Capital One

Strong pay and benefits. If you're the peg that fits the hole, you'll do well.

Interviewee TLDR:

• Know what tech stack your team is working on. Ensure it's what they're actually using and maintaining, rather than roadmaps. Will you be happy if you're maintaining that?
• (If you value in-office) Know where your peers are.

I was hired for a "Backend Software Engineer" position, 100% of which just said you need experience in 'Java, Python, Go, or similar'. Despite making it very clear I have 0, 10, and 1 years experience in those languages (respectively), I was put onto a team that managed a Java application where they were maybe moving to Go.

Instead of being able to work at a senior level, I was just learning Java (the easy part), the Java ecosystem of packages, libraries, and tooling (a bit harder), and trying to read and understand the application which was developed over years, some by contractors and interns (this is where experience in a language is actually useful).

I was eventually driven out for, among other things, not providing "PA-level contributions" to a language I just started using 5 months ago.

The worst part for me was that I never worked with anyone in the physical space. COF has several floors in a Chicago Loop building, but none of my peers worked there.

I started remote, but then they had a return-to-office initiative several months ago, which was a cruel joke for me as I would go in and work alone, surrounded by empty desks.

Internal tooling has a bit of a learning curve. The documentation for it is 50-50 good or out-of-date and thus misleading. The internal GitHub is pretty open, plus Slack, so you can usually find examples.

In the past few years, there were many announcements of so-and-so VP coming in from Amazon, so I think they're buying in wholeheartedly to that, for better or worse.

The interview managers (two for two; I was on two teams) don't seem to have a good idea of the tech stack used on their teams, which will be the literal day-to-day experience of the engineers. Therefore, they do a poor job of describing what you'll actually be doing.

If RTO is actually going to be useful, hiring needs to be location specific.