Pros: Lots of holidays and extra days off, like Invest in Yourself Day. Inclusive culture. Solid engineering talent.

Cons: Too many meetings. Huge variation in code quality.

Pros: Engineering that's high-performance, with big data, AWS-based, microservices, and a wide variety of tech, within a company that is willing to train the next generation. There's general training, perks, etc. I've never worked for an organization that will invest more in its people. And like every place has its problems, I can also say that Capital One seems to address some of the known pain points better than any large organization I've worked for before.

Cons: Change-- more than any other organization I've worked with, things change, and documentation goes out of date within a year or two. Given that there's so much change, it can be hard to learn or update. Dozens of wiki pages are all slightly different, or there are dozens of places and teams to ask questions for anything that goes outside the scope of your team. Also, there are a fair number of new developers, and not always a lot of senior developers. So, some things like Tech Debt don't get addressed, and the continual change of tooling and services leads to some non-optimal code or delivery pipelines. There's also somewhat a culture of "you've got to put in the time to get the knowledge" (domain or otherwise). This is true of most companies, but it is more difficult and lengthy here because of the above.

Pros: Good pay, generous sign-on bonus, and severance pay. Flexible hybrid in-office, though it seems to be slowly tightening.

Cons: They're trying to be a tech company, but instead, they make a lot of things unnecessarily complex and use in-house tools that you'll never see outside the company. It was very frustrating trying to diagnose problems with all the extra layers to get through. I liked my time at Capital One, though, and was a little surprised when my boss, after having bi-weekly one-on-one meetings giving positive feedback, told me during mid-year reviews that I was being put on a PIP due to something that took me too long to work on six months ago. What? Why was this never discussed before in our one-on-one meetings? I don't think anyone would dispute that I was very loud and clear during daily standups about issues I was having while working on that project and how I was solving them or which team I was reaching out to. I did more research and learned about stacked ranking and Capital One's policy of firing the "lowest" ranked 10-15% every half year. So, watch out. Even when everything is fine and you're consistently delivering on all your projects, being arbitrarily ranked lowest will still require that you or someone else on your team who did nothing wrong will be fired.