Capital One

Freedom to do whatever you want, including simply coasting. There’s generally very little accountability in tech across the company. This is good if you’re a self-taught learner and want room to grow on your own.

Great place to give back to the community through outreach programs.

You can retire here.

Visuals and politics dictate your career here.

Many “engineers” plagiarize others’ work, but because the chain of command has no way to judge people or their accomplishments, these people are quickly promoted and then leave before they’re discovered. A lot of headlining projects are just a front used to grab promotions and leave. Due to this problem, many projects are believed to have failed from lack of maintenance, when in reality there was nothing there in the first place.

A culture of “niceness” discourages honesty and leads to honest, talented people being alienated. Many have recently left, yet HR and leadership are unaware of this brain drain because they use inflated internal evaluations to analyze retention. This culture and its intolerance to criticism also leads to simple projects taking 3 years to reach production rather than 2 months, because people who actually know what they’re doing either don’t speak up or are simply ignored as serial complainers.

This advice is addressed to people, from the CEO, Rich Fairbanks, all the way down to the directors.

Get rid of this culture of managing up. It’s in human nature to favor those who make you feel good about yourselves. This leads to the wrong people being in charge of very important things.

Be careful in picking your tech staff and especially tech leadership. Your offices are filled with ex-contractors who can only build to satisfy requirements. They are not the right people to rely on if you’re inner sourcing to rearchitect the internal tech stack.

Try to grow organically instead of having hiring targets. You’d be surprised how little some of your tech workers contribute.