Capital One

The campus (West Creek) is incredible. The pay is relatively high for the area. The bar on hard skills is really low for engineers for comparable positions, so it makes this a great place to learn. There are a ton of volunteering positions for giving back to the community.

From the shared tech side of the house, if you want a tech-heavy, forward-leaning programming job, this ain't it, chief. This is an "argue with the tech lead about why unit tests are important" type of job. If you try to improve the quality of programming, the populist hordes will scorn you. Adding tests and implementing design patterns takes too long, silly! The "You Build It, You Own It" culture translates internally to software developers who ship things without giving it any testing other than a quick, manual happy path. I never saw a solution get off the ground here.

I consistently saw products being created that didn't meet the needs of our users, but did meet the political needs of certain managers. Inevitably, one crew of management would be fired or reorganized, and another team would shepherd the product to its next phase. Be prepared to come in one day and have all your work canceled or reorged away from you.

You need high-quality tech people making the tech decisions and leading the feature teams. All too often the "tech leads" are just tenured employees who are in line for a promotion. This wouldn't be a bad thing if the code they were producing was well-done and battle-tested, but floundering and metric massaging is more common.

What I've seen inside disheartens me as a tech employee and horrifies me as a Capital One customer.