Capital One

The environment is very conducive to learning. You're constantly working with the latest and greatest tech, and you're very unlikely to have your knowledge base stagnate here.

The people around you are all very intelligent and typically very nice.

The salary isn't the greatest, but it's pretty good.

Your managers and higher levels are always saying how it's super important to disconnect at work at 5 and how work-life balance is paramount. There are Invest-In-Yourself Fridays once every month where you're supposed to be able to do anything you want to invest in yourself. Yet the workload is such that if you don't put in extra time, you will fall behind on your sprint work.

You're also constantly told by higher-ups that the culture of the company is such that you always need to be creating visibility for yourself and thinking about creating visibility. You are required to regularly create presentations and present them in front of the department. It doesn't really matter what the presentations are on, but you need to show that you're active, you're constantly doing something super important and constantly sharing knowledge. If you fail to create enough visibility for yourself, you will be PIPed.

If you're working on something new that the team incorrectly estimates the level of effort on and your story work ends up rolling over, you will get PIPed. You will also be blamed if your work depends on an external vendor and there is a failure on the vendor side. Basically, there is a lot of 'cover your assets' movement by management. Despite the company claiming that they have a blameless environment, that is rather inaccurate.

The stack ranking system basically means that even if everyone is working well, someone still needs to be regularly fired.

Get rid of stack ranking.

Let people worry about their work instead of how to advertise their work.