Capital One

The benefits were pretty good; Plano has good BBQ.

Everyone lives in fear of the bi-annual ratings.

They mainly want new grads (or TDPs) that they can 'brainwash' into their way of working. A huge red flag is that it's very difficult for experienced hires to succeed there. Outside experience should be considered and embraced as diversity.

It was apparent that the codebases were engineered by people with very limited experience; sloppy, poorly written, and lacking in clarity. A fairly simple questionnaire application for vehicle loan refinancing is being broken into 10+ micro front-ends. Having diverged from one another, each is largely different and a challenge to maintain.

Agile practice was vastly sub-par; every work item was assigned a 1 or 2 point estimate when they took a full sprint to complete, even for experienced devs. No one respected their work and thought about it beforehand. Refinement sessions were merely a formality. Poor team velocity; consistently averaged far less than 50% points delivered vs. promised.

Culture is more focused on output as opposed to quality. Everyone believes they are walking on water. Suggestions were met with, "Well, what are you going to do about it?" from my manager. I'm sorry, but I couldn't change the entire group's culture of poor practices. Code reviews were a joke; everything 'LGTM'.

RTO alienated remote workers.

There's also a lack of effective onboarding. They spend a week telling you about the architecture of the company's technology systems, but none of that really matters for the developer's day-to-day. No overview of the business of refi was given.

Just be honest and lay people off. Technology won't solve your poor planning and work practices.