Capital One

Great pay and benefits. It's dumb to force people into the office, but they're pretty flexible about it. They seem to be slowly ratcheting up return to office. It was 2 days when I started, then it went to 3, so expect it to keep going up.

At mid and end-year reviews, they fire 10-15% of staff, going by stacked ranking. This means even if you're good at your job, you can get fired if the rest of your team is perceived as better in some way. It leads to a culture of favoritism and stifles collaboration because we're all basically competing against each other.

You have one-on-ones with your manager every two weeks. After getting nothing but praise at these meetings, suddenly at mid-year reviews, there was a BIG PROBLEM with how I handled something from six months ago. It was so terrible that they put me on a PIP. Why didn't we talk about this before?

There were so many chances to help me fix this alleged problem, but success and results aren't the point; they just needed to sacrifice someone. I saw it happen to others before it happened to me. They tried to work through it and fix the "problem" with their work, only to get fired anyway. They were hard workers who were good at their jobs and did not deserve that humiliation. I just quit rather than go through such a humiliation ritual.

A few years ago, I was a lot less confident in myself, and this would have crushed me. Fortunately, I was able to see it for what it was.

Lying to people and telling them it's their fault they're getting fired when it's actually your terrible policy that requires arbitrary firings is disgusting and cowardly.

Putting people through these humiliation rituals with no chance of success is just sick. You've hurt a lot of people.