterprise tools and it caused weeks of issues. CI/CD was a constant pain. Getting new applications onboarded was a headache, enterprise portals rarely worked. Salary: If you're a talented engineer, you can do much much better. Leadership attempted to counter as I was on my way out the door until they heard my new offer. C1 has taken insufficient measures to stop the bleeding in the form of tech attrition. The CEO, Rich Fairbank, went on record saying Software Engineers were too expensive. Sorry Rich, I'll go somewhere that pays me what I'm worth - enjoy your contractors. Stacked Ranking: Stacked ranking is horrible. Managers went up to meetings to defend your rating and to get anything above Strong (Average) you basically had to have a ton of extracurriculars. Doing your job and doing it very well isn't good enough at Capital One. They expect you to be earning certifications, volunteering, conducting interviews, joining resource groups, etc. to "differentiate yourself" from your peers. It's all crap and probably a cost saving measure so they don't have to give too many people decent raises every year. Hybrid Work: People want fully remote work. There are antiquated managers who feel like things are "just better" in person but many many engineers want fully remote work or have left to get it. Nobody wants to go from the comfort of their home to having a commute, spending money on gas & vehicle, prep time before and after work, just to sit in a noisy open office environment where things are less productive. Products: A lot of C1 products I dealt with weren't engineered to a very high standard. Our pages are slow to load, don't look great, and are dwarfed by more established competition. I didn't feel proud to work on a product that felt was vastly inferior to the competition. Constant reorgs and lack of vision from leadership was a consistent hurdle.

After making it onto the list of top companies to work for, we saw our budget, snacks, and office perks pretty much cut overnight. NY office saw one snack each day disappear and never restocked again. We went from fully stocked draws to pretty much nothing but Reeses cups. Some of the Virginia offices saw snacks completely disappear. What kind of company advertise themselves as a 'tech company' without free food? Meeting rooms have become non existent as senior leadership began making their own personal offices. Management have become less and less visible, and the new hires have become more and more like those of traditional / irrelevant companies. The once young and fresh vibe is disappearing, and the company is now filled with people who came from failed startups and places like Barnes and Nobles. Capital One just can't compete with new tech talent, and they simply cannot offer high enough compensation. Educational benefits are lost, and promotions feels incredibly biased. Individual contributor work is not recognized. There is lots of talk about doing things but nothing ever gets done. Bureaucracy is endless and only getting worst as we bring in the more older and traditional way of management. Work culture can be a hit or miss. You can work late or you can have nothing to do at all. Two years ago, Capital One had an amazing work life balance. Today, not so much. Vacations are tracked like hawks and you cannot take a vacation without somebody calling your personal phone. The moral is extremely low. People are dropping like flies, and there haven't been a single day without another 'Goodbye' email.