Tech pivot stumbles; your experience really depends on which Division you are in
Pros
- Salary and benefits are great (for engineers). Full-time Engineers were given a huge pay bump this year to compete with other large tech companies (time will tell if this was only due to inflation). 401k match is the best I have seen anywhere (up to 6%). Health plan is just OK. - Company appears to be doing pretty well. However, there is a dark side to this that I will get to. - Lots of free and easily accessible learning resources. They will pay for all sorts of things, from certification exams to degree programs. There are also tons of opportunities to present about various topics to large swaths of the organization. - Internal mobility is highly encouraged. Employees routinely jump from team to team and division to division. Internal job board allows you to easily find and apply for roles around the company. - Engineers are given a lot of say within the company. As much as I will complain about the tech org later, CapOne does seem to be genuinely trying to encourage a strong engineering culture and giving them the power they need to succeed. - Heavy focus on their TDP program, which aims to attract graduates straight out of college and give them lots of training inside of the company. Sounds like the TDP experience can vary widely depending on what kind of teams you get placed on.
Cons
- CapOne wants be a tech company soooo bad, but it doesn't seem to understand what that means or how to do that. They hired a bazillion software engineers, designers, project, and product people, but have no idea what to do with them. Lots of engineers spend all day just updating libraries and re-hydrating VM images. Internal product teams get more love and resources than the public-facing products that actually make the company money. But hey, this message seems to be making investors excited. - Some divisions have strong products, talent, and culture (*cough* Card). Some divisions are really floundering from both a talent and business perspective. This creates a self-reinforcing loop where good people constantly flee to the already-capable teams and everyone else gets left with the lesser performers. Credit cards are still hands-down their cash cow, so everything else plays second fiddle. - Lots of power jockeying between teams and senior leaders. Typically this comes in the form of creating processes that make a team a gate-keeper for the rest of the company, such as requiring everyone to get their approval for something as simple as adding a column to a database. More and more decision-making authority is being given to HQ teams like Cyber and Change Management, while the engineering teams on the front lines building the actual products have little to no say in how they are allowed to develop things. Little trust is extended to engineers throughout the company; instead, HQ teams try to micro-manage product teams and force them into supposed best practices despite not knowing anything about their products or code bases. This is made all the worse by people with little to no engineering background repeatedly being put in senior engineering leadership roles. These internal tools and processes that lock everything down are more often than not half-baked and have all sorts of functional issues. There is a lot of bureaucracy even compared to other financial services companies that I have worked at. - Their well-known cyber security incident in 2019 was CapOne's 9/11 moment. At first there was a real drive to fix systemic issues that led to the incident, but as time goes on this initiative has driven the tech organization to the brink of madness and self-destruction. Crazy amounts of engineers are being used to do lots of BS work in the name of "cyber security" and "compliance" at the expense of improving their products, but very little of it actually helps their security posture. This is driving away tons of talented tech folks who don't want to spend their entire days working on nonsense like filling out paperwork rather than building products. - Their Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging program is borderline toxic. Race and gender is brought up constantly and seems to be the only thing that matters to most people. If you fall into one of the in-vogue demographics (and don't work at a branch), you will be given several speaking and leadership opportunities. If you aren't, prepare to be berated either implicitly or explicitly on a daily basis. Some company policies and mandatory trainings are created and run exclusively by the EmpowHER and Black Leadership Council groups. Whenever I wanted to hire someone of certain ethnicities on my team, HR always demanded a written explanation due to "diversity concerns", but never did the same for other ethnicities. The sad part is Asians (east and central) get crapped on the most despite making up half of the company's software engineers; lots of H1Bs that are bullied into long hours and low pay increases under threat of losing their visas. The company should do its best to respect people regardless of things they can't control like sex, but this DIB program isn't the way to deal with that topic. Some things I saw related to their DIB efforts: a woman muting all of the men at the start of a conference call because they "already got to speak enough," to lots of cheering. A Division President highlighting the "white" data point on an employee demographics chart during an all-hands meeting and saying "This is the problem right here with our diversity efforts..." despite the numbers showing that Caucasians were under-represented relative to national demographics. A recruiter got drunk at a company event and spilled that a lot of them dig through candidates' public profiles to see if they might be Republican supporters and reject anyone that they suspect of this. A very active member of the DIB program on my team repeatedly complaining in private about "all of the Indians" that worked at CapOne.