Capital One

1. Gives back to the community through volunteer/coders programs.
2. Compensation is above average, and raises are fair. My salary more than doubled after working here for 6 years.
3. Work-life balance is pretty good, aside from late-night releases.
4. Has better values than most other banks. Yeah, C1 gets fined from time to time for violating regulations, but it's no Wells Fargo.
5. Much farther ahead technology-wise than similar financial companies.
6. Strong push for diversity.
7. Pretty good benefits.
8. Invest in yourself days.

1. Uses stacked ranking for performance management.

How will you be evaluated as a developer, you ask? This will determine not only your bonus, but also when you will likely be promoted next and salary increases, so it's pretty important.

At Capital One, this process is known as calibration sessions. All the managers under a senior director get in a room, and they are given a certain percentage of who can be rated as exceptional, very strong, strong, and needs improvement.

There is little regard for the reality of how the employees are actually performing objectively. Astonishingly, the managers work backward from the same distribution no matter where you are in the company (no, I'm not joking) and try to fit all the employees into that, leading to some cases of exceptional employees being underrated or struggling employees being rated as strong.

Your rating will be determined by other managers with whom you have little opportunity to interact on a daily basis and will heavily depend on how much political clout your manager has. Astoundingly, there is little to no consideration put on the opinion of your teammates who would know the most about your contributions.

What this results in is a sort of Hunger Games culture where you can only do better by having those who work closely with you do poorly. As you can imagine, pitting teams and employees against each other in this manner is a huge drain on productivity.

1. Work is not interesting and doesn't build your developer skill set.

The data breach has created a very shortsighted culture. There is a cyber initiative that, in theory, would be important work to safeguard customer data, but as an initiative, it's not very well managed. Don't get me wrong; securing platforms and customer data is and always should be the number one priority. But the kinds of things they have developers doing aren't making the platforms any more secure and are largely dictated by non-technical types. There are teams of developers (a significant portion of devs) that are spending months doing nothing but continually upgrading versions of libraries of internal systems and filling out endless Google Sheets.

This work is the height of tedium, and you can expect your developer skills to slowly degrade if you find yourselves in one of these nightmare positions.

1. Lots of late-night releases.

More so than at other places that I've worked, you likely expect to be up on late-night releases two to three nights per week. This is a drain on your work-life balance and one of the parts of the job that are actually not conducive to work-life balance; otherwise, the workload is pretty fair.

1. High turnover (and loads of technical debt).

This may vary by team, but almost every platform I've encountered is understaffed and filled with technical debt. It's a vicious cycle where developers are leaving because the platforms are unmaintainable, which leads to new developers going through the same burnout and leaving. You can't understaff a platform and continually put off refactoring and listening to developers without paying a price.

1. The hiring process leaves a lot to be desired.

Applicants for software developer positions are given questions out of a pool that interviewers are mandated to pick from and are, frankly, awful. They are solving a small coding challenge that has no resemblance to the kind of work that we do on a day-to-day basis. It's no surprise that with this hiring process, we get a fair amount of developers that can't contribute to the team in any meaningful way and are rarely fired but merely moved from team to team forever.

1. Company politics are rampant.

I've personally seen managers straight up lie to another to get ahead. On one occasion, one manager said he would give a developer to the other if they could transition a platform, and then went back on his word and pretended he never said this. I was shocked. Some of these managers and directors are so without moral compass and scheming, they make Machiavelli's characters look like Fred Rogers.

Continue with the change, banking for good slogan, and giving back to the community. That is one of the best things about Capital One.

Continue to be at the forefront of technology and push C1 to be a tech company.

Get rid of stacked ranking for performance management. That's the number one thing that employees at Capital One hate, and it's legitimately creating a toxic workplace. So getting rid of that would go a tremendous way to improve the culture.

Improve the way we do interviews. Give interviewees questions that resemble the day-to-day work they will be doing. Even better, give them a take-home assignment to code a small web app using the framework their team uses. That way, you can be sure you're hiring the right people.

There was a period where we were going to lay off half the Chicago workforce and then suddenly management changed their mind because we signed a big partner. This kind of thing can't happen, and it takes years for employees to trust management again after something like this happens, if they ever do.