Capital One

Great compensation for new grads, especially in the Richmond area.

Campus was nice with plenty of amenities, such as a discounted pharmacy and excellent, discounted dining areas.

You can definitely find some nice people here, just like in any job.

Hell, you might even enjoy your job if you're lucky.

If you're not lucky, you'll be working on something boring or in a tech stack that's a pain to work with. Even worse, you might get stuck with team members who make you question your own sanity. It's such a huge company that nearly the entire spectrum of experiences is possible here.

Internal politics are a big thing here. Advancement is not a question of what you do; it's who you know. You could be the hardest working developer on the team, but if you haven't been doing side-of-desk work or giving demos or presentations (those are huge), you're out of luck.

Finally, being that it's a Big Financial Company, there's a lot of regulation, bureaucracy, and overhead. The amount of hoops you need to jump through just to get a static webpage available internally is mind-boggling. If you're someone who sees impediments like that as a nuisance rather than a challenge, you're likely to get annoyed.

Ultimately, the pay and WLB have been great, but I've not done anything genuinely fulfilling here. On top of that, I've had to deal with some real jerks (ones who are classist and lack any self-awareness, at that). The only reason I haven't quit yet is that there are hardly any other tech jobs in Richmond, let alone ones that pay as well.

Be more transparent in the performance review process. My performance was being measured by people who took a toll on my mental health, and the information I got back was an incomplete picture.

In all fairness, culture is hard to change. It can't happen overnight, let alone in any perceptible amount of time. That being said, C1 might be becoming a tech company in focus, but in ethos, it's a finance company through and through. Quality work is nothing compared to ego, image, and the bottom line.