Capital One

One of the most advanced tech stocks on paper. When it builds, pipeline works, and it is great. However, when it breaks, it is no fun. As an engineer, you have neither visibility nor access into what is actually wrong, and it will take some time to get it back in order.

Willingness of management to throw employees under a bus. Principal-level associates are judged on how many projects they deliver during the performance evaluation period. If you were not given any projects because there is nothing to work on, it will be taken against you and not against your manager for not giving you work. While you are expected to ask people in other teams for extra work, thus expanding your "brand," you are not going to be working on anything really significant that way. Absolute favoritism toward people who are being loved by managers. Those individuals can't do anything wrong. Yet, more than once during my tenure, I had to clean up their "mess." A very unusual way how annual and mid-year employee performance evaluations are being done. If you end up in so-called PIP, that is pretty much the end of you. The design of that process is basically to fire you at the end, but get 3 months of high-quality work out of you. They will constantly change rules during that process, assuring that you will fail and look incompetent. However, you are under the delusional concept that you will end up having your job at the end, as long as you get everything done. It is not like that; they get your work and you get fired. A whole organizational-level problem is that unless you are one of the senior managers, who appear to be unteachable, on a long enough timeline, with very few exceptions, you will either get fired or perhaps leave on your own terms (if lucky).

Provide your senior developers with projects, and do not punish them when you, as a manager, do not provide them with work. They do need to deliver at their level.