Capital One

Capital One is a great place to work, especially if you are an individual contributor below the manager level. The teams are very agile and independent.

Great place to be if you are young.

Directors and Sr. Directors have a lot of power and freedom, and more or less define the culture for their areas. The worst thing to do at Capital One is to butt heads with a Director. VPs/SVPs usually do not prescribe how Directors and Sr. Directors should run the organization. So, if you have a problem with a Director, going skip level usually doesn't help.

Re-orgs happen all the time at the management level. This is good in the sense that managers at Capital One do not have a "king of the hill" mentality. However, the flip side is that this has led to cliques in the management layer. When a re-org happens, managers jockey to get themselves into better positions, and the way managers do this is by aligning themselves with people of influence. So, the end result is that there are these cliques built up around people with influence. Your growth in the company depends on your ability to stay in a clique and your clique being successful.

The company says that it's a tech company, but product has a lot more influence than tech. Engineers are more or less expected to do what POs tell them.

Ageism is rampant. Capital One uses stack ranking to rank employees. This means that they have to flag 12% of employees as "underperforming", no matter what their actual performance is. Underperforming employees are put on a Performance Improvement Plan. Somehow, underperforming employees tend to be older than the average. And once they leave after being frustrated, the position gets filled by a TDP. TDPs are Capital One's term for fresh hires from college.

Theoretically, there is a path for Individual Contributors to grow to VP level without going into people management. However, I have never seen any IC who has grown beyond Director. The only Director-IC that I have seen spent 20 years in the company to get to Director. Sure, there are ICs at VP level at Capital One, but they are all hired from outside. Practically, once an IC gets to Sr. Manager level, the only way they can grow is by playing the same political game that everyone else plays.

Cut the hierarchy.

Give more power to the engineers.