Capital One

Pay is ok for the job title, but they'll take every second of your time on or off the clock, so it's lousy pay-per-hour.

Switching companies, I got almost the same base pay as a Senior Engineer as I was getting at Capital One as a Lead Engineer.

Race to the bottom culture.

There are turnover targets that range from 10% to 20% per year throughout the company, and I was told in no uncertain terms that "If you just fulfill the responsibilities of your role, you won't last long."

In addition to your regular job, you'll be expected to spend your personal time volunteering to run groups/events at the company, and to study for and earn certifications so that higher ups can brag about having the highest percentage of associates with X-certification.

If you don't distinguish yourself, you're at risk for being used to fill a turnover quota.

Obviously security needs to be a concern for banks, but they've taken it to an extreme where it's difficult to perform basic job-related tasks. You need to get personal approval from a VP for anything.

Other members of my team were using Excel to work with CSV files, so I applied for permission to install Excel on my machine as well, but I was repeatedly told by my VP that I didn't need it.

Be prepared to beg to be allowed to get your work done, and then make up the time spent begging and waiting for approval.

If you plan to work remotely, make sure you live VERY far from the nearest office. At the moment, Capital One requires anyone within 50 miles of an office to commute to that office, even if none of your team members are at that office.

This was the breaking point for me: when they wanted me to spend 4 to 6 hours per day in traffic in order to join virtual meetings with my distributed team.

I joked that it'd be cheaper to hire background actors to pretend to work at their office every day.

The current threshold for being required to commute is 50 miles from any office, but that could change and I wouldn't trust any distance under 100 miles.

I've worked at some notorious companies like Amazon, but Capital One was the first job where I felt like I was fighting against the company trying to get me to fail.

They really are looking to meet their turnover quotas and will keep looking for excuses to fail you until they meet that quota.

The company claims that work/life balance is important, but that is demonstrably untrue. The culture is a pure rat race, with artificial demands and obstacles introduced to ensure people are crushed so that turnover quotas can be met.