Capital One

Good learning opportunities – training and learning from the experience of Senior Developers and Framework teams.

One all-expense-paid tech conference per year.

Too much politics.

Senior management, most of the time, is not aware of what happens within the teams.

Not always full credit is given to the work done by an associate. Beware if you aren’t careful, the other team mates could take credit for your work, and the team leads aren’t that keen to correct that.

Not a very immigrant-friendly environment. They do care about associates who would need sponsorship, but beware, you could be given a performance improvement plan and be fired from the organization without a valid reason, even if your contributions to the team and the organization are tangible.

They care less about the implications if they suddenly lay off a candidate on an immigrant visa. They don’t really understand the stress one has to go through in such a situation.

If you work in a team where you have a few TDP candidates (Technology Development Program, as they call it in Capital One), beware that their feedback would count for or against you, which would become the sole deciding factor in your performance analysis, even if your contributions are great. Their feedback would either boost or degrade your credibility altogether in the team (may be not maintaining an exceptional relationship with them, meaning never questioning the way they get their things done).

They say that they are very flexible when it comes to supporting their associates to work remotely if needed as per the situation they are facing, but that never truly happens. Taking about 4 or less work-from-home days a month might cost you your job. Once in a while, an unexpected sick day could fall into the same bucket. These might turn out to be some lame reasons to get rid of you whenever they feel like it. I was accused of overusing the benefit for just the minimal use of it.

The senior management always mentions in their strategy sessions that they are in a mode to increase the technology workforce. But in reality, they are forcing out tech resources in large numbers every two years and rehiring at the same pace, which makes no sense whatsoever. I never understand why they would want to blame associates who contribute well enough to the team and organization, get rid of them, and rehire a fresh batch of tech guys who would basically face a similar situation 2-3 years from now. I completely feel that is not the best way for one to conduct business.

Very slow green card process. Senior management is never that employee-friendly.

They say they embrace open source a lot, but what it takes to implement an open-source solution is very time-consuming and tedious, and approvals take very long. In return, the blame comes onto the associates for not being able to accomplish something which is out of reach, the actual reason being the lack of a proper support model for all the kinds of applications that are being built in the organization.

The performance reviews and plans they dish out to the associates might not exactly pinpoint what they would need to do to improve, as they usually would contain things that one might already be doing right, except for a few times where he might have made a mistake.

TDP associates dominate all the others.

Late-night works and working on the weekend are all considered a waste by the team leads. Never are those contributions counted properly, at least in my case, for my performance review.

Get your strategies right. Make sure your people in senior management at least have a clear idea of what your strategic goals will be.

Get organized. Lessen frequent reorganizations. Stop acquiring other companies until you are able to control what you currently have.

Stop the cycle of constant hiring and firing. Evaluate your needs well.

Know clearly what's happening at the Agile ART level. Senior Directors and Directors who oversee the ART, please collaborate with teams well enough to be able to know what individual team member contributions are, rather than just blindly believing your lower counterparts.

Check to see if the performance plans being dished out to associates aren't just for namesake. Ensure managers are actively following up and supporting associates to get improvement from them, or just bullet listing a few random points that wouldn't make any sense and would stress out the associate.

Train people managers effectively. Don't just assume that whatever they do is the right thing.

Make sure senior management is checking on people managers to see if they are actually supporting their associates, or may just be bullying them into submission with a strong bias toward just one or two members from the whole team.

Please revamp your performance management systems, which are proving to be no good at the current times.

Be precise and clear what you mean by flexible working options, as my experience with that term has never been right. Also, be clear about the unlimited sick days you say you have for your employees, as sickness doesn't come invited on a particular day.

PLEASE PLAN YOUR STRATEGIES RIGHT AND DON'T PLAY WITH THE INNOCENT IMMIGRANTS WHO WORK FOR YOU.