Capital One

The teams they've put together are generally pretty competent and friendly. People are pretty forward about helping each other out, and the work is often interesting.

Stack ranking is pretty aggressive, especially at certain positions that are more transitional between one type of work (engineers) and the next (managers, people leaders).

The result is that instead of an annual employee review, they calibrate and stack-rank every bi-annually, with other types of employee reviews that happen quarterly.

A lot of this comes from the interest that the founders had in consultancy firms and their managerial methods for optimization, but it's an approach that doesn't make sense for certain types of jobs.

If you're going to stack-rank engineers, do it once every 12 months.

Also, don't hire people into the Principal Associate role. Promote existing people who have been with the company for a while into those spots and hire into one of the brackets either above or below it (associates and managers).