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Capital One is the worst company I ever worked for

Senior Applications Developer
Former Employee
Worked at Capital One for 2 years
November 17, 2014
McLean, Virginia
2.0
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookDoesn't Approve of CEO
Pros

The benefits are very good. The health insurance and 401k options are better than average.

In many departments, they allow people to work from home when needed.

Cons
  1. There is no job security and no stability in management.
  2. There is always a large amount of staff turnover.
  3. They encourage people to move around from one position to another almost every year.
  4. If you stay in one position more than 2 years, you will be considered stale and a candidate for their redeployment process, which is really another term for layoff.
  5. In the banking side of the company, they rely 100% on vendors to do all of the IT processing and changes. They even hire contractors to do the unit and system testing.
  6. There is very little in-depth knowledge at Capital One about how the IT system that is used for their retail banking operations works.
  7. Every new hire must pass a 'personality test'. This leads to an environment where everyone is alike and very boring.
  8. Since all of the day-to-day operations work is outsourced to vendors, the Capital One employees really just work on meaningless tasks to please the directors. Nobody below executive management does any 'real' work.
  9. The review process is an example of HR gone to the extreme – it takes up a ton of time for both the employees and managers.
  10. If you have any morals and try to treat others as you would have them treat you, you won't survive at Capital One.
  11. The environment for the day-to-day non-executive management staff is a model of survival of the fittest, but since most of the work is outsourced to vendors, it is more like a game of survival.
  12. Your job becomes navigating the review process and changing positions quickly enough to keep on keeping on.
  13. The executive management team makes very good decisions on what banks and credit card companies to purchase. But they have no idea on how to run the internals of daily business.
  14. Everyone who worked with me at Capital One had the same point of view as I did.
  15. If you want a career at Capital One, you should be prepared to step on people and basically your main task will be to navigate through the yearly performance review process so that you survive another year.
Advice to Management
  1. Get rid of the personality test.

  2. Get rid of the current performance review process.

  3. Admit that you are a bank. The IT management tries to project the image that they are like Google, Facebook, or Apple.

  4. Which is very funny, because 99% of the retail bank IT work is outsourced to vendors.

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