Capital One

To be brief:

I’m working in the data outcome team.

Pros:

• Good atmosphere.
• Lots of in-team and outcome team and enterprise activities.
• Average standard perks, like private pension and private insurance (no dental).
• People are nice; the culture is not toxic at all.
• Quite flexible working time.

• Salary is quite low compared to the leading market.

• Performance review sessions are not quite fair, as managers can be biased and misjudge people's performance. It is not about competency, but more about visibility.

• Unfortunately, people who are decision-makers are not quite competent.

• Knowledge is institutionalized in this environment, so they stick with internal standards rather than software engineering normal patterns or standards.

• They say we care about delivery and quality at the same time. But in practice, delivery is all that matters.

• As a Principal Software Engineer, you don’t have much control over the product or system you are designing. Policies are pushed on engineers. In other words, engineers up to the principal level are more coders rather than designers.

• Developing in C1 is a pain for devs, as there are lots of controls and constraints, and paperwork is in place even for dev and sandbox environments.

• As visibility is a key game-changer in getting promotion, people figure this out after a while and they try to focus on this side rather than getting the job done. Hence, not real healthy teamwork takes place in this environment.

• Lack of correct processes is all over the place.

• Disjointed connections are all over the enterprise.

A good process expert can help you figure out the wholes where things are disconnected.

A good skill assessment process can also help teams and managers realize who to trust and who not to trust.

Promoting incompetent people and disappointing competent people is building a Dilbert's pattern in the outcome team and the whole organization.