Capital One

Smart people generally. Modern technology stack (this is dependent on team). Pretty good pay (around 75th percentile of market), good 401k match. Nice campus; they require 50% of time to be spent in office.

Capital One practices stack ranking.

This was somewhat relaxed during the pandemic, but the low performance bucket was as high as 15-20% at 2023 mid-year. They seem to have historically used this as a mechanism to lay people off without having the negative press that accompanies it.

Read other reviews to get a sense of what kind of behavior this incentivizes and what sort of culture it creates. If you join as a new employee, you will be at a disadvantage compared to those who have been there for a while or have connections within their organization. Even if it does not immediately worry you, I have seen driven, talented engineers driven out of the company because, eventually, someone in their upper management disliked them.

There's definitely a fake nice culture; people will be friendly, but knives come out behind closed doors during performance calibrations.

A big source of the company's revenue (credit card interest) comes from people trapping themselves in debt. It doesn't feel great to contribute to that.

Company culture has fallen off a cliff within the last year. Ditch stack ranking; it creates perverse incentives and makes the work environment unenjoyable and draining.