Capital One

Work-life balance is reasonable most of the time. Some teams get to solve interesting problems. It's possible to grow if you stay with the company for a while.

Bloated middle management leads to a lack of technical direction. They are not close enough to the ground truth to focus on solving the real problems.

For a company that wants to be "all in" on AWS, the cloud controls are ridiculously opaque and Kafka-esque. Many times, people just won't know how to be productive with AWS because the best practices aren't clearly communicated.

Performance management is an absolute mess. Retaliatory behavior goes unpunished, so talent leaks like a sieve.

It seems to be a universal experience that the average employee has no idea what people are talking about during all-hands meetings. To me, this is representative of too many middle managers who are creating useless initiatives versus helping teams solve real problems.

If these people are going to be effective, they need to spend more time with the rank-and-file employee.