Capital One

Pay is decent. The 401k match is good. They'll pay for an AWS cert if that means anything to you. Ability to transfer internally. Maybe the card side of the business is okay.

TLDR; It all boils down to poor management.

Self-interested managers who pull rank to make terrible decisions. You might get hired for one team and then a more senior manager, with whom you had no interaction, might snag you to their dumpster fire of a team/product, doing work you never intended to do when you accepted the offer.

If giving six months for an entirely new team of people (80% of whom are new to the company) to make significant progress on a legacy product, and firing the new people when that plan somehow doesn't work out, and redoing that cycle multiple times, sounds like a great place to work, then you might like it here.

Plus, you'll have no support from the teammates or management.

If you have the experience, you can figure things out pretty quickly. The portion of the team that can't will be hung out to dry, no matter how much you try to help bring them up to speed.

Opinions are set pretty quickly, which means you'll have a team of 4-6 where 2-3 people are doing most of the work.

They killed the Agile delivery job family, which I can understand why, but from my perspective, it was a terrible decision and will likely continue allowing bad managers to impose poor decisions onto their engineering teams, which only causes more headaches and fires.

You can push back and explain why continuing to make the same short-sighted decisions is bad long-term, but if your manager can't take the heat from their manager, it will just be constant pain for you and your team.

Highly regulated industry, which leads to release freezes, audits, and essentially no trust between coworkers, managers, and teams.

Waterfall veiled as agility because they "do DevOps" and "have CI/CD." Sure, the release cycles can be pretty short, but call it what it is.

Off-hours release windows with lots of manual intervention aren't utilizing the tools well.

Tons of on-call.

Do you enjoy staying up until 6 AM after working a full day, then getting on the next day and doing it all again?

How about not being able to handle personal affairs, not knowing day-to-day when you're working until?

Do you like being a remote control for someone else to do work through?

Do you want to get fired because that remote control culture means you're the one clicking the buttons because the HIPPO told you to?

They're insulated by you being the one doing their bidding.

Do you want to work with people that like to be busy for the sake of being busy?

Do you like your manager kicking cans down the road until you're up against a tight deadline every day?

The one senior person on your team that is familiar with Capital One or the project(s) you're working on is unlikely to have the skills to properly train, knowledge share, and onboard team members effectively.

If you've led sustainable, high-performing teams before, you'll have a lot to overcome to create that here. The manager won't make that any better.

I haven't been fired; I'm still employed at Capital One when writing this review.

All of this is based on what I've been told of past teams, what I saw when I came in, and what I've seen in the area I work. The whole experience has been a nightmare; I'd avoid it at all costs.

I'm sure it's better in some slivers of the company.

Needless to say, I've been applying externally and waiting until I can do an internal transfer.

Hire proactive, not reactive, managers that can take the heat and utilize their team. Don't spin up teams of brand new people for high-priority projects. Don't call yourself a tech company. Don't hire contractor teams that only cause more problems because they didn't even do the work you hired them for. Identify internal talent properly; don't put people in leadership positions that aren't leaders.