Capital One

Good pay, generous sign on bonus and severance pay

Flexible hybrid in office, seem to be slowly tightening though

They're trying to be a tech company but instead they make a lot of things are unnecessarily complex and using in-house tools that you'll never see outside the company. It was very frustrating trying to diagnose problems with all the extra layers to get through.

I liked my time at Capital One though and was a little surprised when my boss, after having bi-weekly one one one meetings giving positive feedback, told me during mid year reviews that I was being put on a PIP due to something that took me too long to work on 6 months ago. What? Why was this never discussed before in our one on one meetings? I don't think anyone would dispute that I was very loud and clear during daily standups about issues I was having while working on that project and how I was solving them or which team I was reaching out to.

I did more research and learned about stacked ranking and Capital One's policy of firing the "lowest" ranked 10-15% every half year. So watch out, even when everything is fine and you're consistently delivering on all your projects, being arbitrarily ranked lowest will still require that you or someone else on your team who did nothing wrong will be fired.

I wish my manager had been honest with me that someone had to go and it wasn't because of anything I did wrong. Sucks to be told you did something wrong when I was so clear and communicative and received no negative feedback until mid year reviews.