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Saying you're a tech company doesn't make you one

Senior Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Capital One for 4 years
February 28, 2020
McLean, Virginia
2.0
Doesn't RecommendNegative OutlookDoesn't Approve of CEO
Pros

Bikes in silly colors, great cafeterias, competitive (not extravagant) pay, as much Kool-Aid as you can possibly chug.

Cons

The performance management system is like something out of the Middle Ages, based on a forced distribution at the team level—meaning if you have four people on your team, one of you is going to get a bad rating. This does wonderful things for team cohesion and makes people optimize for very strange things.

If you are a software developer, expect to get stuck in an on-call rotation at least once a month and doing a lot of DevOps work, even if you weren't hired as a DevOps engineer. Toward the end of my time there, 90% of the work my team did was related to scrambling to comply with some new enterprise-wide mandate (fix X, switch to using Y, etc.). In the end, we had almost no time left to build our product. The product owners and tech leads are really out of touch; a lot of them have no technical background.

Also, the decision to abolish assigned seating and move to "everyone scramble for a seat every day" (excuse me... "Flex Seating"! Yay!) is a horrible decision. It makes the day so stressful to never have any idea whether you will be able to find a decent seat or not, and yet despite the overcrowding, many teams do not allow for regular remote work.

Advice to Management

Thin out your burgeoning ranks of middle management. The VP+ level people get it, Rich gets it, the individual contributors and performers get it, but no one in between gets it. Get rid of half of your senior manager through senior director level people and save what could be a great company.

And give people their own seat. If you really cannot build or rent enough space for your workforce, you shouldn't be hiring more people.

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